by Ben Shapiro
The man nodded, amused. “You expected Dolph Lundgren, perhaps?”
A puzzled expression crossed Mohammed’s face. “Who?”
The Russian guffawed, rolled his eyes. “But of course.” He motioned for the waiter and ordered a few pieces of gaz. The waiter complied immediately.
“I love the service here,” said Andrei. He scarfed down one of the pieces of white pastry. “Delicious.”
Mohammed shifted in his seat uneasily. “Can we get this over with?”
“Nonsense,” said the Russian. “It’s not often I get to eat this well in this country. Besides, if we get up now, we’ll only look rushed and suspicious. What’s your hurry?”
Andrei took his time with the pastries, then ordered a cup of coffee. By the time he’d completed his meal, another twenty minutes were gone. Mohammed kept glancing at his watch. Finally, he’d had enough. “Sir,” he said, his coal-bright eyes burning, “I wish to consummate our business.”
Andrei sighed. “Ah, well. Speed is for the young. Let us walk outside.”
Mohammed paid. Andrei thanked him, then got up. They walked outside, and Andrei hailed a taxi. After a few blocks, Andrei told the driver to pull over and let him out. He left the suitcase in the trunk.
As the taxi was about to drive away, the short Russian tapped on Mohammed’s window. Mohammed rolled it down. “Good luck,” he said in English. Mohammed nodded.
Mohammed watched him walk down a bright alleyway and lose himself in a local marketplace. Then he turned to the driver again.
“Take me to the airport,” he said.
Part 2
Tehran, Iran
“Tomorrow.”
The word hung in the air for a moment. Spoken in Arabic. Not meant for his ears. Brett was sure of that. He couldn’t see a thing—the blindfold over his eyes prevented him from seeing the room. But the next words confirmed Brett’s worst fears; he recognized the voice.
“Welcome, General Hawthorne,” said Ibrahim Ashammi, in a clipped accent.
Brett’s captors forced him to his knees. He felt them hit stone. Then he felt a sweaty hand remove the blindfold. Before him stood the world’s most well-known terrorist since Osama bin Laden. Smiling.
“I hope you weren’t too mistreated on your journey here,” Ashammi said, turning his back to him. “We wouldn’t want a famous war hero victimized by—how did you put it in your interviews—‘barbarians’?”
Brett kept his mouth shut. He knew how this would go, and he knew that the taunting presaged something far more frightening. Instead of listening to Ashammi’s monologue, Brett quietly scanned the room for tools, anything he could use. He almost didn’t notice when Ashammi turned back around, thrust his face just inches from his own. Brett could smell his breath, the faint vestiges of chelo khoresh still on it. “General Hawthorne,” Ashammi said, “I know you, and that you are a resourceful man. I also know that your country is a paper tiger, and that your president is a weakling. Weaklings watch as the world burns around them, thinking they are safe because they have a mirror, and they are lost in the reflection. That is why your country will lose.”
Finally, Brett spoke. “America doesn’t lose. We just convince ourselves not to win. You’re the ones who will lose. We don’t have to tape beheadings to frighten people into joining us.”
Ashammi, to Brett’s surprise, laughed uproariously, clapped his hands in delight. “Oh, you Americans, you don’t understand at all. You’re delightfully out of touch—I mean delightfully until you start dropping incendiaries on our children. You spend your lives fat and happy, eating at McDonald’s, imagining yourselves superior because you have clean shopping malls and manicured front lawns. But while you sleep, while you watch your reality television, your children abandon you, no matter how many Patriot missiles you send against us, no matter how many American troops we have to bury in the sand.
“You see, we offer something you do not: a reason to die. We need not frighten anyone. You do the frightening. Because, you see, people are not frightened to die or to be killed, down deep. Down deep, they are afraid of dying without that death meaning anything. They are afraid that they will die and that a life of playing Xbox and watching your American movies and eating your American food and worshipping themselves will end with them in the ground, and their lives forgotten.
“And, of course, they are right. Their lives are meaningless.”
