by Nick Louth
‘What does this say, brother?’ Ali asked Rifat.
‘It says “Property of US Department of Defense” and there are some serial numbers and technical stuff.’
‘Hey,’ said Ali turning to the other Yemenis ‘It says “Hands off, this Zanneh is the property of Satan”!’ He turned back to Rifat and said: ‘I will kill these people. Zanneh killed my uncle and cousins last year when they were driving on road to Sana’a. Just blew them all up. Why did these Americans not fight him face to face? He was a lion but these Americans are cowards.’ Tears were rolling freely down his face.
A few minutes later they all jumped back in the truck and tore off. Within an hour they stopped at another Bedouin encampment for tea, rice and dates, served by Mazan’s aunt and female cousin. ‘Welcome to Yemen,’ the aunt said, and laughed.
Helliode, meanwhile was talking on his mobile phone. ‘Hey everybody, we must visit the Maqwan. My cousin says Ansa al-Sharia has a harlot on trial.’ He mimicked the act of aiming a pistol. They set off on another dirt road. ‘Faster, Mazan,’ urged Helliode. ‘Or we’ll miss the sentencing.’
In fifteen minutes, the vehicle crested a stony rise, and a small village of baked mud houses was visible. At one end, on a dusty grassless soccer field, a large white tent had been set up, and there looked to be a festival going on, with dozens of cars and pick-ups parked nearby. As they drove into the arena, Rifat could smell the delicious aroma of barbecued lamb. Mazan brought the vehicle to a halt, and they all raced towards the tent. There seemed to be uproar inside. Dozens of Yemeni men in traditional dress all seemed to be talking at once in a local dialect Rifat had trouble understanding. At the centre of the group a woman, no more than a child’s size, in traditional Yemeni shawl and curtain dress was sprawled on the floor sobbing. One arm was being held by a tall bearded man who was arguing with two others.
‘They have sentenced the girl,’ Ali said excitedly.
‘So what are they arguing about?’ Rifat asked.
‘Her father and two uncles are arguing about who should carry out the sentence.’
‘What exactly did she do?’ Rifat asked.
‘I don’t know,’ shrugged Helliode. ‘Some harlotry. There is too much of it.’
Rifat turned to one of the men, a grey-bearded village elder wearing a traditional smock and incongruous silver Nike training shoes, and asked what the woman’s crime was.
‘She was seen unveiled and dancing in the company of her aunt’s male cousin. He is not of her blood.’
‘Will she get the lash?’ Rifat asked.
‘No, not under Ansa al-Sharia. The penalty is death.’ The man stroked his beard. ‘She has offended her family and shamed her tribe in the eyes of Allah. The lash would not change her nature. It merely represses the symptoms.’
The girl was dragged out of the tent by a noisy mob, and thrown into the back of a pick-up truck, where two armed men pinned her down. She was then driven over to one of the goalposts. The rest of the crowd started running after the vehicle. Helliode grabbed hold of the tail of the truck, lifting up his legs and whooping as he hung on to the bumping vehicle, while Ali and Mazan ran behind, cheering. Rifat ran as fast as he could to keep up.
The girl was thrown out of the truck at the other end, and dragged to the goalpost. A rope was thrown over the crossbar, and one end tied to her hands. For the first time, Rifat could now see her face. She was perhaps fourteen or fifteen, with dark brows and strong, proud features. The men roughly bound her feet, and hauled her to an upright position. Her slender frame was taut and she looked out sullenly into the faces of the brothers, uncles and cousins who were intent on killing her. One tall bearded man nearby, the girl’s uncle, carefully loaded a Kalashnikov with a fresh curved clip of ammunition, but another shorter and more muscular fellow, seized the gun by the stock and pointed to his own chest. Ali, Mazan and Helliode laughed as the argument over who was to be the executioner rekindled between her uncle, who was the tribal sheikh, and her father.
The village elder who Rifat had spoken to then interceded and tried to calm them. Helliode joined in and after a couple of minutes heated debate, he pointed to Rifat. The young Saudi, a little alarmed, walked up to the group.
‘Hey friend!’ said Helliode. ‘The elder says the execution should be carried out by someone independent of the family, and I suggested you.’
