Free The Recruit: A Taskforce Story by Brad Taylor

sacred one.
    Jacob played the role, but he’d long since lost belief in religion. Any religion. He’d had that whipped out of him by the pious Christian guards in the white house.
    No, it wasn’t the religion. It was the power. In this land, from Mosul to Raqqa, all that mattered was the courage of the battle-axe, and he’d found a skill that he didn’t realize he had. He knew he would die here, but it caused no angst. In truth, he had died long ago. All that remained was for him to slip the coils of his mortal frame. The difference was a cause. He wouldn’t end up as a page-two news story, caught stealing hubcaps and gunned down in the street. And neither would the men he had brought.
    Hussein may have recruited him, and the other two may have changed their names, diving headlong into the myth of the Islamic State, but he was the leader of their small group. Just as he had been inside.
    With that mantle came a responsibility.
    A man in black, completely covered from head to toe, like something out of a
Star Wars
movie, began walking his way. Jacob inwardly grimaced.
    His name was Abu Yabba Dabba Do, or some other unpronounceable Arabic crap, but Jacob called him Ringo. As in the Beatles. An Islamic fighter from England, he and others like him considered themselves above Jacob and his band because they were of Arabic descent. Ringo was Yemeni. Jacob was a mutt.
    “So, Jacob, are you ready for your first kill?”
    He drew out the name
Jacob
, showing his disdain for the Biblical reference and the fact that Jacob refused to take an Arabic one.
    Jacob said, “It isn’t my first, you shit.”
    Ringo smirked and said, “Death with a gun is not killing. You’ll see. This is absolute control. Absolute. As Mohammad dictated. But your little band of Lost Boys wouldn’t know about that.”
    He was being tested, which was what he expected. Ringo had beheaded many men, and had developed a cult following on Twitter and other social media, but he was an ass. A small man who gained importance after the fact. After the fighting was done, using his knife and a camera to become famous. At his core, Jacob knew Ringo felt a challenge from him and his friends.
    Four tightly knit brothers, forged by a fire outside the Islamic State, with—except for Hussein—no attachment to any Arabic or Islamic heritage, they were an anomaly. True foreign fighters in a foreign land. They called themselves the Lost Boys because of the iconic ’80s movie, but the analogy was apt. They lived in a world of the shadows.
    And they killed better than most.
    Jacob said, “Ringo, step away.”
    That was all.
    And Ringo did.
    Ringo had seen the punishment the Lost Boys had endured. With two blond Caucasians, one African American, and Hussein, the one who had recruited them, their arrival had been anything but welcoming. Convinced they were spies or, at best, journalists, the emir had subjected them to inhuman conditions and cruelty. And they had thrived.
    Because of the white house.
    Ringo said, “You are not the future.
We
are the future.
Kafir
.”
    Jacob looked up, catching Ringo’s pompous eyes with the dead ones he possessed, and said, “The future is dictated by the man who isn’t afraid to die. Is that you?”
    Ringo said, “I am not afraid. I have proved that multiple times.”
    “Do you wish to die today? Without fear?”
    Jacob knew his reputation from Mosul preceded him. Knew that Ringo hated the fact that he was a blond-headed, blue-eyed American, with no ancestral ties to the coming caliphate, but he also knew that Ringo couldn’t get past the stories that had grown into legends.
    Ringo snarled and said, “We’ll see, Lost Boy. We’ll see.”
    And walked away.
    The man on the square finished his speech, which was like every other one, and not unlike speeches given by the blowhard preachers Jacob had heard every night in the reform school. There was a flourish at the end, then a knife placed in his hand.
    He looked at the four men