Prepared For Rage

Iraq was a crusade, nothing less, the first wave of the attempt to subjugate and then obliterate Islam from the world.

Some of the hotheads in the group began speaking outwardly of taking direct action, of targeting local unbelievers for retribution. "The Jews," someone said, and someone else laughed and said, "Are there any Jews left in Germany?" Akil said nothing to encourage them, but neither did he say anything to discourage them, maintaining a silence in which the others read what they wished to read. Incidents of broken windows and assaults soon followed, with a great deal of boastful swaggering after the fact. When no repercussions were forthcoming, a Muslim woman who was seen talking to a German shopkeeper was beaten on the street, and a Protestant church with a woman priest was vandalized.

Akil used the resulting hubbub to suggest that he, Yussuf, and Yaqub begin to meet elsewhere. They agreed. Another man, Basil ben Hasn, overheard and volunteered to join them. Yussuf and Yaqub made him welcome and Akil concealed his displeasure. He didn't like Basil. The young man listened too much and spoke too little, making it difficult to see into his heart. And he was from Jordan, a nation notorious for collaborating with the United States. Bin Laden was not altogether wrong in his distrust of them, they had betrayed too many fighters to the West, some of whom Akil had known personally, and some of whom were now rotting in Guantanamo Bay.

And one of whom had very probably betrayed his master.

If he was wary of enemy action, he was far more alert to the possibility of action by his so-called friends. So, instead of moving their meeting to his living room and giving his fixed location away to anyone who might be interested enough to follow them, they moved to another coffeehouse at the edge of the neighborhood. It was far enough away from the first one to separate themselves from the first establishment's patrons, but close enough that when a week later the riot began they heard the noise from five streets away and ran to investigate.

It was a scene of chaos, drifts of tear gas making their eyes water, men shouting, women screaming, police with riot shields striking at everyone within reach of their clubs. With a faint shock Akil realized that their intent was to contain the inhabitants of the coffee shop where he had first begun to meet with his recruits. The line of officers tightened, one bloody Muslim head at a time. When someone fell, they were dragged away and tossed into the back of a police van. One of the victims was Rashid's new wife, her veil twisted in a tumble of long black hair, her face bruised and bloody. Akil wondered what she was doing out so late, and resolutely banished the memories of Adara the sight brought to mind.

The police line re-formed and stepped slowly but inexorably forward. "But why are they attacking the coffee shop?" Yussuf said.

There were other policemen there, too, Akil realized belatedly, not in uniform but unmistakable nonetheless. Americans, many Americans in cheap suits and bright ties, and Interpol, he thought, or at least representatives of some European security force.

It was time to call in reinforcements. Akil found a discarded bottle and threw it as hard as he could.

The bottle hit the back of one of the helmets, hard enough to cause the policeman wearing it to stumble to his knees. The line broke and turned to see where the new attack was coming from. By this time the gathering crowd behind Akil and his friends were screaming and shouting insults, and they took to his example with enthusiasm. A rain of objects, including rocks, cobblestones, bottles, and cans, hammered down on hastily raised riot shields. The rain increased to a hail, and by the time the hail became a storm the police line had regrouped and begun to advance at a well-disciplined trot.

"Come on!" Akil said, and led his three companions on an agile, serpentine dance through the crowd. At the corner he said, "Split up! Yussuf and Yaqub that way! Basil, with me!" He didn't wait to see if they obeyed; he grabbed Basil's arm and sprinted down an alley, around another corner, and up a street. Basil had shrugged free of his grip and was a pace ahead of Akil. He saw that the boy was laughing.

"This way!" Akil said.

"But that's back to the riot!"

"I know a different way! Follow me!"

At the top of the street the noise of the riot, which had been decreasing, began to increase again. There were the sounds of metal crunching as cars were overturned, the glass of storefronts shattering, the shouts of men, the screams of women and the cries of children, the orders of police commanders bellowed in the vain hope they would be heard above the cacophony.

Akil turned toward it and increased his pace so that he pulled ahead. This time there was no hesitation; Basil's feet thudded behind him. At the corner at the top of a little hill Akil stopped without warning, turned to his right, and stuck out a foot. Basil tripped over it and as he fell forward Akil grabbed the back of his jacket and the seat of his pants and assisted his headlong hurtle into the crowd ru

In one smooth movement Akil continued his turn and reversed course, gaining on the leading edge of the fleeing, screaming crowd until he was able to duck down an alley, another, a third, emerging finally blocks away. He smoothed his hair, steadied his breathing, and walked at a sedate pace back to his one-room flat.

He got out his small, shabby suitcase and began to fill it with slow and deliberate movements. There was time. Yussuf and Yaqub would take extra care in returning. If they returned at all, if they chose to follow him.

They would. After all, he had, and they were as he had been once, young, callow, untried, searching for something to give their lives purpose and meaning, a way to leave something behind, a path that would take them to glory. Any and all of the above. His mind filled with memories of another leave-taking, years ago and half a world away, the day he had followed Zarqawi into Afghanistan.

There had been no hesitation on his part, no second thoughts that October in 1999. He left his job and all his belongings, save a few things in a small pack, without so much as a backward glance.

They found a house in Kabul, and Zarqawi began immediately to recruit expatriate Jordanians living in Afghanistan to plan and execute a series of terrorist attacks in Jordan. He kept an attentive Akil at his elbow, watching, learning, in the begi

The following year Zarqawi was given the task of overseeing an al Qaeda camp near Herat. When they arrived, he handed Akil over to the training master with instructions that Akil be taught the full curriculum. "Play no favorites here," the training master was told, and the training master took to this instruction with a zealous and unrelenting enthusiasm.

At the end of that formative year, Akil could route an anonymous email, drive a D6 Caterpillar tractor, and field strip an AK-47, reassemble it, and shoot and hit a moving target. He could create a web site, outrun a platoon of recruits, and send a suicide bomber out on his mission with words stirring enough that the young man-and sometimes the young woman-believed absolutely that paradise was waiting on the other side of their trigger finger. He could hijack a bus, a train, an airplane. He could kidnap an uncooperative Pakistani city official right out of his Peshawar office in broad daylight. He could negotiate terms for his release, and he could kill him if such terms were not forthcoming, or even unsatisfactory.