“He’s worth the trouble?”
Batta meant, do we trust him? It was possible the Islamic State already knew about Abu Ibrahim and was dangling him to lure them into Syria. In that case, the mission was simple suicide.
“An 8-C. I wouldn’t have asked otherwise.”
The CIA scored its agents on many different scales. The simplest and most important was called the 10-A. The number measured the value of the information the source had provided, from 1 to 10, 10 being best. The letter measured the agency’s confidence that he was genuine and not secretly controlled by another country’s intelligence service, from A to G, A being Most confident. In practice, 10s were reserved for presidents, 9s for ministers and generals. As and Bs were similarly tough to find. 8-C meant that the agency believed “the source had provided important information at serious personal risk and was probably uncompromised.”
“He’s given us good stuff about pipelines, their smuggling routes. Stuff that’s actionable, cost them money. We don’t think they would have put him out as a dangle, especially since they couldn’t know we’d come over the border.”
Durette had a broad, flat face and pale blue eyes that pressed gently yet remorselessly. He had lost a foot to a mine in Afghanistan. He never ordered any of his men into missions. He always asked, and he never downplayed the risks. Yet everyone always said yes.
“I’ll see what Mahmoud says,” Batta said.
Mahmoud had said three hundred fifty thousand. More than double the price of the warehouse job. Still, the number gave Batta a certain confidence. If the Syrian thought the job was impossible, he would have thrown out a ridiculous figure, a million or more.
Three hundred fifty meant he wanted to try.
—
NOW, in Harran, Batta was feeling more than the usual pre-mission jitters. Raqqa wasn’t a red zone, it was a black hole. Even if Abu Ibrahim hadn’t been doubled and Mahmoud didn’t plan to sell Batta and Girol to the Orange Jumpsuit Film Co., they didn’t know the place well enough to judge the on-the-ground risks. Did they face a ten percent chance of hitting a checkpoint? Fifty? Ninety?
Batta forced the fear from his mind. He had survived five years of this stupid war. He’d survive the next forty-eight hours. Before he knew it, he and Girol would be back in Gaziantep, having a drink. Or ten. A few days after that, the murderers in Raqqa would be wondering where their bank accounts had gone. Easy.
“So, through the canals, we find your friend here. Midnight.” Mahmoud pointed to a spot on the map, just off a dirt road that dead-ended in a tiny village northwest of Raqqa. “If he’s there.”
“He’s smart, he’ll have no problem finding it.” In truth, Batta had no idea of Abu Ibrahim’s sense of direction. Batta had never met the man, didn’t even know his real name. Safer for everyone.
“He’s waiting, we pick him up, switch horses.”
“Switch horses?”
“Five of us, four horses. Did you want him to walk?”
Batta felt more than a little foolish. Despite all the preplanning, he hadn’t considered the issue.
“Ajmad comes with me, the two of us together weigh less than you,” Mahmoud said. “He rides Ajmad’s. He can ride?”
“Yes.” Something else Batta didn’t know. But even if Abu Ibrahim had the world’s worst case of hippophobia, he would get over it tomorrow night, given the alternative.
“Back the way we came. We have a crescent moon, not too much light, not too little. We do it all between sunset and sunrise, we get back to Ain Issa, we’re safe.”
Maybe even if they couldn’t get all the way back. Batta hadn’t told Mahmoud, and wouldn’t, but he had a couple of aces tucked away. Tomorrow night, the agency would put a helicopter on standby just north of the border. The Islamic State had captured radar systems and anti-aircraft missiles from the Syrian Air Force and moved them to Raqqa, so the copter couldn’t risk landing inside the city. But Durette had promised he would try an emergency exfiltration even twenty-five kilometers outside Raqqa, if Batta asked.
Better still, they would have a pair of guardian angels, two Reaper drones overhead. The drones would carry full payloads, four Hellfire missiles each, and operate under the agency’s loosest rules of engagement. The lawyers at Langley called it non-identification/one-call launch. In plain English, if the Reaper pilots spotted armed men closing on Batta’s team, they could fire without knowing exactly who their targets were. They wouldn’t even need to speak to Batta or Girol. They did have to call, but if the men on the ground didn’t answer, the pilots could assume that they were in trouble and fire.