Brett scoffed. “And yours, I suppose, are meaningful. Slaughtering women and children.”
Ashammi grabbed Brett by his face, squeezing his jaw until it hurt. Brett clenched his teeth and stared into his eyes. “We will do anything for Allah. That is our strength, and your weakness.”
Brett whispered, “There you’re wrong. You don’t know me, and you don’t know my countrymen. We live for something. We live to kill bastards like you.”
Ashammi laughed. “No, that I know, General Hawthorne. At least those of you left.” He turned to his goons. “Take him to his cell.”
The men seized him by his arms, pulled him to his feet. As they dragged him out of the room, he got a glimpse through a window, just a crack: the Azadi Tower, growing from the ground like a thick-rooted tree, culminating in a latticework tower. Brett suppressed a grin of satisfaction. He knew exactly where he was from the coordinates on Feldkauf’s map. And he knew exactly what he had to do about it. And he’d heard Ashammi’s one word: “Tomorrow.”
He hoped his message would get to America in time.
They came for him in the middle of the night, the better to keep him off-balance. He’d been trained for such techniques, but too long ago to matter, and he’d awoken groggy, head pounding, nauseated by the casual beating handed out to him by one of Ashammi’s lackeys. No marks to the face, of course—they wanted their victims looking clean and fresh before they sawed off their heads. But the big bearded kid had worked his torso over pretty well, and ground the bones of his arm against one another to boot. Yusuf, he’d heard one of the others call him. He wouldn’t forget that anytime soon. Every time Yusuf had balled up his fist and driven it into his midsection, Brett had pictured cracking the lug across the head with a two-by-four.
They’d taken his uniform from him, forced him to dress in an orange jumpsuit, the uniform of their victims. When he’d gone to the bucket that served as a toilet, he’d noticed his urine had turned red. “Like Ali,” he’d thought to himself, “after the Thrilla.” But Ali had survived that.
This, Brett knew, he would not survive.
That wasn’t his plan.
He’d formed the plan after seeing the Azadi Tower, gauging the distance from it, realizing that Feldkauf had given him the exact coordinates of the site. He needed them to release one of their typical terror tapes for it to work, but he thought they’d do that—they couldn’t help themselves, couldn’t stop from parading him on all the news networks. That was their triumph. They wouldn’t win by fighting big battles, but by drawing recruits with the tapes.
He just hoped that the boys in intelligence picked up on the message he’d be sending. And he prayed that the film editor, or whatever cave dweller familiar with Windows Movie Maker they’d be using for this particular production, didn’t chop up the film too badly.
Yusuf and one of his companions laughed and joked as they kicked him awake, grabbed him by the arms, pulled him down the dark hallway. He could see fluorescent lights shining through the cracks of the door before he got there; a ray of light caught the edge of Ibrahim’s knife, which he carried on his belt. Yusuf looked down at him and, in his broken English, guffawed, “You be in movie now. Like movie star.”
Brett muttered through gritted teeth, “Fuck you and your mother.” Yusuf smiled. Brett smiled back. “Also, your goat,” he added.
The door at the end of the hallway swung open. Waiting before a green flag sat Ashammi, his face bared. Normally in these videos, Brett
knew, the terrorists liked to swath their faces in black scarves to prevent identification. For the jihad video of a major American general, Ashammi wanted to take personal credit. Yusuf and his buddy deposited Brett next to Ashammi, on his knees.
“General,” said Ashammi, looking down at Brett, “I hope your accommodations were not too primitive. I must say, you look somewhat the worse for wear.”
“No,” said Brett, glancing at Yusuf. “Nothing I couldn’t handle.”
“Ah, ever the tough American. Well, the good news is that your suffering will not last much longer.”
“Yours either, I’d bet,” said Brett.
“But I will not suffer,” Ashammi said placidly. “Remember, I serve Allah, and no matter what happens, he will be with me.”
“I only hope he’s with all the different pieces of you after we nail your ass with a Hellfire missile.”
“Any plans I don’t know about, General?” Ashammi smiled.
