Yes, the Americans were fools. You invaded Iraq because you said it was full of “terrorists,” Farouk thought. Well, now it is. Allah works in mysterious ways.
THE SUN HAD set when the Mad Dogs rolled up to the concrete blast walls that blocked the entrance to the Khudra police station, a pitted two-story building marked by a tattered Iraqi flag. Suicide car bombs had hit the station three times. Now most cops wouldn’t leave the station even to patrol, much less arrest anyone. But a few officers still worked with the 2–7 Cav; Jackson wasn’t sure if they were brave or crazy. In any case, they knew the streets of Ghazalia better than he ever would. He hoped to take a couple of them out tonight.
Jackson strode to the station’s front gates, where Lieutenant Colonel Ghaith Fahd stood, cigarette in hand. The men tapped their hands to their chests, then shook hands. Fahd was the only officer at Khudra whom Jackson really trusted. “Salaam alaikum,” Jackson said.
“Alaikum salaam.”
“You heard us coming?”
“Nam.”
Jackson was not surprised. His tanks ran on huge engines, modified jet turbines, that announced their presence long before they arrived. Noise was their biggest tactical weakness. But tonight he hoped to turn that flaw to his advantage.
“Cigarette?” Fahd said, offering Jackson his pack.
“Dunhills? Fancy, Colonel.” Jackson shook a cigarette onto his palm.
“My raise came through,” Fahd said, and laughed.
Jackson lit up and gratefully sucked on the cigarette. Though he didn’t smoke. At least he hadn’t before he came over here. “You know those things will kill you,” he told Fahd.
“No quicker than anything else, Captain.”
Jackson marveled at Fahd’s cool. For an Iraqi officer in this neighborhood, even to be seen with an American was an act of supreme courage. Yet Fahd never seemed tired or tense, much less afraid. They walked into the street, out of earshot of the station.
“You have plans tonight?” Fahd asked.
“Yes. A raid.”
“How many men do you need?”
“Only those you really trust.”
Fahd nodded. “Five…no, four. Ehab is home today.”
“Just four men?” Fifty officers were on duty.
“Yes.”
“That bad, huh?”
“Even worse, Captain.” Fahd handed Jackson the cigarettes. “Have another Dunhill. I’ll round them up.”
TEN MINUTES LATER Fahd was back, four men in tow.
“As you like, Captain.” An Iraqi expression that meant: Whenever you’re ready.
Jackson looked at his watch. Eight-forty. Saleh had said the meeting was supposed to start at nine and last an hour. But he’d also warned Jackson that the guerrillas often ran late. And Jackson knew he couldn’t risk watching the barbershop — any American presence would be obvious. He had decided to hit at nine forty-five and hope for the best.
“We have a little while. Where’s your flak jacket, Colonel?”
“I don’t have one.”
“We gave you enough armor for every officer in Khudra.” Jackson didn’t hide the frustration in his voice.
A brittle laugh escaped Fahd’s lips. “Let me tell you a story.” He lit a fresh cigarette. “It will be over before this Dunhill.”
“Sure.”
“My father owned a store in Sadr City. You know Sadr City, of course.”
“Of course.” Sadr City was a giant slum in northeast Baghdad, on the other side of the Tigris River, a desperately poor place.
“We were not wealthy. No one in Sadr City is wealthy. But we were comfortable,” Fahd said. He took a deep drag on his cigarette. “Unfortunately my father — Mohammed — liked to joke. Sometimes he joked about Saddam. In 1987, the Mukhabarat”—Saddam’s secret police—“raided his store. They took him and my brother Sadiq to Abu Ghraib. You can guess the rest.”
“Did you ever see them again?”
“Sadiq survived, for a while. He died two years later.”
“Did he tell you what had happened?”
“He never spoke after they let him go.”
“He never said what they’d done?”
“He never spoke at all.” Fahd pointed at his mouth. “No tongue.”
Jackson felt his own tongue curl inside his mouth as he tried to think of something to say.
“I’m sorry.”
“They must have found a very bad Mukhabarat agent,” Fahd said. “My father’s jokes weren’t so much.”
“And you escaped?”
