The Secret Soldier jw-5

by Alex Berenson

  AFTER WATCHING THE DIGITAL video of the amputation on his laptop, Bakr decided he needed to make two versions of his propaganda tape. The raw footage was too graphic. Even his stomach turned as he watched Kurland’s hand hanging half off the stepladder with the saw digging in. He wanted to enrage the Americans, not sicken them. He would post the uncut video only to a few jihadi websites.

  With the help of Abdul, his translator, Bakr recut the video to focus on the minutes before and after the cutting. He included a glimpse of Kurland’s face and a longer cut to the gauze-covered stump to prove the tape was real. At the end of the video, he made an explicit threat to execute Kurland in twenty-four hours if his demands weren’t met — and explained that the Saudi government had sponsored him, with the details to be revealed after Kurland’s death.

  Bakr planned to get this video to the world’s news channels the same way he had delivered the first tape. Abdul would drive a freshly burned DVD to Hassan’s safe house in Jeddah. From there, Hassan would copy it and upload it to a site run by a Finnish company that specialized in anonymous Internet hosting. They’d used a Russian company for the first video. Then they’d call Al Jazeera and CNN and give them a link to download the video. Bakr knew that the Americans had amazing abilities to monitor the Internet. He wanted to be sure that they couldn’t track these transfers anywhere near him.

  But he took too long cutting the second video. The curfew turned into a problem. So he told Abdul to let Hassan know that they’d deliver the video in the morning. Technically, the deadline for Bakr’s demands wouldn’t pass until noon, and Bakr wanted to wait until after the deadline to post the video. Of course, the United States would never agree to his demands, but waiting would look better. In any case, the video would be online by late tomorrow afternoon, and the United States and Saudi Arabia would be on the edge of war.

  Abdul called Hassan. “He’s not answering.”

  “Leave a message, then.” Bakr wasn’t worried. Hassan might have been on the roof, watching the neighborhood. Or even on the toilet. “If we don’t hear from him, we’ll call back later.” From a different cell. Since the raid on his camp, Bakr had become even more cautious about his phones and e-mail accounts. He never used the same phone twice in a row, and he turned them off whenever he wasn’t using them. E-mail he tried to avoid entirely, although he couldn’t always.

  Sure enough, a half hour later, with the video finally finished, Hassan called Abdul back. But Abdul spent most of the call shouting into the phone. “What did he say?” Bakr asked after Abdul hung up.

  “I couldn’t hear very well. Something about a helicopter. He’s worried. I asked him for details, and he said he’d get Usman, and after a few seconds the phone disconnected.”

  “Lots of helicopters out tonight.”

  “I tell you, he sounded upset. Not like himself.”

  There were only four of them in the house: Bakr, Abdul, Ramzi, and Marwan. The last two were in their mid-twenties and did the menial work, running errands and cooking and watching Kurland’s cell. Bakr wasn’t worried about Kurland escaping, but he did fear that Kurland might try to hurt himself, stop him from making the video.

  “Come on,” Bakr said. “Let’s talk to the infidel.”

  A MINUTE LATER, THEY stood beside Kurland. The ambassador’s skin was pale and slack. His breaths came fast and shallow. Bakr put a thumb into Kurland’s right nostril and tugged until Kurland came awake.

  “Did you tell them where we are?” Bakr said, Abdul translating. Kurland shook his head. Bakr moved his hands up Kurland’s face. “Tell me. Or I’ll put out your eyes.”

  Now Kurland giggled quietly. The sound he made was not noise as much as the idea of noise. “I believe you might. Wouldn’t even need the saw. Just get your thumbs in and push. You fool. How could I tell anyone anything? I don’t know where we are.”

  “He says no,” Abdul said. “He says he doesn’t know where he is, anyway.”

  “Is that all he said?”

  “Yes.” Abdul didn’t want to translate exactly what Kurland had said. He had no wish to see Kurland’s eyes rolling loose, staring up at him from the floor of the cell.

  “Fine, then.”

  “They coming for you?” Kurland said. “Is that it? Coming to get you?”

  “Tell him I’m going to cut his throat. The next time I see him,” Bakr said. Abdul hesitated. “Tell him,” Bakr repeated. So Abdul did.

