Don't Look Back (19 page)

“Who sent you to look for me?” Bashir asked.

“No one sent me.” Quick, shallow breaths. The jaw hung awkwardly. Slightly askew. Dried blood lipsticked the corners of his mouth. “I wasn’t
looking
for you.”

“You merely happened to see me. From up there. Looking down.”

“
I
wasn’t looking.”

“Who then?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know who.”

Jay Rudwick had no training in counterinterrogation. This much was clear. He was fragile and untested, like most Americans. Throw a stone and they shatter. This was good on many counts.

Bashir nodded once, a show of forbearance. “Who else has seen the pictures in this camera?”

“No one.” Jay ran his tongue across his chalky lips. “Listen—”

“No one else saw my picture in the camera?”

“No. I just—it was found. It’s no big deal. No one cares. If you just let me go, nothing will happen. You can let me go.”

“It was found. You did not find it.”

Jay’s pupils glimmered in the faint light. Tears pooled like mercury in the crevice of his nose.

“Who found it?”

“I don’t … No one.”

“No one found it.” Bashir shifted his weight. The floor creaked. “Someone is gathering information. About me, about Theresa Hamilton. You will tell me everyone in your group who has discussed me.”

Jay closed his eyes, and wet tracks forded his lips.

“Do they know who I am?” Bashir asked.

Jay’s chest jerked beneath the strap. Hyperventilating. This too was good.

“N-no. Who are you?”

Bashir set down the camera. Walked into the other room. Returned. His machete now swinging by his knee.

Jay stiffened, the board creaking. “Listen, please, you can let me go. You
can.
You can just let me go, and nothing will happen.”

“Nothing will happen,” Bashir repeated. “Yes.”

He lifted the glass chimney from the lantern. Crouched, giving Jay his broad back. He ran the tongue of the flame along the machete’s edge. Rising heat prickled the hair poking through the gnarled skin at the edge of his jaw, phantom nerves misfiring.

“What are you doing? What— Why are you— Listen, listen. Just wait, okay? Wait a second?”

Bashir rose, his left knee cracking as it did. He stood over Jay and spoke softly, as always. “You will die. That much is decided. Either you will answer my questions and die quickly with a stab to the heart. Or you will die days or weeks from now. That will be worse.”

“What? Wait, I— No.
No
. That’s not— That can’t be possible. I’m from Seattle. I’m a fucking
day trader,
okay?”

Bashir freed one of Jay’s arms. Jay did not struggle or resist. His eyes saucers. He gave his arm, limp, over to his captor. Between Jay’s arm and ribs, Bashir threaded a strap, cinching it just above the biceps. Tight. Jay stared at the tourniquet. Uncomprehending eyes.

“I brought you here to work on you properly, with respect. There are specific ways we must fight, and we must kill in accordance with the Prophet, may God’s prayers and blessings be upon him. This makes us better than you. You are animals.”

Jay tried to pull his head away. Hair scraping along the plywood. Eyes straining. The strap bit into his throat, causing him to cough. “Wait a minute. You’re …
what
? You can’t be
here.
This is
Mexico.
”

“I, too, am often amazed by the strangeness of life.”

“This makes no sense. You’re supposed to be in Fallujah, sawing off people’s heads and—”

“Al-Zarqawi was a butcher fanatic. We do not slaughter innocents or torture. We do not mutilate corpses.”

A hoarse whisper: “
I’m
an innocent.”

“No.”

“
This
is torture.”

“No.”

It was not torture. It was Allah guiding him, using his arm as a weapon. His hand would become Allah’s will. He would feel the warmth of love in his chest as he acted. Every stroke of the hot, sharp sword would be in compliance with the wishes of the Prophet,
salallahu alayhi wasalam.
After, he would feel cured of a sickness.

“Then why … why is my arm tied off?”

“I will very cleanly sever your opposite limbs as is prescribed by the Qur’an. Your right arm above your elbow. And then your left leg above the knee.” He paused. Let his words work. “Unless.”

“What? What? Unless
what
?”

He rose. “You will excuse me. It is time for my night prayer.”

“No.
No no no.
Hang on. Please? Listen— Please can you…?”

