The police line re-formed and stepped slowly but inexorably forward. "But why are they attacking the coffee shop?" Yussuf said.
There were other policemen there, too, Akil realized belatedly, not in uniform but unmistakable nonetheless. Americans, many Americans in cheap suits and bright ties, and Interpol, he thought, or at least representatives of some European security force.
It was time to call in reinforcements. Akil found a discarded bottle and threw it as hard as he could.
The bottle hit the back of one of the helmets, hard enough to cause the policeman wearing it to stumble to his knees. The line broke and turned to see where the new attack was coming from. By this time the gathering crowd behind Akil and his friends were screaming and shouting insults, and they took to his example with enthusiasm. A rain of objects, including rocks, cobblestones, bottles, and cans, hammered down on hastily raised riot shields. The rain increased to a hail, and by the time the hail became a storm the police line had regrouped and begun to advance at a well-disciplined trot.
"Come on!" Akil said, and led his three companions on an agile, serpentine dance through the crowd. At the corner he said, "Split up! Yussuf and Yaqub that way! Basil, with me!" He didn't wait to see if they obeyed; he grabbed Basil's arm and sprinted down an alley, around another corner, and up a street. Basil had shrugged free of his grip and was a pace ahead of Akil. He saw that the boy was laughing.
"This way!" Akil said.
"But that's back to the riot!"
"I know a different way! Follow me!"
At the top of the street the noise of the riot, which had been decreasing, began to increase again. There were the sounds of metal crunching as cars were overturned, the glass of storefronts shattering, the shouts of men, the screams of women and the cries of children, the orders of police commanders bellowed in the vain hope they would be heard above the cacophony.
Akil turned toward it and increased his pace so that he pulled ahead. This time there was no hesitation; Basil's feet thudded behind him. At the corner at the top of a little hill Akil stopped without warning, turned to his right, and stuck out a foot. Basil tripped over it and as he fell forward Akil grabbed the back of his jacket and the seat of his pants and assisted his headlong hurtle into the crowd running up the hill. It parted to let him sprawl on the pavement at the feet of advancing policemen with riot shields and clubs.
In one smooth movement Akil continued his turn and reversed course, gaining on the leading edge of the fleeing, screaming crowd until he was able to duck down an alley, another, a third, emerging finally blocks away. He smoothed his hair, steadied his breathing, and walked at a sedate pace back to his one-room flat.
He got out his small, shabby suitcase and began to fill it with slow and deliberate movements. There was time. Yussuf and Yaqub would take extra care in returning. If they returned at all, if they chose to follow him.
They would. After all, he had, and they were as he had been once, young, callow, untried, searching for something to give their lives purpose and meaning, a way to leave something behind, a path that would take them to glory. Any and all of the above. His mind filled with memories of another leave-taking, years ago and half a world away, the day he had followed Zarqawi into Afghanistan.
There had been no hesitation on his part, no second thoughts that October in 1999. He left his job and all his belongings, save a few things in a small pack, without so much as a backward glance.
They found a house in Kabul, and Zarqawi began immediately to recruit expatriate Jordanians living in Afghanistan to plan and execute a series of terrorist attacks in Jordan. He kept an attentive Akil at his elbow, watching, learning, in the beginning fitted for no task more arduous than fetching tea from the cafe down the street. Jordan had to be taught not to hold the United States so dear, Zarqawi explained, and the attacks would serve to get and keep their attention.
The following year Zarqawi was given the task of overseeing an al Qaeda camp near Herat. When they arrived, he handed Akil over to the training master with instructions that Akil be taught the full curriculum. "Play no favorites here," the training master was told, and the training master took to this instruction with a zealous and unrelenting enthusiasm.
At the end of that formative year, Akil could route an anonymous email, drive a D6 Caterpillar tractor, and field strip an AK-47, reassemble it, and shoot and hit a moving target. He could create a web site, outrun a platoon of recruits, and send a suicide bomber out on his mission with words stirring enough that the young man-and sometimes the young woman-believed absolutely that paradise was waiting on the other side of their trigger finger. He could hijack a bus, a train, an airplane. He could kidnap an uncooperative Pakistani city official right out of his Peshawar office in broad daylight. He could negotiate terms for his release, and he could kill him if such terms were not forthcoming, or even unsatisfactory.
