SALIM MUST DIE

by Deva, Mukul

  ‘True! That did go down rather well,’ the old man in Murree replied curtly. He was clearly reluctant to relent. ‘But the stupid fucker is showing absolutely no signs of letting up. Now he has even started talking peace with the bloody Indians. Before you know it, the shithead will hand over Kashmir to them on a platter. You should have allowed me….’

  ‘By God, man!’ The General's voice crackled with the unmistakable whiplash of command. ‘When are you going to learn to keep that tongue and temper of yours in check? There has to be a time for everything.’ The man in Murree tried to butt in, but the General cut him off. ‘Listen to me! I think the time has come for us to stem the rot before it gets out of control.’

  ‘I absolutely agree. It is high time. In fact if you had listened to me at that….’

  ‘If, if, if…. Damn it!’ Haque broke in sharply. ‘Stop living in the past and listen to me….’

  ‘I am sir, I am.’ His voice was tight with impatience. ‘But where is all this talking going to get us? We will keep gassing while those fucking kafirs decimate us. Just look at the Americans! First it was Afghanistan, then Iraq, and now they have gone for Iran. When will it end? We will keep sitting on our hands and they will come for us next.’

  ‘Will you shut up and listen?’ The General sounded tired and irritable. ‘Please.’

  The tone must have finally gotten through since the old man actually shut up and listened carefully as General Ehsan Haque outlined his plan in detail. Gradually, the anger abated and the hard logical thought process of a trained military mind returned. Every once in a while he would butt in and offer a suggestion, but by and large it was the General who spoke. The call lasted a long time.

  For an equally long time after it had ended, the old man sat lost in thought. Suddenly his face brightened. Turning to his computer he began to troll the internet, but this time there was a sharp focus to the information he sought and studied. The hours bled away as he systematically swept through the information and slowly began to put together an operational plan.

  ‘You have to do better than your best!’ General Haque had said. ‘The strikes must be spectacular, simultaneous, and spread out all over the globe. We must ensure everyone knows that we have the capability to strike at will, when and where we choose to… and anyone who stands in the way of the One God is going to be annihilated. Everything that has been done till date must pale in comparison. Unleash the terror and let the world quiver!’

  THE RAYS OF A NEW SUN WERE STRUGGLING TO PIERCE THE swirling fog of another bitterly cold Murree morning when the old man finally switched off his computer. Rubbing his tired eyes and stretching his stiff limbs, he called out to his younger companion in the house.

  In his mid-thirties, the second man was tall and broad shouldered. He sported a distinctly military haircut and his grey eyes were alive with anticipation.

  Sipping endless cups of coffee, the two of them sat talking for a long time. They spent even more time arguing about and refining the plan. In fact, three full days went by before they came to an agreement on the best line of action.

  They spent the next two weeks mostly on their phones. On the fifteenth day the two men left the isolated bungalow in the hills of Murree. They were both on board Pakistan International Airlines flight PK-211 when it left Lahore Airport for Dubai at 1100 hours the following day. They were also on board the connecting Emirates flight that left Dubai a couple of hours later.

  MALE AIRPORT, MALDIVES

  THE MAN SQUINTED AS THE CLEAR SUNLIGHT STRUCK HIM. After the fog-laden climate of Murree, the bright sun was a shocker. Groping in the laptop bag slung on his shoulder, he pulled out a pair of dark glasses and put them on as he walked up to the edge of the ocean. The old man was watching the water lap against the low concrete wall running along the edge when his younger companion from Murree emerged from the airport building and walked up to him. He was sweating profusely.

  Walking just behind him, pushing a luggage trolley, was a muscular young man with a healthy tanned complexion, in a sparkling white T-shirt with ‘Sunshine Travels’ emblazoned across it.