‘Me?’ Rifat spluttered. The elder nodded, as if this was the wisest course of action to settle such a dispute.
‘Yes, a guest in our country should have the honour of not only sharing our food and our homes, but our customs,’ Helliode beamed, as if he had just declaimed a verse of beautiful poetry.
‘O Rifat. It is a great honour,’ Mazan said, clapping him on the back. ‘You are a blessed man.’
The tall man with the gun stared at Rifat and then, as if finally accepting a suggestion, nodded and smiled. He held out the Kalashnikov for him to take. Rifat, with the hands of Mazan and Ali pressing him forward, took the weapon. Its heaviness surprising him. Bearing the gun in both hands, Rifat looked towards the girl’s father, and offered the weapon to him. The father smiled, and shook his head. Instead he came over to Rifat, kissed him on both cheeks and encouraged him to lift the gun over his head. A gradual cheer rose in the crowd, and suddenly Rifat felt buoyed. Rhythmic clapping and ululation began as he was led to the penalty spot in front of the goal. He had never used such a weapon before, only his father’s hunting rifle. Mazan and Helliode were busy showing Rifat how to aim, and set the gun on single shot for him. Two practice shots were taken, their crack and boom tearing open the sky, the kickback jolting Rifat’s shoulder. The girl’s father, seeing Rifat’s lack of experience, came over and walked him much closer, to within ten paces of his daughter. ‘Otherwise, you miss,’ he grinned and clapped Rifat on the back.
Just as Rifat was bringing the rifle up to his shoulder, the girl lifted her head. Her eyes were as black as night, her brows low and set. She seemed somehow older than her years. Her mouth, no longer a quivering maw, was held firm for a destiny with God she now accepted.
‘May your mother be cursed,’ she spat.
‘So be it.’ Rifat smiled.
He pulled the trigger.
* * *
After the congratulation and feasting, Rifat had cause to think about his act. He realised that God was showing him a destiny, and by firmly taking the weapon and using it he had acknowledged that course. Al Qaeda’s jihad, after all, was merely taking this particular act of righteousness, and multiplying it a million-fold. These public acts of resistance to crusader ideals would become a banner to which the faithful would rally, beneath which foes would quail.
In the feast after the trial, Rifat was given a full plate of lamb by the girl’s father, and use of a tribal heirloom, a silver hookah pipe. His opinion was asked, and his answers listened to. He had never felt the centre of attention in an adult gathering before. When their journey resumed in the evening, he was given more room in the truck. Helliode was dispatched to sit in the back with Ali. ‘Lying in the goat shit, while looking with his one eye at the stars,’ as Mazan described it.
They reached their destination in the small hours. A darkened village, silent but for the bleating of goats and the crunch of the tyres on gravel. Weary but still buzzing, Rifat was given his dust-strewn bag and shown into a room lit only by a single tallow lamp on the floor. The youths whispered their goodbyes and drove off. At first, Rifat thought the room was empty. But then he saw behind and to his right, a shadowy form sitting in an alcove on a cushion. Rifat whirled around in fright. He could make out a slightly-built man, his face almost entirely in shadow. The lamp revealed a thin moustache and a slight beard, at least one gold tooth in his smile.
‘Rifat, welcome,’ the voice said. His Arabic was classical, clear and unaccented. ‘My name is Ibrahim al-Asiri.’
‘I have heard of you, of course,’ Rifat said. The man who was to be his teacher looked only a few years Rifat’s senior,
perhaps in his mid-twenties. Yet his cold grey eyes, one discoloured and milky, the other narrowed and shadowed with dark skin, made him look older. The left-hand side of his face somehow drooped, as if the small scar by his left eye had begun to unstitch the human flesh that cloaked a cold intent. Ibrahim’s full name, Rifat knew, was Ibrahim Hassan Tali al-Asiri. This was the man who had by repute taught the Taliban how to make improvised explosive devices, which maimed American and British troops. This was the man who had taken a hundred crusader lives for every finger on his hands, and whose bomb-making skills made him among the most wanted men on earth. This was a man, one of less than five still alive, who still had a United States bounty of five million dollars on his head. This was, above all, a man whom Rifat knew he must respect and obey.
‘You have been chosen from many, and you have passed many tests. Now you are going to be my apprentice, and in this short time we have much to do.’