Yes, he could kill. Of all the skills he learned that year in the camp near Herat, it was his most difficult and ultimately his proudest achievement.
His first was a Reuters journalist traveling in an area still controlled by the Taliban, with whom Zarqawi had very close ties. The journalist had been filing uncomfortably accurate stories about the Taliban's renascent activities that were appearing in newspapers all over the world. Alerted to his presence, Zarqawi declared that here was an obvious agent of the Central Intelligence Agency and sent Akil and six trained veterans after him with his blessing.
It was almost absurdly easy, a simple roadblock that stopped the jeep and extracted the driver and the translator. Both, aware of the reality of life in Afghanistan at that time, were white and shaking. Akil filmed the journalist bound and gagged in front of a two-day-old issue of the Independent News Pakistan and sent the driver off with it, trembling with relief.
The journalist, a middle-aged white man thick through the waist and addicted to Marlboro cigarettes, was Canadian, spoke English and French, and was at first philosophical at his capture. No ideologue, his view of the world and its leaders was sanguine and cynical and very amusing, and Akil quite enjoyed his company while they waited for the negotiations to play out. Ransom was demanded, and refused. A deadline passed. When AMI, properly masked, shot the translator on camera, in front of the journalist, the journalist was shocked and disbelieving. Conversation ceased. AMI regretted the necessity, not least because conversation ceased afterward.
When the second deadline passed and AMI had the journalist dragged before the camera, squat and malevolent on its tripod, under the impetus of sudden inspiration he borrowed a dagger from one of the other men, a sharp curve of silver, the hilt set with semiprecious stones. He turned the camera on, and walked toward the journalist, forced to his knees with his arms twisted behind his back. The journalist swore and began to struggle. One of the men holding him laughed.
AMI could sense their excitement. He went around behind the journalist, knotted a fist in his hair to pull his head back, and looked into the camera lens. "In praise of Allah!"
"Allah!" "Inshallah!" "Allah!" "Death to the infidel! Death to America! Free Palestine!"
"Motherfucker," the journalist said, his voice a growl of hatred, staring up at AMI through narrowed eyes, his teeth bared. "Do it if you're going to and stop preening for the fucking camera."
Akil brought the knife down and in one clean stroke cut the man's throat open from ear to ear. The gush of blood was immediate and immense, turning the hand that held the knife red, flooding the front of the journalist's body and splashing the men holding his arms. The weight of the body tore the wound open further and left Akil holding it up by the journalist's spine. He tossed the body from him and it thumped soddenly to the floor.
Again, he looked straight into the camera's lens. He raised the bloody blade in the bloody hand. "Alhamdulillah!"
The men's cries rose around him. "Alhamdulillah!" "Alhamdulillah!" "Alhamdulillah!"
It was the beginning.
There was a soft knock at the door, and the memory faded for
the reality of the flat in Dusseldorf. When he opened the door, he found Yussuf and Yaqub standing there.
"Basil?" Yaqub said.
He shook his head gravely. "They caught up with us. Basil told me he would distract them, and for me to run."
He made mint tea and they toasted the bravery and self-sacrifice of their missing comrade. Yussuf was fervent in a prayer for those who had been hurt and arrested. Yaqub was quieter and a little hesitant, regarding Akil with wide, troubled eyes.
Akil took no outward notice. It was their first taste of action. There had to be reaction of some sort. He smiled to himself. It was a law of physics.
When their glasses were empty Akil began again to pack. They watched him in silence until Yussuf said tentatively, "You are leaving us?"
"It has become too dangerous for me to stay," Akil said. He sorted through a selection of shirts and tucked them neatly into his case.
"Where will you go?" Yussuf said.
"Somewhere else," Akil said.
"But where?" Yaqub said.