  ‘We are ready, sirs,’ the young man with the luggage trolley called out brightly. ‘Please follow me. That's our boat.’ He pushed the trolley around them and made his way to a speedboat that was bobbing gently alongside the wooden jetty. The trolley made a hollow trundling sound as it lumbered over the long wooden slats of the jetty. The duo from Murree waited till the luggage was on board and then jumped onto the speedboat. A few minutes later, it pulled away from the jetty and headed out into the vastness of the brilliant blue ocean. The nose of the speedboat lifted into the air as it gathered speed. A fine spray arced out in the wind, gently dousing the two men standing leewards of the tiny cockpit-like cabin. It felt pleasant and refreshing.

  ‘Our hotel, the Blue Moon Resort, is there.’ The enthusiastic young man from Sunshine Travels gestured at the distant horizon. ‘It will take us about forty minutes to get there. The Blue Moon is one of the finest resorts in Maldives. I can assure you that both of you will have a wonderful time.’ Though he was shouting, his voice was blown away in the wind that whipped past the speeding boat.

  ‘What is that?’ Cheema pointed at the huge gleaming golden dome sparkling in the sunlight.

  ‘That is the Islamic Centre. You can see it no matter which direction you approach Male from. We must come down and see it one of these days. Believe me, sirs, it is really beautiful.’

  The younger of the two seemed to be listening intently, but his older colleague was clearly disinterested in his surroundings. The lad's constant drone was starting to get on his nerves. Closing his mind to it, the old man turned his thoughts inwards.

  Ex-Brigadier Murad Salim of the ISI was not here on a holiday jaunt. He was a man with a mission, though officially he was just a dead man, like his younger companion and aide, ex-Captain Azam Cheema. They had both been declared dead when they had engineered their own deaths in a helicopter crash in the wake of the Delhi bomb blasts of October 2005.

  Salim was impatient to reach the hotel and meet the men and women who would be gathering there from all points of the compass. They were a diverse group, from different countries and of different nationalities. But they all had one thing in common. They were gathering to plot death.

  Death for a great many people….

  AS THE SPEEDBOAT CLEAVED THROUGH THE SHOCKINGLY bright blue waters, Salim's thoughts whipped away from him with the wind rocketing past. Lulled by the soothing motion of the boat and the serenity of the surrounding ocean, a medley of thoughts blew him back in time; back over the tumultuous forty years that he had spent in the service of his god and his nation… or so he thought. After all, it had been a very long time since Murad Salim had sat down to think about why he did what he did… or why he had become what he was. Somehow, somewhere in the passage of years, he had lost or suspended reasoning and allowed the hate within to grow until that was all he knew – to hate… and to kill.

  Like an erratically choreographed video-clip, in his mind's eye he saw the barely twenty-one year-old Second Lieutenant Murad Salim standing in silent mortification as he watched General Niazi's ignominious surrender to the hated Indian Army at Dacca on 16 December 1971.

  The headlines of the Sunday Times, London in December 1971, flashed through his mind like a bolt of pain. It took only twelve days for the Indian Army to smash its way to Dacca, an achievement reminiscent of the German blitzkrieg across France in 1940. The strategy was the same: speed, ferocity and flexibility.

  Etched deep in his mind was the memory of a dejected young POW with his head hung in humiliation at the knowledge that the Indian Army had taken over 93,000 Pakistani prisoners, the majority of whom had been formidably entrenched when the Indian offensive surged up and around them. Most of them had not even fired a shot…. He remembered the anger and humiliation on the faces of the people who had gathered to watch the prisoners trudge ignobly back into Pakistan after being released by the Ind
ians following an equally humiliating peace brokered by the hateful, gloating Americans.

  Tears of angry shame mingled freely with the occasional spray of ocean water each time the boat hit a big wave. Salim pushed back the tears from his eyes with an effort, but inside he seethed, and deep within the tears continued to flow, hot and red.

  With an angry sigh, he propelled his mind away from those dark, dampening days and hungrily sought better times. He saw the elation on the face of the young Captain who had been selected for transfer to the ISI not long after the 1971 war. He saw the slightly greying Major and then the hardened Colonel who had first helped the Pakistani Dictator with his coup d'etat and later with the launch of ISI's fabled Operation TOPAC against India. He saw with pleasure and clarity the now well-known Brigadier who had brought about the Talibanization of Afghanistan and consolidated Pakistan's hold over that godforsaken country. He saw the silent, powerful man, perpetually moving in the shadows, who had used the jihadis to unleash terror in India and Afghanistan. He saw the Stinger missile heading for the helicopter that was supposedly taking Captain Azam Cheema and the uber powerful Brigadier Murad Salim to Islamabad….

