Prepared For Rage

by Dana Stabenow

  "Who will lead us now, Akil?"

  Karim's voice brought Akil back from his speculations. He raised his palms with a shrug. "Allah will dispose."

  Karim was not to be so diverted. "It should be you, Akil. You walked beside him for the last seven years. You were his first recruit after he was released from prison."

  "I am not Jordanian, Karim."

  "It should not matter. You were with him when he made bay'ah to bin Laden, both times you swore allegiance side by side."

  "But they thought we were killing the wrong people, Karim. They said so, time and again."

  "You were killing the enemy!"

  Faces turned at Karim's raised voice. "Gently," Akil said, "gently, my friend. Allah shall dispose of me as he sees fit."

  "God helps those who help themselves," Karim said tartly.

  AMI regarded him with a steady eye. "And where is that written, Karim? I am not familiar with the verse."

  Karim ducked his head. "Ay, Akil, you catch me out." He looked up, a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth. "I heard it on an American television program."

  In spite of his grief, Akil felt his lips twitch in response.

  The next day Akil gave orders for the cell to disperse. "Stay on the move," he told them. "Travel no more than two together. Rest no more than one night in a single place. Work toward the Syrian border. Trust no one. No one," he repeated firmly. "Our leader was betrayed. Who knows who else has been betrayed? Check your email as often as you can." He raised an admonitory finger. "Never from the same computer twice." There were nods all around. They were well drilled in security protocol. Still, he knew there would be lapses. People grew tired, or lazy, and careless. It didn't matter, now, but he was expected to say it, so he did. "You will hear from me soon." They were expecting to hear that, too. "Inshallah."

  "Inshallah," they echoed, and by ones and twos, dispersed.

  He and Karim set out on foot, with the clothes on their backs and a thick wad of American dollars. Any border, no matter how well guarded, was susceptible to bribes. This was especially true of the Syrian border. They were stopped many times, and each time either their identity papers passed muster or the cash smoothed their passage.

  They spoke but little, both concentrating on escape. There had been much opportunity in Iraq, their way in opened by the invasion and occupation. The country they left behind was in shambles, and the invader, bent on crusade, was on the verge of being utterly routed instead.

  He had had a part in that, Akil thought, and not a small one. He smiled to himself.

  It was a long way from Pakistan, and not only in distance.

  After Adara's death he had wandered across Pakistan, his only goal getting as far away from his tiny village as possible. Eventually he settled in Hayatabad. With his fluency in English it was easy for him to get a job answering the 800 number for an international banking firm. He rented a room from a Hindu family who, while they shunned the Muslim socially,

  were only marginally solvent and were more than happy to cash his rent checks. He made no friends, although at work he was appreciated for his willingness to trade shifts with anyone wanting a day off to celebrate a birthday or a wedding or a high holy day.

  For years he did not pray, and when after years of turning his shoulder to God he began praying again, he did not go to the mosque. Never again would he tolerate intercession, interpretation, guidance. His appeals were simple and direct, from him to God. He prayed for strength. He prayed for wisdom.

  He prayed for vengeance.

  The years passed. God did not answer his prayers.

  He did not hate God, though. He hated the mullahs who held his people by the throat. Even more did he hate the Western powers who supported them. After his years in America, he understood the rationale behind it, that the pursuit of capitalism required a stable base. That stable base was provided by a strong leader, whose absolute authority was made possible by allowing the mullahs and the imams free rein to enlighten the faithful as to the will of Allah and the laws of the Koran. They would not foment rebellion if left alone to practice-and enforce-Islam as they saw fit. Akil had never dreamed of questioning the source of that dual and complementary authority. Truthfully, he had never really paid much attention to it.

  Clearly not as much as his parents had. The memory of the closed door of what had been until that moment his home still burned redly in his mind.

  Adara had been his only sibling, a bright-eyed, mischievous child grown into a beautiful woman, the light of their family's life. And now she was gone, and he would never see or speak to his parents again. He had, essentially, orphaned himself that night.

