Seeing him in the brightly lit interview room confirmed his first assessment. The man with the bead-braided hair examined Miller carefully.
What the hell, why not? He didn’t get a good look at me, either.
There was a steel captain’s chair firmly bolted to the floor. It had a pair of handcuffs clipped to it, one half open and waiting to attach an interviewee to the chair.
Miller felt his handcuffs being unlocked and then removed.
“Thanks, John,” Sergeant Schneider said to the black detective. “Anybody see him?”
“Everybody in detention, plus a cleaning woman who rolled her bucket onto the elevator. She may even have really been on her way to mop up the fourth floor.”
The detective left the room and closed the door.
“If you promise to behave,” the man with the beaded braids said, “we won’t cuff you to the chair.”
There was a faint hint of a smile on his face. Miller smiled back at him but didn’t say anything.
The Homicide detectives left the interview room.
“Schneider tells me you’re an Army officer, a major,” the detective with the bead-braided hair said.
“That’s right.”
“Jack Britton,” the man with the braided hair said, extending his hand. “Aka Ali Abd Ar-Raziq.”
“What do I call you?”
“Suit yourself. Where are you from, Miller?” Ali Abd Ar-Raziq asked.
“Here.”
“Philly?”
Miller nodded.
“You don’t sound like it. You sound like a Reading nigger. ”
I’ll be a sonofabitch!
“I have family in Reading,” Miller said, coldly. “On my mother’s side. Neither they nor I like that term.”
“I don’t even know what it means,” Betty said.
“Sergeant Schneider, I’m disappointed,” Ali Abd Ar-Raziq said. “Word is that you know everything about everything. ” He paused, smiled, and went on. “To make you conversant with a little Afro-American history not usually found in history books, Reading was one of the termini of the Underground Railroad of fame and legend. A number of the slaves who made it out of the South stayed there and became truly integrated. They even picked up Pennsylvania Dutch accents, started eating scrapple, etcetera. They went to school, college, started businesses, joined the Army, etcetera, etcetera. And soon, having made it, began to look down their noses at other African Americans.”
“Hey!” Miller protested.
The man with the braided hair raised his palm to shut him off and went on: “The reason I know all this is my father’s family are Reading niggers. I’ll bet the major and I have acquaintances in common. You don’t happen to be kin to a General Miller, do you?”
“He’s my father,” Miller said.
“See?” Britton said. “Your father and my father are friends.”
“I’ll be damned,” Betty Schneider said.
“If you’re not nice, Sergeant, the major and I will start speaking Dutch and leave you in the dark. You do speak Dutch, don’t you, Major?”
“Only what I learned listening to my mother when we went to the Reading Terminal Market to buy stuff from the Amish,” Miller said.
“Where’d you go to school?” the man with the braided hair asked in the German patois known as Pennsylvania Dutch. “Where’d you get your commission?”
“West Point,” Miller said.
“Yeah, sure,” the man with the braided hair said, switching back to English. “Of course. Your father’s a West Pointer.”
Miller nodded.
“So what did you learn about Islam when you were at West Point?”
“What is this, a quiz?”
That was opening your mouth before engaging your brain. Watch it, Richard, you can’t afford to piss off Ali Abd Ar-Raziq, aka Detective Jack Britton.
“Before I start to tell you about the lunatics, it would help to know how much you know about Islam. Save us both time.”
“I learned zilch at the military academy,” Miller said. “But after 9/11, I started to read.”
“Give me three minutes of what you learned,” the man with the braided hair said.
“You’re serious, right?”
The man with the braided hair nodded.
“Where was Muhammad born, for example? When?”
“In 570, into the Quraysh tribe, in Mecca.”
“And the Qur’an? Where did that come from?”
“The Angel Gabriel gave it to him—the first part of it— in a cave on Mount Hira in 610. Then he started playing prophet.”
“Something like Joseph Smith, the Angel Moroni, and the Mormons, right?” Britton asked, smiling.
“I thought about that,” Miller said, smiling back.
“What’s the definition of ‘Islam’?” " ’Submission to God,’ ” Miller said. “A Muslim is someone who’s done that.”
“Like a born-again Baptist, right? You a born-again Christian, Miller?”
“I’m Presbyterian.”
“Pity. If you were a born-again Christian, it might help you understand something about how some guy raised in North Philadelphia, in a house like the one where we met, who converted to Muslim from, say, the Holy Ghost First Church of Christ, African, feels about Islam.”
Miller didn’t reply.
“What’s the first and great commandment for a Muslim?” Britton asked.
“ ‘There is no god but God . . . Allah . . . and Muhammad is His Prophet.’ ”
“And the ‘Pillars of Faith’?”
“There’s five,” Miller said. “One is reciting the creed—‘There is no god but God, etcetera.’ The second is daily prayers—formal prayers, with the forehead touching the ground. Third is fasting during Ramadan . . .”
“What’s Ramadan?” Britton interrupted.
“The ninth month of the Muslim calendar. Last year— 2004—it started in October. The fifth of October, I think.”
Britton made a “Give me more” gesture.
