Jihadi (37 page)

They were parked behind a warehouse. The boy was in the back seat.

Skullface sat in the front and craned his neck, checking every angle. It looked like he was waiting for something or someone, but whatever or whoever it was never came. After a long wait, and for no reason the boy could understand, Skullface said, ‘Now we will get out.’

He stood the boy behind the vehicle, motioned for him to be still.

The boy was still.

Skullface went to the back seat, extracted the box and brought it behind the car to where the boy was. He untopped the box and removed the vest.

‘Arms up,’ said Skullface. The boy put his arms up. Skullface settled him into the vest.

‘Arms down.’ The boy complied.

‘I am about to hit a button at the base of the back of the vest, Godwilling, that will arm it. Say Godwilling.’

‘Godwilling,’ said the boy.

Skullface reached around and the boy heard a click.

‘Tell me with your mouth, not by moving your hands, where the button is that detonates.’

‘Over my right shoulder, with the angel who records my good deeds,’ said the boy.

Skullface pointed toward an alleyway that traced the back of the warehouse. ‘You see that little street?’

The boy nodded.

‘Follow it to its end and you will come to the police station. Are you ready?’

No answer.

‘Are you ready? TAKBIR! What do you say?’

‘Allahu Akbar,’ said the boy.

‘If I get in that car and drive away, will you go down the alley?’

The boy nodded.

Skullface smiled, then said it was time to put a jacket on over the vest. He grabbed a boy’s jacket he had set on the ground and said
Bismillah
.

Before he could put it over the vest, however, a wave of grey passed over his face.

Skullface dropped the jacket. His eyes widened, he clutched at his chest, as though searching for something lost there, and then he fell forward. He lay motionless in the dust.

The boy studied him, but did not lean over to touch him, for fear of setting off the vest.

A plane passed overhead through the blue sky. It was an American plane.

Leaving Skullface behind, the boy turned and made his way down the alley toward the police station.

The alley was long and cold, colder toward the centre where he walked because the mid-morning sun did not penetrate it at all there. The boy looked behind once and saw Skullface still sprawled out face-down on the gravel. Then he followed a bend in the alleyway and when he tried to look behind he could not see the gravel anymore.

He kept walking.

The shadows increased and then receded. He saw the police cars lined up in front of the building and he saw officers in blue, as well as Americans in green, going in and out.

The boy stopped and stared, still in the shadows, hoping he could not yet be seen. He looked for a policeman with a kind face.

The word to say to the Americans if you were ever lost in front of them, she had told him, was ‘HELP’.

The word to say in front of Muslims was ‘SALAAM’.

An American with what looked like a kind face stopped in front of the police station and lit a cigarette. The boy felt good about the man’s face but kept watching it to be sure. He watched from the shadows as the man stepped away from the policemen in blue, watched as the man found his corner and stared into the blue sky, watched as the man released the smoke in a relaxed way.

The boy stepped into the light and said, loud and clear enough for the man to hear, ‘HELP.’

According to Dick Unferth, Thelonius was supposed to track down any connections that might have existed between certain terrorists Becky had helped to put in jail and some other terrorists operating in the Islamic Republic.

Dick Unferth set great store by connections.

Thelonius didn’t find any connections. What he found was Sullivan Hand.

That kid was wired to explode.

‘VEST! C4!’ Dayton called at the top of his lungs. ‘CODE RED! TWELVE O’CLOCK!’

Nine green uniforms appeared, one of which handed Dayton a rifle. He dropped his cigarette, crushed it imperfectly with his right boot, raised the rifle and pointed it at the boy.

‘STOP WHERE YOU ARE!’ Dayton said in the native tongue, his eye at the gunsight.

The boy stopped. His forehead was in the crosshairs. A red dot wavered on that forehead.

‘GET YOUR HANDS UP!’ Dayton said.

The boy babbled something, firm, with purpose, but beyond the scope of Dayton’s five or six memorized phrases. He kept talking. Not scared, insistent. Was that good or bad? Well, if the vest hadn’t gone off yet…

‘Get one of the natives,’ Dayton told a nearby captain, technically his commanding officer. ‘Get one of the policemen out here. Find out what the hell the kid is saying.’