The rules made sense. No other Americans, soldier or civilian, were in the area. The risk of friendly fire was nil. The area was farmland, so the risk of civilian casualties was low, too. The one advantage of operating alone in hostile territory was the chance for massive air support.
The pilots had also promised to give advance warning of jihadis in their way. Batta wasn’t counting on the help. Distinguishing a checkpoint from farmers hanging out would be almost impossible. And if they ran across a checkpoint, the drones wouldn’t be much use. The Hellfires had a kill radius of a hundred feet. They would vaporize Batta and his guys just as efficiently as the jihadis around them.
But if the mission was a trap and the Islamic State’s soldiers had set an ambush, the Reapers would give Batta’s team at least a chance to escape.
“So to Ain Issa with our new friend,” Batta said. “Then home sweet home.”
“And you pay. Three hundred fifty minus one, that’s two hundred fifty. Thousand.”
“Nothing would make me happier.”
“Then we agree.” Mahmoud tapped Baraq. “Lucky you, you get to ride this one. You’ll break the others.”
—
THEY FOLLOWED Mahmoud south through miles of pistachio groves. The trees looked like bushes on sticks, twenty feet high, with nuts that hung heavy in clusters. They were ugly, and didn’t offer much shade, and Batta didn’t mind when they thinned out.
Mahmoud had made sure they had plenty of water for the horses. Otherwise, they were traveling light. In his pack, Batta carried only a spare phone, a bedroll, a Makarov, a GPS handheld, a cheap map and binoculars, and a basic first-aid kit—all plausible enough. Girol had the same gear, plus a beat-up short-stock AK.
Though Batta did have one other piece of equipment, one that the CIA had hardly used in fifty years. The scientists at Langley called it an L-pill. Despite the name, it was not a pill at all but a pea-sized plastic ampule covered in rubber. The ampule held a concentrated solution of potassium cyanide. Biting through the rubber and plastic released the cyanide. Unconsciousness from oxygen deprivation occurred in seconds, death in minutes.
During the 1950s, operatives had carried the ampules in their mouths as false teeth. As the Cold War settled down, they fell out of favor. Now they were back, at least around here. To eliminate the risk of accidental poisoning, surgeons attached the ampules behind the ear with skin-colored tape. They were invisible, except for the closest of inspections, but easy to reach and tug off.
Without the cyanide, Batta wasn’t sure he would have gone ahead with this mission. Dying was bad enough. He couldn’t imagine spending his final moments on camera as a masked idiot behind him made an inane speech. Then the final shot, his head laid atop his body, eyes wide in disbelief. Death and dishonor in one neat package.
Batta knew Girol carried a pill, too. Of course they’d never discussed it. He imagined what the Marine would say if Batta asked: Yeah, genius, I got the Hershey-covered version—if it goes tits up, I want chocolate to be the last thing I remember. Delicious. What about you? Hummus, right? One thing all you sand crabs have in common, you all love hummus.
No. Girol would never give a speech that long.
After the pistachios, they passed an olive grove, these trees more pleasing, thick-trunked an
d wavy-branched and reaching for the sky. Van Gogh had painted them, Batta remembered. Crazy Vinny van Gogh, who’d cut off his ear. But crazy as he might have been, van Gogh wasn’t the one riding into Syria.
They tracked south and east as the afternoon wore on. For a while, they could glimpse the two-lane road that stretched north from Akçakale, but it was mostly empty. Only smugglers, jihadis, and refugees traveled here now. Even so, Batta found himself almost enjoying the ride. Baraq was a fine horse, with a long, easy stride.
The sun dipped in the sky. They left the last cultivated fields behind and rode on a track that Batta could barely distinguish from the dusty plains. Batta didn’t need a map or a sign to know they were nearing the border. Instead of sheep, goats wandered the fields, poking sullenly at the dirt. Then the goats disappeared, too. Piles of trash appeared at random, burial mounds for zombies. Even before the war, no one had wanted to live near Syria.