  Then suddenly, the wind whipping past died as the boat slewed sideways and slowed down. The sudden change in motion broke Salim's reverie and returned him to the moment.

  THE BLUE MOON RESORT LOCATED ON THE KAAFU ATOLL IS one of the 1200-odd islands that comprise the Maldives. The resort lies on a strip of land approximately eleven hundred metres long, forty metres wide at its narrowest point and about ninety metres at the widest point. The island is so small that when the tsunami hit it a few years back, the gigantic waves had almost overlooked it. Its diminutive size had saved it from any major loss of life or damage.

  If you approached the Blue Moon island resort by air, you would see a thin sliver of land surrounded by endless shoals of coral set in the brightest blue water imaginable. At the very tip of the narrow southern end of the island is a small jetty, overlooked by a huge glass hut. Heading away from the jetty, about midway to the other end of the island, is a large wooden hut-like structure reaching for the sky in a strangely birdlike manner. This hut is almost the exact centre of the resort. The eastern beach of the resort has been left untouched, probably for water sports.

  Lying to the west and south and ringing the island like an ungainly cordon of wooden sentries, are cottages that rise out of the water on wooden stilts. They are all connected to the island by thin wooden bridges, which reach out across the blue water like umbilical cords. The huts are sinfully luxurious and obscenely expensive. Everything is steeped in the languid sleepiness of a high-end beach resort. It is typically the sort of place where stress, anxiety, and other ills of modern life cease to exist. In fact, after just a few hours on the island it is hard to even imagine that hunger, poverty and crime exist elsewhere on the same planet.

  IT WAS ALREADY LATE AFTERNOON BY THE TIME SALIM AND Cheema finally checked into the two adjoining water villas that had been booked for them. In addition to being ultra luxurious, the suites assured total privacy, which was precisely what the two men needed.

  Salim had just finished getting dressed after a long relaxing bath when there was a soft knock on the door and Cheema entered the room.

  ‘Who's arrived?’ Salim asked.

  ‘So far only the Chinaman.’ Cheema glanced at his wristwatch. ‘The German and the Dutchman should be getting in any time now. The others will get in only tomorrow morning.’

  ‘Good!’ Salim was pleased that things were going as planned. ‘Let's call in the Chinaman tonight and the German early tomorrow morning.’

  ‘Why not wait till tomorrow evening, sir, and call them all in together? It will save us the bother of going over the whole thing again and again.’

  ‘No, no Cheema, don't forget the basics. The Alpha team people will not be allowed to come in contact with Bravo team at all. In fact we will not even allow people from the same team to meet one another unless it is imperative. We don't want all the strikes getting jeopardized just because one person gets blown or is taken and decides to sing.’

  ‘That's true, sir,’ Cheema replied after a moment's thought. ‘You are right… in such a massive operation someone or the other is bound to slip up and get caught.’

  ‘Absolutely!’ Salim nodded. ‘That's why we have to compartmentalize everything and keep it strictly on a need-to-know basis. Even then we have to ensure that our first contact with each of these people is on a one-to-one basis. If we expect them to lay their lives on the line for us, we must understand what makes them tick and then address that particular need in them.’

  ‘You're losing me, sir.’ Cheema grinned. ‘I'm a man of action, not a shrink.’

  ‘No, no, Cheema, we're not men of action. We are the ones who make it happen… the puppeteers, as it were.’ Cheema smiled again as Salim continued, ‘To be a good puppeteer you must understand the basics. You must realize what makes a man a jihadi.’

  ‘Because we are believers.’ Cheema retorted sharply. ‘Why else would….’

