Authors: Mainak Dhar
'Pack up, boys. We don't want to be around when the Taliban get here.'
As silently as they had come, the four men picked up their gear and began their hour long trek through the jagged peaks and narrow passes to reach their exfiltration point, where a chopper was en route to pick them up. They were deep in enemy territory and as much as they would have liked to go in closer to verify their kills, the Predator overhead had already warned them of approaching Taliban forces.
Half an hour after they had left, three pick up trucks climbed the pass leading to the hut. More than twenty heavily armed, black-turbaned Taliban warriors leapt out, weapons at the ready. But when they saw that they were too late to save their leader, several of them sat down, stunned and in shock. From the last truck emerged four men who looked totally out of place. They were all dressed in western clothes, two of them were white and two were black. They were Al Qaeda's most prized foreign operators. Men who had been born and bred in Western society, but had converted to the cause along the way. Men who had western identities and passports and could carry their jihad deep into the infidel's lands. They were to have been the carriers of the deadly cocktail of poisons Al-Zawahiri had come to take delivery of.
They stood looking at the burnt remains of the hut and the men who had assembled there. None of them had known about the exact contents of what special weapons their leaders had themselves come down to take delivery of, and many of the uneducated Taliban warriors poked at the wreckage at random till one of the Western Jihadis told them to be more careful. One of the Americans wondered aloud if the American Predators were still overhead and if they should just get away as fast as possible. The Taliban were going to have none of that. They had lost their leaders, and were now collecting body parts, intent on giving Mullah Omar a fitting burial. One or two of the Westerners tried to reason with them that getting away immediately was the only sensible thing to do, but the illiterate Taliban soldiers pointed their guns at them and told them to wait. The grisly task took fifteen minutes, their hands cut and chafed in many places as they sorted through the charred remains. Unknown to them, they both inhaled and ingested into their bloodstreams a cocktail of some of the most deadly toxins known to man.
The Taliban were silent, many of them in tears. Their Jihad had suffered a massive setback.
Little did they realize that their Jihad was going to take on a horrifying new dimension, and that they were to be the ones to strike the first blow in it.
***
'Mom, I said I'll do it later.'
Mayukh Ghosh put his headphones back on, satisfied that he had postponed yet another plea by his mother to clean up his room. But this time, it seemed that she was not going to be as easily put off as usual. The door to his room swung open and his mother was there, hands on her hips.
'Young man, you will listen to me when I ask you to do something.'
Mayukh stopped playing on his PS3 to talk to his mother. When she started any sentence with the words 'young man', it usually meant he was in bigger trouble than usual.
'Mom, it's not a big deal. I'll clean up my room over the weekend.'
His mother moved some of the CDs and sports magazines strewn across his bed and sat down on it.
'This isn't just about your room. You're seventeen now and you'll be in college soon. You need to start thinking more seriously about what you want to do with your life. I mean, look at you.'
Mayukh sighed loudly, which only served to irritate his mother even more.
'You just loiter around with that good for nothing friend of yours and play video games all day. You need to pay more attention to what your future will be like.'
Mayukh had already tuned out. He had heard this lecture many times, and was in no mood to hear it again.
'Mom, I know what you're going to say. All your friend's kids are doing well in school, they're so well behaved, they all have a
plan
. I'm sorry I'm such a disappointment, all right?'
With those words, he walked out of his room, slamming the door shut behind him. He knew he would be in big trouble when he got back home, but for now he just wanted to be by himself. He rode his bicycle for about twenty minutes, the cold November air blasting into his face. Winter was not yet fully upon Delhi, but pedaling as fast as he could, the wind felt freezing. It was just what he needed to cool himself down. Finally, his legs aching, he stopped to catch his breath. His usually curly and long hair (another cause of his mother's angst- why couldn't he get a haircut?) was now falling all over his face, and he wondered what was it about parents, anyways? Whatever he did never seemed to be good enough. And if they suddenly had discovered that he needed to be more responsible, weren't they to blame in any way?
Mayukh's father was a senior government officer and he had grown up surrounded by people ready to do his father's bidding, never having to work too hard at anything. For his parents to suddenly wake up and demand that he miraculously become independent was more than a bit unfair. He was now old enough to realize that his father's connections had got him into the best schools, and had ensured that he never had to join a queue to do anything. But he was not yet old enough to realize that one day, when his father retired, he would have to learn to fend for himself without that safety blanket.
However, for now, he was content to sit at the nearby shop and drink some Coke and curse the unfairness of it all. He asked the man for a cigarette, and he hesitated as if sizing up how old Mayukh was. At close to six feet tall, Mayukh was very tall for his age and together with a physique that came from four years of playing football on the school team meant that nobody could guess he had just turned seventeen. That was till they looked closer at his face- for his eyes were still the open, trusting eyes of a kid. But the shopkeeper was not interested in such subtleties and passed on a Marlboro.
Mayukh puffed away, imagining what his mother would do when she found out he smoked on the sly once in a while. He didn't like it much, and usually coughed his guts out, but none of his friends would ever know that.
His mobile phone beeped and he picked it up. It was his best friend, Shiv.
'Dude, are we on for our session tomorrow?'
'Of course!'
Then, Mayukh remembered the mood his mother had been in, and added.
'Hey Shiv, is it okay if we meet at your place instead?'
Many things brought the two boys together- a love for cars, a fair distaste for studies and above all else, a passion for gaming. They could spend hours in front of their PS3s, joining forces in myriad online battlegrounds, blasting away at whatever villains it threw at them. With the mood his mother was in, Mayukh figured this time, it might be more prudent to go over to Shiv's place instead of sitting in front of the PS3 in his room.