“I wasn’t there. They never came back for me. I don’t know why. Maybe they felt — what is the word? — lazy.”
“Inshallah.”
“Inshallah,” Fahd said. “Instead they sent me to fight against Iran. I survived — the war was almost over — and then I got into the police academy somehow. Now I am a lieutenant colonel in the Iraqi police, respected and loved by my men.” Fahd laughed. “A charmed life, wouldn’t you say, Captain?” He held up his cigarette, still burning. “And now the story is over, as I promised.” Fahd took a final drag on his cigarette, then stubbed it out into his palm and flicked it onto the asphalt.
“So you don’t wear body armor,” Jackson said.
“If Allah wishes me to stay alive, I will. And if he wishes me to see my father again, I will. Either way I will be grateful for his blessings.”
LED BY J.C.’S armored Humvee, the Mad Dog convoy rolled north on Dodge, a broad avenue that stretched through the center of Ghazalia. Bomb holes pitted the road. Patrols here got hit almost every night, though no soldiers had been killed. Yet.
With the streets empty, they had the road almost to themselves. The patrol stretched a half mile nose to tail, with Fahd’s Land Rover nestled in the middle, a toy among the Bradleys and tanks.
Through J.C.’s night-vision goggles the world glowed yellow and black. Looming over a field to the east was the Mother of All Battles mosque, a concrete monstrosity with minarets designed to resemble machine gun turrets. Saddam had built the mosque to celebrate his decade-long war with Iran, which had left two million people dead. When the electricity was running, the minarets glowed infernally in the night. But tonight the power was out. The mosque and the neighborhood had gone dark, though generators provided power to a few fortunate houses. The blackout was a good break, and so was the new moon. The darker the night, the better the goggles worked.
A tracer round cut through the night, a single shot as the patrol passed by. They’re out there, J.C. thought. Watching us. Waiting for us to make a mistake. Good. Let ’em. His finger crawled around the trigger of his.50-cal.
The Humvee halted as the convoy reached the northern end of the Ghazalia road, where a narrow bridge ran into Shula, a crowded slum. The patrol has to look routine, Jackson had told the Mad Dogs. They can’t know we’re coming. The convoy made a slow U-turn and headed south.
IN THE NARROW back room of the barbershop in Ghazalia, officially known as Al-Jakra for Hair Cutting and Shampooing, Farouk Khan perched uncomfortably on a cheap blue couch. Boxes of old shampoo bottles lay on the floor, and three AK-47s had been left carelessly under a staircase by the back wall. A noisy generator in the corner powered an overhead bulb and a hot plate boiling water for tea. He looked again at his watch. Nine-twenty. Why hadn’t they arrived? Farouk was not a coward; cowards did not last long as nuclear spies. Still, he hated pointless risks.
The door opened, but it was just Zayd, the skinny Iraqi who had guided Farouk from Islamabad to Baghdad. Farouk was thoroughly sick of Zayd. The Iraqi’s manners were atrocious. He spat and picked his nose with abandon, and he never washed. Plus, Farouk didn’t trust anyone so thin. Eating was a great pleasure; who would forsake it? But Farouk had to admit that Zayd had come in handy. He spoke Arabic, Farsi, Urdu, Pashto, and English. In fact, Farouk hadn’t yet heard a language that Zayd didn’t understand. And he knew half the tribal leaders between here and Pakistan. So Farouk had accepted the man’s medieval pers
onal habits.
“Funny, isn’t it, Zayd,” Farouk said. “It’s easy to tell the wealth of a country from a hospital or a supermarket. But barbershops look the same wherever I’ve been. Here, Pakistan, Europe. Black swivel chairs, counters crowded with mysterious glass jars, posters of young men with close-cropped hair.”
“Umm.” Zayd put a knuckle into his nose. Farouk wondered whether the gesture was meant as an answer. For a man of so many tongues, Zayd said surprisingly little. Perhaps great conversations went on inside his head.
Farouk settled back in the couch, feeling it creak under his bulk. Outside he could hear the heavy low rumbling of American tanks in the distance. He jiggled the Geiger counter in his lap and tried to control his nervousness. “Will they be here soon, Zayd?” His companion merely shrugged and poured two glasses of tea, dropping in sugar with his dirty fingers. Farouk grimaced and drank. Then he heard the cars pull up.