  In the lonely years that followed, he had time to reflect on the forces that had worked such havoc on his life. He read a great deal-histories, the Koran, newsmagazines-finding nothing adequate in any of them to explain why he was where he was now. He did, however, believe that he had achieved a better understanding of why the world was where it was. That understanding did nothing to alleviate his anger.

  Quite the contrary.

  They had burned witches once for sleeping with the devil. It was easy to see America as the devil in bed with his own nation, made even easier by the memory of Adara's body hanging from the neem tree. That memory was the last thing he saw before he went to sleep at night, and the last thing he dreamed before he woke again the next morning. It never varied. In a way, he was glad of it. The memory and the dream nourished his anger, kept it alive.

  One day in the summer of 1999, he met a man. The man was not in his first youth, with slightly stooped shoulders and a hard round belly, although his stubby-fingered hands were strong and calloused. He had dark eyes, a long strong nose, and a wide upper lip edged with a thick black mustache, a description that could have fit almost any man in the Middle East, but unlike them, once seen this man was not forgotten. His bright eyes snapped with interest, his speech was rough but decisive and ultimately spellbinding, and his whole attitude was one of purpose and resolution.

  The first time AMI met him was at a coffeehouse near where he worked. The man who occupied the desk next to his introduced them.

  "Ah, Akil," the man said, examining the young man with those bright eyes. "A good name. It means 'intelligent,' and 'thoughtful,'" he told the others around the table.

  There was a bobbing of heads. In another group there might have been some fun poked at Akil, but no one felt they had the right to take liberties with the sober young man, especially without invitation from their host, of whom they were all slightly in awe.

  They would become more so.

  "And where do you come from, Akil?" the man said.

  Akil told him, and then had to explain where in Pakistan it was. Briefly, because even now, five years later, awareness of his exile brought him pain.

  The older man's eyes were steady on his face. "And now you live in the big city. What do you do here?"

  He was grateful that the subject had been changed. It was only later that he realized the man had seen his distress and had changed it for him deliberately.

  The man's name, he said when asked, was Ahmad, Ahmad al-Nazal. He was Jordanian, and when asked he said with a self-deprecating smile that he did many things, none of them really well. For a time he had been a journalist. A few years after that he had gone into video rentals, which explained his near total recall of every movie made since Ben-Hur (Ahmad adored Hugh Griffith). Later, he said, he had worked in a computer store, where he had acquired enough skill to introduce Akil to the Internet. It was from Ahmad that Akil learned of the wonders of email, the ease of anonymous communication, and its incredibly infinite reach. Akil was astonished at how much Ahmad knew about online banking, including things that were at this time only possibilities spoken of in executive meetings. Ahmad predicted that soon everyone with a bank account would be able to pay bills without money ever changing hands. Sums of money would be moved from one account to another from one country to another with a pass code and
a keystroke. One's banker would never know one's face, a distinct advantage, Ahmad said, in certain professions.

  Ahmad was also a student of history, with his own theories as to the causes of the many global conflicts current the world over. Akil's thought had not gone beyond the local, what he could see, what he had experienced. Ahmad took a more global viewpoint, quoted Clausewitz and Sun Tzu, and lectured Akil and a small but ever more devoted group of acolytes on the ability of guerilla warriors to attack not only the enemy's strength but, and what Ahmad said was even more important, the enemy's morale.

  There was some politely but inadequately concealed disbelief at this assertion. Ahmad saw it. "No," he said, "I assure you," and hastened to give examples dating from the Scythians attacking Darius to the American war of independence. "A guerilla army has certain significant advantages over a regular standing army," he said. "It's smaller, for one thing, which makes it not only more mobile but easier to conceal, and infinitely easier for its soldiers if escape is necessary. It strikes not on command but when it wills, at dawn, in the middle of a week, on a high holy day, keeping the enemy in a constant state of apprehension over where the next strike will be."

  They digested this in silence. Akil, looking around, saw no skepticism.

