4

ONE EVENING, I’D RECEIVED A message informing us that a technician would be coming to produce a mask for each of us. He would be at the tower in no more than two hours. The message requested that we be clean-shaven for the cast to be taken.

At first I didn’t understand what was being asked of us. True, we carried out our orders to the letter, as though we were still officers with the Interior Ministry, but what did masks have to do with the task at hand? The whole thing was absurd.

The technician asked me to lie down on the floor and placed two thin tubes in my nostrils. He covered my head, my hair, and my neck, then poured a cold, damp paste over my face, waited a few minutes for the paste to dry, and lifted the mold. Inspecting the inside of the mold, he told me that this wouldn’t be the final one, that he would make another mold from which to cast the mask. I was on my way to the bathroom when he asked what design I’d like. “Hold on,” I said, “Let me think about it.”

We had treated the business with the masks as extracurricular entertainment—something frivolous but fun. Our unusual situation meant we welcomed any distractions at all, but I was considering motivations greater and more profound than providing distractions to the troops; the leadership had some undeclared objective in all this. I held my counsel and told myself we’d find it all out soon enough.

When I went back in, the technician had finished making molds for everybody. They had also chosen faces for their masks. All had gone for comic actors. One had picked Fuad al-Mohandis and had asked for the actor’s famous black-framed spectacles to be added as well. As I thought about what I’d like, the face of Buddha floated before my eyes.

If it was a memory, it was a very obscure one. I couldn’t recall having seen the face anywhere before. A picture of him in a magazine or newspaper, perhaps? Maybe I’d watched a documentary about him. In my mind, Buddha was associated with wisdom, but really I knew nothing about him. Was he a prophet? A god? Did he worship cows? I had no idea why I asked for a Buddha mask. Later, a few people would come to call me Buddha. For some in the resistance, it became my nom de guerre, but my personality would be more readily associated with mystery than wisdom. Others would assume that by making this choice I thought myself superior to everyone else—to those who chose celebrities for their masks. I later found out that all the snipers received masks made especially for them by professional sculptors, and learned, too, that this was a privilege granted only to the elite—to those who had killed, or were about to kill, large numbers of people.

When the same technician came back to see me, he took the mask from a wooden case and very carefully handed it over. And as I put it on, and felt the cold metal’s touch, and discovered that it didn’t fit exactly over my features, I asked him what the point had been of making the mold in the first place, and he said that the purpose of the mold hadn’t been to capture every detail of my face, but to get a rough idea of my measurements. “This is a mask of solid metal,” he said, “an alloy of aluminum and other lightweight compounds. It’s inflexible but affords protection for the face against small fragments of shrapnel.”

Mask in his hands, he said, “Don’t worry, it will never fit your face exactly. It will never become your face.” Well, he had been wrong about that.

For several days, I wore it just a few minutes at a time before taking it off, and then the period I spent masked grew. I would go days with it on, would wear it in place of my face, would forget that I had a face of flesh and blood. I would gaze into the mirror, unconcerned by the sight of my gleaming, immutable metal reflection—knowing that it wouldn’t age, that it was immune to changes in the weather and the aging effect of cigarettes. Taking it off every few days to shave, I would become afraid—so afraid to look at my own face while shaving that I had to ask a colleague to do it for me. I’d tremble when I came to bed. Against my will, I would lay it aside and would feel as though I were standing naked before millions. I would put out the light and, masked, walk over to my little bed, and I would not remove it until I was under the covers. And I would lay it beside my head in readiness for when the daylight came. I would put it on the moment I woke. For months on end, I would do this. And then the madness reached its peak, and for a full six weeks I slept with it on.

With time, I came to realize that I wasn’t substituting the mask for my face as I’d first thought, but putting a barrier between myself and everyone around me, though they were my colleagues and friends, the people I believed in and trusted most of all. Like me, I saw them go into decline, hanging onto their masks, refusing to take them off for extended periods of time. Once his face had become familiar, I wouldn’t smile to see Fuad al-Mohandis. I would develop the strangest ideas about the characters around me. Would completely forget all the conventional associations of those laughing, smiling, frowning masks and would forget, too, the original faces. I would create imaginary faces for their bodies, and whenever we received a group of snipers whose true faces I had never seen—just their masks—their actual personalities wouldn’t come into it at all: nothing would stick in my mind but details of those borrowed identities. I would reach a point when featureless masks—with no noses, ears, lips, or eyeholes, just a grille of very fine wires that the wearer could see through while his own eyes remained completely obscured—would leave me in a state of complete bewilderment. We were breaking down without being aware of it, throwing up barriers around us and ensuring they were buttressed and maintained.

