One Rough Man by Brad Taylor Page B

player and began downloading the songs. Her uncle must have thought they were some pretty good tunes if he’d e-mailed them to her instead of just waiting until he returned. With the music downloading, she went to pack an overnight bag.

21
    A bu Sayyidd was electrified by the story they had heard. “Did you listen to that? The boy found some sort of ancient weapon in the jungle. A weapon that can be used to kill the infidels. What we’ve been sent here to do, we can accomplish in half the time, a month instead of years.”
    Abu Bakr wasn’t so sure Sayyidd was right. He was a pragmatic planner, a man who had escaped death precisely because he had predicted and counteracted contingencies before they occurred. This mission had taken close to a year to develop, and he was reluctant to simply throw it away on the story of a native boy.
    “Sayyidd, please. We don’t have the time or equipment to go foraging through the forest for some sort of mythical weapon. We don’t even know if that boy was telling the truth. We’ve worked too hard to get where we are.”
    Their purpose was to set up a mechanism to infiltrate the United States using the illegal immigrant pipeline already established. Once the cells were in place, they would conduct synchronized acts of terror that would dwarf September 11, 2001. The hope was for a sustainable, repeatable mechanism that would cause the U.S. to crack down harshly on all things Arabic (and even Sikh, Hindu, whatever was seen as “strange”), which would in turn plant a seed of jihad inside the U.S.
    Sayyidd persisted. “You heard the description of the death. The weapon is something like the poison weapons we learned about in the camps. Something The Sheik has tried mightily to obtain. We might now have the ability to do what no other has done.”
    “What on earth makes you think there’s a weapon in the jungle?” Bakr said. “I’ve heard children with more logical skepticism than you.”
    “Have you never heard of the medicines that are found in the rain forest? It’s said to be a wonderland of ancient plants simply waiting to be discovered. What’s the harm of looking? If we find it, we may truly bring the far enemy to his knees! We were chosen for this mission based on our skills and judgment. We need to use both.”
    Never having worked with Sayyidd before, only trusting that his superiors had selected the right man, Bakr was suspicious of Sayyidd’s eagerness to abandon all they had worked for up until now. He took a different tack. “Why is your idea, even as fleeting as it is, better than what we’re already doing? The only difference is time, and the fact that the original plan allows multiple blows against our enemy. How will your blow of one time outweigh the ability to strike repeatedly?”
    Abu Sayyidd inwardly smiled. He was making headway. He had been thinking about their mission for a long time, and saw the fatal flaw within the jihad as currently waged.
    “Tell me, what’s the greatest problem facing the jihad today? Is it truly the far enemy? His transgressions on the land of Mecca and Medina spit in the face of all true Muslims everywhere, yet he is allowed to continue. Why is that? It’s because the true Muslim has been seduced by Satan, choosing Big Macs over the purity of the Quran.
    “The average Muslim doesn’t understand the threat of the far enemy. We need the man on the street to take up arms. The grocer, shoe salesman, and barber. If all Muslims would throw one rock, we would succeed. The only way to do this is to show the far enemy’s true colors, to prove that they want to dominate and rule over a Christian empire.”
    Al Qaeda’s doctrine, developed by Bin Laden and his leadership, stated that the only way to return to the ways of the Prophet was to destroy the “far enemy” that supported, and in some cases propped up, the godless regimes that had come to power in the nations of the Middle East, the so-called near enemy. The United