SALIM MUST DIE

by Deva, Mukul

  Yakub Khan had first worked as the representative of a buying house and then later as the owner of a small but thriving export unit located in Delhi, which specialized in exporting cotton garments to the American markets.

  Yakub Khan had been in Ayodhya on work on the day the Hindutva men brought down the Babri Masjid and torched his brethren in Mumbai and Gujarat. But he was no fanatic and was careful to keep his anger to himself.

  There was no doubt, however, that he was a powder keg just waiting to blow when he was recruited by a vigilant Hizbul scout.

  Once again, Yakub was the ideal recruit for the mission Salim had in mind. He was a family man with two children, had no criminal record, was well established in his profession, and was older than the typical terror recruit. The man was fully conversant with the area he would be operating in and especially the area where he would execute the final strike.

  ‘His only drawback is that he has no experience of any kind when it comes to handling weapons,’ Cheema had pointed out to Salim when they were discussing the various profiles in order to shortlist the strike team.

  ‘That's okay,’ Salim assured him. ‘We can fix that with some training. After all, the weapon he is going to use can be easily handled by anyone with a basic working knowledge of computers.’

  MAI HAD JUST RETURNED FROM LUNCH WHEN HE SPOTTED the tall, bulky Dutchman with a prominent beer belly who walked up to Salim's door with an arrogant swagger. There was something in his walk and attitude that bespoke the military or the police and indeed, Lars Borge was an ex-cop. Not so long ago, he had walked the streets of Copen-hagen in a smart police uniform. Now Lars was employed in the security detail at Copenhagen's Kastrup Airport.

  Lars had always been a good, honest cop. He had been cruising through life with the comforts and conveniences afforded to him by an affluent society that boasted one of the highest quality-of-life indices in the world when one day, without any warning everything fell apart.

  It was barely half an hour after Lars left for work that the two men broke into his house. Both were very young, very stoned on some potent concoction of drugs, and looking for some money to feed their next fix. No one would ever know for sure what triggered off the orgy of violence in the house, but by the time it was over, Lars’ wife, who was in the fourth month of her first pregnancy and his mother, who had been visiting them, had been completely and brutally dismembered by the two junkies. Hardened though he was by his years as a cop, Lars could not stop throwing up for hours after he saw what remained of them. The heartbreak, of course, lasted much longer.

  To add insult to injury, thanks to a minor legal technicality, both killers got away with a sentence that would have made a drunk driver happy. Lars was inconsolable. And angry. His helplessness at being unable to protect his family was overshadowed by his anger at the government's inability to bring the guilty to book. Both combined to become the stepping-stone that eventually led to the birth of the completely new, cynical and embittered Lars.

  ‘In my country they would have given them the death penalty,’ the usually silent lady from the house next door said to him. She had come over to comfort her grieving neighbour. Lars barely knew her, though he knew that Helga, his wife, had spent a lot of time with her. ‘Islamic law is very clear and very simple. You steal and they cut your hand off. You kill and your life is forfeit.’

  Lars did not say anything to her at the time, but Lina's words festered in his head; and the more he pondered over them, the more they seemed to make sense. He began to seek out Lina and spend more time in her company.

  Thirty-year-old Lina Gazzaz was a first-generation immigrant from Saudi Arabia. She had lost her husband to a hit-and-run driver barely three years after they had settled down in Copenhagen. The killer was never traced. Suddenly alone in an alien land, yet by now accustomed to the huge personal freedom she enjoyed in this liberal society, Lina refused all offers by her family to help her return to Saudi Arabia. Her decision was made simpler by the fact that her late husband had been covered by a rather handsome insurance policy. With the passage of time, the pain of his leaving began to recede, but not the anger she felt against the unknown person who had widowed her. Lina took solace in her religion, of which she was a devout follower, and her painting, for which she was wooed by the local art galleries.

