by Eric Maddox
“I don’t know.” He turned to Basim. “Ask him. He knows them all.”
Basim looked as if he’d been kicked in the front of the shorts and threw Amir a dirty look. “Muhammad Ibrahim is not in Tikrit anymore,” he said scowling. “Tell him.”
Amir nodded. “He left when Basim was arrested, a month ago.”
“Where is he now?” I pressed. Amir was silent. “Look,” I said in my most persuasive tone of voice. “What has Muhammad Ibrahim ever done for you? He’s the reason you and your dad and maybe even your brother might spend the rest of your lives in prison. Why are you protecting him?”
That seemed to get through. The kid straightened in his chair. “I have seen him driving into town.”
“With who?”
“A man from Samarra.”
“What man?”
“The brother of Abu Sofian.”
I quickly scanned the link diagram I had embedded in my mind. Abu Sofian was the Samarra insurgent leader who Basim had acted so proud to know. He had died a few weeks earlier. “What’s the name of Abu Sofian’s brother?”
“Muhammad Khudayr,” Amir replied. I shot a quick glance at Basim. He looked as if this was all news to him.
“Where does he live?” I asked Amir.
“In Samarra,” he told me. “Close to the parents of Sabah. I don’t know exactly where.”
New names were coming at me quickly now. Muhammad Khudayr was the brother of a known insurgent, seen in the company of Muhammad Ibrahim. But who was this Sabah? I turned to Basim.
“Sabah also works for Muhammad Ibrahim,” he told me. “He came often to the cement store to get money for their operations in Samarra.”
“I delivered cement to the house of Sabah’s parents,” Amir said. Basim started talking to Amir, trying to figure out which house in Samarra he had delivered the cement to. Then the driver turned to me.
“I know Sabah’s parents,” he said. “If you take me to their house I can show you where Muhammad Khudayr lives. It is very close.”
I liked the way this was going. For the moment, the three of us were working together, unraveling the connections that might lead to Muhammad Ibrahim. It certainly wasn’t standard procedure to have one prisoner talking with another, but I’d given up standard procedure a long time ago.
“Is Muhammad Ibrahim in Samarra?” I asked, returning to the primary objective.
“I don’t know,” Amir replied. “But I know that his brother Sulwan Ibrahim has rented a house there.”
Sulwan was another of Muhammad Ibrahim’s brothers, the one Basim had seen buying quantities of food at the market, food that was possibly meant to feed Saddam. Suddenly, from the utter failure of the previous night, I had all sorts of new directions to follow. The random list of names and places I had kept in my head for so long were beginning to link up and intertwine. I was drawing in, tighter and tighter.
“This rental house,” I continued. “Where is it?”
“I don’t know,” Amir replied. “But Muhammad Khudayr will know.”
I backed up and replayed what I had just learned. Amir could take me to the location in Samarra where the parents of the insurgent operative Sabah lived. From there Basim could locate the nearby house of Muhammad Khudayr, the brother of the late Abu Sofian, another insurgent commander. Khudayr, in turn, might be able to take us to a house rented by Sulwan, the brother of Muhammad Ibrahim. It was a complex and challenging task. But it was also the last best hope I had of accomplishing our mission.
I got Amir to draw as exact a map as possible of the Samarra neighborhood where Sabah’s parents lived, and Basim showed me the proximity of Muhammad Khudayr’s house. Then I went back to deliver this major data dump to Kelly and Bam Bam.
This time Bam Bam didn’t need more than a minute to make his decision. “We’ll take Basim and the kid to show us the Sabah house this afternoon,” he told us. “Then we’ll hit it tomorrow along with Khudayr’s place.” He turned to me. “Muhammad Khudayr is going to take us to Sulwan’s rental house, right, Eric?”
I nodded a lot more confidently than I felt.
“I’ll hold you to that,” he replied, and left to get the preparations for the upcoming hits under way.