  “Good,” Kurland said. “It’ll be a relief.”

  THEY HAD JUST LEFT the cell when Abdul’s phone buzzed with a text from Hassan. “False alarm. All clear.” Yet Bakr wasn’t relieved. The message should have had the code “66” at the end to prove it was real. It didn’t. Maybe the stress had caused Hassan to forget, though Bakr had drummed the necessity for the codes into his commanders.

  Bakr stepped outside, paced slowly around the house. Could the muk or the Americans be on their way? Bakr couldn’t imagine how. Hassan didn’t know the house’s exact location. No one did, except the four men inside it. And nothing connected Bakr to it. He’d rented it months before, paying cash, from a man who owned a dozen houses in Mecca. Anyway, the announcers on Saudi 1, the official television network, had said that the muk were focusing their search on the Najd and Riyadh. The announcers might be lying, trying to hide the truth about the search. But Bakr didn’t think so. He had been very careful. And the neighborhood was quiet. The streets were empty, and the helicopters well away.

  He was safe. They were safe. He was sure. Almost.

  Inside, he picked up another phone, called Hassan. But the call went directly to voicemail. Hassan’s cell was off. What was happening in Jeddah? He wished he could send Abdul to check, but the curfew made travel impossible. They would have to wait until the morning.

  Ten minutes later, Abdul’s phone buzzed again. This time the message came from Usman, not Hassan. “At Ramada Shubaika. Room 401. Come soon. No more messages.” The Shubaika was a neighborhood in north-central Mecca, a couple of kilometers away, reachable on back roads. Even with the curfew, Abdul or Ramzi could probably get there on a scooter. But Bakr didn’t understand how Usman had gotten to Mecca. Barely fifteen minutes before the curfew, Hassan had said that Usman was on the roof in Jeddah. And if something was really wrong, why had Hassan texted the all-clear?

  Nothing made sense. Unless Hassan had already been captured when he called, and Usman had somehow escaped and gotten here. Bakr stared at the Nokia’s screen: “Come soon. No more messages.” He didn’t fully believe the words, but he was afraid to ignore them. He couldn’t go himself, and he couldn’t chance losing Abdul. But Ramzi… and if something went wrong, if this turned out to be a trap, Bakr was certain that Ramzi wouldn’t be afraid to martyr himself.

  “Ramzi,” Bakr called. “Come here.”

  CHAPTER 25

  WELLS LAY PRONE BESIDE A CONCRETE WALL, WATCHING THE HOUSE where he hoped Kurland was hidden, waiting to see whether his bait would draw the jihadis. He was just a few feet off the road but well hidden from the houses on both sides, thanks to the high, unbroken walls that lined the street. And he’d hardly heard a car since the curfew started. The muk were in a mood, and no sane Saudi wanted to anger them.

  Glass scratched at Wells through his thin gown. Dust coated his mouth and throat. Yet Wells couldn’t pretend that he didn’t enjoy this hunt. Growing up, he’d spent more than one November Saturday sitting with his dad on the forested flanks of the mountains outside Hamilton, waiting for deer and elk to bring their brimming bodies close. Hunting was as close as they came to bonding. Though his father hadn’t talked much, on those hunts or anywhere else. Most surgeons didn’t. A noisy operation was a troubled operation. Surgery was a strange way to spend a life. Surgeons saw the hidden damage time wreaked, blocked arteries and collapsed lungs. Inevitably, they grew to think of their fellow humans as broken machines. They cultivated their own inhumanity to cut with perfect dispassion. Yet a successful surgery was a kind of miracle. While Wells, w
hatever his philosophical musings, was a kind of anti-doctor, bringing death wherever he went, a one-man appointment in Samarra. Not for the first time, he wondered what his father would make of him.

  So he lay on his stomach, staring at a gate two hundred feet away, in a hunt exactly like and exactly unlike the ones he’d known as a boy. Gaffan was a block back. Wells hoped someone came out in the next few minutes and made going in easy. He was tired of playing hunches. In Lebanon and again in Jeddah, they’d been forced to attack without knowing if they had the right target. This time, he wanted to be sure.

