Demetrius was about Saul’s height, six feet. Lean, very fit, about fifty, with an intelligent horsey face, tanned from spending time outdoors. Not just West Point, Saul reminded himself. He had an M.P.A. from Columbia and a Ph.D. in political science from Princeton. He remembered Bill Walden’s description of General Demetrius. “He’s not just some military hard-ass. He listens.”
“So, Mr. Berenson, you know my problem?” Demetrius began, leaning forward on his desk, fiddling with a ballpoint pen. Behind him, Saul could see a bit of the air force base and a palm tree through the office window’s partially closed venetian blinds.
“Your problem is that Abu Nazir, IPLA, knows everything your troops or the Iraqis are going to do before you do. So do the Shiites and the Iranians. They’re always one step ahead of you. Your problem is that the U.S. is on the verge of an economic meltdown and the Congress and the country think the war in Iraq is over, only nobody told the enemy. Meanwhile, we, the CIA, have been playing Whac-A-Mole with IPLA and AQI, al-Qaeda in Iraq, not to mention the Shiites, and have been of little or no use to you. That’s your problem. Oh, call me Saul, General,” he said.
“Finally.” Demetrius smiled, putting down the pen. “Somebody from Langley capable of telling something that resembles the truth.”
“There’s more,” Saul said, and told him about the SOG mission to Otaibah and Carrie’s intel. When he talked about the SOG mission, Demetrius went to a wall map and they followed the mission on the map and then Carrie’s route in Damascus and to Aleppo.
“So the Syrians gave sanctuary to Abu Nazir?” General Demetrius asked. “Why?”
“So that Sunnis in Damascus don’t start strapping on suicide vests or RPGs with President Assad and his generals as the target,” Saul said. “Anyway, Abu Nazir’s gone. He’s not in Syria anymore.”
“So where is he?”
“Probably back in Iraq.”
“Any idea where?”
“Could be anywhere, could be south, even north.”
“Why? The Kurds’d have him for breakfast.”
“Hard to say. The one thing we’ve learned is not to underestimate him.”
“But you’ll find him?”
“Eventually. Right now that’s not my priority,” Saul said, moving his chair closer to the general’s desk. “Or yours either. You’re leaving very shortly, aren’t you?”
General Demetrius nodded, looking at him sharply.
“How did you know that?”
Saul pointed to himself. “CIA, remember? Listen, I came to you because it’s vital.”
Demetrius put down the ballpoint pen and leaned forward, his chin resting on hands clasped together as if he were praying.
“I’m listening.”
“I’ve been suspicious of something for a long time. Our ops officer in Otaibah and Damascus came through with intel that confirms beyond the shadow of a doubt that we have a mole. The likelihood is that it’s a very high placed mole somewhere within the Coalition Forces or top echelons of the Iraqi government. But I need to be absolutely honest and clear. It could also be inside the CIA’s Baghdad Station or even at Langley. It could even be inside your own command, General. It is one hundred percent actionable intelligence.”
“Inside my command?”
“Or mine, General. I don’t think it’s likely that a CIA agent or an American soldier would do such a thing, and none of us likes to think it’s possible, but you and I both know, sir, it’s been known to happen.”
General Demetrius stood up. He began pacing up and back in his office, then turned to Saul.
“What the hell am I supposed to do? We’re on the verge of making critical decisions to finish this war. I have to trust the people I work with, that I give orders to.”
“It’s worse than that. The same actionable intel also indicates that Abu Nazir is planning a major ‘action,’ something that may finally trigger the civil war you have been doing everything in your power to prevent, General,” Saul said, rubbing his beard.
“Do you know what it is?”
“Not yet. But I will. Very soon.”
General Demetrius glanced at his watch.
“We have three and a half minutes, Saul. Then I have to go.” He leaned against his desk. “Why don’t you tell me why you’re really here?”
Saul smiled. “They said you were good, General. I have to get going too,” he added, standing up and lifting the handle on his carry-on. “I need a favor.”
“And that is?”
