in Bat Khela that produced suicide bombers as efficiently as a meatpacking plant turned steers into hamburger. Beyond that, his life was a cipher. Another lost boy in a country full of them.
But they couldn’t move Mohammed anywhere, especially not Guantanamo, not until they got bin Zari to talk. Since 2006, the President had said repeatedly that America was no longer holding detainees incommunicado. Technically, he wasn’t lying. Technically, Mohammed and bin Zari were even now on their way to Guantanamo. Their stay at the Midnight House was merely a stopover for “processing.”
But when Mohammed got to Guantanamo, he’d be given a lawyer. And once he told the lawyer that he’d been held at a secret prison along with Jawaruddin bin Zari, the lawyer would demand to know where bin Zari was and whether his rights were being respected. The United States was in no position to answer that question.
So, Mohammed couldn’t be split from bin Zari. And bin Zari wasn’t leaving the Midnight House, not as long as he wouldn’t talk. So far he hadn’t cracked, despite a half-dozen interrogation sessions and two nights in the punishment box. Karp and Fisher were already talking about their next step. Meantime, Mohammed would have to wait. Though Karp’s sympathy was limited. Mohammed had been willing to die as a suicide bomber. Three hots and a cot, courtesy of the U.S. taxpayer, was a decent bargain.
MOHAMMED FARIZ’S BAD LUCK had started more or less at birth. He’d entered the world in 1991, the youngest of six children, the product of a pinhole leak in a Chinese condom. His father, Adel, eked out a living ferrying laborers around Peshawar in a battered Toyota pickup.
Adel charged one rupee, about twelve cents, a ride. After gas and traffic tickets, some real, some imagined by underpaid cops, he cleared four dollars a day, enough to rent an apartment in the Haji Camp neighborhood, a warren of narrow streets around Peshawar’s grimiest bus station. The eight members of the Fariz family piled into four rooms in a six-story building that now and again dumped chunks of concrete on the heads of anyone unlucky enough to be walking by. Even in the summer, when Peshawar hit one hundred twenty degrees, Nawaz forbade her children from opening the apartment’s windows, which overlooked an alley that stank of sewage and stray dogs.
By the standards of Haji Camp, the Fariz family was middle-class. For a decade, Afghans had flooded into the North-West Frontier to flee the Taliban. Many wound up in Peshawar, destitute and desperate. They turned to heroin to salve their misery and prostitution to pay for their heroin. They were nearly all male. The sexual abuse of boys and young men was endemic in the North-West Frontier, in part because unmarried men and women could be killed simply for being seen together.
Prostitution and heroin use were illegal in Pakistan. But the Peshawar police had other concerns. They spent most of their time dodging suicide bombers, and the rest looking for bribes. They rarely came to Haji Camp. By 2003, the neighborhood’s disorder had attracted the attention of the self-appointed soldiers of the Jaish al- Sunni, the Army of the Sunni.
The Jaish were a ragged group of young men who called themselves an Islamic militia but were really a street gang, Bloods without the bandannas. Every few months, they descended on Haji Camp for flying raids, their hands heavy with chains and knives. Their leaders carried pistols but preferred not to use them. Guns were too easy. The Jaish wanted blood to flow. Sirens announced their raids, warning residents of Haji Camp to get into their homes. Anyone who remained outside was assumed to be an addict and fair game.
The day after he turned thirteen, Mohammed was caught in a raid. When the siren sounded, he was escaping Pakistan as best he could, playing World of Warcraft at a computer shop around the corner from his family’s apartment. To pay for the game, he dragged wheelbarrows of bricks at construction sites. Four hours of work brought him five rupees, enough to play for two hours on a slow computer, or an hour on a fast one. On the night of the raid, Mohammed had found a Shield of Coldarra, which promised him protection from even the toughest monsters. Then the siren sounded.
Around him, boys groaned to one another. “Tonight.” “Why tonight?” “Just got started and now this bastard.” “Ten rupees down the drain, man.”
One boy raised his hand and asked Aamer, the owner, if they could save their games and come back when the raid was over. “What the sign say?” Aamer said. There were seven signs, each painted a different color. They all had the same message, in English and Pashto:
“NO Refund EVER.”
“But it the Jaish, Aamer. The Jaish come, we should be having a refund.”
“What the sign say?”
The boys got up from their keyboards and hurried out. But not Mohammed. Mohammed had his new shield and five minutes left on his hour, and he planned to use both. Somewhere on this level, a Blessed Blade of the Windseeker was hidden. Mohammed meant to find it. The Jaish needed fifteen minutes to get this far into the neighborhood. Anyway, he was barely two blocks from his house.
Two minutes later, still three minutes left to play, Aamer tugged Mohammed’s chair from under him. “Boy, you got to go,” Aamer said. “They coming now. Coming quick.”
“But—”
Aamer pulled the plug on Mohammed’s PC, and the screen went black. Then Mohammed heard the shouting of the Jaish, angry voices rumbling like a motorbike. Close by, a glass shattered and a woman screamed, a high-pitched whine that broke off abruptly—
Mohammed realized his mistake. They’d taken a different route this time, found their way in faster. They were close. “Let me stay, Aamer. Please.
Without a word, Aamer tugged Mohammed’s skinny arm and shoved him out the front door. The street was narrow and smeared with crumpled plastic bottles, scraps of wax paper, indefinable bits of metal and concrete. At the end of the block, in front of the halal butcher shop, a man dressed in blue jeans and a black shirt spotted Mohammed and circled a black baton over his head.
Mohammed ran. He could hear the Jaish behind him, heavy footsteps closing on him. They yelled at him to stop, told him they’d show him mercy if he did. But Mohammed was slight and quick and didn’t have far to go. He could feel his Shield of Coldarra protecting him. He almost got home.
Almost.
But he slipped. Slipped on a patch of oil invisible in the Haji Camp darkness. Fifty feet from his building. He got up, but they were on him. He tried to punch and kick. But he was small, and they were big and there were five of them. Then the biggest one, the one in blue, clubbed him on the side of the head with a steel baton, and he couldn’t fight anymore.
“Whore,” the man in blue said to Mohammed.
The five of them surrounded him. He couldn’t see anything but their legs and their dusty black sneakers. The soldiers of the Jaish always wore black sneakers. They were practically the only requirement for joining. The men were panting in their excitement, and Mohammed knew what they planned.
“No, I live here, sir,” he said.
“You’re a whore.”
“Please, sir—”
They dragged him into the alley behind his building, so narrow that even the tuk-tuks couldn’t fit through it. Above him, a woman, a black scarf wrapped around her head, looked down from the third floor. He yelled to her for help, but a hand covered his mouth. He pleaded silently for relief, for his father to realize what was happening and come outside. But even at thirteen, he knew Adel wouldn’t save him, that Adel was as frightened of the Jaish as everyone else.
The men grew serious. Two held his legs apart and the one in blue pulled down his cheap brown sweatpants. What came next hurt so much that Mohammed thought his insides were on fire. He screamed through the hand on his mouth and kicked his legs as hard as he could. The man didn’t stop. The others laughed and one peed on his face.
The man in blue finished, and the other four took their turns. The rest didn’t hurt so much, or maybe they did but he didn’t care. Before they ran off to find a new victim, they gave him a going-away present, pouring a vial of hydrochloric acid onto his legs, searing their cruelty onto him. In a way, they’d been kind. They could have burned out his eyes.
When Mohammed got home, blood dripped out of him. Nawaz gave him a Coca-Cola. Adel took it away and slapped his face and told him that he’d shamed them all. Three days later, still bleeding, he was packed off to a