  SOMEWHERE BEHIND THE GATE, an engine croaked to life. It was gaspowered and no more than a couple hundred CCs. It had to be the motorbike that Shafer had seen on the overheads. Wells stood, held his pistol loose. He’d left the M-16 in the car, figuring on silence and speed instead of maximum firepower. He was flush with the wall and certain that no one in the houses could see him.

  The bike rumbled around the house, stopped at the gate. Two men murmured in Arabic, and the gate squeaked open sideways. Wells crossed a driveway, one house between him and the scooter. Behind him he heard the Jeep’s engine turn over and crank up. He silently cursed Gaffan. No. Noise could only hurt them.

  Behind the gate, a man said, “What’s that?” and another said, “Should I go, then?” and the first said, “Hold on,” and the gate stopped squeaking. Wells ran, ran as best he could with his bloodspattered gown bunching around his legs. He heard the gate squeak again, only now it sounded as though it was closing—

  He got to the corner of the house. The gate was rolling forward, two feet between its front edge and the wall. Wells angled toward the wall and spun nimbly inside the gate—

  Which slammed closed behind him as he got inside. He saw two men. One sat on a motorbike five feet from Wells. The other stood at the far end of the gate, maybe twelve feet away. “Hey,” the man on the bike said. Wells lifted the Glock and shot him twice in the chest. The silenced rounds sounded like distant fireworks. The man’s mouth opened, and his hands came up and he fell off the back of the bike, his legs still squeezing the saddle—

  Wells turned toward the second man, who was coming at him, running, and got one shot off too high and missed. Now the guy was on him, four feet away, and Wells saw the knife in his hand. Wells pulled the trigger again, and the round caught the guy in the left shoulder and twisted him sideways. The guy stumbled, and Wells stepped aside and arched his back like a toreador and let the knife slide by. When the guy had fallen into the wall, Wells raised his arm until the tip of the silencer was almost touching the back of his head and shot him twice, even though once would have worked just fine. The top of his skull exploded, and his brains and blood splattered onto the concrete.

  From the house, a voice yelled, “Ramzi! Marwan! What’s happening?”

  BAKR WAS IN THE kitchen, making a pot of tea, when he heard the commotion, the unmistakable puff of a silenced pistol. Even before he asked the question, he knew. They’d gotten here somehow, the muk or the Americans. He didn’t understand how they had tracked him, but the answer no longer mattered. He still had time to kill Kurland. And then to escape with his video camera and lay out the evidence that proved the princes had supported him. “Come,” he said to Abdul. The camera and knife were on the kitchen counter. He grabbed them and ran.

  WELLS HEARD THE JEEP outside the gate. He didn’t have time to open it. Gaffan would have to get in on his own. Wells ran for the front door and then changed his mind and angled toward the driveway in back. He ducked low as he passed two barred windows. At the back-right corner of the house, he stopped. The ambulance was parked across a short apron of asphalt, in front of a big windowless garage.

  He stepped into the yard between the house and garage. Through a barred window, he saw the kitchen. A pot of tea steamed on the stove, but the room was empty. The back door into the house was open a few inches. Wells listened for footsteps but heard nothing. Had they gone upstairs? They wouldn’t keep Kurland on the first floor. But Arab houses rarely had basements.

  Then Wells remembered the cell in Lebanon that Meshaal had described. He ran for the garage, fearing that he was already too late.

  BAKR AND ABDUL CLIMBED into the cell. They wouldn’t have time to make a proper video, but they could still put the camera on the stepladder and record the moment when Bakr cut off Kurland’s head.

  Kurland stirred as they reached him. His skin was gray, his eyes red and inflamed, as if his body had responded to the amputation by giving up its defenses against infection. He said something Bakr didn’t understand and stuck out his tongue. He smelled like an open sewer, his insides rotting. Bakr didn’t understand how Kurland had gotten so sick so quickly. But no matter. Bakr set up the camera on the stepladder, its top step now coated with dried blood. “Tell him the Americans haven’t met our demands and the time for his execution has come,” he said to Abdul.

  “Do we have time?”

  “Do it.”

  Abdul spoke. Kurland responded with two words that needed no translation.

  “Ask him if he wants to convert to Islam.”

  This time the answer was three words.

  “Fine, then. Tell him that by coming to the Arabian Peninsula, he’s broken Islamic law, and that he’s rejected the opportunity to save himself by converting. Tell him the penalty is death.”

