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. 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 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: Pack your bags.
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.