by Tal Bauer
“Mr. President,” Kris said, “We’re looking at post-al-Qaeda terrorism now, led by Saqqaf. It’s not just targeting us. It’s targeting everyone. Once Iraq, as a country, as an idea, collapses, Saqqaf will attempt to create an Islamic Caliphate from the ashes. He believes that by pushing Iraq to fail through civil war and through terrorism, he can control and shape the chaos that will follow. And it’s working.”
“They’ve started referring to the cities and the desert they control as the Islamic State,” David said.
The president sighed. “So, what are we going to do about him?”
Farther down the table, a general stood. “Mr. President, General Terry Carter, sir. I’ve been assigned to join with the CIA in hunting, capturing, or neutralizing the Saqqaf threat. Please allow me to present our strategy.”
Carter, a picture-perfect military officer, spit-shined and polished, starched and stacked, delivered a slide-by-slide presentation on his new counterterrorism strategy. “We developed this strategy after reading the intelligence supplied by the CIA, by Mr. Caldera.” Carter’s words were bullets, his movements as precise as a drill sergeant’s. Kris felt like saluting. He sat up straighter. Carter was a man to whom details mattered, he could tell. His underwear was probably all the same brand, folded and organized in his drawer, his socks rolled neatly beside his squares of white briefs.
“Saqqaf, up to this point, has been in control of the tempo of battle. He sends out attackers. We respond. He strikes civilian targets. We attempt to harden them. We cannot be reactionary any longer.” Carter spoke directly to the president, as if the room were empty. “We have to be faster, stronger than his people.
“I propose the formation of a joint operations unit, led by Mr. Caldera and myself, where we strike Saqqaf’s people every single night. Relentless pressure and constant attacks that will keep Saqqaf and his fighters off their game. We press them, continuously, until they’re consumed with just trying to stay alive. Until that’s all they can do; be on the run, trying to escape. But we’ll keep coming. We will exhaust them. And then we will destroy them.”
The president and Edwards’s heads swiveled to Kris. “What do you say, Mr. Caldera?” The president asked. “Think this will work?”
Kris shared a quick look with David. “Yes, Mr. President. We think it will work.”
“Then you and General Carter are in charge of the hunt. Form this joint strike force. Take out this son of a bitch.” The president stood, and everyone followed, waiting while the president buttoned his jacket and strode toward the door. The vice president followed, but not after giving Kris a long, hard glare.
The rest of the room scattered, officers and aides slipping out or pulling out their cell phones to make a dozen calls each. Edwards and Carter stood apart, discussing shared resources and budgets for the joint strike force. George leaned forward, poking his head between them.
“This is huge, Kris. Bigger than me, even. If you take this guy out, you’ll probably end up taking my job.”
“I don’t want your job. I want this all to end.”
And, he wanted David, and a home of their own. A place to go to that wasn’t a tiny room in a fracturing country. He wanted to not have to conceal their relationship all the time in public. He wanted the CIA to recognize them. He wanted to be heard, listened to the first time. Not have to pick up the pieces of a broken country, not have to sing ‘I told you so’ at the top of his lungs. He wanted a lot of things, but none of them were George’s job.
George appraised him, peering at him the way a parent might look at their grown child, surprised to see an adult for the first time. “You’ve always been made for more than what the CIA could give you. You take this guy out, and you’ll save Iraq. Maybe the whole region.”
“It’s that kind of thinking that got us in this mess in the first place. One person isn’t the key to anything. Ever. Everything’s connected, George. Saqqaf has set off a movement, and even after we kill him, we’ll be dealing with his children, his devotees, in ten years. It’s all just a circle, a never-ending circle.”
Chapter 19
Joint Strike Force
Sunni Triangle, Iraq
March 2006
2100 hours. Time for last checks, tightening the straps and checking gear. Jackson and Warrick, Special Forces guys from David’s old team, smoked their last cigarettes alongside David.
Kris had briefed the team an hour before. For months, their Special Forces strike force, with David attached, had hit Saqqaf and his fighters and hit them hard, crushing blows to his burgeoning Islamic State.
