A New Faith: Part 3: Chapter 43

Sonia grabbed Maria’s arm in anger when she saw the smoke bombs go off. It took her a moment to realize that the bombs had not been launched by the crowd. She knew that there was no capability within the crowd or for that matter with anyone in Sequoia to create that sort of ammunition. They must have been launched by the mercenaries hired by the UN. Of course, they must have been watching all along and waiting for an excuse to step in. Grudgingly, she acknowledged their finesse in waiting for the right emotional moment and then using those theatrical props for maximum effect. 

“Start broadcasting this to everyone! Everyone in the whole fucking world needs to see this. Now, Maria! Now!” she yelled. 

Maria’s fingers flew across her tablet as she lined up the livestreams from all the main camera drones and started streaming their footage. She chose different vantage points in order to maximize the sense of both the scale of the external assault and its impact on individuals on the ground. Sonia had informed her about the expected armed intervention earlier that day.

It had been Camille’s idea to ensure that live footage of the Johnson Group’s assault on Sequoia be broadcast far and wide. She wanted to make sure that the heinous actions of the UN and the plutocrats acting in the background got fully exposed to the world. 

Mainstream media from all over the world picked up this livestream almost instantly. Maria had given them advance notice. More importantly, the various social media platforms magnified the broadcast multi-fold. Maria’s millions of fans were appalled at these developments in Sequoia and started campaigning for an immediate cessation of the assault. 

On the ground, Sonia watched, the crowd initially getting scared and confused by this sudden aerial assault. They were not sure what the smoke, lightning, and thunder really meant. After a few moments they realized that no one was harmed and it all seemed benign. This pissed them off even more than before as they assumed that it was some failed attempt by their enemy to attack them in a different way.

The mobs surged toward each other with deadly intent. Sonia was sure that this was the moment when the violence would become decisive. She shuddered at the thought of all the maimed bodies that were going to be littered all over the place after the rioters had sated their thirst for blood. 

As she was scanning through the various perspectives from the drones, her eyes were drawn to the footage from one particular vantage point. The camera lens was pointed at a small platform just outside and on one side of the mosque’s entrance. It was about 30-40 feet high and seemed to have been installed there for some renovation work on the outside of the mosque. 

Three women were climbing the ladder that led to the top of the platform. The one leading them had reached the top and was switching on the gigantic megaphone that she had slung on her back while climbing the ladder. The other two joined her and then all three stared fearfully at the mayhem about to erupt around them. The smoke from the bombs had mostly settled down to ground level and it looked as if the platform was floating above everyone else. 

Sonia was transfixed by this scene and she subconsciously realized that many people in the crowd had paused as they had also noticed the three people quietly standing up on the platform. They were pointing at them and the ripple of that knowledge spread through the three mobs. A surprising hush fell over the entire crowd. Maybe they were all looking for an excuse to stop the violence, anyway. Even they didn’t know why they were doing what they were doing at that point in time.

Sonia yanked Maria by her wrist and pointed her to that scene. Maria turned around and her jaw dropped as she saw Kaija, Alia, and a large black woman standing on a platform bang in the middle of the riot. She looked at Sonia questioningly but Sonia was gesticulating at her, “stream THAT. And only THAT to everyone!!!” Maria brought multiple drones in to focus on the platform and also snapped the broadcast audio feed to clean and relay whatever sound was expected from the megaphone that Kaija was now bringing up to address the crowd. 

“Quiet please!”

The famous statement that the chair umpire at a Wimbledon tennis match deployed to get the audience to settle down, seemed almost incongruous in the context that Kaija was uttering it. 

“Do you know who I am? 

Raise your hands if you know me!”

A sea of hands came up almost immediately. No one had any trouble hearing her. Not only was her voice coming through the megaphone but it was also being echoed through Sequoia’s emergency address system. For a moment even Kaija was puzzled at why her voice sounded so loud before she realized what was happening.

“Good… I am glad that you still remember me. I am grateful to you for showing me the respect by giving me this opportunity to speak to you.”

She paused and looked around as the crowd settled down. The murmurs simmered down. Then she continued.

“But I am not the one you need to hear from right now. The two women standing with me are the ones you need to listen to.”

“Alia,” she said as she touched Alia on her shoulder,”and Sara” as she pointed at her. 

With that, she gave the megaphone to Alia and took a step back. 

#####

Unbeknownst to anyone, Camille and her friends had commandeered a small flight and flown to a rural air-field that was close to Sequoia. Hundreds of their comrades had joined them in their RVs and ATVs as the convoy had made its way to the location of the Johnson Group’s base. Rachel had managed to find the coordinates of the base and sent them to Camille.

