Amsterdam 2020 (Amsterdam Series Book 2) (4 page)

The Netherlands is in a state of civil war, which touches off uprisings in England, Belgium, France, and Germany. 

The dragon has awoken, swinging its tail, breathing fire. 

As the weeks go by, the Islamic nations of the Middle East and Northern Africa organize into the United Nations of Islam and elect a new caliphate, the Supreme Leader of the Islamic World.  Their objective is nothing less than the Islamization of all of Europe and Africa.  Global jihad. 

Later historians will call it the beginning of the Great Eurabian War.

In The Netherlands, as in Germany, the security forces and armed services, are forty percent Muslim.  They overrun the House of Parliament and local administrative offices, replacing local police with members of the Muslim Brotherhood, ISIS, and al Queda. 

On June 16, 2012, the Royal Family flees to Denmark to organize a temporary government in exile.  The Netherlands is declared the Islamic Republic of Holland, instituting sharia law across the land.

Three, 16 March 2020

Fredrika Maria

Tonight we meet at a barge on Keisersgracht in the Southern canal belt.  The
Fredrika Maria
was built in 1914 to transport sand and gravel from IJmuiden, converted into a houseboat in the 1960s.  Hippies painted it in rainbow colors and grew weed in flower boxes.  In 2006 the
Restauratoren Nederland
restored it, and made it into a boat museum for tourists.  The flower boxes are now gone, as are the tourists.  Dove gray colors its hull.  But there is a bit of color.  If you look closely, you'll see a curly pink squiggle, written in crayon on a piece of paper, taped to the inside of a porthole. 

A pig's tail, the symbol of the Resistance.
 

We often meet on one canal boat or another.  Since the Islamic Council forbids bars and ca
fés
, clandestine ca
fé
restaurants have sprung up in the canal boats.  When they hear there is going to be a raid, they pick up and move on.  Word gets around where they are, and they open again for business.

The Islamic Council would like to ban the barges, but housing is in short supply and thousands of people live on houseboats.  Also, many on the Islamic Council live in an exclusive area in eastern Amsterdam, IJburg, a small city of luxurious houseboats, built by hip entrepreneurs who wanted more space than the cramped traditional houses of Amsterdam.  If the Islamic Council banned houseboats, half of them would have to move. 

Inside the
Fredrika Maria,
the
ceilings are low, the rooms twenty feet across.  The walls and ceilings are painted white, the original plank floor stained dark brown.  Portholes look out onto the lapping canal.  Skylights above let in the moonlight.

Two dozen people sit at a long table that runs the length of the main room.  A potbelly stove sits in one corner, cozy and warm.  Coffee and sometimes illegal beer is available.  People bring in food they've managed to find, a bag of onions or potatoes.  Some fish.  Or a chicken.  Someone always makes up a stew or soup. 

Smells of mushrooms, onions, and beef fills my nostrils.  Someone got lucky and brought some stew meat.  My mouth waters as I take off my burka
and hang it on a hook.  Underneath I wear gray slacks and a pink cashmere turtleneck.  The others smile at my boldness.  It's a lot of pink.

Before the Occupation, pink was the color for breast cancer.  People wore pink ribbons and pink T-shirts to show support for their mothers and sisters. 

Now pink means something different.  It means pig.  The
Varken Weg.
  It means you support the underground rebels.  If you meet someone and want to know their inclination, you might accidentally lift the sleeve of your burka
,
and show the cuff of your pink shirt underneath.  Or you might draw a curly pig's tail on a napkin, or use your toe to draw in the loose dirt.  Like the early Christians who drew a fish in the sand to find other Christians.  

It isn't particularly wise to wear so much pink, but little defiances help our morale.  Besides, I look good in pink. 

Everyone knows everybody here, although theoretically that's not the best policy in the underground.  We all know how vulnerable it makes us if one of us is captured and tortured.  We should be more cautious, more rigorous.  Yet without our friendships, I don't think we could carry on every day risking our lives.  It helps keep our fear under control.

