CIA operator Raymond Davis found himself at the center of an international incident when two young Pakistani men on a motorcycle started following his car:
Davis didn’t have time to ponder their motives. The intersection of Jail and Ferozepur roads was packed with cars, bicycles, rickshaws, and pedestrians; the motorcycle pulled around his car and stopped just ahead of it. Shamshad, on the back of the bike, turned. He raised his pistol. He cocked it.
There is a switch inside the minds of men who work as Special Forces soldiers. It toggles between the perception of another person as “friend” or “enemy.” In one setting, it inspires a fierce and even noble protectiveness. But the moment the switch is flipped to “enemy,” vision narrows and everything but the target fades away.
Shamshad’s gun cocked, and Davis’s switch flipped.
In an instant he raised his own pistol, a semiautomatic Glock, and fired a series of five rounds straight through his windshield. The bullets punched neat holes through it, leaving only a sprinkling of green glass cubes and trapezoids on Davis’s dashboard.
He shot Shamshad in the stomach, behind his right ear, in the back, in the left arm, and in the left thigh. Shamshad fell onto the motorcycle and dropped his weapon. Haider ran toward the intersection and made it about 50 feet to a brick-and-grass island in the road. Davis opened his door, stepped from his car, and shot him five times, including twice in the back, as Haider ran. It was an unbelievable feat of marksmanship.
Anwar Khan, the manager of a restaurant on the intersection, was washing his hands in the men’s room when he heard the first shots. They sounded strange. Muffled. “I thought it was a customer firing,” he says. He ran into the restaurant as more shots barked from the street. These sounded sharper. Khan watched, amazed, as Davis walked back to his car, retrieved a camera, and then walked to each of the bodies. He photographed them with the calm of a scholar documenting some historical artifact. No hurry. No tremor.
“He was so confident,” Khan says, shaking his head.
As a crowd formed, Davis radioed his team for backup. He waited for them in his car, but the crowd became a mob and smashed out his rear window, raining glass onto the backseat. Davis couldn’t wait any longer. He dropped the car into gear, cranked the steering wheel, and somehow maneuvered away from the crowd and the intersection.
Khan, the restaurateur, stood astonished as the white Honda revved, leaping and gunning its way through dense traffic. “It did not feel real,” he says. “It was like an American movie.”
He was still standing at his restaurant’s window a few minutes later when he heard the approach of a second hard-revving vehicle. A Land Cruiser charged into view, just a few feet in front of the restaurant, which meant it was on the wrong side of the road. And behind it came a wave of people on foot, running and shouting. Only later would he find out why.
A few minutes earlier and about a quarter mile down Jail Road, Zahid Chaudhry, a car salesman, had stepped outside his small dealership and noticed the Land Cruiser. Traffic was backed up, heading toward the big intersection to his right. The Land Cruiser, stuck in the unmoving mass, lurched sideways and climbed over the foot-tall cement traffic divider. The driver — a foreigner, he could see — then turned upstream against oncoming traffic, swerving and surging toward the intersection.
“Look at him!” Chaudhry told a colleague. “He must have killed someone.”
Then, as though to prove him right, the Land Cruiser smashed head-on into a motorcycle. In a sliver of a moment, its rider, a young man named Ibad-ur Rehman, hit head-first into the hood of the Land Cruiser, buckling it.
The Land Cruiser stopped, as everyone on the street watched. Its driver backed up but couldn’t dislodge the bike or its rider. They were both stuck to the grill. So, facing a sickening dilemma, the driver decided to continue forward, racing once more toward the intersection. After a hundred yards or so, Rehman and his motorcycle came loose, and when bystanders ran to his side, they found him dead. They turned — a hundred or more people now — and ran after the Land Cruiser, calling for police and memorizing its license plate number, which turned out to be counterfeit.
When the vehicle arrived at the intersection where Davis had fled minutes earlier, it stopped a moment as the driver and a passenger scanned the scene for Davis. A man approached the Land Cruiser and pulled open the driver’s door. The driver, according to people who witnessed it, swung up a weapon — some said a compact assault rifle of some sort, others said a large pistol — and pressed its muzzle to the man’s head. The man backed away, and the Land Cruiser tore ahead, swinging right at the intersection and toward the American consulate.
Along the way, police said, the vehicle’s occupants jettisoned a bizarre sort of litter: bullets, batteries, a pair of gloves, a baton, and a scrap of cloth bearing an American flag.
The Land Cruiser disappeared behind the walls of the consulate, and the two men inside were spirited back to the U.S. before Pakistani authorities could get their hands on them.
By the way, if you intend on shooting someone, might I suggest cocking the gun before you approach them?