Elmore Leonard - Djibouti

"How much you bet I can?"

"If I believe you can learn to speak our language in, what, six months?"

"Three," James said, "having the gift. I'll be speaking like a camel jockey in three months. You can lay three to one I'll do it and get the population betting against me. They'll hear me say Allah's making me do it and put me down as a fool."

Tariq said, "In only three months?"

"Three more. I been learning Arabian from Short Eyes since I started hanging with y'all. I know how to recite 'Your mother fucks pigs' and other kinds of Arabian sayings. Get that man reading to be a cleric everybody trusts to judge can I do it or not. But how you gonna collect from people making fourteen cents an hour, the ones working?"

"The women bring it in or they send money. Don't worry, we always get it." Tariq said, "But listen, when you become Muslim we'll give you a name that will please Allah."

James said, "I've already thought of one I like the sound of. Jama Raisuli."

Tariq looked at the name in his mind. "How did it come to you?"

"From Allah," James said.

It took almost a year to collect the entire twenty-three hundred he won speaking Arabian in the test, even the sayings and idioms. HE WAS RELEASED FROM prison the day he completed three years less two months: released the same day, the same hour, the Twin Towers were destroyed, blown to rubble 9/11, and James said it again, "From Allah." This time believing it was the Lord's personal sign, a gift to him.

Allah told him to leave Florida and take a flight into Egypt using his new James Russell passport good for ten years. Three flights from Miami to Sharm el Sheikh on the tip of the Sinai Peninsula and hopped on a boat to take him down the Red Sea full of ships to Djibouti. Once he was getting the feel of the Arab world and speaking the language, he used letters of introduction from inmates to put him in touch with jihadists. Now he was going by Jama Raisuli and they began calling him Jama al Amriki.

In Djibouti he met another Amriki, Assam the American, charged back home with treason, a Jew converted to Islam who broadcast threats, promised attacks that would leave the streets of America running with blood. Assam wrote powerful shit about hating America, but speaking proper Arabic like he'd learned it in school. Jama spoke street Arab, was accepted as an African and believed he was. But couldn't see blowing himself up next to a school bus in Tel Aviv, his life precious to him. He didn't know what he'd say if they asked him to become a martyr. He kept busy translating Assam's speeches to Arabic, making them sound meaner.

He didn't see being a jihadist made him a traitor any more than selling blow or holding up a liquor store did. He let his hair grow to his shoulders, wrapped a scarf around it and wore a saronglike kikoi over his trousers, a Walther P38 in his back pocket. Jama had stopped in a shop that sold guns, kept the clerk busy looking for pistols he wanted to see, the clerk distracted as Jama slipped the Walther under his kikoi and left the shop.

On the street an Arab dressed as he was stopped him and said, "You need bullets, don't you?"

It was Qasim al Salah, an al Qaeda hero walking around in plain sight in this quarter. Assam, the other Amriki, had shown Jama pictures of him and spoke of Qasim as a saint: the man who perfected the use of vehicles as improvised explosive devices. In '83, still a lad, he helped plan the destruction of the Marine Barracks in Lebanon, a truck bomb carrying twelve thousand pounds of explosives; 246 killed. He planned and directed the bombing of the U.S. Consulate in Karachi; the bombing of the embassy in Mombasa, Kenya; the Air Force Barracks in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. Now, Assam said, Qasim was planning a radioactive "dirty bomb" for a second attack on America.

Jama said to Qasim on the street, "You spoke and I felt Allah breathing on me. I know who you are and bow my head."

Qasim said, "And you are the American convict who wants to be one of us. I watched you go in a bank and look at it good and then steal a pistol."

"I'm known to rob banks," Jama said, "when I don't have nothing to do."

"Maybe you can be of use to me," Qasim said. "Come to Riyadh with us and we'll see." THE NIGHT OF 13 MAY 2003, they rode through the city, nineteen men, three of their four vehicles packing explosives, to come up on the British and American compounds and open fire with AKs and rocket grenades. Approaching Riyadh Qasim had said to Jama, "You can drive a bomb car if you wish."

He spoke easily, a man who knew his business, seldom in a hurry, looking at the next step.

"I'm not worthy," Jama said, "to become a saint for Allah this soon, my first shot."

"You don't have the desire to be a martyr," Qasim said. "I don't either. So we see if you have a desire to kill for Allah."

They attacked guard posts on the perimeter of the compounds, a Ford Crown Victoria ramming the Cyclone gate until it became tangled in the wire and the driver detonated the thousand pounds of explosives in the trunk. A Dodge Ram armed with four thousand pounds of TNT crashed a second gate, raced to the employee housing area, two-story apartment buildings on a curved street, and blew itself up, taking off the facade, the entire look of the buildings, and setting the apartments on fire. A GMC Suburban followed by a Toyota sedan crashed a gate to drive into the center of another housing compound and the SUV exploded.

Qasim watched Saudi employees of American companies buried in the rubble, an evening tally of 34 dead and 194 injured: blinded, arms and legs blown off, listed as injuries. Osama bin Laden said if our people work for foreign companies they become our enemies. If they accept money paid them, they become evil. Qasim, older than bin Laden, believed the point could be argued but accepted bin Laden's view. It made him important.

He watched Jama during the assault. Jama firing his AK at people rushing out of burning buildings, emptying a clip and shoving in another. A man stood in an upper room without a wall, the man looking over the edge of his floor. Jama took him with one shot and watched him fall to the street. He turned to the building across the way and shot two more in their apartment without a wall. A woman and a man who fell to the street. He was deliberate about his killing, taking his time to be certain of his shots. He watched the entrance of the building now, waiting for someone to come out.

He loves it, Qasim thought.

A woman came rushing from the entrance and he shot her. A woman with smoke rising from her burka.

Later, Qasim asked Jama, "What was in your mind when you shot the woman?"

He said, "Which one?"

"In the burka."

"She was on fire."

Qasim heard it as compassion, but thought, Would he care if she burned to death? He didn't want him to care, but never asked if he did or not.

JAMA WAS TWENTY-EIGHT NOW, his birthday coming on the day they left Eyl for Djibouti.

He rode in one of the five Toyotas rocking across the desert, catching the dust and gravel raised by the two in the lead. Qasim would be in the car directly ahead or behind them. Idris, next to Jama in the middle seats, told him, "We will be there in one period of twenty-four hours. Every two hours we stop to stretch our legs and piss. Twice a day we heat the spaghetti for you. Don't worry," Idris said in English, "these Somalis won't know what we're saying. Harry gave them an English test. He called them camel-fuckers and no one rose to cut his throat. He's with Qasim, but we change cars at times, so I talk to Qasim and Harry talks to you."

There were sixteen Somalis with AKs and their provisions in the five cars: a driver and the Somali in front with him pointing in the glare of distance to the road curving toward a pass through the slopes, telling the driver now to slow down, to watch for falling rocks, until Idris told him in Arabic to shut up. A third Somali sat behind Jama and stared at the back of his head while Jama looked out at the land where Arabs lived and went to sea as pirates.