Shahim looked seriously at the man, bowed slightly, and then turned and ran off into the last remnants of the night. He did not look back at the man, the image from the AI told him that the soldier was getting ready to drive off as Shahim climbed up and over the high ridge that lay between him and his own encampment. He considered the seed he had planted. Naturally he would get his own group to mobilize in response to the attack, but this additional source of verification that it was the Pakistanis that had perpetrated the attack would help fuel the fire he hoped to start.

He did not go to his own cave. He needed to bamboozle the satellite still watching his movements. He ran into a larger cave and into the waking group there as they heard about the attack over their radio. He called on them to gather in the valley below, even as he exchanged his shawl with one of them. None of them argued for a moment with the fearsome warrior, and he joined them as they then all flooded out of the cave to go and gather the rest of the camp’s forces.

The satellite noted them all leave the cave from above, still unaware that Shahim was among them, and now loosing the trail of the man that had come to the camp as they all went this way and that. With the satellite now watching one of the wrong men, the real Shahim ducked into his own cave and changed once more before making his own way down into the valley to incite the gathering horde.

* * *

By the evening, Shahim had agitated and enraged a string of encampments, summoning them to his banner. The deaths of the generals had decapitated a huge part of the region’s militia, and Shahim had stepped into the vacuum. And so, not eighteen hours after he had flicked the first proverbial domino, he came to be sitting in the back of one of fifteen trucks bearing an angry company of warriors down from the mountains.

The reports from the AI were now starting to show signs of concern. It could see the growing convoy descending on the Peshawar Army Base, and its requests that Shahim intercept the insurgents had gone unanswered.

Too late to turn back now, thought Shahim. The dominoes would fall as they may. They had so little time and the plans of John Hunt and the team of humans depended on him initiating the chain reaction here in Pakistan.

But he also needed to continue to dissemble until the last, for the AI and the rest of the Council must not know what he was doing until it was too late for them to stop him. He smiled at his fellow warriors in the back of the truck as it rumbled toward the unsuspecting Pakistani army base, and then stood and clambered toward the clattering old vehicle’s back.