CAPTAIN JACKSON’S PLAN was simple. The barbershop sat on the western edge of Ghazalia. When his convoy reached the street that ran to the shop, the Humvees and Land Rover would peel off and race west. The tanks and Bradleys would follow. With any luck the guerrillas wouldn’t realize what was happening until the Humvees had already reached the shop. The heavier armor would establish a perimeter when it arrived.
The strategy had risks. Jackson had fifteen soldiers in the Humvees, along with the five Iraqi officers in the Rover. They should be able to take out four guerrillas. But if the shop had been fortified, they could be in for a fight. Especially before the Bradleys arrived with reinforcements. Normally, Jackson would put his heaviest firepower at the front and keep the lighter vehicles in the rear, but this time he could not risk alerting his targets.
Even after his men got inside the store, their problems would not be over. Jackson didn’t know the layout of the shop, or even whether it had a second exit. His patrols had cruised by the store twice in the last three days, but he had feared more recon might spook the target. Still, he had no doubt his men could pull off the mission. They’d been through worse.
Jackson looked through his armored window at the deserted storefronts. Time to give the bosses one last chance to chicken out. He picked up his battalion radio and called the Tactical Operations Center at Camp Graphite. “Mad Dog Six to Knight Six, over.” Knight Six was the battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Steve Takahashi.
“This is Knight Six.”
Jackson looked at his watch. Nine thirty-three. The Humvees should hit the shop in minutes. “Our ETA is Niner Four Tree.” “Tree” was army lingo for “three.”
“Niner Four Tree,” Takahashi said. “Roger that. You’re cleared for takeoff.”
“Roger,” Jackson said. A cold excitement filled him as he put the handset down.
FAROUK WAVED THE wand of his Geiger counter over a narrow steel capsule six inches long. The headphones around his ears clicked rapidly, each click a signal that the capsule was emitting radiation. He put the wand over a second steel capsule and again heard the clicking.
Mazen, the mujahid commander, was a giant, the tallest Arab Farouk had ever met. He spoke a rough, peasant Arabic and carried both an AK-47 and a sword strapped to his waist. Since giving Farouk the capsules he had stood quietly by the stairs at the back of the room, nervously watching Farouk flutter the Geiger counter. He fears that he has brought me junk, Farouk thought.
“How many are there?” Farouk asked.
“Thousands,” Mazen said. “Too many to count.”
And with that answer Farouk knew his trip had been worth the risk. Thousands of capsules of cobalt. Allah had bestowed a great gift upon his warriors this night. Khadri would be pleased.
The ring of a cell phone startled him.
“Nam,” Mazen said, and hung up. “One of our brothers is watching the main road, in case the Americans come this way,” he said to Farouk and Zayd. “But they never do. They fear Ghazalia at night.”
“So?” Zayd said to Farouk. “What do you think?”
But Farouk wasn’t quite ready to share his exhilaration. “Show me the yellow metal.”
Mazen handed him a canvas bag, surprisingly heavy and filled with yellow pellets. Farouk waved the wand over them, and again the Geiger counter woke up, clicking loud and fast. The pellets were uranium oxide, he thought. Yellowcake. Slightly enriched, 2 or 3 percent, though nowhere near weapons-grade. Farouk held up the bag.
“You found these in a barrel.”
“Nam,” Mazen said. “It was very heavy. We could hardly move it.”
“It was the only barrel?”
“There were four, Doctor.”
Four barrels of yellowcake? Farouk tried to contain his excitement. This was only the start, he reminded himself. They needed to gather the material and then get it to the United States. But there were ways. They would truck the uranium and the cobalt capsules into Jordan. Then to Dubai, or Turkey. East to Pakistan and then Singapore. West to Nigeria and then across the Atlantic to Brazil. He didn’t know the details; Khadri would handle that. But he knew there were ways.
“My brothers,” Farouk said. “You have answered our prayers.”
“Allahu akbar!” Mazen screamed. Then his cell phone trilled again.