“That sure was easy,” I said to Kelly. Up until this point, it had been almost impossible to get a hit approved based solely on intelligence gained from an interrogation. But events were moving quickly now and Bam Bam had proved his readiness to stay out in front of the curve. We were all invested now in reaching the goal we had worked so hard to achieve.
“We need to turn up something fast,” Kelly told me. “The situation with Basim and the security chief is going to get serious sooner than later. And all those raids we did yesterday came up with exactly nothing. Tomorrow night needs to pay off. It may be the last shot we have at this thing.”
“Let me ask you something, Kelly,” I said, almost afraid to hear his answer. “Do you think we’re getting closer to Muhammad Ibrahim?”
“It doesn’t matter what I think,” he responded. “We’ve got to come up with something to justify what we’ve been doing all this time. We pissed off our Sunni friends, and have a link diagram full of names nobody’s heard of outside of this house. Our asses are on the line, bud.”
Chapter 14
1.9
1815 04DEC2003
Basim and Amir went with the team to Samarra to recon the Sabah house for the raid the following night. The two had become quite a team. When we had finished our questioning for the day, I left them alone, removing their handcuffs and supplying them with cigarettes. I wanted them to talk together, to get comfortable with each other and accustomed to the idea of cooperating with me. There was an element of mutual motivation that was working to my advantage. The two of them could share information, filling in the blanks in each other’s knowledge. At the same time, I was hoping they would see that only by working together could they achieve their freedom.
I didn’t try to win them over by being overly polite or accommodating. I was just honest. I had explained the situation they were in and how they could improve it. I made it clear that I would do everything I could to help them out because, by gaining their cooperation, I was furthering my mission. We needed each other and that, in turn, created a strange kind of friendship that would last as long as our mutual dependency existed.
But at the same time, I never fooled myself into thinking they were actually on our side. I had, for instance, debated whether to take Amir’s father, Thamir Al-Asi, and Amir’s younger brother back to the 4th ID prison. I had no further use for them at that point. But I quickly decided that I needed to keep them around to remind Amir why it was a good idea to continue working with me. They would remain at the guesthouse.
On the evening of the raid, my two prisoners and I stayed up talking for almost four hours. I finally suggested that we all try to get some sleep. It was going to be a big night.
“No,” Basim insisted. “I will start a fresh pot of tea. We need to keep working.”
Amir agreed. “If we are ever going to get out of here, there are many more things you need to know.”
I smiled to myself. You know a detainee is completely broken when he insists on continuing an interrogation session.
And I needed all the help I could get. By December 6, the morning of the Samarra raid, my tour of duty in Tikrit was winding down. No one had actually given me a date for my departure and I wasn’t about to bring it up. But I was pretty sure I’d be hearing from Baghdad within a few days at the most.
The idea of leaving before the mission had been accomplished was unthinkable—I couldn’t just pack up and move on before I had seen this thing through. I was the one who had put Bam Bam, Kelly, and the rest of the team on the line in the first place and I was convinced that we were closing in on something very big and very real. Muhammad Ibrahim was running the insurgency in Iraq under orders from Saddam Hussein. That meant he was in direct contact with Black List #1. If we captured him, h
e wouldn’t necessarily reveal where Saddam was hiding, but taking him down would be like cutting off Saddam’s right hand.
As night fell I did my best to get Basim and Amir ready for the hit. Since life inside the guesthouse was dull and uneventful, Basim had initially been excited by the prospect of a real combat raid. But as the hours wore on, I could see him getting progressively more nervous. I wanted them both to stay focused and, above all, to understand how much was riding on the success of these hits. If we found Muhammad Ibrahim, I guaranteed them they’d be released within forty-eight hours. But if we came up with more dry holes, their future prospects would become a lot more problematic.
So would mine. I could probably serve out the rest of my enlistment in the Army and go back to civilian life knowing that I tried my best. But how was I going to live with the realization that my best wasn’t good enough?
It was 0030 on December 6 when the Samarra raids got under way. Once again Kelly and I were waiting in the communications room for word to come in over the radio. It seemed to take forever. Finally, at 0100, we got word that the team had kicked down the door where Sabah’s parents lived. An hour later Bam Bam made his first report.