"And to do what?" Yussuf said, the one Akil had always thought the superior in intellect.
"To continue my work," Akil said. He sorted through the papers in his desk. None in a name anyone would recognize, so he left them. He pulled out the German passport in the name of Dandin Gandhi he had bought in Barcelona and deliberately ripped it apart, piling the resulting fragments in a large bowl. He lit a match and the three of them watched his photograph melt and reduce to charred ash.
"Your work against the infidel," Yussuf said. "For the greater glory of Islam."
"Yes," Akil said.
Yussuf nodded at Yaqub. "We wish it to be our work as well," Yussuf said. "We will go with you."
Yaqub looked at once thrilled and frightened, but he didn't contradict his friend.
Akil closed his suitcase and stood it next to the door. He shrugged into his jacket and stood for a moment, looking around the room, checking to see if he'd missed anything. No.
He looked at the young men. "You understand that if you set out on this path there is no turning back."
Yussuf met his eyes steadily, without flinching. Yaqub was breathing a little faster than normal, his color high. He shifted from one foot to the other, once starting at a sound from the street.
Akil always felt bound by honor to give them more than Zarqawi had given him. His face was serious, his voice grave. Their eyes widened and they glanced at each other before looking back at him. "You will leave behind family, friends, everything you have ever known. You will be hunted by policemen of every nation, always on the move, often hungry, always tired, never again knowing a night's peace, and at the end only death."
"But a glorious death," Yussuf said quickly.
"Glorious indeed," Akil said. The rest came by rote. He had said it so many times he was hard put to it to infuse the words with any conviction. "We will either convert the infidel to the true faith, make them our slaves, and have sole dominion over the earth, or we will put them all to death. If we ourselves die in this endeavor, Allah will take us as his own, and we will be most richly rewarded in the afterlife."
"Seventy-two virgins for each of us," Yaqub said, and nudged his friend.
Akil pretended not to hear this. As useful for recruiting suicide bombers as it might be, he himself doubted the seventy-two virgins. "But all this you have had from the imam, and you are men of faith, so I need not repeat it to you here. My concern is what happens between now and then. It is not an easy task, what you wish to do."
"We will follow you," Yussuf said immediately.
"Today? Now? Are you this moment prepared to walk behind me out this door and never look back?"
"We are," they said in chorus. Yussuf walked to the door and opened it for Akil.
He didn't look back, but their footsteps echoed in his ears.
7
THE CARIBBEAN, JULY 2007
Munro was ten weeks out of Miami, trolling for go fasts before they headed back to port, when they spotted their first northbound freighter of the patrol. "Has she seen us yet, XO?"
The XO had binoculars glued to his eyes, feet spread to keep his balance in the slow swell rocking the ship. "I don't think so, Captain. Oh. Yeah." A long sigh. "Now they have."
"Damn it." Cal looked over his shoulder. "Launch both boats."
The coxswains, Garon and Myers, had been standing at his heels, waiting for the word. Their boarding teams had long since dressed out and were standing by the two small boats. "Aye, sir," they said in unison, and vanished down the ladder, probably afraid he'd scrub the boarding. Any day they didn't get their hands on a small boat was a bad day for them.
Although none of the crew relished the thought of taking migrants aboard. Most of them had probably been seasick by now and it was more than likely that the sanitation facilities were nonexistent. The last time they'd had to take on migrants the ship had stunk for a week afterward. He stifled a sigh. "Try to raise her again, Ops."
"Aye, Captain." Behind him Cal heard Lieutenant Terrell, the operations officer, key the mike for the marine radio. "Unidentified motor vessel, this is the USCG cutter Munro. Heave to, heave to, I say again, heave to, heave to."
Silence on the radio. They weren't responding. Cal heard the whine of the winch on the davit and went out on the starboard bridge wing. The hull of the orange rigid inflatable had barely touched the water before Garon started the engine and the wake boiled up behind the stern. The crew released shackles fore and aft, the sea painter was away, and Garon gunned the engine and the small boat pulled away from the Munro's hull in a wide arc, wake a white froth in a blue sea.
