The Ghost of Al-Madam

Rasheed had no idea how long he’d been out, only that by the time he woke, the monster was already gone.

He’d faced killers before—every kind.
Some highly trained. Some born for it.
And lately, he’d even crossed paths with entities that bent the laws of reality—gifted minds, near-supernatural.
Still, nothing in his history came close to this one.

This was evil that walked like a man.
He worked his arms loose, wrenched himself free from the restraints.
It took effort, but it wasn’t impossible.
He staggered to the sink, washed the blood and grit from his face, and changed into a fresh, high-collar shirt.

Grabbed a burner.
Slotted in a new SIM.
His stomach was still knotted, waves of unease rolling up from somewhere his brain hadn’t caught yet.

He called Krangthai Bank.
Claimed his card was damaged.
The operator apologized, promised a replacement right away.

That was the protocol.
The Maker had designed incident reporting this way.
The next step would come from the Maker’s network.
Rasheed waited.

Sat still, playing the whole thing back in his head.
After their first real op, the Maker had gifted them a “parcel”—said, pick any target, let it fly. But Kamran never used it.

Instead, he decided to transport it in Bukan, Iran, stack it inside his own safehouse.
Rasheed heard the regime’s top brass were coming—to see Kamran’s legacy up close.
That’s when the choice would come:
Light it up now, or hold out for something worse.

The Maker’s crew dropped them at Rasheed’s bungalow on Lake Van, Türkiye. From there, they would take it across the border.
Rasheed didn’t want to go with them.
Thought he’d hand it off to Baharram.
But Kamran didn’t trust his own brother—not with this.
Even blood couldn’t guarantee results.

Eventually, Rasheed laced up his boots.
When he was on a job, failure wasn’t an option.

He skipped the direct road through Salmas, led the crew south, through Iraq. The desert was wide, open, and clean of surprises.
Fifty extra miles across no-man’s land, but worth every step.
That border triangle—Türkiye, Iraq, Iran—was Rasheed’s home turf.
He’d started here.
Smuggled between those borders for years.
Even met Kamran on this ground.
For him, it was just a backyard choked with wild stalks.

They ditched the jeep in the Tuntunlu dunes.
Hiked on foot into Ari, in Erbil, Iraq—carrying only the essentials, and the parcel.
Rasheed had arranged for a welcome party.
But what met them wasn’t anything Baharram expected.
An armored unit. Fully kitted.
American Humvees. U.S. uniforms.
Formation like they’d just rolled out of the Pentagon.

Baharram nearly fainted.
Dropped everything.
Started backing away, ready to bolt.
Rasheed caught his arm—chuckling.
The troops weren’t Americans.
This was Rasheed’s trick from the old days.

Years spent cutting deals with a rogue Iraqi unit—rebels who hoarded abandoned U.S. gear, copied the look, moved like ghosts in daylight.
When needed, they could take out a real American convoy, vanish into the dust, and leave even the Pentagon confused.
They’d done it before—more than once—and always slipped away clean.
War’s chaos made it possible.
The U.S. Air Force had bombed its own units more than once—overconfidence always came with a cost.

With the local crew guiding them, Rasheed and Baharram rode through the sand in those Humvees—crossed from Ari into the dunes of Baisur.
Dusk had fallen like a slow-breathing beast, and with it came the decision to halt.

Pushing forward with no headlights was suicide—but turning them on would throw flares into the dark, calling down the real U.S. military or something worse. It was better to stay low near the shallow riverbank at the edge of the dunes.
The team unfolded their camps, ate dry rations, drank in silence.
One by one, local rebels crawled into tents—bodies melting into mats and quiet.

They kept rotating shifts while most of the unit slept.
Rasheed crashed out early.
Drained from the long haul, pitched his tent between the unit commander and Baharram Gazi.

He had no sense of time when he woke.
When his eyes opened, the full moon stared back through a slit in the tent—pale, perfect, and something was terribly wrong.

It wasn’t fear, exactly.
Rasheed didn’t scare easy.
But something primal curled in his gut.
The desert was too still.
Even the wind felt like it was holding its breath.

He listened.
No footsteps.
No quiet patrol chatter. Nothing.
That was wrong.

He grabbed his Nightwalker and slipped outside, slow.
Silence pressed in—heavy as stone.
No lights anywhere. No eyes watching. Just absence.

He headed for the commander’s tent first—close enough to check.
In less than a minute, he eased the zipper open.
Shouldn’t have bothered.

The man’s throat was already split wide, head cocked back at that angle only death allows. Blood had dried thick and dark—a crusted black collar across his neck.

Instinct roared—find Baharram, find the package.
He scrambled to Baharram’s tent, slashed it open—empty.
Of course.
That stubborn bastard never trusted anyone, not even Rasheed.
Kept the package close, clung to it like a blanket, refused to hand it off.

Rasheed stepped outside.
And there it was.
Bodies—everywhere.

Silver moonlight lit them like props in a horror tableau.
All of them—every last soldier in the unit—slumped, sprawled, or folded.
Each with their throat opened wide.
No signs of a fight. No gunshots.
Just silence, stillness, a graveyard of slit necks.

Rasheed froze.
How? Who could wipe a tactical unit without a single sound?
No time to guess.

He heard it—low, distant, almost a hum.
From the river, behind camp.
Not a voice, exactly.
Something… in-between.

Could’ve been his mind playing tricks.
But it was the only lead he had.
He followed it—stayed low, moved like a shadow.
And that’s when he saw it for the first time.
The monster.

A body, slick with drying blood, dark red turning rust-black in the moonlight. Wearing a tactical suit.
It stood over Baharram Gazi, kneeling at the water’s edge, hands tied behind his back, whole body shaking.
The thing—whatever it was—held a small, flashy blade, pressed right to Baharram’s throat.

