Saul's Game

by Andrew Kaplan

  Carrie had walked into the private high-stakes salon in a skintight dress, with eyes only for Sabagh, now Cadillac. She made brief eye contact with the target in the gambling salon, then tracked him to his hotel room, where he tried to solve his money problems with a bottle of Russian vodka, a pretty Ukrainian prostitute, who later had to be whisked out of the country, and a Beretta 9mm pistol that Carrie had to pry out of his hand, finger by finger, never knowing till the last second which of them he was going to shoot, her or himself.

  She packed Cadillac off back to Damascus the next day with his debts taken care of and $10,000 in American taxpayer money in his briefcase. In the six months since then, with his wife, Aminah, happy in Dior and, more importantly, in President Assad’s wife Asma’s good graces, everything Cadillac had given them, every piece of intelligence, had been twenty-four karat. He had become the CIA’s most important asset in Syria.

  Walden studied the file again, although he’d already read it.

  “Okay, so Cadillac says blah-blah and the satellite shows a compound in Otaibah, a suburb east of Damascus. Could be Hezbollah? PFLP? Hamas? Could be President Assad’s grandmother? Could be anybody.”

  “We’ve been watching it for two months by satellite and a local team,” Carrie jumped in. “I was there two weeks ago myself at the makhbaz, the local bakery, pretending to be a Circassian. You’d be surprised what you can learn just standing there in an abaya, listening to other women buying bread. There are approximately fifteen to twenty men with families in that compound. Police don’t go on that street. Assad’s security goons never come by. This, in the most paranoid, security-conscious dictatorship in the Middle East. Are you kidding me? Why is that?” she said.

  “Satellite infrared confirms the number of people inside,” Saul said.

  “Only nobody ever comes out of the compound except to go to the market or the mosque. There’s no telephone landline, no Internet, and they never make cell-phone calls. Just whatever contacts they might have at the mosque or the market,” she said.

  “Still doesn’t make sense. Why would Assad, an Alawite allied with Hezbollah and Iran, give sanctuary to Abu Nazir? Head of IPLA. It’s Shiites versus Sunnis? They’re deadly enemies. They hate each other,” Walden said.

  “Abu Nazir’s doing it because it’s next to Iraq yet it’s the one place he knew we wouldn’t look for him—and he had to get out of Anbar because we were getting too close. We suspect Assad’s doing it because, in exchange, Abu Nazir’s willing to keep the Sunnis in Syria from what they’re dying to do, which is assassinate him,” Carrie said.

  “How do you know this? Cadillac?”

  She nodded.

  “So forget the raid. Instead we go in with a drone. Low risk. Flatten the place. Complete deniability. End of Abu Nazir. Period,” Walden said.

  Saul leaned in on Walden’s desk.

  “We’ve had this conversation before, Bill. We can’t get intel from a corpse,” he said. “We need an SOG.” He meant a Special Operations Group. Only ever used for the highest-risk missions.

  “If you blast him to smithereens with a drone, they’ll say he’s still alive. He could become more dangerous dead than alive. Last week he had a suicide bomber in Haditha lure children on their way to school with candy and then blow them up into a million pieces,” Carrie said. “Little children! We need an SOG to make sure it’s him and to get the intel to finish this filthy war. So do it, dammit. Before the son of a bitch moves and we lose him again.”

  “Twenty-seven minutes to touchdown,” Chris Glenn, the SOG team commander, said over the helicopter’s roar.

  They were going in light and tight, he thought. Possibly outnumbered by hostiles in the compound. Two UH-60M helicopters with ten SOG team members each. Total twenty men plus the CIA woman, Carrie. The only advantage, the element of surprise, and after thirty seconds, that would be gone and all hell could break loose, unless they were able to eliminate the guards silently and take out the rest before they woke up. The key was planning. And Carrie being right about Abu Nazir and where he’d be in the compound.

  And one odd thing he wanted to check out himself. Something opaque that had shown itself in the spy satellite infrared images. An underground cave or vault. They were hiding something.

  Or someone. Or several someones, he thought.

  “Keep it tight, guys. Nothing gets out. No light, no sound. Not even a fart,” Glenn said, moving over to Carrie. “You good to go, Mingus?” Per her request, they’d code-named her after jazz bassist Charles Mingus. Carrie and jazz. Everybody knew it was her passion. Back at FOB Delta, it became a team joke.