Most of the jihadis were now on the run.
Every night, they swooped in on another safe house, another location uncovered by meticulous hunting through emails, text messages, and cell phone calls. Every night, Kris stripped the jihadis they arrested of all their belongings, taking the pocket litter and the safe house computers and the jihadis’ notebooks, and spent the next twelve hours perusing everything, combining it with intercepts and drone overheads and human intelligence from on the ground. By afternoon, Kris had another list of targets, another night of work for David and the strike team.
General Carter and Kris had turned out to be a potent, formidable pair.
Tonight, Kris had told them to “expect resistance”, which meant “expect a firefight”.
Everything in David raced. His mind, his heart, the tapping of his finger against his rifle. Details thundered through his mind. The sequence of events, the breach order. The call signs, the signal to go. Where to set up perimeter locations. The targets.
Cool professionalism warred with nervousness. He’d been on a hundred raids, had been on a hundred different missions. But today, his skin was too small, his bones too large. Everything was ultracrisp, like the world had been sharpened before his eyes.
Kris stamped out his last cigarette and stood before David. His eyes ran over David’s blacked-out face, his black fatigues. A few hours ago, they’d woken up in Kris’s cot beneath his plywood table-turned-desk in a curtained-off section of the warehouse the strike team used as a base. The sun set and they ate breakfast for dinner, sitting side by side on the cot. Their workday started at sundown.
“You’ve got this.” Kris smiled. “You’ll get him.”
David nodded. They were going after Saqqaf’s senior lieutenant, a man named Mousa. A month before, Mousa and Saqqaf had ordered a pre-dawn raid on the Askari Shrine in Samarra, one of the most revered mosques in the Shia faith.
At dawn, as the sun splintered the sky, explosives planted by the fighters had ripped the mosque apart. The golden dome, a shrine in the hearts of millions, lay in a pile of rubble and dust, and all that remained was broken concrete, twisted rebar, and screams.
Blind rage followed, fury and anguish that split the city and the country. Reprisal killings rolled in wave after wave, bands of Sunni and Shia gangs murdering and beheading their way across the country.
Thousands were killed. Morgues started turning away the dead. There was no more room.
Bodies were left in the streets. Severed heads rolled in gutters, lay on their side next to piles of trash and bloodstained mud.
David wondered if the end times were upon the world. If the Apocalypse had truly come. Months of decimating cell after cell after cell, flipping low-level and mid-level fighters. Siphoning all phone calls, all emails. Everything they could scrape from any of Saqqaf’s associates. They’d choked off his ratlines into Syria, choked his supply routes. And yet, Saqqaf had managed to throw jet fuel on the bonfire of Iraq’s sectarian tensions. The end truly did seem nigh.
The radio crackled. General Carter’s voice rang out in David’s ear. “Everyone, form up. Prepare to move out.”
Kris grasped his hand. David squeezed his fingers. It was the most they allowed each other around everyone. Neither in nor out, they existed in the in-between space. Neither acknowledging nor denying it. Hiding, and yet not. Sharing a room, but never holding hands, never kissing in pu
blic. “See you in a few hours,” Kris said softly. He smiled, the same smile David saw in his dreams when they were separated, the same smile that lived in the center of his heart.
“Ya rouhi.”
Joint Strike Force
Sunni Triangle, Iraq
0230 hours
Mousa sat in a cell, hands bound behind his back, hood covering his head. Halogen lights burned down onto him, turning the night to the brightest day. David stood outside the cellblock, watching.
“You okay?” Kris frowned. He sucked down the last of his cigarette, blew out the smoke quickly. David had been quiet since the team had come back, since they’d dragged Mousa in, screaming curses and raging about hellfire and infidels.
David couldn’t tear his eyes from Mousa. “I’m fine.”
“You sure you want to do this?”
“I have to do this.”
Kris stamped out his cigarette. “Then we need to get started. It’s after zero two hundred already.”
Slowly, David nodded.
