Fazal must have been louder than he realized, as, the minute he had uttered the words the crowd fell silent. Whatever he had said rang out loud and clear over the din of the crowd and echoed across the grounds. Everyone had heard him. A gentle breeze blew across the arid desert and carried plumes of sand swirling and rushing like waves over the dunes. One by one, the warriors turned to face him. In the deathly silence the gravity of his remark began to bear upon him in a way that scared him into feeling that he might just have made the biggest mistake of his life. Fazal grew nervous, enough to run away as fast as his legs could carry him, he was least prepared for such a reaction. He would get far though, and he knew it. It wasn’t just these people’s unusual coldness towards him, he wasn’t even sure if they realized that he understood their cause or for that matter their lives, their stories. He drew in a lungful of the hot desert air, adjusted his helmet and fought against himself to stand absolutely still.

The faces surrounding him bore no inviting expressions. Slashed faces, gouged eyes, bared teeth and open wounds stared at him from a distance of a mere few feet. There were eyes that penetrated him causing his stomach to twist with fright, scowls and clenched jaws, which looked piercingly into his soul engraving bloody depictions of death on the empty walls of his teenage mind. These people were seasoned fighters, children of the sand, they had grown up seeing their houses blown to pieces, their mothers, sisters and wives raped, their newborns trampled upon and their brothers and friends cut to pieces by the Wahadis. Their scars told sordid tales of decades of rape, mutilation, economic exploitation and a systematic and rapid genocide that had stolen from them not only their childhood, but also their forefathers, their history, their heritage, friends and family. These souls did not know love, nor did they tolerate happiness, even compassion. Happiness, they believed distracted their minds from their cause, which was and always shall be the utter annihilation of the last of the Wahadis. If there was any education these rebels had given their children it was to hate the Black Army. The rebel children were schooled to repeatedly chant oaths of the Black Army’s destruction every minute of their growing days, children, the minute they learnt to stand steadily on their two legs were taught to nestle automatic rifles to familiarize their tender arms with the cold metal of the firearm.

These people, Fazal realized, weren’t ones to tolerate so much as a word that had nothing to do with either beheading a Wahadi or a plan to steal into one of their camps and blow something up. But now that he had already suspended himself on the tightrope of their attention there was no other way, if not ahead.
Gulping gently, Fazal spoke;

“I have been inside the secret garden of Firdaus, I know the way in”

Silence.

“I…I can get at least three of you inside from a secret rear entrance at the foot of the mountains of Rooh, I know where they lie.”

Not a word.

“If we creep into their security bunkers as stealthily as we can and take out their peripheral guards, we...we can, maybe, make a quick trip to Firdaus and back before they call for reinforcements…they aren’t even that well armed, swords, machetes, the most we can expect is maybe a Kalashnikov or two, but that’s going to be it…I am sure!”