  Neither Lars nor Lina could ever be sure why and when the relationship between them deepened. Maybe it was just a matter of two lonely individuals leaning on each other for sustenance. Maybe it was the manner in which they had lost their spouses and the fact that the killers had walked free. Or maybe it was just karma. Barely six months after the brutal murder of his wife, Lina and Lars had become inseparable. A few months later began the unplanned but thorough indoctrination of Lars Borge by Lina Gazzaz.

  By the time Salim's scouts closed in on him, Lars had been honed into the ideal terror weapon. Because of his police training and background, he knew exactly how the security network functioned. He knew what he should not do, to ensure that he did not feature in any criminal record or files. And, like most of the death-dealers activated by Salim for this operation, he was not of Asian origin, nor a Muslim by birth, and was fully integrated into the society he was going to attack.

  Within fifteen minutes of Lars's departure from Salim's suite, Mai had located his profile on meetyourmatch.com. On an impulse, he even wrote him a message from his own profile. The message was innocuous enough and would raise no flags, yet it did link the two.

  THE MAN FROM LONDON CAME IN LAST. HE WAS UNLUCKY enough to have missed his flight on the first day. But that was nothing new for Ben Ashton. Bad luck had dogged him for the better part of his life.

  The only son of an Iraqi nursing professional, the stunningly beautiful Nahida Hanani, who had fallen in love with a handsome British doctor on her shift, Ben's misfortunes began with his birth, which happened six weeks prematurely. This early exit from the safety of his mother's womb into the cold, cruel world ensured that Ben's early years were fraught with repeated visits to the hospital. By the time he was ten years old, the neighbourhood joke was that he spent more time at the hospital where his parents worked than they did.

  It was on Ben's sixteenth birthday that Nahida got the call from her father in Baghdad. ‘Your grandfather is in bad shape; the cancer has totally wasted him. He wants to see you for the last time, before…’

  ‘He was my constant childhood companion,’ a teary Nahida told her husband David when he returned home that evening. ‘I would really like to go back and meet him before he…’ She burst into tears.

  Dr David Ashton was as besotted with his wife now as when he first set eyes on her. He could stand everything but her tears. ‘Of course you must go, darling,’ he consoled her, ‘but I may not be able to get away so quickly. Why don't Ben and you go ahead and I'll join you two later.’

  ‘Thank you so much, David,’ a tearful Nahida replied. ‘This will also be a good opportunity for both of you to meet my family and see my country.’

  That was how, two days later, Ben found himself with his mother on board an airliner headed for Baghdad. Despite the troubled times Iraq had been through in the recent past, both of them were full of excitement, one at the thought of revisiting her family and the other at the thought of the exotic journey his mother had promised him.

  But Ben's ill-luck ran true to form. What was supposed to be a meet-the-family and see-the-country expedition turned out to be something else altogether.

  Although several months had elapsed since that fateful day in January 1991 when the US-led air armada had pulverized Iraq and decimated its infrastructure, the effects of the ‘collateral damage’ caused by the ‘sixty thousand tons of high explosives’ dropped on Iraq in the six-week long air war were evident everywhere. Nahida had been following the march of events in her country closely through various news media and should have been better prepared for what lay ahead, but she was not.

  The omnipresent scenes of death and destruction that s
he witnessed plunged Nahida into the depths of despair. From this despair arose a vice-like hatred that gripped her.

  The Americans must be made to pay… they need to be thrown into a living hell for this… monstrosity that they have inflicted on my beloved Iraq.

  It was a very subdued duo that boarded the flight back to London a few weeks later. It was an even more subdued Ben who dropped out of college a few years later, much to David's disappointment. David had always hoped that the quiet but intelligent Ben would follow him into the medical profession. But his disappointment was short-lived since his own existence was abruptly terminated by a cardiac arrest. In Ben's troubled head his father's death signalled the final break from the society that he had been born and bred in, and his mother's bitter rhetoric against the West finally held sway. A few months later, the young man officially converted to Islam, his mother's religion.

  By the time the thirty-year-old Ben was elected as an office bearer in the National Union of Railwaymen, his indoctrination was complete.

