THE CAMERAMAN USUALLY covered soccer matches for the Al-Arabiya television network, but the equipment today was the same, the best that money could buy. He could capture a million people in the frame or zoom in on a single face. Ultra-high-definition sensors rendered flawless images of whatever he’d selected. The control booth would occasionally tell him to take an artistic shot, and on a clear night he would zoom in on the moon and fill viewers’ screens with images of craters, ridges, and shadows that most people never knew existed. It was an awesome piece of technology.
From high atop one of the hotels, he panned right to catch the buses, cars, and pedestrians that were clogging the highway from Mina. They were latecomers making their way back to the Masjid al-Haram, the enormous outdoor mosque in the holy city of Mecca, Saudi Arabia. It was the last day of the Hajj, and they were obligated to enter the mosque and complete the final tawaf, seven laps around the black building in the center known as the Kaaba. Only then would Allah erase their sins and their pilgrimage be complete.
Covering the Hajj was easy work for the cameraman, except for the heat, which could run to 130 or 140 degrees Fahrenheit on the roof. He downed another bottle of water and zoomed in on the profile of a single pilgrim, prostrate before the Kaaba with his hands pressed up against its stone side. Tears of joy streamed down the man’s face as the song of the muezzin appeared to be directed only to him. It was one of the cameraman’s favorite shots. He focused on the individual for several seconds.
The tearful man raised his head and the cameraman began to zoom out. He widened the frame until it included the dozen or so people closest to the pilgrim, symbolizing the man’s family. He kept widening the picture until perhaps a hundred people were in the shot, representing the pilgrim’s community. The cameraman kept zooming out until viewers could see the tawaf, rotating counterclockwise like a great galaxy of Islam. The final shot encompassed the entire Grand Mosque with the Kaaba drawing the viewer’s eyes to the center. It was breathtaking. The booth usually held it for twenty or thirty seconds before cutting to a different angle. The cameraman lifted his eyes from his viewfinder and looked out over the scene, savoring the moment.
There was an explosion in the crowd, followed by a cloud of smoke rising into the air near the Kaaba. The crying man was gone, vaporized along with at least a thousand people around him.
Oh, no, thought the cameraman. Some madman snuck in a bomb. Is nowhere sacred?
There was a second explosion and more smoke on the other side of the Kaaba. And then he heard the sound, the whoosh of two objects flying rapidly through the air, followed by the noise of the explosions.
Delayed by the speed of sound, he realized. Not a madman on the ground, but a madman in the air . . .
The cameraman instinctively spun the camera toward the action. Its powerful lens picked up faint trails of smoke. He followed them into the sky and zoomed in until he spotted a dot in the distance. He zoomed as fast and as far as he could until the dot took form, the form of an aircraft turning away. The image was grainy on the hot and hazy summer day, but the cameraman had no doubts about what it was. The distinctive, bat-winged aircraft was possessed by only one nation on earth, and millions of people had just seen it attack the holiest site in all of Islam.