Posted on 06/20/2016 1:06:53 PM PDT by Travis McGee
Piss Christ? Piss Koran!
Part Four: Resolution
by Matthew Bracken
“Your call, smart guy.” The phone connection made a click and the line went dead.
(The rest is at the Gates of Vienna link above.)
Mike wasn’t a kid. He knew that he wouldn’t live forever. He’d had enough brushes with death to understand that a healthy old age was not guaranteed in the contract. He’d been standing next to men who had stepped the wrong way, and fallen. He’d helped pull a man’s body off a concrete footer where he’d been impaled on an uncapped rebar stake. Just two stories down, and dead as a nail. Laughing and joking the minute before. A paragraph in the back of the paper, if that. There but by the grace of God.
Before he’d climbed the tower, Mike hadn’t planned out how the stunt would finish up. He figured that at the very least, he’d be arrested for trespassing. In fact, he didn’t even have a bottle of piss. It was apple juice, in case he spent the whole day up there and ran out of bottled water. He just wanted BCA News to be forced to publicly account for how casually they accepted Serrano’s Piss Christ as “art,” showing it on their website for years, when they were too cowardly to ever show a single peep of an unpixilated Mohammed cartoon. But finishing the morning by crawling down the twenty ladders, and hoping that some police officers would arrive to protect him from the gathering crowd of enraged Muslims?
No way. Not even if he had believed Vic Del Rio about the police escort, and he didn’t believe that lying weasel for a second. Not after Del Rio set him up for the mayor’s phone call, and the coordinated SWAT helicopter assault. Now there was only a single thin line of police barricades across the middle of 53rd Street, but there were no police officers standing behind it. Frank Salerno had said that the mayor wanted him dead. That, he believed. Some kind of a deal had been struck, but it wasn’t with him. It was between the mayor and the leaders of the local Muslim community.
So even if he wanted to go, to slip away quietly, the mob now unrolling their prayer rugs on 53rd — already angry enough to chew rebar and spit bullets — would see him coming before he was halfway down the twenty ladders. In their minds, he had already desecrated their Holy Koran by tearing up Sura 9:5, the Verse of the Sword.
So the die was cast. Well, nothing lasts forever. It had been a great life, and he’d had a wonderful wife. At least it was a gorgeous August morning in Midtown Manhattan, the rising sun casting beams and shadows down the length of 53rd. If this was his day to go, he thought he might as well make the best of it. He looked at his watch. It was 8:33, so he had just under a half hour. That is, if the mob was going to wait until after their morning prayers to stop the two blasphemies.
He picked up his iPhone to see what they were covering on BCA. A reporter was standing in front of a wave-pounded marina in Cabo San Lucas while Hurricane Eliza swept through. He selected his other television network preset buttons, and saw that none of them were covering the events around 6th Avenue and 53rd Street in Midtown Manhattan. Vic Del Rio had been right. The plug had been pulled on his stunt. He put the ear bud from his little Sony radio back in. On WNYR, he was surprised to hear Jerry Conroy’s voice, but it only took him a moment to understand that it was a pre-recorded “best of” show.
Meanwhile, beyond the puny little barricade just to the west of the crane, 53rd Street was rapidly filling up with devout Muslims who had heard the imam’s call to action. While he watched, he saw something glint in the sunlight. A man in a tan robe unrolled his prayer rug, revealing a sword, which he waved in circles over his head. Then the sword went against the pavement, his prayer rug concealing it.
Mike tried calling the WNYR studio office line again, but got a busy signal. He knew it would be useless to call the other radio and television stations on his list. But he also knew that there must still be cameras on him, even from across 53rd in the Grand Hotel. He found his spiral notebook and his Sharpie, and was considering which sticky-noted verse advocating the murder, plunder and rape of the infidels to tear out of the Koran next, when he heard an insistent rapping behind him. He looked around his poncho lean-to shanty toward the corner office of the bank building, and saw a crowd of people, at least half of them in police uniforms.
The woman from the other office was there again, holding another file folder message against the window. It read >call this number< followed by nine digits. He didn’t recognize the area code; it wasn’t from New York. It was hard to see around the shanty, so he unclipped the bungee cords from the corners, rolled it up, and put it away in his pack. With the BCA cameras a hundred yards across 6th Avenue turned off, it no longer made sense to hide from the eyewitnesses who were nearest to him, police or not.
He still had a zip-lock bag with unused prepaid flip phones, so he used a fresh one to call the number. It was picked up and answered on the second ring. He heard “Hello?” It was a woman this time.
Thanks, I will.
The more layers you peel back, the more it stinks.
Hey FBI, was Omar Mateen ever a confidential informant????
Hmmm?????
Did you know that Brooklyn Mike is a Black comedian? At least the Google version is.