‘I am looking forward to it,’ Rifat said simply.
‘Now you should sleep. But tomorrow, you are going to start to realise your destiny. You will become Al Qaeda’s master bombmaker in Europe.’
* * *
Rifat was awoken by the bleating of goats, and a murmuring somewhere further away. It wasn’t yet dawn, and his back and shoulders ached. The sleeping bag was laid on a shelf inside one of two remaining walls of a ruined house, with only a piece of faded carpet insulating him from the hard stone slab. A tatty canvas roof stretched over a framework of thorn boughs. A nanny goat, her eyes slotted and ears moth-eaten, was chewing at some dry weed in the wall, just a few inches below him. Her two snow-white kids studied him from a distance.
The murmuring was Ibrahim al-Asiri, conducting the Fajr on a piece of green carpet just beyond the canvas roof. Rifat, alarmed, scrambled out of bed to join him in prayer. He hadn’t heard a muezzin, but then perhaps there wasn’t one within earshot. Ibrahim had told him last night that hardly a single mosque remained undamaged after the 2004 civil war in this tribal region.
Breakfast was a chokingly thick qishr coffee, flavoured with cinnamon and ginger, a handful of dried dates and some stale unleavened bread. Immediately afterwards, Ibrahim led him out to a battered Nissan pick-up truck, with some bulky canvas covered cargo. The rest of the village, now visible, seemed totally abandoned. Even the qat terraces were dried up and brown.
‘This was a Shia area, until the water dried up,’ Ibrahim said, scanning the skies with binoculars. ‘And great cover for us. The CIA thinks Al Qaeda is solely a Sunni group, and they send their drones down to the south-east Sunni heartland, where our forces are capturing territory from a corrupt government. But for you and me, whose business is abroad not here in Yemen, hiding amongst our enemies is better than hiding amongst friends.’
Having scanned the skies one last time, Ibrahim motioned Rifat to get into the pick-up, and then drove off, down into a dusty gully that led between rising bluffs. It wasn’t yet eight, and the gully was completely in shadow. Ibrahim flicked on the headlights. Only one worked. But his driving was far more careful and cautious than the cavalier chauffeurs that had thrown Rifat around yesterday. After half an hour they arrived at the deepest point in the gully, where an abandoned goat fold led into the smoke-stained mouth of a cave. An elderly man with traditional robes, a curved dagger and a dirty headdress was sitting in front of the embers of a fire. He was cradling an AK47 across his lap, and a bulging cheek indicated he was chewing qat.
Ibrahim greeted him, and passed him a small wad of notes. The man nodded and gave them both a carious grin. The bombmaker then returned to the truck, undid the canvas and lifted out two battered toolboxes. He asked Rifat to pick up the truck battery from the back and follow him. Struggling with the heavy battery, Rifat followed him into the cave. Ibrahim shone a torch into the depths, and in the flickering shadows he saw that the rough cave mouth opened up into a surprisingly wide and high vaulted chamber, shaped long ago by water. Swirls of pink and orange sediment were interspersed with florets of grey crystalline growth, and rose in battlements towards a hidden roof. The right-hand-side floor sloped sharply down and away to a series of crystalline stalagmites, but on the left there was a broad limestone shelf easily big enough to park a truck, had the entrance been wide enough to accommodate it. The wall here had been reinforced with mud bricks, and there were piles of scorched rubble. Beyond the torch picked out a series of shiny metallic panels. Ibrahim indicated that Rifat could put the truck battery down, next to a similar one, which was connected to a junction box on the wall. While Rifat held the torch, Ibrahim quickly replaced the wires from the existing battery to the new one, then flicked a switch on the junction box. The cave was flooded with light. After Rifat’s eyes adjusted, he could see that the panels were a reconstruction of the inside of an airliner. Six curved aluminium panels, with a ribbed interior surface were held, convex side to the wall, by a series of wooden props. Another aluminium plate was connected from the side, held up by blocks of stone and wooden struts, to effect a passenger deck. But most impressive of all were the three rows of seats, undoubtedly from a genuine aircraft, still displaying Omani Air antimacassars on the headrests
‘Welcome aboard Oman Air flight 62,’ said Ibrahim laughing. He pointed enthusiastically underneath the rows of seats. ‘See, we even have the correct anchoring struts. All from a Boeing 727 that was scrapped three years ago. It’s actually thicker than the Airbus 310 and Boeing 777 fuselages we will be up against, so it is a demanding test.’
