The Black Widow (Gabriel Allon #16) - Daniel Silva Page 0,94

Safia had almost no understanding of the tenets of jihad or even the basics of Islamic practice. She admitted that she missed the taste of French wine. Mainly, she was curious about how she was remembered in the country she had attacked—not the France of the city centers and country villages, but the Arab France of the banlieues. Natalie told her, truthfully, that she was spoken of fondly in the cités of Aubervilliers. This pleased Safia. One day, she said, she hoped to return.

“To France?” asked Natalie incredulously.

“Yes, of course.”

“You’re the most wanted woman in the country. It isn’t possible.”

“That’s because France is still ruled by the French, but Saladin says it will soon be part of the caliphate.”

“You’ve met him?”

“Saladin? Yes, I’ve met him.”

“Where?” asked Natalie casually.

“I’m not sure. They blindfolded me during the trip.”

“How long ago was it?”

“It was a few weeks after my operation. He wanted to personally congratulate me.”

“They say he’s Iraqi.”

“I’m not sure. My Arabic isn’t good enough to tell the difference between a Syrian and an Iraqi.”

“What’s he like?”

“Very large, powerful, wonderful eyes. He is everything you would expect. Inshallah, you’ll get to meet him someday.”

Safia’s arrival at the camp was an occasion for celebratory gunfire and cries of “Allahu Akbar!” Natalie, the new recruit, was an afterthought. She was assigned a private room—the former quarters of a junior Syrian officer—and that evening, after prayers, she took her first meal in the communal dining hall. The women ate apart from the men, behind a black curtain. The food was deplorable but plentiful: rice, bread, roasted fowl of some sort, a gray-brown stew of cartilaginous meat. Despite their segregation, the women were required to wear their abayas during mealtime, which made eating a challenge. Natalie ate ravenously of the bread and rice, but her training as a physician informed her decision to avoid the meat. The woman to her left was a silent Saudi called Bushra. To her right was Selma, a loquacious Tunisian. Selma had come to the caliphate for a husband, but her husband had been killed fighting the Kurds and now she wanted vengeance. It was her wish to be a suicide bomber. She was nineteen years old.

After dinner there was a program. A cleric preached, a fighter read a poem of his own composition. Afterward, Safia was “interviewed” on stage by a clever British Muslim who worked in ISIS’s promotion and marketing department. That night the desert thundered with coalition air strikes. Alone in her room, Natalie prayed for deliverance.

Her terrorist education commenced after breakfast the next morning when she was driven into the desert for weapons training—assault rifles, pistols, rocket launchers, grenades. She returned to the desert each and every morning, even after her instructors declared her proficient. They were no wild-eyed jihadis, the instructors; they were exclusively Iraqi, all former soldiers and battle-hardened veterans of the Sunni insurgency. They had fought the Americans largely to a draw in Iraq and wanted nothing more than to fight them again, on the plains of northern Syria, in a place called Dabiq. The Americans and their allies—the armies of Rome, in the lexicon of ISIS—had to be poked and prodded and stirred into a rage. The men from Iraq had a plan to do just that, and the students at the camp were their stick.

During the heat of midday, Natalie repaired to the air-conditioned rooms of the camp for lessons in bomb assembly and secure communication. She also had to endure long lectures on the pleasures of the afterlife, lest she be chosen for a suicide mission. Time and again her Iraqi instructors asked whether she was willing to die for the caliphate, and without hesitation Natalie said she was. Soon, she was made to wear a heavy suicide vest during her weapons training, and she was taught how to arm the device and detonate it using a trigger concealed in her palm. The first time the instructor ordered her to press the detonator, Natalie’s thumb hovered numb and frozen above the switch. “Yalla,” he beseeched her. “It’s not going to really explode.” Natalie closed her eyes and squeezed the detonator. “Boom,” whispered the instructor. “And now you are on your way to paradise.”

With the camp director’s permission, Natalie began seeing patients in the base’s old infirmary. At first, the other students were reluctant to call upon her for fear of being regarded as soft by the Iraqi instructors. But soon she was receiving a steady stream of patients during her “office