  They were all young men, unmarried, some religious, some not. And indeed Ahmad spoke very little of religion.

  "A guerilla army," Ahmad said, "targets the enemy not on its flank but at its heart. A school bus. A government building. A hotel."

  "You mean civilian targets," Akil said.

  Ahmad shrugged. "A guerilla army has one more attractive facet. It is made up of people who volunteered because they support the same cause. True believers, if you will."

  "Freedom fighters," someone suggested.

  Ahmad nodded equably, but Akil, watching closely, saw his eyes glitter. With excitement, perhaps. Or was it triumph? How long would conversation have gone before Ahmad himself had introduced the phrase "freedom fighters"? "There are many names. Rebels. Partisans."

  Terrorists, Akil thought. At least so far as Western propaganda was concerned.

  "Soldiers of God," one excitable young man said.

  The others looked startled. Ahmad smiled again but made a shushing movement with his hands, as the excitable young man's words had reached tables other than their own. "Regular armies fight because they are doing their two years of national service," he said, in a lower voice, "or they have been called up in a time of war. Often a war they have little interest in fighting." He smiled and raised an eyebrow. "Like in Platoon," he said.

  They laughed, and the conversation shifted so smoothly from talk of real war to talk of war movies that no one but Akil noticed.

  Over the next few months there were many other conversations on many other topics in coffeehouses around the city. Occasionally Ahmad would invite a favored few to a simple meal in his apartment.

  In October the man at the desk next to Akil's came back from lunch pale and sweating.

  "What is it?" Akil said.

  "They are arresting Arab militants all over the country."

  "And so?" Akil said. "You aren't a militant. You have nothing to fear."

  "Ahmad is one of them."

  It was a purge of dissidents by the government, under pressure from the West. The dissidents were imprisoned briefly and then expelled from Pakistan.

  Ahmad invited a select few to his apartment to say good-bye while he packed. "Come," he said, "no long faces. It could have been much worse."

  "Where will you go?" one of them said.

  Ahmad closed his valise and straightened. "I was thinking…"

  He turned to look at them. "I was thinking I would go to Afghanistan." There was a moment of breathless silence. "You go to join the Taliban," Akil said.

  Ahmad lifted his shoulders. "Perhaps." He paused with uncharacteristic hesitation. "I did wonder…"

  "What?" Akil said.

  Ahmad smiled at him, at the circle of intent, watching faces. "I did wonder if you might like to come with me."

  Akil knew then that God had been listening to his prayers after all.

  A WEEK LATER, HALFWAY TO THE BORDER, THEY HEARD THAT AL QAEDA had released a video of Ayman al-Zawahiri, who called Zarqawi "a soldier, a hero, an imam, and the prince of martyrs."

  Karim snorted. "And it only took them sixteen days after he died to admit it."

  A week after that bin Laden himself released an audio recording, which Akil and Karim heard in a cafe in Haditha whose television was tuned to Al Jazeera. "Our Islamic nation was surprised to find its knight, the lion of jihad, the man of determination and will, Zarqawi Musab al-Zarqawi, killed in a shameful American raid. We pray to God to bless him and accept him among the martyrs as he had hoped for."

  Karim raised an eyebrow at Akil. "What do you think?"

  "A very poor-quality recording," Akil said, and drained his cup.

  They heard the broadcast of bin Laden's second audio tape in Abu Ka-mal, barely but safely over the border into Syria. "Our brothers, the mujahedeen in the al Qaeda organization, have chosen their dear brother Zarqawi Hamza al-Muhajer as their leader to succeed the amir Zarqawi Musab al-Zarqawi. I advise him to focus his fighting on the Americans and everyone who supports them and allies himself with them in their war on the people of Islam and Iraq."

  Karim stared at Akil. "An Egyptian?"

  "So it would seem," Akil said.

  "You are not surprised," Karim said, almost an accusation.

  Akil glanced at him, amused. "Zarqawi was as a father to me, and bin Laden hated Zarqawi. He didn't like Jordanians much, either, he thinks you are all spies for Amman. And never forget that his mother is a Shiite."