The convoy was not unarmed. Most of them were in their teens and their twenties. Their bodies were their real weapons. They had decided to confront the Johnson Group in the long and illustrious tradition of non-violent protests that had successfully fought against armed oppressors. Unlike that tradition, though, they had armed themselves with the modern tools for broadcasting their confrontation to the entire world. They had cameras of all kinds and drones to carry them. They wanted to make it abundantly clear to the world that the Johnson Group was an immoral - unfortunately, not illegal - force that was attempting to surreptitiously destroy the peaceful city of Sequoia. If need be, the activists had decided to provoke the Johnson Group in shooting at them and were ready to die for their cause.

This was that faction of the climate movement that was mostly made up of folks who were tired of the glacial pace of change that the movement was achieving through the usual policy process. They were fed up with the delays and the constant subversion of the democratic governance system by the fossil fuel companies. They wanted to escalate the activities and had started blowing up fossil fuel infrastructure. They were no longer interested in reasonable negotiations. They understood that their enemies understood nothing except the naked use of power. If that is what they wanted, then that is what they were going to get.

This group had been launching a series of guerrilla attacks all across the world with several other like-minded folks. They didn’t care if innocent lives were lost in those attempts. This was war. It was the war for the ultimate survival of humanity and all life forms. There was going to be collateral damage. They had accepted it as long as the fossil fuel companies took heavy losses everywhere. They were no longer afraid of losing the sympathy of the masses. The masses were going to suffer far more if these activists did not shut down all of the fossil fuel companies.

The ongoing crisis at Sequoia had given Camille an opportunity to re-direct the fury of this group in a different direction albeit for achieving the short-term and narrow objective of saving Sequoia. The group had been livid when they had heard about the Johnson Group's armed campaign to occupy Sequoia. Camille decided to go with this group to not only pull the spotlight on Sequoia but also to defend it at all costs.

As their ATVs raced across the uneven terrain toward the Johnson Group’s base, Camille’s phone rang. Rachel had called her to switch on her display and look at the live footage from Sequoia. Camille - who was riding pillion - did that and immediately realized that something momentous was occurring in Sequoia. She saw Kaija standing on a platform with two other women amidst a sea of angry-looking men. One of those two women was pacing on the platform with the megaphone in her hand and saying something. The key thing was that the rioters all seemed to be listening to her. Camille called for a halt and asked everyone in the convoy to listen to Alia before resuming their journey. They were a few miles away from the Johnson base. And was she glad that she stopped to listen to Alia.

#####

Alia took the megaphone from Kaija’s hands. She glanced at Sara and gave her a sad smile. Sara was petrified to stand in the midst of this sea of violent men. So many Nadeems, she thought! But something in Alia’s innate confidence and the unruffled calm of Kaija gave her some strength. She managed to stiffly nod at Alia who then turned squarely toward the crowd. A deep breath and another. “Here goes,” thought Alia. 

“I killed Qasim!” 

A hush fell on the crowd. Everyone just stared at her. This was the last thing anyone expected her to say. They were all expecting her to tell them to stop fighting or something on those lines. Some of them knew that she was a cop and were expecting her to threaten them with punishment. Many had seen her at the earlier riot when she had offered to discuss the details of the investigation with them. 

“And Sara killed Nadeem!”

There was pin-drop silence. If not for the visual evidence, anyone would have thought that the plaza in front of the mosque was absolutely empty. 

“We are both Muslim women.”

Alia was taking deliberate pauses between her simple, short, and direct statements. No long sentences. No paragraphs. No caveats. She had decided to keep it as unambiguous as possible. 

“I repeat, we are both Muslim. I lived in Iran before Sequoia and Sara in Sudan.”

Alia now looked down as she paced to one end of the platform with her back to the crowd. She let a few moments go by and then turned back to look at the crowd.

“I killed Qasim because he had killed my father many years ago. At that time, his name used to be Basheer. He was part of the local militia. My poor father was a grocer. Qasim - or rather Basheer - didn’t even know my father. One day, he came to the market where my father had his store. Without any reason, Basheer shot my father and my two elder brothers along with several other innocent people in the market.

Sara killed Nadeem for the same reason. He had led a gang of blood-thirsty thugs to her village. His men tortured and killed her family. She barely escaped that carnage herself.”

With her head down, Alia paced swiftly across the platform from one end to the other and back. She knew that all the eyes were on her. Everyone was hanging on to each and every word that she was uttering. She looked up at the crowd again.

“These two deaths had N-O-T-H-I-N-G to do with their religion! Nothing at all!

Qasim and Nadeem had committed horrendous crimes against our families. Most probably, they were also responsible for many more crimes against other people.

One day their paths crossed with ours in Sequoia. And we ended up killing them. They should not have been in Sequoia in the first place. They should have been caught and punished long ago. But somehow they had escaped. Somehow, they had found their way to Sequoia.”