Then it looked up.
Right at Rasheed.
Paused for a second, even tilted its head like it was fun.
It was a kill straight out of Taliban’s old playbook—gruesome, slow, ritualistic. But this thing wasn’t Taliban. Not even close.

Whatever glinted in its hand—it wasn’t a knife.
Not a sword either.
Slim. Short. Almost surgical.
The kind of weapon no Taliban would carry.

In just seconds, the killer moved.
It didn’t stab Baharram. Just touched him.
And blood exploded—like the man’s arteries had been praying to erupt.
Baharram convulsed, body jerking, blood spraying from his throat in wild arcs.
Rasheed considered pulling the trigger.
But some part of him already knew—if bullets worked, the camp wouldn’t be packed with corpses.
Before he could move, the demon turned.
Reached the river’s edge in two lazy steps.
Glanced back.
Tilted its head again, left then right—like cracking its neck mid-stretch.
Then leapt, splashless, vanished into the black current.
Gone.

Rasheed stayed frozen too long.
When his body finally broke loose, he sprinted to Baharram’s collapsed frame.
Hands still tied behind his back.
Kneeling.
That wasn’t what made Rasheed’s skin crawl.

Baharram hadn’t screamed.
Couldn’t.
Something was jammed in his mouth.
Something torn from his own body.

Rasheed didn’t want to remember the details.
Some horrors haunt more than words can ever hold.
He searched anyway—ripping through sand, hunting for the parcel.
The one they’d come all this way to deliver.
Nothing.

Just a half-torn dog tag by the riverbank.
Marked with that blasphemous creature’s name: Caesar.

Dawn took forever to arrive.
And when daylight finally broke, it brought no peace.
Only truth.

Bodies everywhere. Not just outside.
Inside the Humvees.
Inside the M1A2 Abrams they’d rolled in as muscle.
Throats slit open—same method, same precision.
No one fired a shot. No one even called for help.

Rasheed’s insides turned colder than the desert air.
He tore through the camp again—checked every boot locker, ammo crate, even crawled under the tire wells.
The parcel was gone.
The monster had taken it.
Somehow—surgical, unstoppable.

He managed to start one of the Humvees.
Drove out the same way they’d come in.
Quiet. Alone.
Blood on his boots and questions in his head.

Back at Lake Van, he collapsed in the bungalow—mind racing, body in shock.
How the hell would he explain this to Commander Kamran?
Would the man believe a single word?
Odds weren’t good.
To Kamran, it might look like betrayal.
Rasheed had picked the transport crew.
Rasheed had brought Baharram.
Rasheed had overseen everything.
And now Baharram was dead.
The parcel was gone.

Looked like Rasheed staged the whole thing.
Used his own brother as a shield, cut a deal, vanished the weapon.
And that was all it took—just the possibility.
Enough to get a man killed.

Rasheed spent the next two days playing it over, second by second.
No word from Kamran. No messages.
No call-out. No search team.
He started to wonder why.

The answer showed up on the third day.
Same men as before—The Maker’s crew, the ones who’d delivered the parcel.
They knocked.
Said nothing more than: —Come with us.
And Rasheed knew better than to argue.

He climbed into their bulletproof Brabus G-Wagon without a word.
They drove to a private airstrip where a monstrous black chopper waited, blades already slicing through air.
The moment he stepped inside, they blindfolded him.
They didn’t want him seeing the route. But Rasheed could still feel it—wind patterns, elevation shifts, the angles of turns.
They were heading north.
Somewhere deep.

Nearly an hour passed before the helicopter dropped down into a fortress ringed with ancient, cold trees.
He looked around.
Maybe the edge of Armenia. Maybe Georgia.

They walked him into a massive stone mansion.
Old as history on the outside. Royal inside.
In the lounge, Commander Kamran sat at one end of a long couch.
On the other: The Maker himself.

Rasheed laid it all out.
Told them about the killer—the one called Caesar, The Ghost of Al-Madam.

Years back, Mossad had obsessed over that name.
Every time Rasheed was picked up abroad—and it happened more than once—they flashed a photo, always the same question:

—Where is he? What is Caesar planning next?

Rasheed had never met that thing of a man—just heard whispers out in the dunes, until now.

He’d always slipped Mossad’s grasp.
Foreign soil, backdoor exits, trusted allies.
But he never forgot how desperate they were to find a clue.

This time, Rasheed brought proof.
The dog tag, torn off at the scene—and the footage.
He showed everything to the Maker, who passed the phone to Kamran.
Kamran watched the video straight through.
Silent. Face like stone.
Then handed the phone back.

The Maker turned to Kamran, voice flat and clear.

—Except for your brother’s method of death, everything else points to one goal. Someone came for the parcel.

The Maker continued, his voice like glass gliding over steel.

—Yet whoever orchestrated this… knew your brother. Intimately. That much is certain. For even if they butchered every soul in that camp, only he was left with such… a signature. There’s no tactical reason—no operational logic—for one man alone to be found with his own genitals severed and shoved into his mouth.

The Maker delivered it clinically, a surgeon’s report on cruelty.

Rasheed felt bile surge.
The memory he’d tried to bury clawed up from the dark.
He couldn’t fight it.
He rushed to the powder room and emptied his stomach.

By the time he came back, they were hunched over a map.
Discussing logistics, routes, traces.

From Kamran’s body language, Rasheed could tell—he hadn’t lost trust yet.
Later, they tracked the parcel’s last ping—just outside the Iraq camp.
After that: nothing, total silence.
The parcel was buried underground, for sure.

The Maker had already locked it remotely.
Any forced tampering, unauthorized attempt to open it—and it would detonate instantly.

For now, the parcel was off the board.
The priority had shifted.
The Maker wanted the killer.