The trail dipped. Mahmoud raised a hand, and they stopped and followed him down from their mounts. The sun was setting, the sky above turning a somber blue. An easterly breeze quickened and cooled the air. Mahmoud poured a jug of water into a metal bowl and offered it to his horse. Batta poured his own bowl for Baraq. The horse ducked his head and lapped gratefully, though his eyes stayed wary. Or maybe Batta was projecting.
He pulled on his jacket against the cold night to come, finished watering his horse, and saddled up. The sky was nearly dark, and Batta knew the stars overhead would be momentous out here, with so little light pollution. Satellites and constellations were already jostling for place.
Ahead, twin lines of razor wire created a dirt no-man’s-land not even ten meters wide. No signs marked the end of Turkey or the beginning of Syria. No floodlights or guard posts. Just the wire, unspooling east and west, held by wooden posts. Metal stitches, only they divided the world instead of pulling it together.
The smugglers had chosen the perfect place for their crossing. To the east the lights of Akçakale glowed faintly, but Batta saw no houses or lights south of the border, and the nearest Turkish settlement was at least three kilometers north.
Batta couldn’t see a break in the fence, but Mahmoud led them toward a post marked by a trash heap topped with a tire. As they closed on it, Batta saw that the smugglers had hidden their work by attaching the cut wires to handles attached to a fence post. A helicopter survey wouldn’t catch it.
“Hold on.” Batta reached for his phone. It looked like an ordinary Samsung Galaxy but could run on both mobile and satellite networks. It didn’t have full worldwide coverage, but it could reach the satellites the Defense Department kept in fixed low-earth orbit over Syria and Iraq. The satellite antenna was hidden inside the phone, so it was safe to carry even here. But connecting to the satellite network drained the battery quickly. Batta reserved it for important calls or texts. Now he powered up the phone, sent three letters—S-Y-R—to Durette, turned it off again.
Mahmoud snapped open the clips and gingerly held the razor wire. “Dismount.”
Batta stepped through the gap into no-man’s-land. He didn’t feel like marking the occasion, and he saw the others didn’t either. They passed through the second line of fences, saddled up, rode south.
—
FOR THREE HOURS, they hardly spoke. The trail followed a dry wash, a stream that ran only during the winter rainy season. In every direction, the high plateau stretched empty. But they weren’t the first to come this way. The moonlight revealed tire tracks in the streambed, and they passed an old campsite, complete with cigarette butts and shards of glass.
Mahmoud led them confidently. Smugglers and opium runners had traveled this route long before the Islamic State arrived. Mahmoud was a fourth-generation border rat who had grown up twenty miles south of Raqqa, or so he’d told Kareem.
Lucky for my family, my father sees those cockroaches coming, makes us leave. My friends, now they’re stuck, if they want to get out, they have to come to Turkey with nothing. His hatred of the jihadis seemed sincere. Most of them aren’t even Syrian. Iraqi and European. The Iraqis are thugs, they don’t care about religion, they like murdering. The Europeans are worse, they pretend to pray, but what they really want is to screw little girls.
They stopped every hour to water the horses and stretch their legs. Batta’s feet chafed inside his boots. He felt a blister rubbing against his left ankle, hurting more with every mile. At their next stop he would have to cover the worn skin with a bandage. Baraq was slowing, too. Batta had to nudge the horse with his heel to get him moving. Seventy-five kilometers translated to about forty-five miles, a long day’s ride even for an experienced horseman. Tomorrow night, they’d be riding even longer, sixty miles round-trip, at the limits of endurance for both rider and mount.
Finally, Mahmoud raised his hand. “Time to give these boys some sugar and carrots to get them over. Maybe some bread for us.” He hopped off like he was made of rubber. Batta dismounted slowly, rubbing his calves and wondering how ugly the blister would look. For the first time in his life, he felt old. Thirty-one and old. Beside him, Girol came off his own ride, a short but well-muscled horse who for some reason was named World, in English.
“All right, genius?” Girol seemed fine, adding to Batta’s embarrassment.
“Guess it pays to be a shrimp on these rides.”
But Girol wasn’t listening anymore. He had tipped his head to the side like a dog hearing a coyote’s howl. Soon Batta caught the sound, too, the rumble of an engine to the south. Batta remounted and urged Baraq up an incline on the left side of the wash, to the east. At the top, he saw it. The vehicle was three or four miles away, its headlights white specks in the night, bouncing over the black soil like a ship riding a gentle sea.