Bashir walked outside. Wet, hot air enfolded him. Clouds gathered. Soon they would open again. A few birds called tentatively, but the jungle had grown quiet. The animals awed into silence by the sky’s fury. The sound of dripping filled the canyon. Water draining from every surface.

A bucket sat beneath the corner of the house, filled with runoff from the roof. Here he would make his ablutions. He set down the machete. Dipped his hands in and scrubbed them front and back. Scraped his nails up his wrists. The icy water brought him back to the Hindu Kush, where between missions he performed
wudu
with the freezing melt of mountaintop snow. Cleansing himself for contact with the Qur’an.

The distraction with the American had put him past his usual time for praying
salat.
It was still full dark, and the sun was well past the required eighteen degrees below the horizon, so he was within the valid window to perform the night prayer. Even so, he preferred not to delay the
isha
past the first third of the night. He had made enough compromises here.

These compromises, they were necessary. He was allowed to lie for self-protection. To change his outward guise. To shield. He wore no prayer cap here, no pajama-like
shalwar qameez.
He trimmed his beard. What mattered was that he kept hate in his heart. Nurtured it. Protected the flame so it burned day and night.

Cupping his hand, he brought up a mouthful of water so cold that his teeth throbbed. He scrubbed his finger across the front. Back to the molars. Then shoveled water up his nose. Cleared each nostril with a blow. He washed his face. Forehead to eyes to chin. Again. Again. Making every part clean. Every part pure.

As a young child, he had once taken a shortcut in his ablutions. Spent insufficient time wiping his hair with water. When he’d moved to touch the Qur’an, his mother had called him over to the kitchen. She was cooking stew. She’d asked for his hand, pulled a spoon from the boiling pot, and dropped it into his palm.

The jungle had always been home. His childhood village was two hours east of Sukkur in southern Pakistan, on the wild brink of India. A tribal region, rich with religious recruiting. The madrasas offered free board, clothing, food. He was sent. By the age of twelve, he’d memorized the Qur’an in its entirety. In a Deobandi seminary, he was exposed to the teachings of ibn Othaimeen and ibn Baz, the Saudi scholars who would provide inspiration for the global jihad to come. There was a great excitement in the sixties and seventies, a return to faith. An Islamic revival. During this time Bashir let his fledgling beard grow long and began eating with his thumb and two fingers, as did the Prophet, praise and glory be to him.

His diligence and rigor were noted. As a fifteen-year-old, he was asked to Saudi Arabia. At university in Jidda, in the lecture hall of the theologian Abdullah Azzam, he first met Usama. An economics student, bin Laden struck him as simple-minded and religiously unsophisticated. An amateur. But a rich amateur, whose resources would one day be required. When Azzam was fired in 1979 for issuing a fatwa against the Soviet invasion, Bashir was brought to a different campus in Islamabad. The curriculum there was equally vigorous, yet more practical. Martial arts. Tactics. Strategy. In May the boys were trucked into Afghanistan. They would return in the fall. Their summer school was fighting in the jihad.

It was there that Bashir found his calling.

More precisely in the training camps. Plastics, land mines, TNT, Semtex—he learned to identify explosives by feel, by taste. The puttylike give of C4. The sweet glycerin of dynamite. Training was vigorous. Accidents happened, some more altering to one’s appearance than others. Here he learned to sprint up mountains. To carry boulders so large he sank into the earth under the weight of them. To stalk without shoes, silently, shaping his foot to each stone. To crawl through rivers cold enough to turn flesh to rubber. He slept in a sleeping bag stained from carrying corpses out of battle.

Now and then the Saudis drifted through, soft and rich. They dozed late in the mornings, shot guns at the stars at night. But they left money. Money was good. Bashir learned not to trust the Afghans themselves, who were in love with war. Or the Yemenis, who desired to be martyred above all else. But the rest became his brothers, and when they clasped hands and bumped chests and shoulders in greeting, he felt for them a pious devotion.

By his third year, he had grown too valuable to return to campus. The rugged Hindu Kush, with its thick forest and thorny bushes, its mountain haze and fast streams, it felt like home. An incredible labyrinth that stretched across the lines of the map to the Arabian Sea, on to the Indian Ocean, back up to China. A magical veil behind which the mujahedeen drifted. Hid. And attacked. Bashir came to know the smaller ranges as well as he knew the hairs on the back of his hand. Spin Ghar and Tora Bora. Suleman and Toba Kakar. And Bajaur. A staging ground from which Bashir launched raid after raid.