It went further. I lost the ability to aim unless I was masked. It happened when I was lining up a target standing by the Maspero building. The officer was waiting for a car to pick him up; it was as rare an opportunity as you could get. According to protocol, I shouldn’t have waited or hesitated. We had standing orders to snipe soldiers and officers on sight. I took off the mask to get a clearer look through the scope’s narrow, round eyepiece and as I got back into position and searched around for the target I found that he was looking straight at me. The target, at a distance of approximately a kilometer, was staring into my eyes with a defiance that my hands shook to see, and if it hadn’t been for the last vestiges of common sense, I’d have assumed he was actually looking at me and that he recognized me. I moved back from the eyepiece in a daze and put on my mask, then looked through the scope to find that the man had turned his face away and was looking at the Nile. Much reassured, I took aim again and fired. I didn’t kill him because he was an officer of the occupation, but because I was convinced that he had seen me.

After taking out that target, I never again removed the mask while taking aim. The mask had become the secret to my precision, and maybe, without my realizing it, the secret behind the accuracy of the entire Tower Group.

For days and days, I studied East Cairo from behind my mask. I felt no need to hide behind the scope and heavy rifle. I did not give in to curiosity and inspect all the little details that the scope would let me see. Up here I was immune, protected by height, distance, and my mask. I was an ancient Egyptian god with a borrowed face, whose true features no man could ever know, do what he might. A Greek god, full of contempt for the world that he’d created—killing whomever he chose, deserting whomever he chose, sleeping with whomever he chose, impregnating whomever he chose. And the day a drone came with a message, telling me that my colleagues and I were now free to select targets and snipe without checking back with the leadership, I felt that my divine status had been confirmed, and I told myself that what was to come would fulfill me utterly.

Now I had the green light, the five battleships became easy pickings: close range, immobile, and, should we so desire, quite sinkable. And that was why we ignored them. Long-distance, arbitrary targets in East Cairo were now our main concern, and bulky drones brought us vast quantities of ammunition. We’d abandoned our beloved Dragunovs and now relied exclusively on two models: the McMillan Tac-50 and the Barrett M107. We must have poured thousands of half-inch rounds into East Cairo.

I killed the minister of foreign affairs. I received a message telling me his car would pass along the Corniche within the next quarter of an hour and that it would be stopping at some point between the Semiramis and Maspero. On tenterhooks, I tracked the black Mercedes and, as it sped toward the Maspero building and I realized that it was going to go on without pulling over, I had no choice but to fire five rounds into the vehicle. At last, it did stop, but only thanks to my bullets. Nobody got out. I killed the minister of information. I was watching the outside of the Maspero building through my scope when he stuck his head out of one of the windows, chattering away on his cell phone. A happy coincidence indeed. I don’t think it was more than three seconds between my spotting him and opening fire. I killed what could have been a general from the Fourth Army of the Knights of Malta who drove past in his armored car and got out to inspect a checkpoint. His mustache and eyebrows were what got my attention—the mismatch between his salt-and-pepper hair and the lone lieutenant’s star on his shoulder. I killed him, and I’m still not totally sure whether or not he was a general in disguise. I killed a former colleague, a major in the police, who was sitting on a balcony at the Semiramis. He was dressed in civilian clothes, slumped beneath an umbrella, drinking beer straight from the bottle and smoking. I recognized his face but couldn’t remember his name, just that I’d graduated a few classes ahead of him, and I supposed that if he was relaxing like that on a hotel balcony he must have done well for himself under the occupation. So I shot him.

One hot, listless day, I aimed my rifle in the general direction of Bulaq Abul-Ela and opened fire at random. Three hundred rounds buried themselves in the district’s buildings, and I had no idea if I had killed or injured anybody. Then I turned the gun on Tahrir Square and fired through a gap between the twin wrecks of the Nile Hilton and the Arab League. I hit a large number of cars, and buses, and pedestrians until the square had cleared completely, and then I went on firing into the deserted space until my gun jammed.

I didn’t stop to consider what I would say to the leaders of the resistance to justify my actions, or to think about the reprimand I’d get. I didn’t care about my fellow snipers, standing around unable to understand what I was up to. And when I was done and I turned to face them, I saw only the immobility of their masks, kept on to hide their quaking eyes.