madrassa in Bat Khela, a town of fifty thousand, sixty miles northeast of Peshawar.
FOR THE NEXT FOUR YEARS, he was given endless hours of instruction in the Quran and the hadith, the sayings of the Prophet. He didn’t believe a word. He’d seen the truth of the men who called themselves warriors. His parents never visited. He imagined, hoped, that his mother wanted to see him. But without his father’s permission, she could no more travel to Bat Khela than the moon.
At the madrassa, Mohammed rarely spoke. He couldn’t be bothered to argue when boys called him stupid. When he talked too much, the scars on his legs burned. He preferred silence. Fortunately, the teachers didn’t mind. At night he sat, pretending to study his Quran, on his cot in the whitewashed third-floor hall where sixty boys slept side by side. In reality, he endlessly replayed the night the Jaish had caught him. If only he had quit the game a few minutes earlier. If only he had seen the pool of oil on the street. If only he’d fought harder. If only. But the story always ended the same way.
ON MOHAMMED’S SEVENTEENTH BIRTHDAY, the imams passed the word. Two students were wanted for a “special mission.” Everyone at school understood the code. Mohammed asked to join, surprising the imams. They hadn’t known he was so pious. Of course, they misunderstood entirely. Without ever hearing the word, Mohammed had become an ironist par excellence. Raped. Blamed for being raped. Disowned by his family. Finally, as punishment, sent to learn from the men who’d trained his rapists.
So Mohammed had decided to buy his way out of the hell of his life by giving himself to his namesake. When the bomb went off, his classmates would call him a hero. In heaven he’d be given a truck-load of virgins to pummel as he pleased. Or else. he’d just be dead. Either way, he’d come out ahead.
FOR TWO WEEKS, nothing changed. He went to class, ate, pretended to pray. The other boys didn’t say anything to him, but he could see in their faces they knew what he’d agreed to do and they respected him. Fools. One night at dinner, just as he was wondering if he’d been rejected, he felt a tap on the shoulder:
He was taken to a house in western Peshawar. Haji Camp wasn’t far away, and Mohammed wanted to say good-bye to his parents, at least his mother, but he knew better than to ask. He expected they’d show him how to make a bomb, but they didn’t. Eventually he figured out why: given his life expectancy, why teach him?
On the third night, a mud-encrusted SUV parked in front of the house. A fat man stepped out. Once, in Haji Camp, Mohammed had seen a television show about Japanese men who wore robes and wrestled with one another. Sumos, they were called. This man was Pakistani and wasn’t as big as the sumos. But he moved the same way they did, a sidestep waddle. He came into the house and sat next to Mohammed. The couch creaked under his weight, and Mohammed tried not to smile. He could tell the man was important. The man looked at him for what seemed like a long time.
“Do you know me?”
“No, sir.”
“I am Jawaruddin bin Zari. Have you heard of me?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You know why you’re here.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Are you scared?”
No one had asked Mohammed that question before. He considered. “No, sir.”
“Do you understand the mission?”
“Not exactly, sir.”
“But you know you will die as a soldier for Allah.”
“Yes, sir.”
The man patted his shoulder. “Good.”
THE TRUCK SHOWED UP a week later. It was empty and shiny. It drove away and came back filled with bags of fertilizer and barrels of oil. The next day the men drove it to a house on the edge of Islamabad. Mohammed had never left the North-West Frontier before. He spent most of the drive with his face pressed against the passenger window.
The house in Islamabad had a television, a treat the madrassa had lacked. Mohammed lay in front of it for hours, watching cricket matches. The men ignored him. They treated him as ignorant and stupid, and he supposed he was.
Mohammed hadn’t been told the plan, but he knew he wouldn’t be in the truck when it exploded. His death would be a diversion. He would wear a bomb vest and walk as close as possible to the main Diplomatic Quarter checkpoint before blowing himself up. In fact, bin Zari planned to blow the vest himself, via a cell phone, though he hadn’t bothered to tell Mohammed.
That final night they ate a simple meal, grilled lamb and diced cucumber and tomato. They prayed together. Mohammed fell asleep in front of the television. He was dreaming of World of Warcraft when a heavy hand shook him awake. Bin Zari, holding a pistol.
“Can you use this?”
Mohammed nodded. At the madrassa, he’d learned the basics of handling pistols. Bin Zari shoved the gun into Mohammed’s hand.
“They’re coming,” bin Zari said.
“Who?”
Bin Zari slapped Mohammed’s face. “Stupid. The police. And the Americans.” He ran out, and Mohammed heard his heavy steps headed to the roof. Mohammed peeked outside the window and saw a Nissan and a van rolling into the front yard. Men jumped out of the van and ran for the house. Then the shooting started.
He hardly remembered what happened next. Somehow, he got to the big room at the back of the house. But it was filled with fog that burned Mohammed’s eyes and nose and mouth. He tried not to breathe, but he couldn’t help himself.
He hid under a crate and put his T-shirt over his mouth and waited. An American, a black one wearing a strange black mask, came in. Mohammed lifted the pistol and pulled the trigger. He could hardly see, but he knew he’d hit the black man, because the man fell down. The floor shook when he hit it. Then another man in a mask came in. Mohammed fired the rest of his bullets, but by then he was so blind he could have been two meters away and he would have missed. He threw the pistol away and raised his hands and stood.
The Americans took him and put a hood over his head and gave him to the Pakistani police. He knew they were Pakistani because they smelled like his dad and they yelled at him in Pashto. They put him in a truck and told him he was stupid, a stupid jihadi, and that he’d killed an American and that he was going to a very bad place. And then they hit him. They hit him in the arms and the legs and the stomach with sticks. Two of his ribs came loose and wagged in his belly. He asked them to take the hood off, but they laughed, and with the laughing he was back in the alley with the Jaish, not remembering it but actually back in the alley. Only this time he was wearing a hood.
Later, the truck stopped. They took him out and took the hood off him. They were at an airport, planes all around and a sweet smell. Mohammed had never seen an airplane up close. They were bigger than he imagined, and not as smooth, metal bits sticking from the wings. Bin Zari was there, too. The police took off his clothes and put the hood back on. And then someone stuck him with a needle. The poison ran through his body and into his head and got stuck there. Then they put him on an airplane. Even with his hood on, he could tell when the plane took off.
He wanted to sleep, but he couldn’t, and if he closed his eyes he couldn’t move at all, like he was inside a box, only the box was made of his own skin. And the scars on his legs itched and itched, but he couldn’t touch them because his hands were locked together and it was all happening at once and when he opened his eyes he couldn’t see and—
But when he banged his head against the floor, he felt better. So, he banged his head. Finally, the men took off the hood. Bin Zari was next to him in the plane, and he told Mohammed to calm down, that the Americans had them now and they needed to be strong, be soldiers for Allah. The poison would wear off eventually, he said.