‘How did you get all this here?’ asked Rifat.
‘Piece by piece. It really didn’t attract attention mixed in with heaps of other scrap. It was only the last part of each trip, from the nearest town to here, which we undertook at night that required any subterfuge at all.’
He took Rifat to the far end of the chamber, where two twisted and blackened panels were propped against the wall. One had a fist-sized hole in it, and apart from the blast marks was relatively clean. The other was buckled and dented in numerous places, and covered in a smelly and sticky-looking residue. ‘That is the difference between fifty grams of explosive carried externally to the human body and fifty grams carried internally. As you can see the cushioning effect of human tissue is unexpectedly powerful.’
Realising what that residue was, Rifat began to feel queasy. Ibrahim then showed him a blackened stump of a seat, its metal skeleton frozen with drips of melted plastic into which were melded fibres, and what looked like a human tooth. Rifat’s gorge rose, but he tried to suppress it.
‘We initially used the body of a goat, but we had no confidence that it replicated the effect we were looking for.’
‘Was this a martyr?’ Rifat asked, pointing at the tooth.
‘No. That would be a waste of Holy purpose. It was a Filipino caretaker kidnapped from the Golden Sands Resort about eighteen months ago. The tribe which took him for ransom soon realised he was of no value. I still don’t think he has been missed by his embassy. I would have preferred an American security contractor, but that would have brought too much unwelcome attention. There are no such things, after all, as Filipino drones or Filipino special forces are there?’ He laughed.
Ibrahim brought Rifat back to the widest part of the cave, laid down a plastic sheet on the stone, and carefully brushed the dust from it. ‘Now Rifat. Today is your first test in handling explosives. Open that toolbox.’
Rifat squatted down to undo the steel catches and lift the lid. Inside was a packet in silver foil, about the size of a large bar of chocolate, but twice as thick. Beside it was a packet of disposable surgical gloves and a Zip-loc bag of small electronic components.
‘That packet contains one thousand grammes of PETN, pentaerythritol tetranitrate. It is a close chemical relative of both C4 plastic explosive and nitro-glycerin. It is more than enough to destroy any aircraft. Now please hand it to me.’
Rifat held his breath. He leaned across to the box, and with both hands carefully lifted the packet, raising himself inch by
inch from the squat to a standing position to pass it. Ibrahim received the packet, somewhat casually, in one hand. ‘Now, PETN is the most sensitive of all compounds to explosive shock. Even the tiniest detonator is effective.’ He suddenly turned to Rifat and tossed the packet about a metre to his left. ‘Catch!’
Rifat screeched as he hurled himself towards the falling packet. His fingers touched it, but failed to get a grip. The PETN thumped onto the plastic sheeting. There was no explosion, no noise but for the hammering of his heart and gasping breath. ‘My God, what are you doing!’ Rifat wailed.
‘I am teaching you lessons that you will remember,’ Ibrahim laughed. ‘Lesson one. PETN is not kinetically sensitive. It is not nitroglycerin. From the fact that we are still here, we can conclude that there was no detonator connected to it.’
Rifat panted, trying to hide the anger he felt at this deliberate humiliation.
‘I am showing you why PETN is particularly suitable for bringing down aircraft,’ Ibrahim said. ‘It’s immeasurably more powerful, weight for weight, than ammonium nitrate, the classic fertilizer bomb. And unlike the IRA favourite, Semtex, pure PETN has no tagging agent to give it an odour. Sniffer dogs cannot detect it. It does not show up on x-ray machines, although of course a detonator would be another matter. It doesn’t even show up on the new range of x-ray bodyscanners that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security is introducing. But most importantly, as we have seen, neither the bumps and bangs of take-off and landing, nor those of baggage handling detonate it. It can only be detonated by heat. Specifically heat exceeding one hundred and forty centigrade, by a chemical additive, or through an electrical or explosive detonator.’
‘Like a mobile phone alarm?’ Rifat said.
‘Precisely so. Even such a small electrical signal, if it could produce a fire.’