come in to empty his latrine bucket saw him praying, and laughed at him. He was doing it wrong by praying in Pashto instead of Arabic. “Teach me,” said Mercer. The man refused.
The headman, Farzaad, thought the American was trying either to trick them or to mock them. In response, they made his conditions worse. His midday meal was cut, his thin blanket taken away. Once in the middle of the night one of them came in and beat him with a wooden rod, breaking his rib.
He kept praying. He began listening to his jailors’ Arabic prayers through the walls and memorizing them. A week later, a different Talib, Mateen, saw him trying to recite the Arabic prayer, and showed him the proper way, when to stand and when to bow. Mateen brought him a bucket of water and a cloth so he could wash himself before prayer. He performed the Fajr at dawn, the Zuhr and Asr during the day, the Maghrib at sunset and the Isha after nightfall.
His conditions did not improve, but he kept up the prayers, five times a day, every day for months. One day Mateen gave him a prayer mat. Weeks later they began giving him regular meals again. They stopped beating him. Months after that, they invited him to perform the Isha outside along with them. It was one of the few times he’d been out of the hut in almost twenty months. He joined his jailors under the stars, bowing to the west. And every night thereafter he did the same. He made sure not to look around too much, to focus on the prayer and on the act of prostrating himself before God.
Each night, he gave himself one small thing to observe. He noted there were always five men, though not always the same five. There was a pickup truck parked in the camp, and he noticed the tire marks in the dirt that told him the direction of their village. There were two torches staked into the ground, one near his hut and one where the pickup truck was parked. One night he focused on counting the weapons—five AK-47s, piled in the flatbed of the pickup truck during prayers, and two knives, which their wearers removed and set beside them as they prayed. One night he observed the physicality of the men—who seemed the strongest, who the weakest. Who carried himself with assurance, who averted his eyes when Mercer looked at him.
He sometimes asked them questions about their faith after the completion of the prayer. They were, not surprisingly, somewhat ignorant of their own religion. But he listened to their stupid ramblings. He didn’t flatter them personally—that would be too obvious. It was always about their faith. About growing closer to God and saving his infidel soul.
One night, he decided it was time. He had built up enough strength, gone enough weeks without beatings, without being denied a meal. They led him outside for the Isha. This time he laid his prayer mat down next to Akram, one of the men who wore a knife. Akram removed the knife and sheath, and made sure to set them down on the opposite side from where Mercer had placed his mat. They, of course, still didn’t trust him. But the months of his charade had bred something else in them—an indifference to him. He had bowed and bowed until they had forgotten who—and what—he was.
The six men—five Afghans and one American—began the prayer, standing under the stars, turning their palms to the heavens. They dropped to their knees and bowed down—and closed their eyes. Mercer bowed too, then rose back to his knees as they continued to recite the prayer. He reached over the back of Akram, unsheathed his knife, then grabbed him by his hair and drew the blade across his throat. Blood spurted onto the man’s prayer mat.
It happened so quickly and so silently that the other men did not notice for a moment. Mercer turned to the man on his other side and cut his throat. The man cried out before his windpipe was severed, and the other three sprang to their feet.
Farzaad drew a pistol from beneath his tunic. It was a weapon Mercer had not counted on and had never seen. Mercer dropped his knife, grabbed the pistol with both hands as he’d been trained to do, twisted it free, and pressed the muzzle under the headman’s chin and blew his brains out. He shot the two