Ebola K: A Terrorism Thriller (3 page)

Rashid didn’t say anything.

Austin sat back down on the couch. “Take a
deep breath. Make the tea. We’ll drink some. Then we’ll go. For all
we know, Benoit and Margaux will come back while the water is
coming to a boil and we can ask them what’s going on. If not, we’ll
go over to the hospital and ask Dr. Littlefield. He’ll know.”

At first, Salim hated Pakistan. Every single
thing about it was unlike America. Of course, he expected that. But
after living nineteen of his twenty years in a Denver suburb, and
only one year in Hyderabad, the romantic
idea
of Pakistani
life—the basis for his expectations—was nothing like the
reality.

From the moment he landed in Lahore and
walked off the plane, it started. The air was pungent with the
smell of curry, diesel fumes, a whole range of plant smells, and
even a bit of rotting garbage. All the smells of a city that one
gets used to and doesn’t even notice, until suddenly replaced by a
whole different set of smells, becoming a constantly noticeable
reminder of alien-ness.

But that was just the first thing.

The people spoke English with an accent that
Salim had a hard time following. Of course, his parents spoke with
a similar accent. However, they used good grammar in calm, slow,
educated speech—not the rushed slang of people on the street.

Salim’s accent was distinctly American, and
that earned him suspicious glances from everyone he spoke to. His
sense of alienation made the suspicion feel like hate. Back on that
day, as he waited three hours for his tardy contact to come forward
and collect him, he sulked near a ticket counter, trying to figure
out how to turn his meager cash into a ticket back to Denver.

In fact, he’d been looking at his watch as he
sat there, and had picked the top of the upcoming hour as the time
when he’d stop waiting and call his father to beg him for money to
buy that ticket. But ten minutes before the hand reached twelve on
the clock face, a man walked up to him. “Salim?” he asked.

From there, Salim and his bag were hurried
out of the airport, rushed into a taxi, and dropped off on a
crowded street. He was hustled through block after block of pushing
and shoving people, and finally trundled off in a rickety white
van. Five others, silent young men with worried faces, shared the
rear seats of the van with Salim. A driver and the man in charge
sat in front.

They spent the better part of two days
heading north in the van, slowly navigating roads which were mostly
rutted paths, wide enough for the van but not much more. It was
hot. It was dusty. It was a miserable trip. When one of the
frightened young men tried to strike up a conversation to pass the
time, he was scolded so fiercely that no one in the van attempted
to speak for the rest of the trip.

On his second night in Pakistan, Salim and
the other young men spent the night in a house that looked like the
ones he’d seen on TV whenever soldiers were raiding villages in
Afghanistan or drones were blowing them up in Pakistan. Pale stone
walls with barren courtyards, the houses were all the sandy color
of the surrounding dirt. And everywhere there were dirty,
third-world people.

The six shared a room for the night: four on
bunks, two on the floor. One of the brave among them whispered a
question, and after that a quiet conversation grew. One of Salim’s
fellow travelers was from Canada, one from Florida. Two were from
the UK, and another hailed from Germany. All were children of
Muslim immigrants and had spent most—if not all—of their lives in
their respective countries.

The next day, Salim was put in the back of a
dilapidated Japanese pickup with Jalal, a nineteen-year-old from
London with a comically thick working-class English accent. They
rode in the truck most of that day, along dirt roads that wound
their way past mountain villages and a few towns. They whispered
about where they might be—Pakistan or maybe Afghanistan. Though it
could have been Tajikistan or China, for all they knew.

Late that day, with the temperatures dipping
near freezing, they arrived at their new home and training center,
a complex of buildings that looked to have grown up out of the
dirt. Indoor plumbing was a luxury left hundreds, if not thousands
of miles behind. Comfortable, bug-free mattresses were replaced
with cots made of blankets over sticks lashed together. The kitchen
was an outdoor cook’s fire. It was camping, only instead of a tent
Salim slept between stone walls under a leaky roof.

Two months in, Salim had gotten used to the
thin air, the cold nights, the simple meals, and Spartan life. They
trained six days a week, usually four at a time under their two
instructors on marksmanship, ambush, shooting from a moving
vehicle, physical conditioning, and a host of other skills that any
good jihadist might need.