The captain obeyed. The deformed, half-smoked cigarette, which Dayton had not quite extinguished, smouldered on the ground near his feet.

Considering how close he was to blowing out the brains of what looked to be an eight- or nine-year-old boy, Dayton Mazzoni felt he was handling the situation pretty well. He wasn’t shaking at all. He smelled the nearby tobacco smoke, but didn’t dare attempt to stub it out again, didn’t dare divert the smallest measure of his attention from the target.

Procedure said that whenever you positively identified an individual wearing a vest like that, whenever you had clear visual confirmation, as in absolutely no ambiguity, and the subject was over twenty yards away from any other person – as this kid was – then you were to shoot to kill.

Procedure didn’t say anything about making an exception if you happened to be engaging with a kid who clearly didn’t speak your language and who had eyes that locked on yours, eyes that looked, even from that distance, like they wanted out of this situation as bad as you did.

Dayton did not want to shoot the kid. So if anything went south here, Dayton was pretty much on his own as far as procedure was concerned. Then again, he was pretty much on his own no matter what happened.

Dayton’s red laser sighting dot moved in tiny jags, in alignment with the movement of his own pulse.

The nine green uniforms were kneeling, but none of their scopes were lit up. Good, Dayton thought. They didn’t want to confuse him.

‘Your call, Bobbler,’ said one of the green uniforms. Dayton now assumed everyone had the kid in the crosshairs. ‘Do what you need to do.’

‘HOLD FIRE. Where the hell is that policeman?’ Dayton shouted. Being the first one to take aim at the kid had given him a certain authority that even he didn’t quite grasp, but it was imperative that it be used well now, so he used it.

The captain reappeared, with a slim, blue-uniformed teenager in
tow. Using peripheral vision, Dayton sized him up and was unimpressed. This ‘policeman’ had a peach-fuzz moustache. It wasn’t a policeman at all. It was police boy.

Police Boy was the one member of the Islamic City Police Force stupid enough to have stayed in the vicinity just because the Americans had said to. Everyone else had run as soon as someone translated the word ‘vest’.

You play the cards you’ve got.

‘He keeps saying something,’ Dayton barked, never taking his eyes off the boy. ‘Tell him to say whatever it is he’s saying again, from the start, so you can understand it.’

‘Slower please,’ Police Boy said. ‘Slower. My slow English.’ His face was tight and grim and his slim hands were trembling.

‘Make him talk, Police Boy. Slow. Translate.’

And that came out too fast. From the corner of his eye, Dayton saw the terror on his translator’s face, winced.

‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have called you that. What’s your name?’

‘Abbas.’

Still staring at the boy in the vest: ‘What’s it mean?’

This question appeared to startle the young man, but once he grasped it, his face loosened up just a little.

‘Lion,’ he said.

‘Abbas, you’re our lion. You’re going to be brave. You’re going to make him talk. Okay?’

Abbas nodded. He made a verbal request in plaintive tones to the boy, whose hands were now raised, and who was still babbling. The boy began babbling more slowly. A good sign, Dayton thought. Following instructions.

‘He says someone put the vest on him, and he wants help taking it off.’

‘Bullshit!’ one of the green uniforms shouted.

‘HOLD FIRE GODDAMMIT. Abbas. Tell him if he moves without permission, I’ll shoot him and make it hurt, but he won’t die. Tell him that. Ask if he understands.’

Abbas shouted something, and his voice squeaked as he did so.

The boy nodded. Second consecutive instruction followed.

‘Tell him he needs to hold absolutely still for a count of twenty.’

Abbas relayed the message.

Everybody watched everybody else while Dayton counted to twenty, silently.

‘Ask him to tell me whether his arms are feeling tired.’

Abbas posed a question. The boy answered.

‘He says they do.’

Fourth consecutive instruction followed.

‘Tell him to
slowly
put his hands right up on top of his head.
Slowly
, Abbas. He can rest them there.’

The boy received his instructions and complied. Five consecutive instructions followed.

‘Ask him if he knows how the vest works.’

The boy listened and gave a reply.