Another pause. But Alia was no longer pacing. She was staring, unblinkingly, at the crowd now. 

“Sara and I must be punished for the crimes we have committed.”

She said each word slowly, deliberately, and as loudly as she could. 

“Both of us will accept our punishment. And that should be that. Nothing more and nothing less!”

Tears had formed in Sara’s eyes as Alia had said the last two statements. All night, they had agonized over what to do when they had sought refuge at Kaija’s place. In the end, they had concluded that this was the right thing to do. But it still pained her. She did not want to go back to Sudan. Now what was she going to do? She had nothing left to live for. 

Maria was utterly bewildered. Her Alia, a killer? That didn’t make any sense. What did she mean by that whole revenge business? Did this mean that Alia would be now gone from her life for good? Wasn’t that the punishment for such serious crimes - deportation? 

The thought about the punishment had crossed the minds of everyone in the crowd, too. Many of them knew very well the high cost of serious criminal activity. Murder was as serious as it got. Justified or not. These two women were truly formidable. They had confessed their crimes in public knowing full well that their life in Sequoia would soon be over. In all likelihood, their life was over, period. It was highly unlikely that the Iranian and Sudanese governments would not execute them. They just stared at Alia and Sara, dumbstruck.

“We both wish that we had not acted in such a manner. That we had, instead, gone through the proper channels through which Qasim and Nadeem would have been lawfully punished. But, we didn’t do that.

We took the law in our hands. And THAT is not right. We broke the social compact that has enabled all of us to have lived safely and happily in Sequoia for the past five years.

This is a voluntary confession. Nobody is coercing us. We shall take the punishment that the court assigns us.

The question for all of you who came here today with the intention of committing unlawful acts is - will YOU take responsibility for these criminal acts that you have committed today?

Will YOU take the punishment?

Will YOU let the social compact in Sequoia continue to exist? 

Will YOU let Sequoia to survive?

WHAT WILL YOU DO?”

#####

As soon as Sonia saw Kaija introduce Alia and Sara to the mob, she took off from Maria’s control room. She had a reasonably good idea of what was about to happen and she needed to be on the location to take full advantage of it. All her plans to quell the riot had failed. But this wrinkle had brought forth a glimmer of opportunity. And if anything, Sonia was a master at recognizing when the door was being cracked open and how to then kick it off its hinges to barge right in. This was it!

Her Plan A had been the attempt over the past three days to persuade the leaders of the three mobs to not commit any violence in the first place. She had told them that it was okay to have peaceful protests. But that plan had gone down the drain without a whimper.

Plan B was to use Maria’s audio-video wizardry to try and persuade the mob itself to desist from violence. That had fallen flat as most of the rioters had shrugged off the heart-wrenching pleas of respected people and even their own families and friends. The two mobs had rolled right through all that and gone and attacked the mosque. 

The Plan C that she had put in motion quietly and unknown to all the people that she worked with was appealing to all those citizens of Sequoia who disapproved of the violence to organize a counter-riot. The vast majority of Sequoians had been passively watching the events that had been unfolding around them. Most had been afraid and hiding from those events. Just as the muscle memory of violence had kicked in for the rioters, these reactions of fear and cynicism had kicked in for these folks. Sonia’s plan was to try and get this vast silent majority to show up at the site of the riot in overwhelming numbers to force that mob of violent men to dissipate. if need be, she had authorized them to physically restrain the rioters. Sonia had quietly reached out to numerous women who were relatively well-known and reasonably well-respected in Sequoia to organize such a crowd of counter-rioters. Unfortunately, this plan had also failed. On the day of the riot, only a small number of women had found the courage to assemble together and march to the site of the riot. 

As she was heading to the site of the riot, Sonia was frantically messaging all those women leaders to re-double their efforts to increase their turn-out. She was praying that Kaija’s appearance on the scene would surely inspire some more women to cast off their fears and do what needed to be done. 

She watched Alia’s confession from one side of the platform. She was incredibly sad at the fate of these two women. Their actions could not be forgiven. That was clear to her. Yet, she knew that Alia was not a bad person at all. As Alia was wrapping up her confession, Sonia noticed that the numbers of the counter-rioters - mostly women - had swelled massively. 

Their size was distinctly larger than the three mobs of men who were concentrated in front of the mosque. And it was growing rapidly as more and more women were pouring out of their flats and buildings. Alia’s and Sara’s courageous act of confessing their crimes had served as a major catalyst for them in shaking off their apathy. At least Plan C was showing signs of life! But Sonia had to make sure that it would decisively end the riot which would then allow her to tell the mercenaries in no uncertain terms to back the fuck off.

Sonia quickly climbed up to the platform and yanked the megaphone out of Alia’s hands. Alia was surprised to see her boss. But she meekly handed it over and stepped back. 

