Storymania - Arabia by Jc Morigawa

Arabia
Jc Morigawa

Chapter One Arabia

Ammar stepped off the elevator with a scowl on his face that his secretary and subordinates could not miss. He walked by them without his usual cheery greeting into a spare, though well-appointed, office with a huge wall of glass overlooking Port Beshera more that 80 floors below. As he passed even his secretary without acknowledgment, a sort of shudder passed through the office. The door to his office closed behind him and after a collective shrug everyone went back to work.

Ammar walked over and stood in front of the fourteen-foot sheet of glass that composed one entire wall of his office. Even in his funk, Ammar, as always, appreciated the spectacular view of the harbor from his office. The fascinatingly busy waterway was stretched out below him, full, as usual with freighters, cargo ships, jet boats, and yachts all in a dance that, magically, kept them from colliding. A helicopter flashed by and jets rose every few minutes into the sky to add an excess of drama and chaos to the scene. A backdrop of towers, incredible in their gracefully delicate design surrounded the whole dazzling production, some rooted in the placid water of the harbor by slender columns of steel or massive pedestals of shimmering limestone. One could almost believe that this was the center of the world or maybe some alien world, so surreal was the view of the harbour and towers that seemingly rose directly from the frothing waters into the sky. Nothing but the water spoke to the sense of the natural; everything else was manmade. In fact, as Ammar knew, the area where he looked had been nothing but sea a decade before, the towers rested on artificial islands creating a new world in a place where land was the most precious commodity.
Ah well, it was a great accomplishment, but today he could not bask in it; his most precious project would either succeed or fail. And now that one of the crowning achievements was in his sights, Ammar remembered that he had arisen slowly that morning, as he had on most mornings of his sixty-three years. He was a ‘slow starter’. Even so, on this morning it was odd because this was the most important morning of his life. He wife had long since been up and he could smell coffee brewing in the kitchen. As he assembled himself in his morning ritual of shaving, showering, tooth brushing and dressing, his thoughts never left the reason for his ritual and that of a thousand other members of his team in their home this morning.
He could see in his mind that complex in the desert, one of the centers of Arabian achievement and pride. It was no trouble to conjure up a vision of what was to happen on this day. He only wished that he could be there, but, God willing, that too would come, someday. A new world is not created everyday, but two in one lifetime wasn’t bad. The vision faded as the phone rang.

“Yes,” said Ammar, not moving from the sink.

“Ammar Abu Bakr, it is Reggie.”

This was not surprising, as only Reggie and two others could automatically be put through to him at any time.

“Yes Reggie. Some problem?” he responded.

“There is a problem, yes."

Ammar had looked over at his screen to see that the few men and women of his team allowed in the command post were huddled around a giant screen illustrating the planned path and nature of the mission. The problem was outlined to him by Reggie and was the reason for his foul mood as he entered the office that morning.
As he stared again over the harbour scene, Ammar’s mind drifted back across the currents of his life that had led to this day. He thought back to that day long ago, the day he met Shihab Asad. He had never forgotten that first encounter. His friend, Shihab Asad, never drew an ordinary breath. He had once described him thus to his biographer.

“From the moment I first saw him sauntering down a narrow alley towards me outside the Medina bazaar, it was quite obvious that here was an extraordinary creature. We were both only ten years old at the time and had no knowledge of each other until that moment. We might not still, except for my eternal clumsiness. On seeing Asad walking down the alley toward me, I was perhaps instantly jealous of that lanky frame, carrying his beautiful face in such an easy, cocksure manner. I realize that now, but at the time I would never have admitted that such a thing could have caused me to walk straight into a wooden post supporting a street awning. I hit it with such force that I backed up, dazed. Blind with pain, I continued stumbling backwards into a basket of overripe fruit in the vendor’s stall behind me.

“I looked up to see Shihab Asad standing over me laughing, his head thrown back, his hands on his hips, his glorious black curls streaked by sunlight. A passerby might have thought him most cruel but he reached down a hand to me and lifted me from my predicament with such good nature that it instantly warmed my heart. I noticed neither my pain nor the stall owner in his checked turban admonishing me loudly to the crowd and Allah.”

“’Thank you’ I mumbled, my head down in shame.”

“’Oh, no matter!” he laughed; his piercing eyes looking straight at me. ‘I have never seen such a wonderful fall. You must have practiced very hard.’ We both started to laugh and then we began to pick up the spilled fruit putting it back into the basket. We laughed again, mumbling our own insults under our breath as we worked, the stall owner cursing us without pause.