“Dry hole at first objective,” he told us. My heart sank. “We are moving on second objective.”
Confused, Kelly and I looked at each other. Did that mean they were moving on the Muhammad Khudayr location?
“Confirm location of second objective,” Kelly requested.
“We’re going to the rental house,” Bam Bam replied.
“Thank you, God,” I whispered. Whatever had happened at the Sabah hit, it had given them enough information to locate Sulwan Ibrahim’s rental house. But if they hadn’t rolled up anyone at the first hit, how did they know where to go now?
Ten minutes later Bam Bam called in to report that the rental house was being assaulted. We waited tensely for another thirty minutes before we heard the results.
“Dry hole at second objective,” Bam Bam said, his voice betraying no emotion. “RTB, with two PAKs.” RTB was “Return To Base.” PAKs were prisoners. The raids were over, and sitting in that cramped room crammed with communication gear, I felt totally confused. What just happened? We hadn’t found our targets, but they were returning with two prisoners. It seemed like we’d reached another dead end. Was Muhammad Ibrahim real or was I chasing a ghost? I could find his buddies, his driver, his business partner, everybody but the man himself. My time was almost up. So were my options.
The team arrived just as the sun was coming up and the two new detainees were brought in for processing. The first was a guy named Luay, the brother of the Samarra insurgent leader Sabah. He’d been the only adult male at his parents’ house at the time of the raid. Luay was the one who had revealed the location of the rental house to the shooters. Since it seemed more likely that Muhammad Ibrahim would be hiding there, Bam Bam had made a quick decision to skip Muhammad Khudayr’s house and go directly to the new location. There they had captured Muhammad Ibrahim’s eighteen-year-old son, whose full name was Muslit Muhammad Ibrahim Omar Al-Muslit.
I began to breathe a little easier. The raid hadn’t been a total failure. We had actually found the rental house and rolled up the son of our prime objective. I was still in the game.
Before I started interrogating my new charges, I checked in with Basim to get his perspective on the night’s events. I could tell as soon as he walked in the room that he had something on his mind. I asked him what was wrong.
“I will tell you what is wrong,” he snapped back. “They did not go to Muhammad Khudayr’s house. I know Muhammad Ibrahim was there and we did not go to get him.”
I was caught off guard by Basim’s agitation. It surprised me to see him so invested in the raid’s success. Of course, he had everything to gain from the capture of his old boss. But right then, it seemed as if he was really rooting for our side. I realized that, in spite of myself, I kind of liked Basim.
“What about this guy we got at the Sabah location?” I asked, trying to calm him down. “Is it Sabah’s brother?”
He nodded. “Yes. I have seen him before, but I don’t know him.”
“I need to talk to him now, Basim,” I continued. “But if he doesn’t cooperate I may need your help.”
“You won’t need my help,” Basim assured me. “You will make him talk.”
“What makes you so sure?” I couldn’t resist asking.
He grinned. “I wasn’t going to tell you anything, and look what you have gotten out of me.”
I headed over to the room where Luay was being held. As usual I started with the preliminary questions establishing his background. But before I could get too far into it, I got a call from Kelly.
“You might want to come over here,” he said.
Shit, I thought. What now? “Am I in trouble?” I asked.
“Just get your ass over here,” Kelly replied. “There’s something you should know before you start interrogating Sabah’s brother.”
I went back to the house and entered through the kitchen door. There I was stopped dead in my tracks. Kelly and the team were standing at the table, where neatly piled bundles of hundred-dollar bills had been stacked in an impressive pyramid. It was more money than I had ever seen in my life. Hell, it was more money than any of us, put together, had seen.
“Thought you might like to know what 1.9 million dollars looks like, Eric,” Kelly said with a huge grin.
I just stared. “Where did it come from?” I asked at last.
“After we hit the Sabah place, we were in a hurry to get to the rental house,” one of the shooters explained. “We just piled everything we could find into the Humvees and headed out. We got a safe that we didn’t open until we got back.” He gestured toward the money. “That’s where we found this.”