He led countless small operations and three major battles against the Godless Communists. He became a militia commander. He became fully blooded.

He became the Bear of Bajaur.

Not a name he chose. The Soviets called him that. A sign of respect. He would have chosen “The Lion.” But that would have been vanity. A sin.

He released his thoughts of home. Let them drift away.

Bent over the bucket in another jungle in another hemisphere, he continued his ablutions. Scooped water up his forearms. Scrubbed his elbows. The top of his head. Dug his wet fingers in his ears and twisted this way and that. With dripping hands he reached past the band of his loose-fitting cotton pants and spent ample time cleaning there. From inside he could hear the American’s voice, pleading to the walls—“No one saw the camera. I swear. I swear it was just me, and I won’t tell anyone anything if you let me go.” Bashir sat to wash his feet, sawing the blade of his hand between each toe and the next. When he rose, he felt pristine and righteous. Picking up the machete, he started back to the house.

By the time the Soviet dogs fled from Afghanistan, jihad ran in his veins. He battled in Kashmir. Fought at Usama’s side in Sudan. Joined the civil war in Algeria. For much of the nineties, Bashir was captured and escaped. Jailed and released. The Pakistani police held him for five months. Starved him. Kept him seated in a chair for weeks, dousing him with water every time he drifted off. He gave no names. More precisely, he turned over only the false names he’d been trained to release. He spent two stints in dirty Egyptian jails. Whipped with cables. Shocked with electricity. He survived a year in the inhumane jails of the Northern Alliance, where they bound him like an animal and hung him from his wrists and ankles, dislocating his shoulder again and again. Always he found his way free and back to the holy struggle.

With every conflict it grew clearer that the Americans were interested only in keeping the Islamic world crushed under their heel. Their reach extended into every corner of the Holy Land. There was al-Aqsa in Jerusalem, lost to the Crusader-Zionist alliance. Medina and the sacred house of Allah in Mecca, home of the glorious Ka’ba, occupied by U.S. troops. Ousting apostate Muslim tyrants would not be sufficient to liberate the House of Islam. More drastic action would be required.

A new way took shape. A shift in focus from the enemy within, the near enemy, to the far enemy. Transnational jihad.

The United States was the head of the snake. So the head of the snake they would strike.

The Base: a movement dispersed across nations, hidden and yet present everywhere, like Allah. No center of gravity. The enemy would have nowhere to aim a mortal blow.

Word whipped across the land, a fire finally given oxygen. Usama was a deft self-promoter. Obsessed with international media. Careful to dye his beard before the cameras. He was the face. But Ayman al-Zawahiri, in American terms, was the CEO. The last emir of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad. A qualified surgeon who spoke English and French. Wisdom fell from his lips. The real direction came from him. In one of the great honors of his life, Bashir swore his
baya,
his fealty, to him.

The ideas of al-Zawahiri and the resources of bin Laden opened a new world of possibilities. Back before the United States knew that there was a war, the Base was busy recruiting a new generation of mujahedeen. Battle-hardened warriors who had felt the sting of shrapnel. They remained in Afghanistan in an uneasy alliance with the Taliban. The Taliban were extremists who did not follow the true law of Islam. They were innovators. Too zealous in how they tortured and killed. They overreached shari’a law. Condoned public decapitations and other atrocities. Above all, they were cowards who wished to rule their tiny sandbox and little more.

Something was needed to force their hand.

Nineteen jihadis. Twelve box cutters.

It was sufficient. The Americans waded into the Afghan swamp. Bashir was promoted and became one of al-Zawahiri’s operational chiefs. Once again he reigned over the mountainous passes. His name became a thing of lore among American elite forces. The Bear of Bajaur.

But quickly the noose tightened. One by one the Arab nations turned against them. Yemen, Pakistan, Syria—even Iran—drew their nets around operatives. Some permitted drone attacks. Leadership was gutted.

And then the infighting began. Hostility between factions. Commanders clashing with their counterparts. Panicked Taliban delegations piping up. Chiefs from major jihadi groups denounced Usama. Accused him of heresy, of treachery. At times they seemed more like schoolgirls than holy warriors.