At this distance Batta couldn’t tell what it was, much less if it had military insignia or flags. But its lights seemed high off the ground, like a pickup on big tires, or possibly a five-ton truck. Or maybe it had spotlights mounted on the roof. It bounced hard, coming as fast as the soft earth would allow, forty or fifty miles an hour.
Batta turned, rode back down. The others had remounted. “A truck. Maybe a pickup.”
“Just one?” Mahmoud said.
“I think. Be here in four, five minutes.”
“We split up. You and I, down the middle. You”—he nodded to Girol—“and my brother get out of sight, you follow him there.” He pointed to a low hill on the right side of the wash, to the west, maybe a half kilometer down.
Batta saw what Mahmoud wanted to do. The hill wasn’t much, but if Girol and Ajmad could reach it, they would be behind the truck and whoever was in it.
Ajmad looked doubtful.
“West thirty seconds, south thirty seconds, back. Go, brother.”
Ajmad kicked his horse into a gallop. Girol gave Batta a thumbs-up and a big sarcastic grin and followed. Marines—the best.
Mahmoud slapped his horse and trotted off. Batta shoved his Makarov into the back of his jeans, urged Baraq to follow. For three minutes, Batta couldn’t see the truck. But he could hear its engine rumbling toward them. Then it crested a low rise and he saw it, close now. It had a spotlight mounted on the roof, and its front headlights were parallelograms, a shape that marked it as a Toyota Hilux. Jihadis loved Hiluxes. It was using its high beams, and those combined with the spotlight mounted on the roof to create a wall of white. Batta shielded his eyes and forced himself to keep Baraq trotting. The good news was that the lights were focused in a tight cone. The men inside the truck would have little chance to see outside it. Girol and Ajmad should have a chance to set up.
The Hilux was a hundred meters away, fifty, twenty. Mahmoud and Batta rode out of the streambed and waved it past. Instead, it stopped. A man standing in the pickup bed swung its spotlight on them.
Baraq was tense beneath Batta’s legs, taking mincing sideways steps to relieve his anxiety. Four men stood in back of the Hilux,
all carrying AKs. The driver and a single passenger sat in front. Batta fought the spotlight to look at the men. They wore civilian clothes and were clean-shaven, no beards. They didn’t obviously belong to the Islamic State. But they weren’t Kurds either. As a rule, Kurdish men had medium brown skin, jutting noses, strong chins. These six had the sandy skin and narrow eyes of desert Arabs.
Smugglers or jihadis.
They raised their rifles. The man in the passenger seat stepped out onto the dry wash. He was short and squat. “Raise your hands.”
Mahmoud lifted his arms. Batta followed.
“Down. Now.”
Batta’s eyes adjusted enough for him to see a cylindrical tube attached to the truck’s body behind the driver’s door. It was a foot long, three inches in diameter. A flag holder.
Only one group stuck flags on pickup trucks around here. Black flags with the Muslim creed, the shahada, in white Arabic script across the top, and the words Muhammad is the messenger of Allah in a circle in the center.
The Black Standard, the emblem of the Islamic State.
Batta couldn’t wait for Mahmoud to see the flag holder. They had no time. If they dismounted, they were as good as dead.
Batta whistled and kicked Baraq hard, spurring the horse to the right. The men in the bed of the truck swung their AKs on Batta and fired into the night. But the horse was moving wildly, an impossible target. Then Girol and Ajmad opened up with their own AKs from the hillside. The jihadis went down like puppets whose strings had been cut, three into the pickup’s bed, the fourth over the side, like he wanted a head start on burying himself.
The driver accelerated forward, but Mahmoud opened up with his Makarov, popping holes in the windshield. The truck stuttered to a halt as the driver slumped over the steering wheel. The fat man looked around. He’d very obviously made the mistake of leaving his pistol in the pickup. He ran for it, but Mahmoud galloped at him, bowling him over a step from the door. He tried to stand, but Mahmoud stilled him with three rounds.
The Prisoner Page 2