Salim scanned the sky. “I hate watching for drones.”
“It’s an easy day.” Jalal handed the binoculars to Salim, “It’s your turn.”
Salim lifted them to his eyes and looked at several high, wispy clouds off to the west, thinking that maybe he saw a bright spot up there. “Has anyone ever seen a drone?”
“Dhakwan saw one last week,” said Jalal. “You knew that. I was there when he told you.”
“He saw something,” said Salim, finding himself asking why every single thing said by anybody needed to be taken on faith.
“It was a drone.”
“How do you know it wasn’t a passenger jet or something else?” Salim asked.
Jalal pointed to the south. “Dhakwan said it was in the sky that way. They say there are five or six camps near the base of that mountain.”
“We’re not supposed to know where the other camps are.” Salim shook his head and looked at the mountain, curiosity making him wonder if he could see the camps.
Jalal chuckled. “If the CIA catches me and tortures me what will I tell them? The camps are at the base of a mountain? Which mountain, they’d ask. What could I say? I still don’t know where we are.”
Salim said, “You better learn something to tell them when they torture you because you know they won’t stop until you do.”
“I know as much as you,” Jalal said, “which is nothing.”
They both laughed and didn’t worry about being scolded for it. A few hundred meters to the east of the compound, the two instructors and the trainees were sitting in the back of an SUV with the rear door open, shooting at targets nailed to trees and making too much noise.
Jalal said, “The only thing we see besides mountains and sky are the other trainees and our instructors. We don’t even know their real names.”
“Be thankful you don’t.”
“We see the truck that brought us here driven by a no-name man with a beard, dressed like every other peasant we saw on the road. He comes now and again. He drops off food and sometimes ammunition. That’s everything I know.”
Salim looked at another far away spot in the sky. It turned out to be a bird. “Do you think we’ll get killed by a drone in our sleep one day?”
“Does it matter how we die as long as it’s not running away like a coward?”
“I suppose not,” Salim mused.
“It only matters that we die for jihad, to stop things like this.” Jalal pointed at the sky. “I don’t know what you heard in America—your news is little better than propaganda—but drones kill more innocents than combatants.”
“We hear about some of that on the news.” Salim lowered the binoculars. Holding them up too long made his arms tired. “That’s one of the reasons I’m here.”
“It’s the main reason I’m here. Rich countries think they can murder Muslims who have no money, and nobody will care. It’s wrong.”
Salim nodded and the two sat in silence for a long time after that, scanning the sky both with and without the binoculars.
“What do you think we’ll do?” Jalal asked.
Salim shrugged. “We spend a lot of time training with the RPGs.”
“I hope it’s not a bomb vest. I don’t mind dying, but I want to die fighting. The thought of blowing myself up to kill people is unsatisfying.”
“Unsatisfying?” Salim gave Jalal a sidelong glance. “What does that mean?”
“I want to see the results of my work, at least some of it,” answered Jalal. “If you wear a vest, you press a button, and then you’re in heaven. You don’t even feel pain. You’re just gone.”
“You want to see Americans die before you go?” Salim asked.
“Americans? Brits? Any Westerner? No, I’d be happier to kill soldiers, but it doesn’t matter. In those democracies—if you can call them that—people vote for governments that kill Muslims. They buy the bombs with their taxes, sit their fat asses on their couches, suck in all the Muslim hate propaganda, and tell themselves because they have no uniform on they have no guilt. But they are all guilty.”
“Be careful, Jalal. You’re starting to sound like a zealot.”
Jalal laughed. “If we’re not both zealots, what are we doing here?”
“Sometimes I wonder.”
“Don’t say that to anybody else.” Jalal looked around. “You hear me, mate?”
“Yeah.” Salim handed the binoculars back to Jalal.
“Dhakwan says his cousin was put in a sleeper cell in Germany. He thinks they’re building a network and when the time is right, we’ll take our RPGs to every major airport in the West, sit at the end of the runways, and shoot down airliners until they stop flying.”
“That’s stupid.”
Jalal turned and raised his voice. “Stupid?”
“Calm down, Jalal. That won’t work.”
“Why won’t it work, Mr. Weapons Expert?”
Salim said, “You’ve used the RPG. Tell me, what is the range of that weapon?”
“A few hundred meters,” answered Jalal.
“Right.”
Salim asked, “How high is a plane flying when it gets to the end of the runway?”
“Thirty meters. A hundred meters. It depends on the airport.”
“And how close can you get to the end of the runway?” Salim asked.
“Depends, I guess,” answered Jalal.
Salim kept pushing, “How fast is an airliner moving at the end of the runway?”
“A hundred and fifty miles per hour? More?”
Salim nodded. “Probably what I’d guess. And accelerating. How fast does your RPG round fly?”
“I don’t know.” Jalal shrugged, frowning.
“I don’t either,” said Salim. “Is it as fast as a bullet?”
“No, of course not. They don’t tell us these things. You know that. It’s not important for us to know.”
“Is it as fast as a car?” Salim asked.
“Faster.”
“Is it as fast as an airplane?”
Jalal’s face grew thoughtful.
“You can see the round accelerate,” said Salim. “You can see it all the way to the target.”
“And?”
“I don’t know how fast the RPG flies, but I’ll bet a plane flies faster.”
“That doesn’t matter.” Jalal sounded defiant.
“Why?”
“If we’re at the end of the runway, we simply shoot the plane as it’s coming toward us.”
“And if you hit it—and that’s a big if—where will the wreckage fall?” Salim asked.
Jalal shrugged.
“I don’t know either.” Salim shook his head. “But I guess some would probably land on you.”
“I’ll shoot when its overhead.”
Salim suppressed a laugh. “So on your very first attempt, you’re going to hit an airplane that’s a hundred meters over your head, traveling at two hundred miles an hour away from you with an RPG round that might be going slower than the plane. And on your first attempt, you’re going to guess how to lead the plane by just the right amount? Is that right?”
Jalal fell silent again.
“How would we train for that?” Salim asked. “I mean if they wanted that kind of attack to succeed, wouldn’t we train for that?”
Jalal’s voice faltered as he said, “You’re my only friend here, Salim, but sometimes you make me feel stupid.”
Salim laughed out loud, then looked around to make sure the instructors weren’t in sight. “I’m not that smart, Jalal. I used to hang out with a bunch of guys in school that made me feel stupid all the time. Not on purpose, but they always talked about computer programming and their calculus homework and stuff. I just felt stupid by being around them, but they were my friends.”
Jalal nodded for no real reason.
“I’m not trying to make you feel stupid.” Salim turned to face Jalal. “Just think, that’s all. Dhakwan believes things because he wants to believe them, not because they are based on any kind of fact. I’m not that smart, but I’m smart enough to know to ask questions. And sometimes all you have to do is ask questions and things that aren’t true fall apart under examination. That’s all.”