No Man's Land - A Russell Carter Thriller by Roland Fishman Read Free Book Online

everything Thomas had told him.
    Most Australians believed a major terrorist attack on Sydney would never happen, but logistically it wouldn’t be difficult. Security around Sydney, especially the harbor, the bridge and its foreshores, was lax. Which, if the clan was planning a significant strike around New Year’s Eve, could create a serious problem.
    He knew of plain-clothes police who’d entered the naval base at Garden Island on the harbor using library cards as ID. And, not so long ago, two state police agencies had discovered that a company subcontracted to guard HMAS Penguin and the Garden Island naval base was closely linked to the well-known organized crime figure Hassan Bakir, a member of the Iron Dogs outlaw motorcycle gang.
    Also of concern was another hardcore bikie group, the Soldiers of Allah. Even before Carter had left the order, they’d been on a Trident watch list. Members of the group were known to have jobs in harbor security and were suspected of engaging in weapons smuggling and drug trafficking on a significant scale. If the clan had infiltrated one of these groups, they could use them to orchestrate an act of terrorism on Sydney Harbour, making the threat very real.
    Carter ran his binoculars over the track that ran from the lawn to the highway, looking for any movement under the foliage. There was none. He switched his attention to the road leading to the ocean.
    Did he want to get embroiled in a fight that’d been going on for centuries and where there were no winners?
    The issues were far from simple. During his training with the order, Carter had studied Islamic history in an effort to understand the deeper dynamics of the fundamentalist Muslims’ conflict with the West and what motivated modern-day terrorists.
    It’d surprised him to learn that the period of Islamic supremacy, beginning in the eighth century and continuing into the twelfth, had been a time of relative peace, prosperity and cultural and technological advancement. Different religions, including Judaism and Christianity, had been tolerated under Islamic rule. This was known as the Golden Age of Islam.
    The fuelling of the jihadists’ religious fervor began in the eleventh century with the first of the Christian crusades, initiated by Pope Urban II; the aim had been to restore Christian access to the holy places in and near Jerusalem. The city was a sacred site for all three major Abrahamic faiths: Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
    Throughout the next two centuries, the Muslims maintained the strength of their powerful empire, which stretched across Middle and Eastern Europe and into Asia, managing to repel the crusaders, who came from all over Western Europe. In later centuries, though, the western invaders had more success, and many Muslims came to see westerners as the enemy, intent on humiliating and subjugating all devout followers of Islam.
    In Europe the period from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries was a time of great scientific, artistic, philosophical and – most importantly – industrial expansion, propelling the western world out of the Middle Ages and into the modern era.
    As Islamic power waned and the western powers seized control of large parts of the globe, Muslim clerics claimed that the followers of Islam were suffering because they’d strayed from the path laid out in the Koran and were being punished for their sins. The solution, they preached (according to historians), was to return to the practice of Islam as it’d been in the time of Mohammed, more than a thousand years earlier. They rejected industrialization and modernization, and instead sought to enforce the strictest possible interpretation of the Koran.
    While the twentieth century witnessed the independence of numerous Muslim countries from colonial rule, many of their leaders regarded the establishment of Israel as an extension of a historic campaign against Islamic lands. The West, particularly the United States, was held