The Janson Directive - By Robert Ludlum Page 0,103

know that he was as close as he had ever been to the holy places and yet could not walk where the Prophet, blessings be upon him, had stepped while he was on earth. He accepted, as always, God's will, and he drew strength from the righteousness of his cause. Despite the recent setbacks in the Kenna province, the Caliph was a leader in the struggle against the corruption of the West, the brutality and depredation of a global order the West imagined to be "natural." He prayed that his every choice, his every act, would move his country closer to the day when its people would rejoin the ummah, the people of Islam, and he could be their rightly guided Caliph in more than name.

Welcomed into the camp by smooth-faced boys and gray-bearded eminences alike, he felt the powerful brotherhood of his fellow believers. The desiccated, dun-colored soil was so different from the vibrant tropical vegetation of his native land, yet his brethren of the desert had a pitch of vigilance, zealotry, and devotion that came less naturally to-many of his own Kagama followers. Barren land, perhaps, but it bloomed with the righteousness of the Holy One. The desert leaders were enmeshed in their own campaigns, in Chechnya, in Kazakhstan, in Algeria, in the Philippines. But they knew that every one of their conflicts was a skirmish in a greater battle. That was why he knew they would help him, as he had helped them in the past. God willing, they would, by working together, recover the whole earth for Allah one day.

The first order of business was to allow his hosts to impress him with their training school. He had heard about it, of course. Every leader in the worldwide fellowship of struggle knew of this university of terror. Here, while the government in Khartoum turned a blind eye, the members of this secret brotherhood could learn the ways of the new kind of war. In bunkers carved into the rock were computers that stored the plans of electric generator plants, petroleum refineries, airports, railroads, military installations in scores of countries. Every day, they searched the Web for more of the open secrets that the West so carelessly made available. Here, in the model of an American city, you could study urban warfare: how to block roads and storm buildings. Here, too, you could learn the patient arts of surveillance, methods of assassination, a hundred ways to make explosives from materials available in every American hardware store. As he passed from one unit to the next, he smiled his humorless smile. They were treating him like a visiting dignitary, the way they must treat the president of Sudan on his secret visits. They knew, as he did, that he was destined to rule his homeland. It was just a matter of time.

He was tired, of course. But he had no time to rest. The evening prayer was over. It was time for the meeting.

Within a tent, they sat on low cushions on the cloth-covered ground and drank tea from simple clay cups. The conversation was cordial yet shied away from specifics. All knew the Caliph's extremely fraught situation - his astonishing recent gains, and the fact that they were under ceaseless assault by the coordinated forces of the Republic of Anura. There had been reversals, humbling ones. There would continue to be reversals - unless additional assistance could be provided. The Kagama's repeated attempts to enlist the support of the Go-Between were met with frustration. The Go-Between not only declined to provide the needed support but grew emphatic that the Caliph desist in his efforts at exacting vengeance! Oh, the perfidy of the infidel! Then his further attempts to reestablish contact with the Go-Between, to persuade him of the inexorability of the Caliph's will to justice, had failed, utterly and mysteriously. That was why the Kagama leader was here.

Finally, they could hear the sound of a military helicopter, feel the whomp-whomp percussion of its propellers. The camp leaders glanced at one another and at their Kagama guest.

It was the visitor they had been waiting for. The man they called Al-Mustashar, the Adviser.

Colonel Ibrahim Maghur was a man of the world, and his connection with the insurrectionists in the camps was necessarily clandestine. He was, after all, a senior member of Libyan intelligence, and Tripoli had officially renounced its direct links to terrorism. At the same time, many powerful members of the regime retained their sympathies for their brethren