  ‘Of course we are believers, Cheema,’ Salim replied. ‘Let me rephrase that statement…. We must understand fully what makes a man ready to kill with total impunity. To kill and maim men, women and children whom he does not know and who have done nothing directly to harm him in any way. And to do all this with total disregard for his own life!’

  Salim let his words hang in the air for a moment before he continued.

  ‘These questions have engrossed hundreds of scholars the world over… and are likely to do so for many, many more decades in the future. The fact is that the reasons behind what the world calls terrorism are as diverse as the types of people who commit these so-called terrorist acts.’

  Salim got up and began to pace the floor. Cheema listened to his mentor with rapt attention.

  ‘Until the early nineteenth century, the only acceptable justification for such violence was religion. This was basically because religion gave its believers a socially acceptable way of recognizing evil and taking up arms against it. In Islam, the earliest form of this action was assassination, and it existed right from the time of Prophet Mohammed, peace be upon him.’

  ‘That is true, sir.’ Cheema nodded grimly. ‘There is no walking away from the fact that three of his successors and nearly one-third of our caliphs were assassinated.’

  ‘Correct. In fact, the word “assassin”itself is derived from a group called ashishins that was founded by Hasan Ibn al-Sabbah in the eleventh century. They spread terror throughout the Muslim world and killed Sunni Muslims in large numbers for almost three centuries till they themselves were exterminated. They sought to replace an apparently corrupt Sunni regime with a supposedly ideal Shiite one and were possibly the world's first jihadis.’

  ‘You make it sound as though it is only Muslims who indulge in such things.’

  ‘Oh no! Of course not!’ Salim shook his head vigorously. ‘The bombing of abortion clinics in America, repeated attacks by the German Red Army and the Baader-Meinhof Group, the American Weathermen, the Ku Klux Klan, the Phineas Priesthood and the Aryan Nation, the Italian Red Brigade, the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka and Japan's Aum Shinrikyo speak adequately of the wide-spread and universal nature of violence. But the fact remains that religious, ideological and nationalistic motives are the most common reasons why people indulge in such acts of violence.’

  There was a brief pause as Salim waited for Cheema to assimilate this information. He knew that one day he would have to pass on the baton to someone, and Cheema appeared to be an ideal successor. He is ruthless enough. In more ways than one, Cheema was like the son Salim had never had. It is important for him to understand and not just implement. One day he will have to take charge. Inshallah!

  ‘The ideological terrorist… I use the word terrorist loosely, of course’ – Salim threw up his palms defensively when he saw Cheema start up in agitation – ‘merely for the sake of this discussion.’

 
Salim resumed when Cheema sat back, somewhat mollified.

  ‘Like I was saying, the ideological terrorist normally does not offer any clear view of the world he is trying to create. Generally his goal is destruction, not creation. However, the left-wing often has a well-rehearsed ideology while the right-wing is more likely to be pathological.’

  ‘And why is that?’

  ‘Possibly because the leftists are looking ahead at a world they hope will arrive, whereas right-wing organizations are looking backward at a world they think has been lost.’

  Salim paused to take a sip of water. Then he resumed pacing the room.

  ‘In contrast, nationalistic and religious terrorists are a different kettle of fish. They seek to implement ideas they have learnt at home and usually have a fairly clear picture of the kind of world they wish to create. More often than not, it is the world given to them by their religious or nationalistic leaders. These leaders may, of course, at times completely misrepresent the doctrines they espouse, but the misrepresentation normally acquires authority with the passage of time and the extent of indoctrination to which the men are exposed to.’

  ‘Hmm!’ Cheema gave this some thought. Finally he asked, ‘What about economic causes?’

  Salim nodded approvingly at Cheema's question, pleased that his adjutant-cum-heir-apparent was applying himself to the discussion.

  ‘Cheema, the argument that terrorism springs from poverty and ignorance appears to be false since a study of the Middle East region found that the number of such incidents increased as economic conditions improved. When the intifada began in 2000, the unemployment rate among Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip was falling and economic conditions were improving. The fact is that the jihad spread as the economy got better.’