With six trainees in the camp, two would take
the rotating duty of drone watch while the other four trained.
Keeping out of sight when drones were overhead kept them out of the
crosshairs when America’s politicians needed to boost their
popularity with news feeds of exploding Muslims.

Salim scanned the sky. “I hate watching for
drones.”

“It’s an easy day.” Jalal handed the
binoculars to Salim, “It’s your turn.”

Salim lifted them to his eyes and looked at
several high, wispy clouds off to the west, thinking that maybe he
saw a bright spot up there. “Has anyone ever seen a drone?”

“Dhakwan saw one last week,” said Jalal. “You
knew that. I was there when he told you.”

“He saw something,” said Salim, finding
himself asking why every single thing said by anybody needed to be
taken on faith.

“It was a drone.”

“How do you know it wasn’t a passenger jet or
something else?” Salim asked.

Jalal pointed to the south. “Dhakwan said it
was in the sky that way. They say there are five or six camps near
the base of that mountain.”

“We’re not supposed to know where the other
camps are.” Salim shook his head and looked at the mountain,
curiosity making him wonder if he could see the camps.

Jalal chuckled. “If the CIA catches me and
tortures me what will I tell them? The camps are at the base of a
mountain? Which mountain, they’d ask. What could I say? I still
don’t know where we are.”

Salim said, “You better learn something to
tell them when they torture you because you know they won’t stop
until you do.”

“I know as much as you,” Jalal said, “which
is nothing.”

They both laughed and didn’t worry about
being scolded for it. A few hundred meters to the east of the
compound, the two instructors and the trainees were sitting in the
back of an SUV with the rear door open, shooting at targets nailed
to trees and making too much noise.

Jalal said, “The only thing we see besides
mountains and sky are the other trainees and our instructors. We
don’t even know their real names.”

“Be thankful you don’t.”

“We see the truck that brought us here driven
by a no-name man with a beard, dressed like every other peasant we
saw on the road. He comes now and again. He drops off food and
sometimes ammunition. That’s everything I know.”

Salim looked at another far away spot in the
sky. It turned out to be a bird. “Do you think we’ll get killed by
a drone in our sleep one day?”

“Does it matter how we die as long as it’s
not running away like a coward?”

“I suppose not,” Salim mused.

“It only matters that we die for jihad, to
stop things like this.” Jalal pointed at the sky. “I don’t know
what you heard in America—your news is little better than
propaganda—but drones kill more innocents than combatants.”

“We hear about some of that on the news.”
Salim lowered the binoculars. Holding them up too long made his
arms tired. “That’s one of the reasons I’m here.”

“It’s the
main
reason I’m here. Rich
countries think they can murder Muslims who have no money, and
nobody will care. It’s wrong.”

Salim nodded and the two sat in silence for a
long time after that, scanning the sky both with and without the
binoculars.

“What do you think we’ll do?” Jalal
asked.

Salim shrugged. “We spend a lot of time
training with the RPGs.”

“I hope it’s not a bomb vest. I don’t mind
dying, but I want to die fighting. The thought of blowing myself up
to kill people is unsatisfying.”

“Unsatisfying?” Salim gave Jalal a sidelong
glance. “What does that mean?”

“I want to see the results of my work, at
least some of it,” answered Jalal. “If you wear a vest, you press a
button, and then you’re in heaven. You don’t even feel pain. You’re
just gone.”

“You want to see Americans die before you
go?” Salim asked.

“Americans? Brits? Any Westerner? No, I’d be
happier to kill soldiers, but it doesn’t matter. In those
democracies—if you can call them that—people vote for governments
that kill Muslims. They buy the bombs with their taxes, sit their
fat asses on their couches, suck in all the Muslim hate propaganda,
and tell themselves because they have no uniform on they have no
guilt. But they are
all
guilty.”

“Be careful, Jalal. You’re starting to sound
like a zealot.”

Jalal laughed. “If we’re not both zealots,
what are we doing here?”

“Sometimes I wonder.”