“It lasts a lunar month,” Miller went on. “No eating, drinking, smoking, or sex during the day. It starts when you can tell a white thread from a black thread by daylight and ends at nightfall with a prayer and a meal called iftar, and then starts up again the next morning.”
Britton nodded at him. “And the Fourth Pillar?” he asked.
“Almsgiving. The Fifth is making a pilgrimage to Mecca.”
Britton nodded again. “Tell me about jihad,” he said.
“Holy war,” Miller said. “To take over territories, countries, which are ruled by non-Muslims.”
“This is new, right, something dreamed up recently by belligerent rag-heads? And having really nothing to do with the gentle teachings of the Prophet himself?”
“No. It goes all the way back to Muhammad. By the time he died, in 632, jihad saw the Muslims in control of the Arabian Peninsula. In the next hundred years, jihad had taken Islam all over the Middle East, from Afghanistan to Spain.”
“Okay,” Britton said. “The pop quiz is over. You’re not exactly an Islamic scholar, but neither are you wholly ignorant of who you’re dealing with like most people I’ve met in your line of work.”
“My line of work? The Army, you mean?”
“No. Intelligence, counterterrorism. You may be a soldier, but you’re not here to line your troops up and march down Broad Street.”
“I’m here—as I told you in that house off Broad Street— because we have reason to believe that a group of Somalian terrorists have stolen a 727 with the intention of crashing it into the Liberty Bell, and, further, we have reason to believe that there may be a connection with some—how do I say this?—native Philadelphian Muslims. Can we get to that? You said you knew something.”
“You see the movie Black Hawk Down? Read the book? Mogadishu?”
Miller nodded.
Both were right on the money. Do I tell Britton that the Black Hawk belonged to the 160th Special Forces Aviation Regiment and
that First Lieutenant Richard H. Miller, Jr., was flying Black Hawks in Somalia for the 160th at the time?
“A guy on The Philadelphia Inquirer wrote the book,” Britton said.
“So I understand. He did a good job.”
“When that happened, when they dragged the bodies of the American soldiers through the streets, the reaction of some of the lunatics here was that it was the will of Allah, about time, right on, brother. That shock you?”
Miller shook his head.
“And, right away, some of the local lunatic mullahs— who have no more idea where they come from in Africa than you or I do—started claiming they were from Somalia. Pure bullshit, of course, to impress the brothers. And then, because that seemed to work, they embellished the story. They had contacts with Somalia, they said, and we—meaning, the mullahs—have to go over there.
“We had a series of fund-raisers, some of them your standard church chicken supper, all proceeds to the cause, and some your standard knock over the local grocery store, your friendly neighborhood drug dealer and hooker, etcetera. And they came up with the money for the plane tickets, got passports, and went.”
“You tell anybody about this?”
“I turned in a report. A couple of weeks later, the FBI wanted to talk to me. So I got myself arrested—did this routine —and two guys from the FBI talked to me—in this interview room, come to think of it—and I told them what was going down, and they laughed, and said, one, the AALs couldn’t get into Somalia and, two, even if they could the Somalians would not only not talk to the wannabes but would probably cut their throats and steal whatever they were carrying.”
“So what happened?”
“Off the AALs went, they said to Somalia.”
“You sound as if you don’t believe they actually went.”
“What the FBI said made sense to me. None of these wannabes speak Arabic, much less Somali. I figured they wouldn’t get any further than Kenya, or Ethiopia, where they would find out what Somalia was really like and decide it was the Will of Allah to whoop it up with the local hookers instead of actually going there. Who would know they hadn’t gone? Or they would actually try to go there and get knocked over by some really professional bad guys.”
“So what actually happened?”
“I don’t know,” Britton said. “Right about that time, my wife was about to have our first son, so I did almost a year in the Pennsylvania Correctional Facility in Camp Hill.”
“Excuse me?”
“I was picked up on an armed robbery charge, plea-bargained it down to four years, and was sent to the state slam at Camp Hill, near Harrisburg. When I was a bad boy, which was often, they put me in solitary, from which I was surreptitiously removed and sneaked out of the joint in the warden’s trunk. That way, I got two weeks with my wife—a couple of times, three—we had a nice apartment in Harrisburg —before they sneaked me back in. The department shrink said I had suffered severe mental stress on the job, so technically I was on medical leave.”
“Jesus Christ!” Miller said.
“Anyway, like I said, it was about a year before I got back to the mosque.”
“I don’t understand,” Miller confessed.
“The mosque hired a pretty good lawyer to appeal my conviction. The sonofabitch used to come to Camp Hill— which meant I had to sneak back into the prison to meet with him and then sneak back out—every other month to tell me how he was doing. After about a year, like I said, the Supreme Court ordered a retrial, the district attorney declined to prosecute, and I was sprung.”
“You volunteered to go back?” Miller asked, incredulously.
Britton met his eyes for a moment before replying.
“I’m in pretty deep with the mullahs,” he said. “It would have been hard to get anybody else into the mosque who would have learned much.”
“You couldn’t pay me enough to do what you’re doing,” Miller said.
“Yeah, but, like I was saying, when I got back to the mosque the mullahs were, quote, back from Somalia, end quote, they were watching me pretty closely . . .”
“They were suspicious?”