“A counteroperation to block Abu Nazir’s action is being set up. I may—repeat may—have to come to you at some point for some Special Forces–type resources. Not sure if and not sure how much. Anyway, just in case, the name for this counteroperation is ‘Operation Iron Thunder,’” Saul said.
“And flushing the mole is part of this operation?” Demetrius asked, heading for the door.
“You could say so,” Saul said, following him to the outer office, where a half-dozen officers stood ready for the general. “You could definitely say so.”
General Demetrius stopped.
“And do you know where I’m going now?”
Saul smiled. “You’re flying, along with some additional resources, on your specially fitted C-17 to CENTCOM HQ in Doha, Qatar. Actually, I’m headed to the Middle East myself. Only not to Qatar.”
“Would you like a lift? I think we need to continue this conversation,” General Demetrius said.
“I was hoping you’d ask,” Saul said as a master sergeant grabbed the handle of his suitcase and pulled it after them outside the office toward the general’s waiting staff car.
The C-17 was bigger than any aircraft Saul had ever flown in. Both sides of its cabin aisle were fitted with rows of screens and electronics, which enabled the dozens of officers and men working at their stations to track the latest data from land, sea, and air operations from all parts of General Demetrius’s widespread command across the entire Middle East and South Asia. For several hours out of MacDill, an F-16 fighter jet flew escort, then peeled off when they were well out over the Atlantic.
Saul sat toward the rear, in an area of seats that were set in rows like business-class seats in a normal passenger jet. He worked on his laptop, doing tradecraft, setting up basic drops, codes, locations, for Operation Iron Thunder. He used special CIA encryption software that was unique to CIA Top Secret Special Access files; it could not be decoded by standard NSA, DIA, or other agency decryption software, not even by other CIA decryption software.
Two hours out, Lieutenant Colonel Larson, looking much more in his element in a Class-A uniform, came and asked if Saul would like to join the general for coffee. Saul followed him forward past the men and women working at their screens, talking through headsets to their counterparts in various commands, to the general’s office. It was completely closed off. Inside was a desk, conference table, armchairs, and a lounge area with a stocked bar, all of it modernistic and made of stainless steel; it had the odd feel of a men’s club for robots.
General Demetrius was sitting in a swivel armchair, sipping coffee and reading a copy of the Economist, which he put down when Saul came in. He poured Saul a cup of coffee.
“How do you take it?”
“Milk and sugar; you take yours black, thanks.”
General Demetrius swiveled toward him, hands on his knees like a sumo wrestler about to pounce.
“You’re setting up a separate operation outside Langley, aren’t you? That’s what this little trip is all about, isn’t it?”
Saul sipped his coffee.
“Good coffee. I’m here so you could ask me that.” He looked around the partitioned office. “No bugs I hope.”
General Demetrius shook his head.
“You are worried. Who else knows about this?”
“The director of the CIA; the vice president, Bill Walden. Took him by surprise, but he finally agreed. Facts are facts. The national security advisor, Mike Higgins. The president. Now you.”
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“Where are you going to run it from?”
“I’ll be moving around. But I’ll have something in Bahrain,” he said. “The capital, Manama. For obvious reasons.”
“Middle of the Persian Gulf. Not that far from Iraq. Or CENTCOM. Or Iran, for that matter. Like the real estate people say: location, location, location. Or do you have some thing or some one particular in mind, Saul?”
“Both maybe. Manama’s a crossroads. A place where people come to do business, clean and dirty. And close enough to your headquarters in Doha, General, although I suspect you won’t be there that often.” He put down his coffee.
“You know damn well I won’t be sitting on my ass there,” General Demetrius growled. “There’s a battle shaping up in Basra right this minute—and we don’t have shit there.”
“It’s not just IPLA. The Kurds, the Shiites, the Mahdi Army, the Iranians . . .” Saul ticked them off. “Abu Nazir is trying to light a match. There’s plenty of tinder lying around.”
“How soon and where?”
“I’ll let you know very soon,” Saul said, looking at the map of Iraq on the general’s laptop screen. “There are some things I have to do first.”