“Okay then! Y’all heard what she said.”

Then turning to Alia and Sara, she announced into the megaphone, “I am arresting you for the murders of Qasim and Nadeem. Please don’t try to resist!”

The second sentence was unnecessary for Alia and Sara. Resisting arrest was the last thing on their minds. But it was important for Sonia to say it out loud to establish her authority at that moment in front of this mob. She turned back to the mob.

“Now I want all of you to quietly and peacefully leave this place and go back to your homes or wherever the hell you need to go to. Just get the FUCK out of this place!”

Her face had that dangerous look of daring the crowd to disobey her order. It worked - to an extent - as some of the rioters started looking around uncertainly. 

Then someone shouted, “this is not about just those two murders. We don’t care about that anymore. These bastards have killed our people for centuries. Everywhere they go, these barbarians murder us. We are not going to let them off the hook this time around. This ends now! We shall get our revenge.”

It was not clear who “we” and “they” were. That was the dumb thing, Sonia thought. These idiots were so programmed to hate and fight, that it didn’t really matter to them which particular tribe they belonged to. They would always find someone to hate and then kill. She had lost her patience with this nonsense and there was no way in hell that she was going to engage in a dialogue with them. 

She stared back at the guy who seemed to have shouted. A few sounds of approval popped up in support of that guy. Then she sneered at him. She sneered at them all. She knew that her face was being projected on the sides of the buildings. So she let them have the full effect of an utterly contemptuous Sonia.

“Look around you!” she waved at the women who had gathered on all sides of the three mobs but were watchfully maintaining their distance. Maria duly switched the projection from Sonia’s face to pan the vast crowd of women surrounding the rioters. She even zoomed in on a few faces that she deemed to be the fiercest among all. 

“If you don’t drop your weapons and quietly leave, all those women standing there will make you do it. And they outnumber you by a factor of… I am going to guess here… I think, it is at least ten!”

She let that hang in the air for a bit. 

Then she sweetly and sarcastically, asked, “would you like to get your butts kicked today?”

Switching her tone dramatically, she let them have the full blast of her anger.

“I am so fucking tired of this. All you stupid men have been running around hating someone… killing someone… just creating a fucking mess… from the beginning of time! 

What the hell is wrong with all of you?!

You have oppressed us women for millennia. Abused us. Exploited us. Tortured us. Raped us. Killed us. Mindlessly!

Now that we thought that we had finally found a refuge here in Sequoia, from all that violence and ugliness, you want to start that same nonsense here, too?

Do you actually like this shit?!

Because of your thoughtless and inane behavior, those assholes out there,” and she waved warningly at one of the drone cameras because she knew the mercenaries were watching all this,”are just waiting to swoop in and turn us into slaves again.

I mean… WHAT THE FUCK! 

You want to go be a slave. Please fuck right off from Sequoia. 

Seriously! Get the hell out of here. Like… NOW!

But don’t you dare drag the rest of us into that same muck as yourself.”

All the anger, all the frustration, all the irritation, all the annoyance, everything that she had to suffer through all her life just because she was a woman, came out. That dam had burst and the flood exploded out on the mob. They didn’t know what hit them. 

“I have to ask again… are you fucking deranged or something?

Do you not like your life here in Sequoia?

Is ALL this stupid violence worth it?

Really? I mean… what is going on in that thick head of yours?

I am done with your nonsense. All of us women are fucking done with it. 

We ain’t going along with your stupidity anymore!

If you don’t go back to your fucking homes quietly right now…

I promise you that we shall make you go VERY painfully. 

THAT I promise you!”

The full Sonia experience of flashing and glaring black eyes; the long and curly black hair swishing around as she paced; and the slashing gestures was on. Those who knew her well, were used to this. But those who didn’t know her felt like they were the puny demons quavering in front of the goddess Durga. The one who was so incandescent with rage that she was about to smite them from the face of the earth.

The ones who had been standing close to the platform had merely seen the life-sized version of this show. The rest had seen all this projected in larger than life form on the walls of the buildings. Her voice had thundered through the public address system. Maria had even added some nifty echo effects to her voice. The whole effect was simply overwhelming.

The one-two punch of the sombre yet bold confession made by Alia followed by this display of raw power by Sonia and the vast sea of women surrounding them completely snuffed out the fight from the mob. Their shoulders slumped. They knew they were beaten. They started shuffling about trying to find a way to get away from this place as soon as possible. 

Sonia smiled broadly and added, “Yes - thats right. Get going! Don’t make me come after you!”

Then she turned her gaze back at the drone cameras. She raised her middle finger at them and enunciated, “P-L-E-A-S-E F-U-C-K O-F-F!” 

After sending that direct message to the mercenaries and the plutocrats, she turned to Alia and Sara, “you two - let’s go!”