Thank you, Matt,for a stunningly good short story. I would love to see you put some flesh on these bones and make it into a several hundred page novel. Alternatively, maybe you could have 6 or 8 similar stories about different people and create a thoroughly interesting and informative novel along the lines of World War Z.
I also happen to agree with your comments at the Gates of Vienna website, in which you indicated that the push-back against this tide of Islamization will only come from the blue collar elements of our society, not the so-called leaders of the conservative movement. As you said, the latter will either be in deep hiding, or will convert. My money is on the latter, so that they can retain their status in society, which is all that they are interested in.
Again, thanks, another job well done.
I think our Elites are using Islam as their Brownshirts.
The first time I really got wind of the evil of those Islamic scum was in a McDonalds in Paris in 1994. I watched one of those dickless MFs come from about two feet behind his head and pop his old lady across the face. Not a peep out of anybody there.
Yeah, I got that. It would just have been emotionally satisfying to me :-)
And another guy with that moniker calls Rush once or twice a year.
Can’t copyright titles or nicknames.
Sure they are, but when the police are held back and stood down (San Jose) there can be unintended consequences.
Thanks, but I have no plans to extend the story. I’ll admit it’s a great setup for a novel or TV series, but it will never happen. Not unless I turn it around so the villains are white Christian redneck bigot Islamophobes.
Then, I’d have lots of offers....sad but true.
Piss Koran was only a sidebar from the novel I’m working on.
I’m 80% finished writing the follow on to Castigo Cay. It’s set between Ireland and Morocco with a sea-jihad and kidnapping theme. Look up “the sack of Baltimore, Ireland, 1631,” and slide the time bar forward four centuries. When the West is weak, Islam moves into the vacuum.
In my new “future dystopian” novel, 80 Irish and English schoolgirls are kidnapped from an elite (“safe”) boarding academy in SW Ireland. They are taken in a long-range fishing vessel to Morocco, for ransom or sale as sex-slaves. One of the wealthy grandparents finances a rescue operation for all of them, instead of only paying to ransom his own granddaughter. A mixed English/Irish team is put together, ex-SAS and ex-IRA, under the leadership of a famous ex-SAS colonel.
The SAS have the know-how and skills, but can’t obtain the required guns. They are operating far outside the official lines, and the UK government would stop their rogue mission if they could. So they must turn to the IRA to get access to the required weaponry. Weapons the IRA never turned in or accounted for after the peace agreements in the 1990s. (This is all true, about the IRA guns.)
The vessel that was going to carry the team to Morocco was seized by HM govt in Wales just days before their launch, as the UK govt is getting wind of the outlaw operation. So the rescue team must come up with a replacement vessel right away, and get going. The slave auction will take place in only two weeks, after the Sharia-compliant three-month waiting period is over. (This is to ensure that none of the girls are pregnant. I’m not making this up.)
Dan Kilmer and his old schooner are in SW Ireland, selling off a cargo of drums of diesel fuel that they “recovered” from an abandoned USAF air base in the Arctic. The SAS/IRA team make him an offer he can’t refuse to carry the team to the Canaries. That’s the setup. I’m smoothing out the second half, (actions in Morocco), the first half is finished. Not sure of the ETA for completion.
Can’t wait for the new novel - your writing style is something that I both enjoy and admire. You also put the lie to just about everything the liberals/Leftists have been spouting on a wide variety of issues for several decades.
Thanks for everything that you do.
Bravo Zulu, Brooklyn Mike. Bravo Zulu, Travis McGee.
You’ve lived up to your screenname. The old man would have been proud of you.
Matt, amazing story and it made so many well-stated arguments against the hypocrisy of the current brand of PC that we are subjected to. The thing that has always struck me about the identity groups that preach and demand tolerance are the least tolerant people on the planet. Liberals, Muslims, you name it.
I can hardly wait for the new Dan Kilmer novel, I had to go back and get the audio of your original trilogy and listen to it again earlier this year!
And I loved the serialization of the story- the original Travis McGee (JDM) would have liked that touch I think...
Your voice is important and I applaud your courage...
Sure they are, but when the police are held back and stood down (ORLANDO) there can be unintended consequences.
One has to wonder what percentage of top ranking U.S. govt officials do they already own. It really seems to be the only plausible explanation for quite some time now.
“One thing I know: if we wait for GOPe pu$$ies to rescue this country, it won’t happen.
If this country is going to be saved, it will be Joe Bluecollar, not Mr. Television Bowtie who does the heavy lifting.
AMEN!
Well, that's your call of course, but sliding in the bit about the San Jose police stand-down was brilliant.
As this culture further devolves having 'Brooklyn Mike' pop-up with a quick installment/update here and there would be amazing.
No big commit, just a quick short story every 6 months or so.... or whenever the other side does something particularly foul.
Yep, there it is.
Congratulations and many thanks!
Very moving. Thank you for writing it, Travis McGee.
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