“When we finished, Asad turned to me and cocked his head as if observing some oddity, ‘Hey, my new friend, come and play football tomorrow at my house. My friends and I always have a great game on Saturday. You can practice your falls.’ He laughed at his own joke with such a pleasant laugh that I joined in myself.

I could only nod in gratitude as he told me the directions to his house, starstruck by my new friend. If I had known at that moment that this boy would create a nation, it wouldn’t have surprised me one whit. I watched Asad as he sauntered out of sight. I soon learned he always walked in that luxuriously confident style as naturally as he laughed in delight at the world. I wasted part of my youth trying to imitate that walk. It was like trying to learn play music by ear and just as impossible if not born with it.

All that day I planned for the next; kicking my football, practicing so I would be good enough for Asad and his friends. I was a very average athlete, and thought I was even worse than I was. My lack of self-confidence stretched to all areas except reading. I knew I excelled there, reading voraciously every book I could find at levels far beyond my age. I prepared for that day at Asad’s house as if I were preparing for exams, which would decide the rest of my life. In fact, such was the case.”

Ammar’s mind snapped back to the present. He needed to complete his letter to the President. He pulled his light screen from his pocket. It expanded in his hand and hardened, with the half completed letter crystallizing on the surface of the screen. It read:

15 October 2033

Dear Mr. President

I, Ammar Abu Bakr, write to you with a trembling hand. On this day we shall watch our nation bask in the glory of bringing a new world to Islam. Our faithful servants will, God willing, set foot on the surface of the second planet, which we will name Hanbal Jawhar, and claim it for the Arab Nation. The road has been long and our efforts great, yet, . . . .

Ammar pondered how he would complete the letter and what repercussions there might be if the mission failed. Truly, he mused, it was incredible that there was even a mission to fail.

Suddenly a large passenger jet lumbering toward the airport made a path across the wall of glass in Ammar’s office. Seeing and hearing it, Ammar’s mind again drifted.

His thoughts drifted to that dramatic and horrible event that had sparked the birth of this world he now lived in. When those hijacked jets crashed into the World Trade Center at the start of the millennium, a crack developed in the Islamic Crescent which spread and grew larger becoming a faultline and then an earthquake that changed the face of Islam and the Arab world. In spite of his morning aggravation, Ammar sighed at the thought of Asad’s immediate, yet childish grasp of the gravity of that event. So many saw it as a triumph, something to assuage and soothe the festering wounds of the wrecked Arab nations. Asad saw it for what it was, the event that would finally bring down the tottering perverted structure that held a people in a loose, dark yet unbreachable despair.

As Assam tried to turn his thoughts back to the task at hand, he felt an odd burning in his chest. The pain increased until Assam staggered back a step from the intensity of it. As his mind searched blindly for relief from the pain, it only found more agony as a hammer blow struck him just below the terrible burning. He found himself on his knees on his prayer rug with no idea how he had gotten there. The final trip to the floor was made in a fog of pain and sense of surprise that his life seemed to be ending on this day. Unfair, he thought, as he drifted into unconsciousness, but then fairness had never been part of the world he knew, anyway.

“Ammar,” a familiar voice called out to him through a haze of neither seeing nor complete darkness. That voice could not be. If it were the voice he knew that it most surely was, then most certainly he was dead.

“No Ammar, you will not die today, soon, but not today. I will give you my strength for the final journey.

The voice was gone; the one that Ammar knew all too well and never expected to hear again. He knew now that he would live, at least for a while. The pain was gone and he slipped into a deep unconsciousness, yet one that sucked his thoughts from the conscious world he had just left and unraveled them further in this nether world that was neither life nor death.
Across his numbed mind the incredible events that had led to the freeing of the genius and vision of the Arab people now rushed. He saw clearly the destroyed and recreated cities of astounding beauty, the fertile vibrant lands replacing wasteland and again he felt the awakening.
Yet as the events rushed by him, he sensed a warning. He felt deeply in his soul the folly of men before God, always thinking that they would get it right, only to be graphically shown by Him just how far off the mark they were.
But, damn it, they had gotten it right! He, Shihab Asad and Jason Satterfield, they had done it together. Yes, they had gotten it right and no spirit nor saint nor shapeless thing from Hades would take that away from him!

“Getting defiant in your coma,” chuckled Assam to himself.

“What new world will I awaken in tomorrow?”