Brett smiled back. “Maybe. Maybe not. You’ll find out soon enough.”
Ashammi took a long ceremonial dagger from his robes. “General, I’m sorry to have to get down to business. I’ve enjoyed our conversations. But I will admit that I will enjoy killing you more, given how much Muslim blood you have on your hands. Now, I am afraid we don’t have much time. Let me be perfectly clear. You will cooperate. If you say anything we do not wish you to say, I will personally cut off your testicles. If you do anything we do not wish you to do, I will cut off your testicles, and then I will slash your throat after letting you bleed.”
Brett grunted. “You make a convincing argument.”
“I have to admit, I am somewhat surprised at your reasonableness.”
“I’m already going to get killed, I assume. No reason to lose my balls in the bargain.”
“Very wise. All right, Hassan, record.”
A young man, no more than seventeen, hit the record button on the digital Canon. The red light flashed. Ashammi began to speak.
When the taping was all over, Ashammi thanked Brett for his cooperativeness. Then he offered him a copy of the Koran. Brett turned it down and told Ashammi to stuff it up his ass. Ashammi smiled, then gestured to his henchmen to take Brett back to his cell.
Brett lay back against the stone wall on his thin mattress, thinking of Ellen. He tried to remember her face, the softness of her eyes; he tried to recall the feel of her body, every line of it silhouetted. He found himself crying. For himself, just a bit. Mostly for her. For the child they had never been able to have.
Then, slowly, he did something he had not done for years: he got down on his knees and he prayed.
“Dear Lord,” he whispered to the darkness, thick with the stench of feces and urine, oppressive with the smell of sweat, “I know I haven’t spoken with You for a while. But I need you now. I may never forgive You for what you did to my Ellen, why You took our baby from us. They say You have a logic all Your own, and I reckon that’s the case, since I sure as hell can’t understand You or the things You do. I know I’ve tried to do the right thing as I see it, and I haven’t broken too many of the lessons I learned in Sunday school.
“And You know better than anybody that I’ve never been one for prayer. I always thought that some people treat You like a gumball machine, like if they pray just the right way and say just the right things, that You’ll give them what they want, when this whole world is about something bigger than what any of us want. It’s about what You want, and I do hope that I’ve done at least a few things the way You want them.
“But now I’m not praying for myself. I’m praying for Ellen. Because after this, she’s gonna be alone, Lord, and I just want her to be happy. You took her children away from her. Maybe I took myself away from her. But however it worked out, now she’ll be on her own. Please let her find someone else. Please let her be happy for once in her life. Please let my sweetheart go on with her life, let her understand what I’ve done and why I’ve done it. Thank You, Lord, in advance. Amen.”
Brett closed his eyes and dropped into an uneasy sleep.
Washington, DC
President Prescott always felt a surge of power through his body when he sat in the Situation Room. This is where they had all made their biggest decisions. It’s where Kennedy read teletype during the Cuban Missile Crisis. It’s where President Barack Obama had sat, watching SEAL Team 6 take out Osama bin Laden. And this is where, Prescott knew, he’d be sitting—at the head of the table—while American special operations troops dispatched Ibrahim Ashammi.
Intelligence had recognized General Hawthorne’s signal within minutes of its first airing on the Ashammi hostage video. Hawthorne had spoken the prewritten message from Ashammi just as Ashammi had written it, prompting a national debate on whether Hawthorne should have complied with the propaganda requirements of the world’s leading terrorist. But intelligence kept the fact that Hawthorne hadn’t complied under their hat. While the rest of the world had watched Hawthorne’s mouth, intelligence had watched his eyes.
Hawthorne had been blinking in Morse code. It was an old trick, one Hawthorne must have picked up from Jeremiah Denton, a Vietnam War–era POW. Denton, forced to tape interviews by his North Vietnamese captors, had blinked out the message “T-O-R-T-U-R-E” repeatedly in Morse code, giving the first evidence that America’s enemies in Vietnam weren’t the hippie-loving flower power communists the campus leftists preached about.
