Dead on Arrival

46

The materials finally arrived. Praise be to God.

A man, a Muslim, someone he didn’t know, knocked on his motel room door at two in the morning. He’d been sleeping and he woke up, terrified that it was the police. He looked through the peephole in the door, and when he saw the man’s face, his dark skin, his features, he was instantly relieved. He opened the door and the man, who never said a word, handed him a box and left.

The next day, a Thursday, he and the boy connected the C-4 to the radio receivers and the blasting caps. There was enough material to construct one more device than he needed, and he was trying to decide what to do with the additional material. He could keep it for the next operation or have the boy plant it somewhere in the refinery, but keeping the material would be dangerous, particularly when he was traveling, and he didn’t want the boy to spend any longer inside the refinery than they had already planned. The longer the boy was inside the facility, the higher the likelihood that he’d be discovered.

And then he thought of a better use for the extra device — a humane use.

When the devices were ready, he told the boy that he would place the bombs in the plant the following Monday night, and detonate them Tuesday morning. He wanted to breech the tanks on a weekday, and he preferred Tuesday to Monday because so many of these people tended to take three-day weekends.

The boy simply nodded his head.

Oh, he would miss this boy.

And then the boy finally asked him the question he’d been expecting for some time. ‘What will happen to my mother?’ he said.

‘She’ll be fine. They’ll question her for a while, but she won’t be arrested. And we’ll send her money, and with you gone she’ll be able to live off what she gets from the government. And, of course, she’ll have God’s blessing for eternity because she will be the mother of a martyr.’