  THE GARAGE WAS A big concrete shed, three car-sized bays wide. Wells tried to lift the front doors, found them locked. He ran to the windowless door on the side of the garage, pressed on its steel handle. It, too, was locked. He wondered if the men inside were waiting, standing inside the door with their rifles poised. Forcing your way into a room without covering fire was an all-time no-no. But he needed to keep coming. So far, the sirens weren’t any closer. Help — if the Saudi police qualified as help — was a ways off.

  Wells put the tip of the silencer to the edge of the door, just above the handle. He angled it diagonally down and squeezed the trigger twice. By his count, he’d fired seven rounds here, and three at the house in Jeddah. He still had nine rounds left. Which ought to be enough.

  From somewhere inside the garage, a man shrieked.

  KURLAND OPENED HIS EYES. They were back. They were talking. The big one talked in Arabic, and the little one translated. That was how it went. But whatever language they spoke, they were beasts. They’d taken his hand. His left hand, with his wedding ring. Too late, he’d realized his ring was gone. He wished they’d taken his right. If he was going to die in this little room, he wanted to die wearing his ring.

  Now they were back for the rest of him. He knew even before they spoke. They didn’t offer him water or Coke or anything else. No fake courtesies. Not that he wanted any. They seemed rushed. They made their speeches, their psychotic justifications, and ignored his curses and came at him. The big one holding a knife that must have been a foot long, with a black handle and a gleaming serrated edge. Kurland was afraid now, more afraid than he’d ever been, but angry, too. He wanted to see Barbara again. His kids. And grandkids. I don’t deserve this. I don’t deserve to die. Though no one ever did.

  Fine, then. He would die. But he didn’t plan to make it easy. Dignity didn’t matter to him anymore. His skin burned and his skull throbbed and his swollen tongue filled his mouth like a loaf of bread. They’d taken his dignity when they took his hand. So when they got close he shook his arm free of its sling and pushed the tip of the stump against the wall behind him—the pain—

  He screamed. And dug his heels into the floor to rock the chair off its back legs, and leaned forward and toppled over, feeling a ridiculous surge of triumph as the floor rose toward him—

  THE SHRIEK BROKE OFF. Then started again, this time resolving into a man’s voice, words in English: “No, you don’t, you bastards—” Wells pushed open the door and came into the garage in three big sideways steps, holding the Glock in a two-hand grip, keeping his shoulders forward and down to make himself a smaller target. All useless if someone
was waiting inside, but he had to try. He looked side to side—

  A Toyota Camry, a shovel, a pick, a humming electrical generator, empty water bottles, an orange first-aid kit that looked like the twin of the one he’d found in Jeddah. No jihadis. He ran around the Camry and saw two flat metal plates, big, the ones that utility workers used to cover the holes they made when they dug up streets. A crude hinged hatch had been cut into the front plate. The hatch, two feet square, was unlocked. And open.

  The hole was about twelve feet deep. Wells peeked down, saw metal rods embedded in the wall that seemed to serve as a crude ladder. But the hatch was too narrow and the cell too deep to allow him to glimpse the entire space below. Unless he squatted down and put his face to the hatch, he couldn’t see Kurland or the kidnappers.

  BAKR COULDN’T BELIEVE THAT Kurland had knocked over his chair. Crazy American. He and Abdul flipped it up, ignoring Kurland, who was yelling and waving his stump, blood leaking from the gauze. Bakr reached for his knife, but Kurland thrashed his head sideways so he couldn’t get a clean stroke. Bakr tried to grab his chin, but Kurland snapped his jaw like a wild dog. “Get the morphine,” Bakr said to Abdul. The syringes were in the first-aid kit, in the garage.

  “We don’t have time—”

  “I want the video to be clean, not this screaming—”

  “The video, the video, you’re insane—”

  “Do it!”

  WELLS HEARD THEM YELLING and backed away from the hatch and dropped onto his hands and knees. They didn’t know he was here. For the first time, he thought he might succeed. He was far enough from the hatch that the jihadi climbing out wouldn’t see him, close enough to be able to kill the guy cleanly. “This is stupid,” the man below said. His feet pounded on the metal rungs, rising step by step—