Over the past few years, though, the landscape had begun to change. At first, it was almost imperceptible. Slight shifts in the focus of his clandestine meetings. Additional buffers between him and real power. The work that had once been for the glory of God had been corrupted to nourish the greed of a handful of men. The young royals who had recently come into power cared nothing about what their country had once been. They knew nothing of hardship and the comfort of Allah’s blessing. Instead, they took their comfort from palaces, Western whores, and bottles of forbidden liquor that cost more than many of their subjects earned in a year. Islam was just a convenience to them. Like Christianity in the West, it was something to be played at when useful. If there was anything that could surpass the Americans’ thirst for oil, it was the Saudi royalty’s thirst for wealth and power.

The scent of the forest around Singh began to change as he continued forward. Rotting vegetation and blooming flowers were slowly overcome by something very different. Sweat and excrement. Sex and rotting flesh.

Gideon Auma had rejected every offer of a civilized location for their meeting, insisting that Singh come to him in the jungle. It wasn’t entirely unexpected, of course. Auma continued to survive the ire of the entire world based on shrewdness and caution.

The foliage began to thin, and his young guide put away his machete. The stench intensified to the point that Singh felt compelled to cover his nose and mouth with his hand. Discarded human figures appeared on either side of the poorly defined trail, strewn randomly and in various stages of decomposition. Later, they were secured to trees with barbed wire or nailed to makeshift crosses erected in the soft earth.

Singh felt a revulsion that he hadn’t suffered even in the most decadent of ISIS camps. At least ISIS maintained the pretense of remaining faithful to Allah. Gideon Auma adopted any and all belief systems that suited him. Above it all, though, was the man himself. God’s representative on earth.

They weaved through the looming Christian symbols, watched by the empty eye sockets of the corpses hanging from them. After a few hundred meters more, they passed from the realm of the dead to the realm of the living. Haggard girls, stolen from surrounding villages and now existing as sex slaves, scurried for cover. He imagined that their bodies, filthy, scarred, and broken, would soon end up with the others at the perimeter of the encampment.