Free Where Pigeons Don't Fly by Yousef Al-Mohaimeed Page B

packed with dates and sacks of cottage cheese.
    The Grand Mosque was surrounded by cells, each one a small square room no more than nine metres square with a door consisting of a plate of reinforced steel a metre high, topped with iron bars as in a prison. Any passer-by could thus see into the cells, discouraging visitors to the mosque and worshippers from using them as places to rest or sleep. The young men of the group used these tiny cells to store guns and ammunition and their dates and cheese.
    The preacher shouted to the mosque walls, and the hills of Mecca thundered and echoed back his words: ‘My Brothers in God, the Prophet, may the prayers and peace of God be upon him, said that in the last days God would send a man to set the
umma
back on the path to righteousness; He would send the Mahdi, Mohammed Bin Abdullah, to fill the earth with justice after it had been filled with injustice and tyranny.’
    The leader of the group suddenly snatched the microphone off him and addressed his followers: ‘Seif! Seif! The northgate!’ before the preacher resumed his account of the Mahdi’s prophesied return at the start of a new century and exhorted the worshippers to acclaim him between the
rukn
and the
maqam
.
    The leader took the microphone a second time: ‘Brothers! The government’s soldiers are yours for the taking!’
    And so the two voices of the preacher and the leader mingled in a distant dawn, the flocks of pigeons fleeing, hearts quaking as the sniper climbed up towards the soaring minarets.
    Eid was a skilful sniper. In the days that followed he relentlessly picked off any soldier who invaded the court of the mosque or descended from the sky beneath his parachute. Suleiman remembered their time together in Sajer, chambering a bullet and preparing to shoot a bird swimming through the sky. As it approached the tree to land on a branch, the bullet zipped, lodging in its little heart, and it tumbled to the ground a motionless corpse.
    â€˜The true marksman,’ Eid would tell Suleiman, ‘is the man who can hit the target on the wing, the moving target, not the stationary one. There’s no glory in a sitting target: that’s for women!’
    The same was true of life: the moving target is seductive, hard won. Any man can claim the prize that sits there, the whole world’s for the taking, but not everyone has what it takes to seize the fleeting chance, the fleeting moment, and turn it into opportunity.
    In jail, Suleiman recalled a young man called Salah, one of a group of Egyptian pilgrims. The Egyptians spent days in anticipation of the confrontation, inspired and impatient and listening to tales of
jihad
in the way of God. These feelingswere completely new to them, and when the actual moment came it affected them so forcefully that some snatched up guns and began chasing after the soldiers and guards and shooting them dead.
    Amongst those roused to action was a youth by the name of Abdullah. He wasn’t granted the chance to enter the Grand Mosque, but he was member of the group and lived in the suburbs of Mecca. He took his vehicle and a machine gun and headed out to Sajer to inflame his comrades out there and lead them back to occupy the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina, drawing the world’s attention to a second target and perhaps relieving the siege around his brothers in Mecca. Chased by the police and the army, who tried to make him surrender and hand over his weapon, he instead turned his car about and sent a shower of lead in their direction. They responded in kind. Their bullets broke the rear window of his truck and successive rounds slipped through, penetrating the flesh and sinews of his neck until his head lolled forward against the steering wheel, a fat fruit fit for picking.
    The days passed slowly in the Grand Mosque and one by one they fell. Helicopters fired down from on high while teams of police and National Guard troopers took aim from the