“I wasn’t the only guy from the mosque, by a long shot, in Camp Hill,” Britton said. “And they hadn’t seen much of me while I was in there. Yeah, they were suspicious. They’re very suspicious people. Anyway, I didn’t want to ask too many questions, and they weren’t talking much about Somalia— which I figured was because they really hadn’t been to Somalia —so I let it rest.
“And then, about six months ago, two mullahs showed up. They said they were from Somalia. I don’t know if they were or weren’t. But they certainly were from someplace other than here. Spoke English like Englishmen. And what they were up to, I don’t know. They kept me out of their meetings.”
“You tell the FBI about them?”
“I told Chief Kramer. He told the FBI, and the FBI told him they had nothing on the names I’d given him. So the chief staked out the mosque, got pictures of them, and gave the pictures to the FBI. The chief got word to me that the FBI had run them. They were pilots for an Arab airline— Yemen Airways, I think—and were in the country legally. Going to some flight school in Tulsa, Oklahoma. All approved by the U.S. government.”
“And?”
“And that was the end of it until a couple of weeks ago— about the time your airplane went missing in . . . where?”
“Luanda, Angola,” Miller finished.
“. . . when the lunatics began talking more than a little smugly about what was going to happen when the Liberty Bell was no more.”
“You report that? To Chief Kramer? The FBI?”
“These people come up with some nutty idea once a week. They’re going to blow up City Hall or the Walt Whit-man Bridge or the Benjamin Franklin Bridge or one of the sports arenas. Poison the water. Assassinate the archbishop. It’s just talk. I don’t report much—or any—of it until I have more than hot air to go on. You heard about the kid who kept crying ’Wolf’?”
Miller nodded.
"And then you showed up,” Britton went on.
“And asked you if you had heard anything about the Liberty Bell,” Miller said.
Britton nodded.
“You have to admit that flying an airplane into the Liberty Bell sounds bizarre,” Britton said.
“Bizarre or not, we think that’s what they intend to do,” Miller said. “You have the names of the two Somalians?”
“They’d be in my report. Schneider?”
“I can get that,” Sergeant Betty Schneider said. “But you said the FBI said they had nothing on those names. What about the names the FBI put on the stakeout photos?”
“The chief never gave them to me,” Britton said. “I suppose he has them.”
“He went out for coffee,” Betty said. “Maybe he’s back.”
She left the interview room and a minute later returned with Chief Inspector Kramer.
“They never gave me names,” he announced. “Just said the two were on the up-and-up. I can call there, but it’s late and all I’m going to get is the duty officer, who’ll probably stall me until he can clear it with the Special Agent in Charge.”
“Chief,” Miller said, “I’d like to suggest we wait until I can tell Castillo about this.” He turned to Britton. “How long can you stay?”
Chief Kramer answered for him: “We picked him up on suspicion of murder. We can probably keep him until breakfast —say, eight o’clock—without making the AALs more than usually suspicious.”
“Castillo said he’d get back to me as soon as he could. Why don’t we wait for that?”
“Okay with me,” Chief Inspector Kramer said. “Okay with you, Britton?”
Detective Jack Britton said, with no enthusiasm whatever, “Why not?”
[THREE]
Delta Force Compound Fort Bragg, North Carolina 2310 9 June 2005
Around the time the first Delta Force was organized, the Army had about finished implementing a new personn
el policy regarding offenders of the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
Someone had pointed out—many soldiers, officers, and enlisted thought very late in the game—that only a very few soldiers committed what in civilian life would be called “serious felonies,” that is to say, rape, murder, armed robbery, and the like. The vast majority of prisoners in Army stockades all over the world had been found guilty of offenses against the Army system and most of the offenses had to do with being absent without leave, mild insubordination, drunk on duty, and the like.
Those sentenced by court-martial to six months or less were normally confined to prisons, called “stockades” on the larger military bases—forts like Bragg, Knox, and Benning— where they spent their days walking around the base, guarded by shotgun-armed “prisoner chasers,” picking up cigarette butts and trash.
Someone had pointed out that not only did this punishment not contribute much to the Army but that the prisoner chasers—usually, one for every two prisoners, sometimes one for each prisoner—had to be taken off their regular duties to perform that guard duty, which was not an effective use of manpower.
Furthermore, if a soldier disliked the Army so much that he went “over the hill” or told his sergeant to take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut when chastised, for example, for having a dirty weapon, or needing a shave, he probably wasn’t making much of a contribution to the Army when he wasn’t in the stockade.
The ideal was “cheerful, willing obedience to a lawful order, ” and, if a soldier wasn’t willing to offer that, what was he doing in the Army?
If a first sentence to the stockade didn’t serve to make someone see the wisdom of straightening up and flying right, then hand him a Bad Conduct discharge and send him home.
That would do away with having to have large, heavily guarded stockades, with barbed wire, chain-link fences, guard towers, and everything else that went with them all over the Army, and having to take a hundred or so men on each post away from their normal duties on any given day to serve as prisoner chasers.
It might also result in an Army where most soldiers believed that cheerful, willing obedience to a lawful order was really not such a bad idea.
By Order of the President Page 49