“We needed this,” I said, turning to Kelly. “I hope it means we can keep going now.”
“You just bought us 1.9 million dollars’ worth of time,” he replied.
“How long is that?”
“Longer than we had a few hours ago.”
I headed back to the guesthouse, feeling great, talking to myself, and not caring who might be listening. “We ain’t done yet,” I said out loud. “Are we done, Casey? Hell no, we ain’t done, brother. We’re just getting started.” With $1.9 million, my theory suddenly had a lot more credibility. More important, it went a long way toward justifying what we’d been doing in Tikrit since the team arrived. We were obviously after the right guys, with the means to finance and carry out the insurgency. We’d proved that much. Now all we had to do was find them.
I was reenergized and on the top of my game when I continued my interrogation with Sabah’s brother, Luay. I was ready to work all day to get anything and everything he knew. But I didn’t have to. He collapsed like a house of cards within five minutes.
While falling short of an outright admission that his brother was a terrorist, Luay did acknowledge that the nearly $2 million we had found was used to fund the insurgency. Muhammad Ibrahim, he said, had given it to his brother Sabah as a slush fund for the Samarra operation. Luay also revealed that he had sat in on several meetings between his brother and Muhammad Ibrahim, as well as Abu Sofian, before the coalition forces had killed him. The whole crew would drink tea as they planned out attacks and reported on their latest recruits.
But it didn’t take me long to realize that Luay wasn’t cut out to be a real insurgent himself. He didn’t have the nerve for it. He was much more interested in his upcoming wedding, he told me. It was scheduled to be held in four days. He admitted with a shy smile that he was a virgin and that all he wanted was to make it to the mosque on time. No global war on terror was going to keep him from his future wife. He would do and say whatever necessary to get his detainment over with as quickly as possible.
After a couple of hours I called in my new backups, Basim and Amir. More than anything, I wanted to see how Luay would react. Maybe he had something more to tell tha
t their presence might shake loose. He did, in fact, look stunned and surprised when they walked in, and he began talking even faster than he had before.
“My brother Sabah left for Baghdad three days ago,” he said before I’d even had a chance to ask the question. “I haven’t seen them since. I haven’t seen any of them since.”
“How often did you see them before that?”
“Almost every day. Sometimes they would stay and talk. But usually they just picked up Sabah and left.”
“Where did they go?”
“I don’t know. They would leave at night and Sabah would come back in the morning.”
I moved in closer, wanting him to understand that his answer to my next question was crucial. “How often did you see Sulwan?” So far, Sulwan, Muhammad Ibrahim’s brother, was my most direct link to Saddam. It was Basim who had seen him buying large amounts of food in the market.
“I saw him a lot with Muhammad Ibrahim,” he replied. “He would come to the house. But only during the day.”
“Why only in the day?”
He shrugged. “He would leave in the evening. I never saw him at night.”
“Where did he go?”
“I never asked.” I looked over at Basim. He was obviously thinking the same thing I was: Sulwan was going to Saddam’s hiding place at night.
“Did Sulwan stay at the house he rented in Samarra?” I continued.
“No,” he replied. “I don’t think he stayed in Samarra.”
“Then why did he rent the house?”
“It was for Muhammad Ibrahim. After Basim was arrested he couldn’t stay in Tikrit anymore.” He glanced over at the driver. “Muhammad Ibrahim was certain you were working for the Americans.”
“Do you know who this is?” I asked, changing tack and pointing to Amir. I was curious how familiar the Samarra insurgency was with Thamir Al-Asi and his sons.
“Yes,” Luay replied. “That is Amir Thamir Al-Asi. He shouldn’t be here. He has done nothing.”
“Just answer the questions, asshole,” I shot back. “You haven’t earned the right to an opinion yet. Only Basim has earned that right.” The driver laughed. Giving him his props was the right thing do. I wouldn’t have come this far without his cooperation, willing or otherwise.
