De Australische schrijver John Birmingham werd geboren op 7 augustus 1964 in Liverpool, Engeland. Zie ook mijn blog van 7 augustus 2010 en eveneens alle tags voor John Birmingham op dit blog.
Uit: Weapons of Choice
“He unwrapped the banana leaves from around a small rice cake, thanking Allah for the generosity of his masters. They had included a little dried fish in his rations for today, a rare treat.
Sometimes, when the sun climbed directly overhead and beat down with a slow fury, Adil’s thoughts wandered. He cursed his weakness and begged God for the strength to carry out his duty, but it was hard. He had fallen asleep more than once. Nothing ever seemed to happen. There was plenty of movement down in Dili, which was infested with crusader forces from all over the Christian world, but Dili wasn’t his concern. His sole responsibility was to watch those ships that were hiding in the shimmering haze on the far horizon.
Still, Adil mused, it would be nice to know he had some real purpose here; that he had not been staked out like a goat on the side of a hill. Perhaps he was to be part of some elaborate strike on the Christians in town. Perhaps tonight the darkness would be torn asunder by holy fire as some martyr blew up one of their filthy taverns. But then, why leave him here on the side of this stupid hill, covered in monkey shit and tormented by ants?
This wasn’t how he had imagined jihad would be when he had graduated from the Madrasa in Bandung.
USS Kandahar, 1014 Hours, 15 January 2021
The marines wouldn’t have been surprised at all to discover that someone like Adil was watching over them. In fact, they assumed there were more than two hundred million pairs of eyes turned their way as they prepared to deploy into the Indonesian Archipelago.
Nobody called it the Caliphate. Officially the United States still recognized it as the sovereign territory of Indonesia, seventeen thousand islands stretching from Banda Aceh, three hundred kilometers off the coast of Thailand, down to Timor, just north of Australia. The sea-lanes passing through those islands carried a third of the world’s maritime trade, and officially they remained open to all traffic. The Indonesian government-in-exile said so-from the safety of the Grand Hyatt in Geneva where they had fled, three weeks earlier, after losing control of Jakarta. »
John Birmingham (Liverpool, 7 augustus 1964)