  Yet again, as life would have it, Ben's run of ill-luck continued and a couple of years later he was blown out of the corridors of power by the politics that flourishes in every labour union. This was the final nail in the coffin; it left him disillusioned with life in general and the country he lived in, in particular. When Salim's scout approached him, it seemed to Ben a heaven sent opportunity to make up for all the wrongs, real and perceived, that he had suffered.

  Mai spotted him as he was walking up to Salim's suite. But the sun had already plunged over the horizon, and he was unable to make out anything except that he was Caucasian.

  ‘It doesn't matter.’ Mai whispered, looking at the shadowy figure entering Salim's suite. ‘I will meet you soon. After all, I am the one who has to train you.’

  THE SOFT, MELODIOUS RING OF THE PHONE EARLY NEXT morning put an end to Mai's vigil.

  ‘We're planning to start the training and rehearsals at ten o'clock,’ Salim said when Mai answered the phone. ‘I want you to brief each of the team members in your suite, unless you prefer to do it in mine.’

  ‘Mine would be better,’ Mai replied. ‘I have got some mock-ups and dummies so it will be easier to explain.’

  ‘Good!’ Salim was pleased with Mai's thoroughness. It was comforting to know that the man who was going to play a pivotal role in the operation was competent and systematic in his planning. ‘Be ready at ten. I will join you shortly before that.’

  SALIM WAS WAITING IN MAI'S SUITE WHEN KARL GUNTHER arrived. There was something about Karl that put Mai off immediately. What difference does it make… you don't have to like him, just train him. In any case, he is not going to be around much longer. With a mental shrug and an impassive face, the Chinese scientist stepped forward to greet the German jihadi.

  Salim spoke up before the others could. ‘For the sake of the mission, the less you two know about each other, the better. It is not that I do not trust either of you implicitly, it is just that we cannot disclose even by mistake what we do not know.’

  Both men acknowledged the logic with a nod.

  ‘Before we begin, I would like both of you to join me in a brief prayer, so that we may thank Allah for blessing us with this opportunity to strike at the kafir.’

  Salim was a wily puppeteer. By the time the prayer was over, the mood had been set and he had their undivided attention.

  ‘Once again, keeping operational security in mind, we will not be discussing the specific details of your actual target. That will be done by me later, only with you,’ he told Karl. ‘Today, our friend here,’ he gestured towards Mai with a brief smile, ‘will teach you everything you need to know about the weapon that he will hand over to you when you two meet next. He will tell you how to handle the weapon, get it past airport and airline security, how to carry it into the target area and, most importantly, how to put it to best use, so that we are able to achieve maximum….’ he searched briefly for the most appropriate word, ‘impact.’

  Salim paused briefly to allow the words to sink in, then focused on Karl. ‘Before I hand you over to him, I would again like to stress that you must clear all your doubts and questions before you leave here. Subsequently, barring the bare minimal communication required to coordinate the strike, we will operate strictly on our own. Even this basic essential communication will only be carried out through the meetyourmatch website as you have already been briefed.’ There was a slight shift in his tone as Salim moved into the motivational mode. ‘Remember that what we are going to do will be truly spectacular. It will surpass anything that has ever been attempted earlier.’ His voice throbbed with the conviction of the true fanatic… or the ultimate psychopath. ‘You will be remembered forever.’

  On that note Salim pulled back and gestured towards Mai, who stepped up eagerly to take forward the lesson. This was his moment in the sun. He had about him the eager air of a professor addressing his first student.

  ‘Here.’ Mai extended his hand towards Karl. Nestled in his palm were two marble sized glass balls. Both of them were filled with a colourless liquid. As Karl took them from Mai, one of them slipped and fell to the floor. It hit the slatted wooden floor and broke with a thin crinkling sound. ‘I'd handle them carefully if I were you,’ Mai cautioned. ‘There was only water inside that one, otherwise….’ He gave a brittle laugh. Then he told them what would have happened to all three of them if a certain chemical had been inside the vial.