Cal went back inside the bridge and met the eyes of the XO coming in from the port wing. A quick nod told him the portside boat was safely away.
He squinted at the sky, a calm blue with a few cumulus clouds on the horizon, reflected in the glassy surface of the sea. At least they wouldn't have weather to contend with.
He returned to the bridge. Taffy was looking through his binoculars. Cal picked up his own and went to stand next to him. "How many?"
"Can't tell yet. There's about half a dozen people on deck. They say they're fishing but they've got no gear in the water or showing on deck."
Cal adjusted his binoculars and zeroed in on the tattered flag fluttering off the freighter's stern. A crew member had bent it on just moments before. "Haitian."
"Yeah."
"So they say."
"Yeah."
Over his shoulder Cal said, "Where are we, BMC?"
"Forty-two miles south of Providenciales Island, Captain," Bosun's Mate Chief Guilmartin said promptly, without looking down at the radar. "About a hundred and fifty miles north of Haiti."
Cal exchanged a brief glance with the XO. They had yet to take a migrant on board and already the crew was figuring out how long it would take to get them back to their country of origin and, more important, off Munro. Cal didn't blame them. Freighters smuggling migrants were all about the transportation and not at all about the hygiene.
Taffy muffled a curse.
"What?" Cal raised his glasses again.
When first sighted, the eighty-foot freighter had had maybe half a dozen people on deck, but when the white-hulled cutter with the orange stripe angling back down the hull bore down on them people began pouring up on deck. Like all coastal freighters encountered during Caribbean patrols, it was hard to see how this one kept her gunnels above water. She was wooden, her hull flaking paint and riddled with worm, her exhaust so black and her wake so uncertain Cal couldn't see how she'd made it out of whatever harbor she'd sailed from, let alone managed to get twenty miles off Miami Beach.
And now her hold was emptying itself onto her deck, where the sudden weight topside created a dangerously unstable condition on a ship that was already a hazard to navigation.
Inevitably, she began to roll, a little roll at first and then, very quickly, a lot, so that she was shipping water over the sides. They could hear the
screams of the frightened passengers on the cutter's bridge. Cal bypassed Ops for the marine radio. "Unknown freighter, unknown freighter, this is the cutter Munro. Stop your people from packing the deck, you're going to capsize."
There was no discernable result and Cal went on the pipe and repeated the message, his voice booming out across the water.
"She must be taking on water," the XO said.
"Boat in that bad of shape, probably got the pumps running all the time. Probably shut them down to go all ahead full when they spotted us." To Terrell he said, "Tell the boats to keep their distance until things quiet down over there, they can't do any good if they get swamped by a bunch of panicked migrants."
Terrell gave the order. The two small boats veered off to idle on either side of the freighter. Seeing this, the people on the freighter began to shout and wave with one arm, flailing for something to hold on to with the other as the freighter's wallows increased in angle and velocity. The crowd on deck continued to increase as more people clawed their way up from below.
They were close enough now that Cal could hear the shouts and screams. Again, inevitably, a man fell overboard, screaming, followed by a second, then a little girl. Three people jumped in after her, and then a rain of bodies overboard, too many to count.
The freighter rolled heavily to port and swamped the deck. The rushing water swept half the remaining people topside overboard. Relieved of their weight, the dilapidated little freighter swung even more rapidly to starboard, probably further impelled by water rolling back and forth belowdecks, as textbook a display of the free surface effect that Cal, watching helplessly half a mile off their starboard beam, had ever seen. She rolled again and this time she kept going, all the way over, water swamping the gunnel, lines, buckets, boat hooks sliding down to the gunnel and over the side, the house disappearing beneath the waves, until at last she was keel up, there to display a soft-looking hull playing host to an entire biosphere of seaweed.
And people everywhere in the water, screaming and splashing frantically and grabbing for each other. The few who could swim struck out away from the sinking ship and began to tread water. Some of them were already being picked up by the small boats, who had moved in and were tossing PFDs to the people in the water.
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