Mayukh noticed the TV playing in a corner of the shop. There was a banner scrolling across the bottom of the screen. One or two other people who had come to buy cigarettes at the shop had stopped to watch. One of them said aloud what was on all their minds.
'That is one screwed up country, isn't it? First the Taliban, then bloody Osama, then the American war, and now this. They should just nuke it and end the misery.'
Mayukh never spent too much time in front of the TV, least of all watching news, but over the last twenty-four hours, there was no avoiding the news that had been coming out of Afghanistan. It was all over the Net, and all over every news channel. He could hear the newscaster read out her lines.
'The US military has repeated that the sudden upsurge in violence following the reported deaths of Mullah Omar and Ayam Al-Zawahiri is not a cause for concern and represents the death throes of the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan.'
The screen cut away to a balding, white man in a military uniform.
'We won a major battle in our ongoing war on terror two days ago with the strike that took out the top leadership of the Taliban and Al Qaeda. The Taliban are now little more than disorganized rabble and the spate of suicide bombings yesterday just show how desperate they are getting in their attempts to destabilize Afghanistan and the progress the democratically elected government has achieved. Our mission is on track and I am confident that the day is not far when peace returns to Afghanistan.'
Mayukh's phone rang again. It was Shiv.
'Dude, what do you want to play- Medal of Honor or Dead Rising?'
Mayukh sniggered.
'Come on, Shiv, don't try and change the game just because I keep wasting you on Medal of Honor.'
There was a pause before Shiv responded.
'But I want to kill some zombies. I was reading this amazing book in which zombies come to life. Wouldn't that be cool?'
Mayukh took a deep breath. Shiv was cool, but sometimes he just took everything too literally.
'Shiv, zombies exist only in frigging video games. Speaking of which, we are on for tomorrow and I am going to whip your ass.'
***
Abu Jindal, who had once been known as Nadir Dedoune, felt like crap. His head hurt, he kept throwing up every hour or so, and his skin had taken on a strange yellow complexion. As he looked at his reflection in the window of a Duty Free shop at Karachi airport, he wondered what bug he had picked up. Perhaps this had all been a stupid idea after all. Growing up as an Algerian immigrant in a poor ghetto outside Paris, he had never known anything other than grinding poverty. There were no jobs, no opportunities, only the condescending and spiteful looks of the rich white French. That was till he met Mullah Amir, who preached to small groups of young men at the local mosque, and had opened Nadir's eyes to the atrocities being committed against Muslims around the world. He had found a new meaning and purpose to his life- to wage Jihad against these infidels. He had made the trip to Afghanistan to take part in some mission that he had supposedly been chosen for. The running around and firing of guns in a camp inside Pakistan had been fun enough, but then he had been totally terrified by what he had seen after the Predator strike that had killed Mullah Omar, Al-Zawahiri and the others. His mission on hold, he had been told to leave immediately.
'Emirates Flight 605 to Paris via Dubai is now ready for boarding.'
It was 5:30 in the morning, and Nadir bought a cup of coffee. No sooner had he taken a sip than he rushed to the bathroom, emptying the contents of his stomach into the sink. When he had retched himself dry, he washed his face, and then looked down to see clumps of hair in his hand. There were a couple of bald patches on his head where the hair seemed to have just come off.
What was happening to him?
All he wanted to do now was to somehow get home and see a doctor. He took out a cap and put it on to cover his hair. He tried sleeping through the flight, though he had to get up three times even before the flight reached Dubai to throw up. On the third occasion he saw blood in the sink. The flight was delayed in Dubai by several hours, which made his life even more miserable. A couple of hours after the flight had left Dubai, the woman sitting next to him, bored of watching the Sun gradually set over the horizon, turned to order a drink. She saw him start to shake, as if having a fit.
'Sir, are you okay?'
Nadir couldn't hear her. His eyes were glazed over and as he shook even more violently, his cap fell off. He was now nearly hairless, his hair lying in clumps all over his seat. As she watched in horror, boils seemed to break out all over his body, oozing pus and blood. He then retched all over the seat in front of him. Passengers screamed, and a Flight Attendant shouted out whether there was a doctor on board. By the time a doctor got to him, Nadir was lying lifeless, a ghastly apparition, covered in his own vomit, pus and blood, a deformed, hairless yellowed being where there had once been a handsome young man. The French doctor felt for his pulse and then shook his head sadly at the Flight Attendant.
'Il est mort.'
There were horrified gasps from several of the passengers who had gathered around to see what was happening. They all began to move back to their seats as the Flight Attendant wondered what to do with the body. Suddenly one of the passengers exclaimed to the doctor.
'Doctor, he's speaking.'
'C'est impossible!'
The doctor leaned over near Nadir and saw that indeed his lips were moving. There was still no pulse. He leaned closer to hear what he was saying. He jerked back when he heard one word.
'Jihad.'
Then Nadir's eyes snapped open.
He sat up calmly, as if nothing had happened, looked around, and grabbed the black scarf from the Flight Attendant's neck. He then proceeded to calmly tie it around his head, as everyone around looked on, speechless.
Then he leapt out to bite the screaming doctor's hand.
On three other flights headed for New York, London and Washington, the men who had accompanied Nadir to the camp in Afghanistan similarly transformed as the Sun set.
David Bremsak knew nothing of this, sleeping his first full night's sleep in close to a month. His bunk at Camp Delta just outside the town of Gardez was hardly luxurious, but it beat humping up and down the Shahikot Mountains wondering if he was in some Taliban sniper's sights. He was dreaming of Rose, her long, blond hair, her smell, her touch, when he was woken up. He looked up to see Dan, his M82 in hand.