  The matter-of-fact tone used by Mai to describe the end they would have met chilled even the hardened Salim. Karl looked petrified. He gazed at the remaining vial in his hand with acute distaste. One thing was certain: Mai now had their undivided attention.

  MAI'S SESSION WITH KARL LASTED NEARLY TWO HOURS, BUT by the end of it he was confident that Karl would be able to do what was required of him.

  ‘Good! That's it then. Keep going over what I have told you,’ Mai said as he shook hands with Karl and showed him out. ‘And in case any more doubts come up, I will clarify them for you either before you leave or when we meet next.’

  Salim was on the phone when Mai closed the door after Karl. Ten minutes later, there was another soft knock on the door and Kismat and Sahiba limped in.

  Salim is bringing them to me in the same order that he himself briefed them, Mai thought as he watched Salim go through the same ritual that he'd been through with Karl Gunther. Then Mai began to brief the two young women. His thought was confirmed when the Canadian Reis trouped in just after the Khan twins had departed.

  TO MAI'S SURPRISE, AFTER HE FINISHED BRIEFING ABRAHAM Reis, instead of Erik Segan, Yakub Khan or Lars Borge, it was Ben Ashton who hesitantly entered the suite when he opened the door.

  Maybe the others will come later, he told himself as he began briefing Erik Segan, who trooped in after Ben.

  The briefing given to Erik was entirely different from the earlier briefings given to the others. So was the weapon to be used. Erik's operation was going to be totally different and far more deadly.

  It was almost time for dinner when Mai finished.

  ‘I think you handled the briefings fabulously.’ Salim gave Mai an approving clap on his back. ‘I am sure that each of them has understood how to handle the weapons and get them past security, and they've also understood the conditions that enhance or retard the effects of the weapon.’ Mai gave a pleased smile. He was about to speak when Salim continued, ‘I want you to give them all some time to mull over things so that you can clarify any doubts that may come up. Okay?’ Salim didn't wait for a response. ‘After that you can leave. When is your return flight, by the way?’

  ‘On the eleventh,’ Mai replied, hiding the surprise he was feeling. So who were the others who had come to meet Salim? the perennially inquisitive scientist asked himself as Salim left. And why am I not being allowed to meet them?

  MAI WOULD NEVER HAVE GUESSED THAT JUST FOUR SUITES away, the men he was wondering about were being given a very thorough training by Cheema. The weapon they woul
d use called for a session with a trained military hand and for that ex-Captain Azam Cheema of the ISI was ideally suited. Of course, there was a part of the briefing that was common to both teams. For the Alpha Team personnel, this had been handled by Salim.

  ‘From the time you receive the weapon, you must ensure that you do not go home, or to the home of any one you know or are related to even distantly. You must not call or contact anyone or check into any hotel under your real name. Your mobile phones must be switched off at all times. You will not even call home to check your answering machines. Nor will you use any credit, debit, ATM or loyalty cards belonging to you. I want all traces of you to dry up… you must drop off all electronic radars.’

  ‘Why all these precautions? I thought you said the operation was secure and would be totally under wraps. Are you expecting something to go wrong?’

  ‘I am not,’ Cheema had responded firmly and reassuringly. ‘But you must remember that we are going to war.’ He wagged a warning finger. ‘In every battle the situation is fluid, anything can go wrong at any time. So, just to be on the safe side, we will always work on the premise that our operation has been compromised and they are out looking for us. We shall take all precautions accordingly. This way we will ensure we're always one step ahead of those trying to hunt us down, even if they are onto us.’

  The logic made sense to all the team members.

  ‘Just keep in mind that the only way to beat them is to ensure they do not spot you. If they spot you, they will home in on you within no time. Once that happens, they will bring you down immediately. Do bear in mind that the technological resources available to our enemies are vast. You can be spotted if there's the slightest slip up… one single swipe of a credit card… switching on your mobile phone… one wrong phone call… and the whole operation is blown and, of course, you're as good as dead.’