  Karim brooded all the way to Damascus, where Akil replenished their funds and sent emails to the cell members directing them to contact their new leader. He ignored any replies by the simple process of discontinuing that account.

  They spent two nights at the Four Seasons; a risk, Akil admitted, but Zarqawi had left the Swiss account in a very healthy state, and what was fate for, if not to be tempted? He was sure the Prophet would have understood. They outfitted themselves in a Banana Republic a block down the street, Karim looking very smart and very Western in his new clothes, and young enough to think of his appearance as something other than camouflage.

  They ate a sumptuous meal in an Indian restaurant in a quiet neighborhood, and found a late-night cafe where the waiter didn't hurry them over their coffee. Karim watched the girls walking by in giggling groups. Akil watched the omnipresent television hung from the ceiling in one corner, this one tuned to CNN. An earthquake in the Far East, more bombings in the Middle East, a plane crash in South America. Tony Blair on his way out due to his slavish allegiance to George Bush's Iraqi agenda. A space shuttle landing at Cape Canaveral after a successful mission to the International Space Station, and then someone from NASA came on to talk about the retiring of the space shuttle in 2010, and the missions scheduled between now and then.

  In business news the world's stock exchanges were climbing to new highs, well into recovery from the burst tech bubble a few years back. Construction of new homes was also at a new high. Rupert Murdoch was buying more newspapers and media conglomerates. There was a brief spot on Al Jazeera and how it had become the voice of record to Muslims everywhere. An American media company was being simultaneously lauded and chastised for carrying Al Jazeera on its basic programming. It seemed even the Pentagon was watching Al Jazeera nowadays. Pity it wasn't the White House.

  Karim spoke to him twice before he heard him. "I'm sorry, Karim," he said, turning. "What did you say?"

  "You have not told me where we are going," Karim said, a little diffidently. One learned not to question in Zarqawi's organization, one learned to obey. "Or when. Or what we do next."

  Akil forced a smile. "All in good time, Karim."

  Karim looked at him, worried. Isa seemed very preoccupied and remained so all the way back to the hotel. />
  It wasn't until they got to the airport and Akil gave him his ticket that Karim realized their destination was not the same. "Isa!" he said in consternation. "I want to go with you! I follow you! I look to you!"

  "Gently," Akil said, embracing the younger man and kissing him on both cheeks, for indeed he was fond of Karim. They had fought side by side since the invasion of Iraq, in Mosul, in Baghdad, in Fallujah. He trusted Karim, he really did, or he did as much as he was willing to trust anyone. Zarqawi had taught him well in that respect. It was a wrench to sever his last tie from his old master, and Karim's skill really was unequalled at building and setting IEDs, but Akil's plans had no place for him and he held to his purpose. "Where I must go, you cannot follow."

  Karim had tears in his eyes. "But where do you go?"

  "First to Paris," Akil said, pointing at the next gate, where the agents were preparing to call the flight. "And then, who knows? Bush the Unbeliever says that it is better to fight us on our ground than for the Americans to fight us on theirs. I am beginning to believe he is right, Karim."

  He kissed Karim on both cheeks again and stepped back. "Go with God, little brother." He even smiled a little. "Go, now. They are calling your flight."

  He watched as Karim dragged his feet down the jetway, and he waited while the airplane backed away from the concourse. He waited while it made its ponderous way down the taxiway, he waited until it turned onto the runway, and he waited until he saw it lift off, rising swiftly into the air.

  He waited until it was out of sight before turning and walking past the gate that was boarding passengers for Paris in favor of another farther down the concourse, whose agent was just announcing preboarding for its flight to Barcelona.

  In Barcelona he checked into a quiet hotel a block off Las Ramblas. The next day he spent wandering through the city, guidebook in hand, dutifully admiring buildings by Gaudi. He tried to take a photo of La Pedrera, only to discover that his battery had died. He clicked his tongue, received a sympathetic glance from an American man, and put the camera away with a sigh.