‘He says,’ the quavering voice translated, ‘that there is a button that makes it go off. He was told to push it but he doesn’t want to. He wants help taking the jacket off.’

‘Bullshit! Don’t you believe it, Bobbler!’ came a voice from a green uniform. Even though he knew Mike Mazzoni was sleeping off a hangover, eleven miles away, Dayton said:

‘Shut up, Mike.’

Everything got quiet.

‘Ask him what disarms it.’

This one sentence from Dayton marked the point at which things began to fall apart.

Much of what the dead guy sharing this story still has left to relate would not be there for him to tell if Dayton had not, while talking to Abbas, used the unfortunate word ‘disarm’. If he had used some other word, like ‘stop’, in its place.

Or if Abbas had known what the hell ‘disarm’ meant.

If only Dayton Mazzoni had said, ‘Ask him if he knows how to turn the damn bomb off,’ the rest of this dead guy’s book could have led in a different direction, a direction that steered well clear of the multiple disasters to which this particular conversation led.

If it hadn’t been for a single word that lay beyond Abbas’s woefully limited English vocabulary, Dayton Mazzoni and his brother might still be playing cribbage somewhere.

Ali Liddell (that’s me, that’s the dead guy writing this book) might not have landed in Bright Light.

Fatima might not be locked away in her own cell somewhere in the USA.

Fatima’s sister Noura and her mother Salma might still be alive.

And so might Abbas and the boy wearing the suicide vest whose true name the guy telling this story chooses not to repeat.

But Dayton did the best he could with the words he knew. The rest was not up to him.

‘Ask him what disarms it.’

Abbas, fearful that even a moment’s pause might result in someone shooting him, had decided to start talking, even though he did not quite know what the English word ‘disarm’ meant.

He supposed it meant ‘destroy’. It sounded like ‘destroy’. As in, to take one’s arm off one’s body. The guy telling this story acknowledges that it does sound like that. If you wanted to destroy something terrible, wouldn’t you think ripping off its arm would do that?

Abbas translated what he thought Dayton wanted to know into the native tongue. Because he wanted to show Dayton that he was doing what he was told, he made his request over and over again.

‘What button sets off the bomb in the jacket?’

‘How does one explode the jacket? Tell him.’

‘He wants to know how one sets off the bomb, you see. That’s what he’s asking. What makes the bomb explode?’

And so forth.

‘The button above my right shoulder,’ the boy said.

‘He says the button above his right shoulder disarms,’ Abbas said.

When Abbas was nervous, he talked a lot. So he repeated this point in several ways. The idea here was to convince Dayton Mazzoni that he knew what he was talking about. Which he didn’t.

‘Tell him I’m going to walk toward him. Tell him that when I get close to him, I’m going to want him to put his hands back up in the air. Way up high.’

Abbas translated. The boy said something.

‘Don’t do it, Bobbler,’ said one of the green uniforms.

‘He says the vest is very heavy,’ Abbas offered. ‘So heavy that he is afraid it will make him fall down. He needs help.’

‘Don’t fucking do it, Bobbler,’ the voice said again. ‘Shoot him. Then we call in the pros to deactivate it.’

Bobbler put his rifle down.

‘Let’s take a look,’ he said, and walked toward the boy, grabbing Abbas and bringing him in close, too. In case the kid said anything else.

‘Wait,’ Abbas said, as though he wanted to go back. But Dayton’s grip was strong.

The kid made direct eye contact. Dayton got a visual on the button.

‘Wait,’ Abbas said again.

‘Why?’

Abbas had no answer.

Dayton looked back at the kid in the vest, who looked back at him. The kid was still doing exactly as he had been told.

‘Tell him I don’t want to hurt him.’

Abbas translated. Accurately.

Dayton nodded at the boy in the vest, who kept his hands on his head and nodded back. The nod said,
I don’t want to hurt you, either.

Dayton hit the button on the kid’s shoulder.

Three one-hundredths of a second later, bits of broken nail and barbed wire made a THWOCK sound as they ripped through everyone within a hundred-foot radius.

‘Wait,’ Abbas wheezed. Like the boy in the vest, like Dayton, like nine green uniforms standing within that hundred-foot circle, Abbas was focused on dying.