The trick must have escaped Ashammi, intelligence figured—how would he know Morse code in the age of text messages and cell phones?—and Ashammi had put out the propaganda tape too eagerly to fully vet it. Hawthorne’s message had been brief but definitive: “AIRSTRIKE NOW. 51.4231. 35.6961.”
The message prompted a full-scale debate inside the White House. It raised too many questions. First, was Hawthorne’s location correct? How would he know where he was, given that prisoners were typically blindfolded and kept in windowless rooms before their executions? If Hawthorne was wrong about the location in a heavily populated area of Tehran, the United States could end up with the blood of dozens on its hands, and an international mess almost impossible to clean up. They could blame it all on Iranian nuclear weapons, but after Iraq, the public wouldn’t be buying.
Second, even if Hawthorne was right, could American aircraft breach Iranian airspace to take out Ashammi? A strike in a populated area would require too much pinpoint accuracy for a missile; military aircraft would have to be utilized. Such an action would surely have grave ramifications for international politics, including ongoing nuclear negotiations with the Iranian regime. It was unlikely that Iran’s military would be able to take out an American warcraft, but there was the real possibility that the Iranians could get lucky. If that happened, the Prescott administration would have to explain not only to the world but to the American people how a regime he’d called “borderline friendly” had killed Americans in order to protect a terrorist mastermind sheltered on their soil. Furthermore, the Israelis were sitting around waiting to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities. With the Americans taking action on Iranian soil, they could take advantage of the situation to double up with a brief bombing campaign, sinking any possibility of a nuclear deal.
Third, what was the political upside? This third question was never spoken among the military brass, of course, but it was the question that drew the most attention from Prescott’s inner circle. On the one hand, taking out Ashammi would be not only a great foreign policy triumph, but it would, in one shot, deflate accusations that Mark Prescott was too much of a coward to stand up to America’s enemies. On the other hand, if Ashammi lived and the American public never found out about Hawthorne’s encrypted message, he’d be seen as a bumbler, a Jimmy Carter on a mission to save hostages. They could still nail Ashammi later—he would just be shadowed until a more convenient time, perhaps when he traveled outside Iran. Then Prescott would give the order to kill him.
In fact, Prescott had been leaning in the direction of leaving things be, but two factors had decided him on action. First, Prescott wanted a taste of glory. He needed the domestic political support to ram through the Work Freedom Program. And it would be difficult for Congress to turn him down days after he had taken out the man responsible for the bombing of several American embassies. He already had his slogan written in his head: “Protecting America from Those Who Would Harm It, Abroad and at Home.”
Second, some right-wing bloggers had caught onto Hawthorne’s signal. Mostly, they were kooky survivalist types, the sorts of folks who posted conspiracy theories on message boards. But the CIA informed Prescott that such information, once it got out, could jeopardize any sort of attack. And if the information began to take hold, Prescott figured for himself, he’d be blamed for doing nothing. Already some of those nuts on Fox News had been making oblique references to the rumors.
But an airstrike was simply too risky.
And so he’d called on the CIA. It had now been four days since the tape; he knew it was possible that Ashammi had moved Hawthorne. He knew the operation would be near impossible. And unlike the bin Laden raid, this wouldn’t be taking place at a quasi-remote estate. The operation would happen in the heart of Tehran, near one of its most prominent landmarks. It would have to be a perfect operation, with no unforeseen factors. His military advisors told him that the possibilities of success were far less than 25 percent.
He authorized it anyway. If they failed, he couldn’t be blamed for trying, or if he could, he’d find a way to call it a well-intentioned mistake. If they succeeded, he’d have made the gutsiest call since Obama. Gutsier, even. What a hashtag that would make!
So now, he sat at the conference table in the Situation Room, surrounded by the members of his cabinet. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Bill Collier, the only man in the room in uniform, bit his lip nervously. The rest of his cabinet leaned forward, watching the night-vision camerawork on the screen. The feed was choppy and slightly delayed, the audio rough and patchy.