Kris led them in. He’d been the lead interrogator for the strike team, picking apart low-level fighters and senior commanders, breaking them down one by one. Mousa was the most senior commander of Saqqaf’s they had captured alive.
He moved behind Mousa. Gripped his hood. Waited.
David stood in front, feet spread, arms crossed. He nodded at Kris.
Kris ripped the hood off.
Mousa’s dark eyes shone with hatred, with pure, wretched fury.
David was stuck in Mousa’s stare, pulled in like gravity, falling into a black hole. He couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t look away. Couldn’t escape the clawing dread rising through him, a wave trying to pull him under—
Revulsion, like acid, tried to drench him, drown him. He wanted to gouge Mousa’s eyes out. He wanted to grab him and throw him down, punch him until he bled, until he choked on his blood, his tears. He wanted Mousa to feel one ounce of what he’d made so many others feel, taste the fear, the helplessness, he’d help unleash upon the world.
Twenty-six years. It had been twenty-six years since he’d felt that same touch of evil, wave after wave of hatred and despair. The raw whisper of twisted darkness reaching for him, grabbing onto his soul.
David clenched his hands into fists, dug his fingernails into his skin.
Mousa spat at David’s feet. “Kufir,” he hissed. “Traitor. You pretend to be Arab, yet you’re only a dog for the Americans. The blood of Muslims is on your hands. Hell awaits you, my brother.” He grinned, savage. “The abyss of al-Nar, the fires, awaits you and all hypocrites. All who have turned against the Prophet, salla Allahu alayhi wa sallam, and Allah.”
“Have you heard of the Amman message?”
“Do not speak to me, infidel—”
“The Prophet, salla Allahu alayhi wa sallam, said, ‘My ummah, the nation of Islam, will not agree upon an error.’ Do you know of this hadith?”
“Do not speak his blessed words, infidel! Your tongue is not worthy to speak his sayings!”
“Five hundred Islamic scholars and imams from over fifty countries have condemned your butchery. They have issued a binding ruling, a fatwa, against you. The ummah has spoken.”
“Lies, from a hypocrite. True Muslims know what we’re creating and believe in the struggle for our Caliphate.”
“Muslims around the world gag against your savagery, your barbarism. You do not speak for the ummah. The scholars have defined who a Muslim is, who a believer and follower of the Prophet, salla Allahu alayhi wa sallam, is. I have news for you, Mousa. It’s not you.”
“Do not dare accuse me of apostasy!”
“You have no idea what it means to be a Muslim. What it means to follow Allah, and to worship Him.”
Mousa sneered. “The Amman message. The Hashemite King of Jordan is an American puppet and a CIA spy! He has Muslim blood on his hands, too! He aligns himself with the infidels and allows Muslim blood to soak the world! He is takfir! A hypocrite and unbeliever! He will join you in al-Nar!” Mousa’s bellows bounced off the cell walls, physical blows that hit David in the center of his chest. “The Sheikh is the future, the head of the Caliphate!”
“The imams have turned against you. Muslims are disgusted by you. Before Saqqaf, no Iraqi cared about Shia or Sunni. Friends and families joined together. There was harmony—”
“The innovators, the bastard Shia, should be wiped from the earth with their apostasy!”
“Your Islamic State has no Shura council. No religious guidance. Your ‘Sheikh of the Slaughters’ isn’t even literate. He pulls lines from the Quran without understanding their meaning, their context. He has no idea what he’s saying. He sounds like an idiot, Mousa.”
“Lies!” Mousa tried to lunge at David. “The Sheikh has a guide. An allamah, a high scholar! He reads the signs of the end times! Guides the Sheikh’s designs!”
Behind Mousa, standing out of sight in the shadows, Kris stiffened. David kept his face impassive, tried to look bored, even. “And who is this allamah? This learned scholar?”
“He is known as Sheikh Jandal.” Mousa hocked spit at David’s feet. “Because he will bring the death of the infidels, the disbelievers, and the kufirs Like you!”
“You disgust Muslims. No one wants you, or your death cult.”
“We are loved!”
“La,” David shook his head. “I do not love you.”
