I tried singing.
Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound — but the rocks beneath the thin slippers they gave me were sharp enough to pierce through, and every step made me wince so hard the words died before they left my lips. I kept trying anyway. Not because the singing helped. Because it was the only thing left that was mine.
A shove struck the back of my shoulder.
I kept walking.
The chant came again, rolling across the desert air like a drumbeat without mercy.
"Allahu Akbar..."
I thought about my family. Not dramatic thoughts — not final words or speeches I would never get to give. Just the ordinary things. Laughing at dinner. Sunday mornings at Cornerstone. My mother humming while washing dishes, completely unaware that the sound of it was one of the most beautiful things I had ever heard and that I had never told her so.
I should have told her.
I tried not to swallow my saliva too often. I had read somewhere, in some book from some other man who had been in some other impossible place, that the body swallows more when it is afraid. I was trying to control the fear from the inside out. It was not working.
Another shove. Harder.
The man behind me wanted me on my knees without having to say it. I stiffened my legs. If I was going to die, I wanted to see the face of the man who would do it. I wanted him to have to look at me.
He kicked the back of my left knee.
I buckled. Came down hard. Pain shot through both knees but the sand here was softer than the path we had walked, and I registered this the way you register small mercies when large ones seem unavailable.
The man behind me stayed out of my line of sight. His eyes had never met mine. I had been trying to understand that — the refusal to look at me. Either he was disciplined, or he did not want to be here any more than I did.
I chose to believe the latter. It was the more merciful interpretation, and mercy was what I had left.
A jeep appeared on the horizon.
The dust cloud behind it rose like a judgment. My executioner began his chant again — Allahu Akbar — but this time the words had a different quality. Rehearsed. Thinned out. Like a man performing a role he had not written.
I filed that away somewhere beneath the fear and kept my eyes on the horizon.
The jeep stopped beside us with a violence that sent sand and dust across my lower body in a wave. I coughed and turned away, the particles striking my skin like small needles.
"Is this the American who cowers behind a cross?"
The voice was tall before the man was. Deep, accented, calibrated for authority. He stepped from the vehicle slowly — the deliberate movement of a man who had learned that speed was for the uncertain.
I looked at him.
He circled to my side. The knife came out of its sheath with a sound I felt more than heard.
I stared at the horizon.
I thought about the children.
Not the mission briefing version of them — not the file photographs and the demographic data and the security protocols. The actual children. The ones I had seen in grainy footage that Tariq had risked his life to send. The ones who held their small Bibles like new toys, turning the pages with the careful reverence of people who understood, in their bones, that the book in their hands was worth dying for.
Jesus had given me this task. Not the agency. Not the church missions board. Not the coordinator who had stood at the front of Cornerstone on a Sunday morning and said we need someone.
Jesus.
Long before that Sunday. Long before I raised my hand.
The tall man squatted beside me. The knife came near my face.
"Are you afraid, American?"
I said nothing. My trembling said everything.
"You feel like your Jew King now, yes?"
I ignored him. He waited. He was a man who understood patience as a weapon.
"This does not have to be unpleasant," he said. His voice had dropped, intimate now, almost gentle. "You are guilty of infidelity in my land. Our law says you must die by strike upon the neck. I have slaughtered many of your kind." He paused. "Some pleaded to your Christ. Some pleaded to me."
He sighed.
"Very well."
He stood. His fist closed in the collar of my shirt. The man behind me — my silent executioner — moved to my left. Their chanting rose together, loud enough now to carry across the desert, loud enough to be heard by whoever might be listening.
Allahu Akbar. Allahu Akbar.
My breathing became rapid. Shallow. The kind of breathing a man does when his body has stopped believing in tomorrow.
The knee drove into my back.
The hand closed around my head and pulled.
I closed my eyes.
"Oh Jesus," I whispered. "Please. Please."
The words came out broken. Embarrassing. Not the prayer of a devoted man in his finest hour. The prayer of a bald man from Meridian, Mississippi, who had raised his hand too fast and flown too far and ended up on his knees in Syrian sand with a knife at his throat and nothing — nothing — left but the name.
Just the name.
Just Jesus.
A hand landed on my shoulder.
Not the fist. Not the blade.
A hand.
I opened my eyes.
The shorter man — my silent executioner — stood in front of me. His face had changed. Something in it had released. The performance was over.
"We had to be sure," he said quietly. "My brother."
My mind struggled to process the words.
The tall man removed his hood.
He was Syrian. Dark eyes with something in them I had not expected from a man who had just held a knife to my face: warmth. The specific warmth of a man who has been through the fire and come out the other side still believing in something worth the burning.
"James Taller."
The knife disappeared into his sleeve.
"Welcome back."
The shorter man helped me to my feet. My knees ached. My hands were still trembling. I did not try to stop them.
"Operation Bald Sheep begins tonight," the tall man said.
I looked at them both.
"Why the show?"
The tall man glanced toward the distant rooftops on the horizon — the village. The place where everything was hidden and everything was at stake.
"Because if the underground church has been compromised..." he said, "even you would not know who to trust."
He looked at me directly.
"And we needed to know if your faith would hold when the knife was real."
I looked at my hands. Still shaking.
"I almost lost control of my bladder," I said.
The tall man smiled. It transformed his face entirely.
"So did I," he said. "The first time."
He put his hand on my shoulder.
"Come. The children are waiting."
The jeep engine started.
I climbed in.
I was still trembling.
I was also exactly where God had told me I would be.