General Demetrius looked at him.
“Operation Iron Thunder?”
Saul nodded.
“Where do you start?”
Stand in the fire of a blast furnace to get the answer in a place where there is no God, Saul thought, for some bizarre reason thinking of his father. “By sending my best operations officer into the enemy’s camp with a big fat target painted on her back,” he said.
“What?”
“Sorry. A stupid metaphor. We don’t just know we have a mole who’s feeding IPLA, General. For the first time, we also have a lead that might help us nail who it is. There’s more. The Iranians. They may be also be getting intel.”
“You’ve been reading my DIA reports. There’s something going on with the Iranians. The Shiites in Iraq have suddenly gone quiet. Too quiet. If our withdrawal from Iraq were to come under heavy enemy attack, it could be a bloodbath,” General Demetrius said grimly.
“What if we were to come under attack from both sides, the Sunnis and the Shiites at the same time—and they know everything you’re going to do in advance?”
“You must be a mind reader. What the hell do you think has been keeping me up at night?”
“I have a plan,” Saul said.
“Iron Thunder.”
“Exactly. I understand you play Go. Something of a fanatic, they say,” Saul said, taking a board and a box of black and white stones out of his carry-on. “You can be black. If you like, I’ll take a modified komidashi.”
General Demetrius studied him. “Are you hustling me, Saul?” He glanced at his watch. “Are you sure? The game’ll take at least a couple of hours.”
“No,” Saul said, waiting for the general to play his first stone. “Not that long.”
CHAPTER 9
Tal Afar, Iraq
15 April 2009
It was raining, gray clouds bundled over the city. Brody followed Daleel and five of the others, weapons concealed beneath their robes, in a single file through the narrow street. They were going to the mosque for the noon Dhuhr prayer. The street was muddy, the pavement cracked and rutted. Every shop and building was battered, shot through with bullet holes from the heavy fighting that had taken place there two years earlier between Abu Nazir’s IPLA joined by elements of AQI and the U.S. 82nd Airborne.
Although Tal Afar had been officially proclaimed a “Coalition success” and it was a majority Turkmen, not Arab, city, you could still hear the sounds of one or two rocket attacks and IEDs almost every day. But Brody wasn’t thinking about any of these things. He had a decision to make. His life depended on it.
The young Turkmen woman in the makhbaz, the bakery shop where he bought the flat bread for some of the group, spoke English. One morning, three weeks ago, when Afsal had walked outside to talk privately with Mahdi and, for a moment, they were alone in the shop, she looked at him and asked, “What is an American doing with these Sunnis?”
For some reason, maybe because it was the first time a woman had spoken to him in English in six years, or because she wore a braided female Turkmen’s cap that meant she wasn’t an Arab, wasn’t in any way like his captors, or maybe because her black eyes held a hint, though it was hard for him to believe, that she looked at him the way a woman looks at a man, he told her: “I’m a prisoner, an American Marine. They captured me.” Then, louder, “Bikam haadha?” How much is that? Because Afsal and Mahdi had just come back in.
After that, each time he went into the makhbaz, she glanced at him. Even Mahdi noticed.
“What’s going on with you and that Turkmen girl?” he said.
“Nothing. We say salaam, hello, that’s all, and I buy the bread, thanks be to Allah,” Brody said.
“You think she likes you? A foreigner? You think she’ll be like American girls, who all you do is look at them and they spread their legs?”
“I’m a married man. I have a wife and two children,” Brody said.
“But you want the Turkmen girl too?”
“No. Why? Do you want her?”
“Pah! Turkmen women grow mustaches on their upper lips. Too bad you can’t have a soft Arab woman, American,” Mahdi said.
“I told you, I’m married,” Brody said as they took their shoes off at the entrance to the mosque. But even here, one of them, Afsal, who had been next to him all along, stayed behind with his AK-47, scanning the street for IEDs or any cars or carts that might come along with a bomb, or worse for IPLA, an Iraqi army patrol—more dangerous now because recruits in the new Iraqi Army were nearly all Shiites.