“Don’t say that to anybody else.” Jalal
looked around. “You hear me, mate?”

“Yeah.” Salim handed the binoculars back to
Jalal.

“Dhakwan says his cousin was put in a sleeper
cell in Germany. He thinks they’re building a network and when the
time is right, we’ll take our RPGs to every major airport in the
West, sit at the end of the runways, and shoot down airliners until
they stop flying.”

“That’s stupid.”

Jalal turned and raised his voice.
“Stupid?”

“Calm down, Jalal. That won’t work.”

“Why won’t it work, Mr. Weapons Expert?”

Salim said, “You’ve used the RPG. Tell me,
what is the range of that weapon?”

“A few hundred meters,” answered Jalal.

“Right.”

Salim asked, “How high is a plane flying when
it gets to the end of the runway?”

“Thirty meters. A hundred meters. It depends
on the airport.”

“And how close can you get to the end of the
runway?” Salim asked.

“Depends, I guess,” answered Jalal.

Salim kept pushing, “How fast is an airliner
moving at the end of the runway?”

“A hundred and fifty miles per hour?
More?”

Salim nodded. “Probably what I’d guess. And
accelerating. How fast does your RPG round fly?”

“I don’t know.” Jalal shrugged, frowning.

“I don’t either,” said Salim. “Is it as fast
as a bullet?”

“No, of course not. They don’t tell us these
things. You know that. It’s not important for us to know.”

“Is it as fast as a car?” Salim asked.

“Faster.”

“Is it as fast as an airplane?”

Jalal’s face grew thoughtful.

“You can see the round accelerate,” said
Salim. “You can see it all the way to the target.”

“And?”

“I don’t know how fast the RPG flies, but
I’ll bet a plane flies faster.”

“That doesn’t matter.” Jalal sounded
defiant.

“Why?”

“If we’re at the end of the runway, we simply
shoot the plane as it’s coming toward us.”

“And if you hit it—and that’s a big if—where
will the wreckage fall?” Salim asked.

Jalal shrugged.

“I don’t know either.” Salim shook his head.
“But I guess some would probably land on you.”

“I’ll shoot when its overhead.”

Salim suppressed a laugh. “So on your very
first attempt, you’re going to hit an airplane that’s a hundred
meters over your head, traveling at two hundred miles an hour away
from you with an RPG round that might be going slower than the
plane. And on your first attempt, you’re going to guess how to lead
the plane by just the right amount? Is that right?”

Jalal fell silent again.

“How would we train for that?” Salim asked.
“I mean if they wanted that kind of attack to succeed, wouldn’t we
train for that?”

Jalal’s voice faltered as he said, “You’re my
only friend here, Salim, but sometimes you make me feel
stupid.”

Salim laughed out loud, then looked around to
make sure the instructors weren’t in sight. “I’m not that smart,
Jalal. I used to hang out with a bunch of guys in school that made
me feel stupid all the time. Not on purpose, but they always talked
about computer programming and their calculus homework and stuff. I
just felt stupid by being around them, but they were my
friends.”

Jalal nodded for no real reason.

“I’m not trying to make you feel stupid.”
Salim turned to face Jalal. “Just
think
, that’s all. Dhakwan
believes things because he
wants
to believe them, not
because they are based on any kind of fact. I’m not that smart, but
I’m smart enough to know to ask questions. And sometimes all you
have to do is ask questions and things that aren’t true fall apart
under examination. That’s all.”

Jalal nodded again, “That’s good advice,
Salim. “

Salim pointed to a spot overhead. Jalal
examined the blue sky with the binoculars.

“Do you miss anything about America?” Jalal
asked.

Salim thought about it for a minute, but had
trouble gleaning down his long list to something that sounded
worthy of being missed. “Do you miss anything about London?”

“Some.” Jalal sighed. “Coming here, is this
what you thought it would be?”

Salim shook his head, but wasn’t sure what to
say.

Kapchorwa’s few hundred shanties, houses,
buildings, and huts surrounded a particularly snaky section of red
dirt road on the lower northern slopes of Mt. Elgon. The road
straightened out east of town and didn’t hit any sizable population
center until it was well into Kenya.