A FEW SECONDS earlier the Mad Dogs’ Humvees had swung west off Dodge, flicked off their lights, and accelerated toward the barbershop. The Humvees didn’t have jet turbine engines like the tanks, but then again they didn’t weigh seventy tons. They swept down the dark silent avenue at seventy-five miles an hour, the wind pushing back J.C.’s face. He stared down the road through his goggles, looking for movement, but he didn’t notice the small man frantically dialing his cell phone from an Opel sedan.
As they closed in, J.C. wondered what they might find. Probably nothing. He hoped that anyone inside would be smart enough not to fight. The first seconds of a raid were the most dangerous. The Mad Dogs had to hold their fire as they sorted out friends and foes.
BUT TONIGHT THAT wouldn’t be a problem. Qusay’s alert backfired. By the time his call went through, the Mad Dogs had nearly reached the store. The guerrillas — eight in all, including Farouk and Zayd — could only grab their guns and run for their cars.
THE HUMVEE THUMPED over a curb and into the narrow parking lot. J.C. saw three guys with AKs running from the shop. He covered them with his machine gun. “Stop!” he yelled.
They turned and fired wildly. Rounds thumped into the Humvee, and another seared by J.C.’s head. Hostile fire, he thought automatically. Rules of engagement permit lethal force. Even before the words were complete in his mind he had put the.50-caliber on target and squeezed its trigger.
Fire flashed out of the weapon’s muzzle. At close range a large-caliber machine gun has unfortunate effects on the human body. One man’s head exploded like an overripe pumpkin; the other two were cut nearly in half. Before their bodies had hit the ground J.C. had already turned his gun on the shop’s front door, where two more men stood, firing hopelessly. This time one survived his initial burst. But not the second.
Five kills. J.C. felt no emotion at all. The mission wasn’t over yet.
MAZEN RAN INTO the storage room, his shirt drenched with blood. “You told them,” he yelled at Farouk. “Spy. Jew spy.” Mazen swung his rifle at Farouk, who hunched down, catching the blow in his right shoulder. A dull pain spread down his arm.
“I swear to Allah—” Farouk croaked out the words, feeling his bowels loosen.
“Idiot,” Zayd said to Mazen. “Look at him. He’s more frightened than you.”
Zayd pulled a grenade from his belt, ran to the door, and tossed the grenade into the barbershop without looking out. “Inshallah, that will give us time,” he said. The building shuddered as the grenade exploded in the front room.
“Stay here,” Zayd said to Mazen. “Kill as many as you can. Farouk, come.”
Farouk reached for his Geiger counter.
“Leave it.”
Farouk shook his head. He seemed to have
forgotten how to speak.
“Fat fool,” Zayd said. “It won’t help you anymore.” But Farouk held on to the counter like a charm. He would not die in here tonight. Allah would not permit it. Not after what he had found.
Zayd turned away and trotted up the staircase. Farouk followed, huffing with each step up. But at the top of the stairs Zayd cursed wildly. A cheap steel lock held the door closed.
ANYPLACE ELSE, CAPTAIN Jackson would have taken his time, brought up his tanks and reduced the barbershop to rubble, then let the Iraqi cops sort through the pieces. But not Ghazalia, not tonight. Already men were on the street, pointing at the store and his Humvees.
After the initial firefight, the barbershop had briefly gone quiet. Jackson had crept toward the shop, hoping they had killed everyone inside. Then a grenade had blasted out the front window, sending a glass shard into his cheek and a trickle of blood down his face. He was more annoyed than hurt; he shouldn’t have left himself so vulnerable.
Now he stood behind the open armored door of his Humvee, his ear cradled to the company radio as he ordered his Mad Dogs into place. Lieutenant Colonel Fahd waited a few feet away, Dunhill in hand. He hadn’t said anything, but Jackson could see the eagerness in his eyes.
The company’s tanks positioned themselves at the corners of the block, cordoning off the stores so no one could enter or leave. Three cars were parked in front of the barbershop, and J.C. had already taken out five guys by himself. Only a few jihadis could be left, Jackson figured. He clicked on the company radio.
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