So they watched him even closer, Brody thought as he bowed his head to the floor in unison with the others in prayer. Except ten days ago, it happened again. Abu Nazir himself had driven by and called Afsal and Mahdi out to his car, leaving Brody and the Turkmen girl—her name was Akjemal—alone in the bakery. She motioned him to the side of the counter and spoke quickly, showing him a beautiful round bread with star patterns baked on the top.
“My uncle Jeyhun is the sheikh of our neighborhood,” she whispered quickly. “He doesn’t want to risk anything here in Tal Afar, but he is willing to smuggle you to Mosul under sacks of flour in his truck. Mosul is not far, maybe sixty kilometers. He knows American soldiers there. He says you can be turned over to the U.S. First Cavalry in one hour. Will you come?”
“They watch me closely. If they catch me, they’ll kill me. You and your uncle too,” he said, glancing at the shop window. Afsal and Mahdi were still talking by the car.
“I’m a Turkmen woman. I don’t fear these Sunni dogs,” she said, her cheeks reddening. He understood then that she did like him and that everything hinged on what he said next. Out of the corner of his eye, through the window, he saw Afsal coming back into the shop.
“I’ll let you know,” he said, moving away from her. “That is beautiful bread, al anesah, but we will have the usual order, please.”
That same afternoon, Abu Nazir called for him. They sat over small cups of tea in the main room on the top floor of a large stone house, one of several connected by underground tunnels in the Old City, where they were staying. Although Abu Nazir spoke softly, the whole time Afsal stood by the door, a 9mm pistol in his hand. Through the row of arched windows, Brody could see the roofs of stone houses in the city, many of them showing scars from the fighting, and on a hill in the distance, an old Ottoman castle. Abu Nazir told him they would be leaving Tal Afar soon.
“It’s been hard for you, hasn’t it?” Abu Nazir said, putting his hand on Brody’s shoulder.
Brody found it hard to breathe. It all came back. The capture. The beatings. Killing Tom Walker. Digging his grave in the sand. Then more beatings. Again and again till he couldn’t take it anymore. His tiny concrete cell that he called his tomb, because he came to think of himself as dead. No more Jessica,
no more Dana, his little girl, no tiny Chris, his own son. The endless beatings and taunts from Afsal and Mahdi. Afsal the worst, his personal demon, until he thought he would go insane, and there were times in the cell and even when he was praying with them—at first just to try to mitigate things a little and because he was so desperate for any kind of human companionship, anything—even then, even when he was saying the shahadah with them, he knew all they wanted to do was kill him and he thought he was going insane.
Because he was afraid. Like acid, drop by drop eating his soul away. He had been afraid all along. He had lived with it all this time. He had lived with it all his life.
Nine minutes. Gunner Brody.
And then, when they had left Syria in the middle of the night, they took him out to the middle of the desert. There was nothing there. Only emptiness and a hawk against the golden sky. And God, he thought. Finally, Allah. He was sure of it.
Afsal put the gun to his head. They were going to kill him and leave him there; his bones never to be found. For Jessica, he would be MIA, missing in action, forever. Would she wonder sometimes, years later, probably married to another man, what had happened to him?
Jessica. What had happened to her? It had been six years. Did she still think of him? Had she found someone else? Did she get a divorce and remarry? What of the kids? Dana would be thirteen now. What was that? Eighth grade? A teenager. Starting to think about boys maybe. And Chris? His baby boy? He would be seven. Going into second grade!
He should have died then and there in the desert. Only right at that exact moment, Abu Nazir had driven the flat sand in his SUV and pulled up perhaps fifty meters from them. He had leaned out a window and shouted: “U’af!” Stop!
So they had come to Tal Afar. A city seared by war. Many of the houses empty, where the only movement at night came from cats or rats that you sometimes saw in the streets or on the top of a broken wall, eyes gleaming like dimes. And another room, this one he had to share with Afsal, who would sneer at him, “Infidel! American! Because you say the shahadah, do you think you are fooling anyone, you piece of camel shit!”
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