“You are a dirty kufir,” Mousa spat. “You mean nothing. You should be killed where you stand.”
David’s throat clenched. His fingers dug into his folded arms, his elbows, again. The world spun, like a top out of control. “I had to postpone isha prayer because I had to capture you. I haven’t said my night prayers yet. But, as you know, the Prophet, salla Allahu alayhi wa sallam, prayed for the entire night, giving thanks to Allah as often as he could. So, I will go pray. You should pray too. Pray an istikhara. Ask Allah for guidance. Ask for his forgiveness.”
His words tasted like rot, like decay. Like lies.
Mousa tried to surge out of the chair, tried to rush David. His restraints held him back. He looked like a chained dog, foaming at the mouth, fury in his cold eyes. “You are no Muslim!”
“Taqabal Allah.” May God receive your prayers. “You need to repent, Mousa. The ummah has abandoned you. Allah has abandoned you. Why do you think you are here, with us, tonight? Allah delivered you to me.”
He walked away.
Mousa bellowed curses at David’s back, struggling to break free. He cursed David’s existence, called down Allah to burn him alive, condemned him to death. His shouts descended into blind wails, growls of fury, of frustration.
David watched from the observation room, waiting.
Kris, standing behind Mousa in the shadows, slipped around and stood in front of him. Mousa jolted. He’d thought he was alone.
Kris wore the same black fatigues as the strike team. He stared Mousa down, crossed his arms over his chest. “I am going to question you about your involvement with Saqqaf.”
“I have no involvement with Saqqaf.”
“I know everything about you, Mousa. I’ve listened to all of your calls. I’ve read all of your emails. I’ve listened to your wives’ phone calls. I listen to them call their mothers, their sisters, in secret, even when you’ve forbidden them to. I know things about them that you do not.”
Mousa bared his teeth. Pulled at his restraints. “I have nothing to do with Saqqaf,” he spat.
“I am trying to respect you. Honor your position as Saqqaf’s right hand. Did you not help plan the destruction of the Askari Shrine?”
Mousa’s eyes flashed, but he said nothing.
“Of course you did. Mousa, I know you. I’ve captured all your friends. Every one of your brothers has sat in that chair. They’ve all told me so much about you. So much, in fact, that it feels like we are brothers as well.” Kris let a tiny, wry smile curl his lips. “Tell me, how is Abu Abdel? Has he recovered from his injuries?”
; Mousa shifted. The first crack appeared. Unease spilled over his features.
“You cared for Abu Abdel. Personally carried him from the battle. The brothers speak highly of you, you know. They say you are their leader. Their emir. That you are the Sheikh’s right hand, his favorite of all the brothers. But now, you’re telling me that you don’t even know him?” Kris feigned disappointment. He screwed up his face. “How loyal are you, truly? To turn your back on the Sheikh? On your brothers?”
“I love the Sheikh!” Mousa shouted. “Saqqaf is the future! He will lead the Caliphate to the final battle, to the day when Islam will triumph over the armies of the cross! Until all infidels are destroyed, and the rivers overflow with your blood!”
“Ah.” Kris smiled. “So you do know him.”
Mousa fumed.
“We will find your Sheikh. We will find him. We’re getting close. It’s only a matter of time. We’ll find him, like we found you. We’ll capture him. I’ll sit him in the same chair you’re sitting in.”
Mousa’s eyes blazed. His uncertainty vanished. A slow smile pulled his lips apart.
Outside the interrogation cell, David cursed. No, damn it.
“The Sheikh will fight you until his last breath. He will sacrifice himself in the battle against the kufir and the takfir and your infidel West. He will bathe in your blood and dance on the dust of your bones, spread the ashes of your body, and the bodies of those you love, across the corners of the world. You will never capture him alive.”
Kris tried to restart Mousa’s interrogation three times during the night. Mousa refused to speak any further, shutting down and retreating into himself. He chanted prayers, calling down Allah to punish the wicked and the infidels. Kris left him for the final time as Mousa asked Allah to strike Kris down where he stood.