We are an odd mix of people.  Gays, lesbians, women, atheists, Christians, Jews, and liberal Muslims.  We were engineers, teachers, travel agents, hotel clerks, students, entertainers, actors.  Some of us live our everyday lives with our actual identities, doing our other work at night or on the sly.  Others live solitary lives, far from our families, in hiding, living in the shadows.  We belong to one of many hundred small armed resistance cells in Holland.  The cells are organized into regions.  Each cell has its specialty—manufacture of false identity papers, social services, underground press, propaganda, information and intelligence, the secret army, and labor action. 

Many cells adopt names:
Zwart Masker,
Black Mask,
Rotmuffen,
Barbarians,
Horzels,
Hornets,
Kraaien,
Crows.  We are the
Watergeuzen,
Sea Beggars, another term for pirates. 

Our group does a little bit of everything, mostly information, intelligence, and safe passage.  Each of us has entered a world of duplicity and lies.  All quite naturally, as if we were born sociopaths.  I sometimes wonder how we will be able to return to being law-abiding citizens once the war is over. 

How do I introduce them to you? 
We all have many names.  Those of us who have converted to Islam have Muslim names, which are on our identity papers, our official names.  We have our underground names, which we use among ourselves, and the names we use on missions, forged on identity papers, which change depending on the mission.  Then we have the names we wear in the flesh of our hearts, the names we were born with.  We almost never reveal our real names, not even to our closest friends.  When we do it's like ripping a bandage off a moist wound.  It hurts.  It makes us feel vulnerable. 

I will use our underground names.  Some of us choose nicknames, like Berger, who is built like a mountain, or pet names we had as children.  Or perhaps a common name.  

They know me as Lina.

I slide down and sit next to Rikhart, our forger.  Before the war, Rikhart was a cartoonist, who ran into his share of problems with the Islamists.  He is a very sweet man who grumbles when you ask for false identification cards overnight.  His fakes look better than legitimate papers.  He rationalizes his illegal expertise saying he doesn't get paid for his work, therefore he's not profiting from crime.  We all need our rationalizations. 

Next to Rikhart sits Lars, who can get anything you need on the black market, which is how he makes his living.  Like me, Lars started as a courier, but when forging demands got too great for Rikhart, Lars joined him, and helped organize a false paper service.  He has contacts inside the Islamic bureaucracy who, upon request, will accidentally leave doors and drawers open in certain offices, where we can break in and steal blank identity cards and passes.  He has an impressive collection of various types of official identity cards, passes and permits, birth certificates, and official rubber stamps from the local police.  Like Rikhart, Lars is meticulous, dependable, and very gay.

Then there is Kaart, a courier, who also does one of the most important jobs in the group.  He finds a different meeting place in Amsterdam every Friday morning at 9:00 for the cell leaders to meet and plan strategies.  He then notifies each member, usually through secondary messengers, so there's no chance that someone from the
Landweer
will follow him.  He arranges food to be at the meeting.  Not everyone gets enough to eat, and it's important the leadership doesn't go around fainting.  He is constantly on the move, and changes clothes often, or wears a burka
to throw off anyone following him.  He uses five or six distinctive walks, which he changes out—the stiff-legged businessman, the loose-limbed drifter, the gimp, the old woman.  He can look completely different just by the way he holds himself.  I'm sure I have passed him in the street and not recognized him, even though he's my cousin.

A dozen or so women sit in the middle of the table.  Femke, our communications expert.  Anika, transportation, who steals bicycles and cars if we need them.  Edda and Truus, who help people in hiding, whom we call the
onderduikers—
the under divers.
  Margo heads small arms procurement.  You don't want to stumble into her.  She almost always carries a few weapons hidden beneath her burka.
 

Women do most of the running around, spying, and delivery.  The men plan sabotage, blow up bridges, free political prisoners, destroy railroads, and fight.  These roles are fluid.  Each does what he or she does best.  Or what's needed at the time.  But women have the benefit of being shunned and invisible.

Tonight the women are loud and enjoy themselves.  We spend so much time being silent, that when we're with friends it's hard not to be a little boisterous.  The men understand and indulge us.  They know not to take our flirting seriously. 

One or two of us are assassins, but none of us know who.  It is a secret we hold as closely as our true names.  Women make the best assassins.  The Islamists don't expect it.  They have so little respect for women, they could never imagine we would be capable of carrying off an assassination.  They see us as slow and clumsy in our burkas,
so that's how they think of us.

