Jibraill meditated best when he was flooding adrenalin, every iota of his being stretched tight to full consciousness of his surroundings. He felt every contact his trainer soles made with the pavement, knew intimately the location of each parked car, was aware of the entire gamut of signifiers his slightest gesture or nuance could arouse in any observer.

And his most intimate observer, Hadi, only truly slipped into the creative state of flow when he was behind the lens, challenging the skills he'd built on from the first camera he'd got for his ninth birthday, one of those throwaway jobbies you take to the beach.

He was using a mobile phone with realtime video-messaging facility for their outing today, mainly because it allowed him to feed the images straight through to the third member of their shady trio, Umar, to paste straight up onto their website, ji.had.u.org.uk. It also served the double function of hiding the device from the cameo actors, so that Hadi's role as interpreter of these absurd events could surreptiously slip between the gazes of the sleepwalking pedestrians.

Hadi was fairly invisible beside Jibraill, as his out-of-parts thespian partner perilously navigated his way through the filling-out Friday crowds in the garish orange boiler-suit they'd picked up at the flea market, with a cumbersome rucksack drooping off his shoulders, his flanks weighed down with cylindrical packages and, hardest of all to pull off, a canvas sack taped over his head.

Hadi couldn't help but smile as he ducked into the doorway of Partisan Foods for his closing position to screen the chaos from. He even gave a subtle wave to Gemma, the check-out girl at the "radical" food co-operative, from whom he purchased his staple requirement of a crate of non-US-imperialist cola every Tuesday. For a moment it looked like she was going to leave the till to see what he was up to, so he tried his best to look casual, while ensuring that the hole in the pocket of his fleece was still lined up with the lens on his phone.

It was strange how brainwashed the shoppers all were in this sleepy Midlands town, so corroded by conformity that even the fused spectres of suicide bomber and Guantanamo detainee embodied in Jibraill's saffron-clad person were barely registering against their glazed sense of the mundane, drizzling day.

But now the happening was starting to happen. A patrol car almost cruised languorously by, and then the double-take the driver did was almost audible over the screech of her brakes.

Even sensing his way, ninja-like, from inside his hood, at times Jibraill's fleet heels were both in the air together. As the officer barked panic down her radio-mic, and her male colleague darted to try to head off the impending threat before it could reach its target, Jibraill deftly side-stepped around PC Agnew's attempted armlock, guided as he was by an earpiece down which Hadi was relaying whispered guidance with the hands-free on his other phone.

So it was that with a bang Jibraill burst open the door of the drowsy Army Recruitment Centre.

It was from here that over the past 5 years a skeleton-staff of over-fed squaddies had been indoctrinating and enrolling the local teenage chav population, sending them off to fight and kill and be killed in the lands that belonged to the people of himself, Hadi and Umar, in Afghanistan and Iraq, waging an unholy war against his creed for their leaders' religion of petrochemical resources and geopolitical power.

And meanwhile this lot got to sit here clocking up their military pensions doing office work, thousands of miles from the arena of conflict.

As Jibraill flew into their shop, the sergeant and private on duty turned as one, together with a pimply ginger kid in jam-jar glasses and branded sportsgear who'd been in the middle of trying to spell his surname against a clipboard. They saw the sack-headed vision of their nightmares mere instants before they heard the bang of the door being flung against its hinges, and then there was silence.

There was a clatter as something hard and plastic fell to the floor.

"Shit, my detonator!" Jibraill cursed, but straight away both the policeman and the private were onto him, pinning his hands to the floor away from his padded torso, while the sergeant did the splits across the floor to kick the object away with his polished boot.

As the air filled with sirens it became clear that the detonator was in the form of a trophy, something like an Oscar but instead depicting two soldiers in the baffled poses of Laurel and Hardy.

"Ji-had-U!" proclaimed Hadi cheerily as he broke onto the scene to whip the bag off his cohort's head to reveal a comic 70s disco-wig in rainbow tints. "Your mates'll split their sides when they see you falling for this on the "˜net. Dom Joly eat your pranking arse off!"

Jibraill was well into a wholesome guffaw by now.

And not far behind was Umar, with his laptop set up to show the victims of the prank receiving their Ji-Had-U award live in person.

Except that by now there were a dozen assault rifles pointed at the trio, and the phrase "triggerhappy TV" begins to assume a more chilling significance in the last breaths they take in this account of their exploits.