Someone has brought wine, and the mood is festive.  For no apparent reason.  Berger, the best cook among us, spoons out bowls of hot steamy soup.  My knees nearly buckle from the heady aroma.

I collapse beside my friend Nasira, one of the few religious Muslims in our group.  Her parents were from Somalia, liberal, both professors at Amsterdam University.  When the Islamic Council took over, her parents refused to kick women out of their classes.  They were among the first publicly executed for “sedition.”  Nasira hates the Islamic Council as much as the rest of us.  Perhaps more.

Berger sets a bowl of soup in front of me.  The steam moistens my face.  My stomach growls.  Nasira passes bread and cheese.  Someone has brought a salad of dandelion greens.  What a feast!

Rikhart gets up, digs for something in his leather briefcase by the door, and hands me a manila envelope.   I peek inside.  Four passports.  My group's new IDs.  They are now a family of Italian immigrants from Calabria.  “Make sure to grill them on their new identities.  Their memories must be flawless concerning their new profiles.  Make sure they check their clothes for monograms and laundry marks.  Make sure they get rid of their previous papers.  Even their ration cards.”

I nod and sit on the envelope.  This is not the way it should be done.  I should visit him at his studio so no one else knows about this assignment.  But like our friendships, we can't always follow the rules.  Secrecy wears on us.  We need to share.  Besides, we have learned to ignore conversations around us when we know we shouldn't be listening.

Lars turns on the radio for DR news from Copenhagen.  Everyone listens quietly.  It mostly has to do with recent victories of Coalition Forces in Spain and Greece.  They have retaken the border between Greece and Northern Turkey, and are forcing UNI troops back toward the Sea of Marmara. 

Putting the “cork in the bottle,” as Pim likes to say.

#

Europe is a very different map than it was in 2012.  The Netherlands, England, France, Belgium, Germany west of the Rhine, Austria, and the south eastern European countries of Albania, Macedonia, Kosovo, Montenegro, Cyprus, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Bulgaria, are under Islamic control.  Civil war continues in France.  The major cities are controlled by Islamic governments, the countryside home to the Resistance.
 

Norway, Sweden, Finland, Iceland, Ireland, Scotland, Denmark, Italy, and what's left of Germany make up the Coalition Forces.  They have destroyed all of the mosques in their countries and exiled their Muslim populations.  I would like to say there have been no atrocities, but that isn't true.  Hundreds of innocent Muslims have been killed.

Switzerland and Russia remain neutral, but who knows how long that will last.

Israel has endured the saddest fate.  Several nuclear bombs, dropped by Pakistan, decimated much of the country.  Nearly the entire population of eight million people was killed or fled as refugees.  The land is radioactive and ravaged.  Only the most desperate of the desperate remain.

The United Nations of Islam are strong, and includes all of Northern Africa, Egypt, the Middle East, most of Turkey, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and all the other “stan” countries.  They have the advantage of an endless supply of young idealistic martyrs.  Their major disadvantage is their almost complete lack of naval power, which means their only access to Europe is through Turkey or around the Black Sea up through Russia.  Tribal wars in Northern Africa are sapping the UNI organization, confusing loyalties, as are sectarian fighting in Iraq and Syria. 

The Great Eurabian War is really two wars: civil wars in Europe, where Islamists have taken over democratic governments, and a war of aggression, jihad, organized armies from the United Nations of Islam, trying to push north to unite with European Islamist regimes.  To unite all of Europe under the caliphate.

War has raged for eight years now.  The UNI has made it across the Marmara Sea three times, and three times have been beaten back.  They invaded Spain, and now have been pushed out.  Attempts to cross through Georgia into Russia have failed.  They have managed to take Sicily and Sardinia, but their naval power is too weak to invade Italy. 

Many children have never known a life without war.  To them it is normal.

UNI troops are becoming exhausted and stalemated.  They were greatly weakened by the Great Influenza epidemic of 2014, which decimated 12 percent of their forces.  But they came back strong.  Some countries, such as Egypt and Turkey, are agitating.  They want to end the war.  They want to go back to their normal lives.  There is a reason that every time the Islamic empire has tried to conquer Europe it has failed.