  “Hey, Mingus, what’s wrong with Chris Brown?”

  “Lil Wayne, yo.”

  “Katy Perry, dog!”

  “I’m fine. You watch your own ass, Jaybird,” she said to Glenn. His code name.

  She clenched her hands on her knees so no one could see them trembling. She’d been off her meds going on sixty-plus hours. The only reason she wasn’t flying either on a high or a low with her bipolar disorder was that her system was probably so hopped up on adrenaline from the mission, she decided, shaking her head to clear it.

  Glenn and the machine gunner opened the cabin door to a roar of wind. Through the open door, with the night-vision goggles, she could make out scrub on the desert floor speeding beneath them; it looked almost close enough to touch with her feet.

  They were supposed to be in Syria one hour flying time in, maximum forty-five minutes on the ground, one hour back to the Iraqi border. Total: two hours and forty-five minutes. Hopefully finished before daybreak and before the Syrian Army knew they were in-country and could react. Once they were back in Iraq, the administration in Washington could deny they had anything to do with it—and nothing left behind but some dead bodies to prove otherwise.

  And they’d either have Abu Nazir in custody once and for all or he would be dead. If Cadillac’s intel was solid. And till now, he’d been a hundred percent.

  “Ten minutes. Everybody on night vision,” Glenn announced.

  One by one, the team members put on their night-vision goggles and adjusted their helmets and communication gear. There was little talking among them.

  For weeks, they had trained on a mock-up of the Otaibah compound in the desert near FOB Delta. Each team member had his specific assignment and every man had trained to back up the others in case they were hit. The keys to success were speed and silence in the middle of the night. Every one of them was a combat veteran, the elite of the elite, in incredible physical condition; hair-trigger-trained volunteers who had pushed themselves beyond what they ever thought they could do in order to do exactly this kind of mission.

  “Five minutes to target,” the pilot called back over the sound of the rotor.

  “Selectors to burst,” Glenn said as everyone moved their carbine safety selectors into firing position. Men started stretching their legs, getting ready to get up and move.

  Carrie leaned over to look out the open door. Through the greenish field of night vision, she could see scattered structures on the outskirts of Otaibah. Small farms and shacks. These were poor people. Tribesmen who minded their own business. People who didn’t make it in the wider Syrian society, who didn’t want visits from the GSD, the brutal Syrian secret internal security forces. If this was where Abu Nazir really was, he had chosen well. She checked her watch one last time: 1:56 A.M. local time.

  “Three minutes. Everybody ready for landing.”

  The men in the helicopter got ready to get up. They were seated in the order they would exit from each side of the chopper. Carrie peered intently into the darkness.

  And then she saw it. A pair of yellowish lights from a house on a street about a mile or two ahead. Was that the compound? What the hell were lights doing on at two in the morning? Then more lights. It looked like the compound was lit up. Oh God, she had led them into a trap! They were going in hot.

  And streetlights too. Oh no! The satellites had shown no
streetlights at night in this part of Otaibah. As if the government had deliberately neglected this part of the city.

  The intel was bad. Cadillac must’ve lied. Or someone. It was all her fault. They would die because of her. She looked around wildly, trying to think of how to get the pilot to pull them out, to find some way out. But they were too low.

  They were coming in fast now. Too late to think about it as they passed over a fence topped with barbed wire and over the compound’s courtyard, bumping down in a cloud of dust.

  “Go! Go!” Glenn hissed, slapping her on the back as she stumbled out of the helicopter.

  Jumping out, she felt the team moving around her. Every nerve in her body was screaming, anticipating an IED going off or men wearing kaffiyehs letting loose with automatic rifles any second. Everything was a swirling green haze in the night goggles, the lights over the courtyard like something in a van Gogh painting.

  She ran behind Glenn, his M4A1 in firing position, toward the main building.

  CHAPTER 3

  Otaibah, Syria

  11 April 2009

  23:31 hours (two hours earlier)

  Brody was dreaming of Bethlehem. That first time with Jessica. They were in high school; she a sophomore, he a junior on the football team. He was a jock. Never a choice about that. Because the son of Marine chief warrant officer 02 Marion Brody aka Gunner Brody was going to damn well be a tough-as-a-mother son-of-a-bitch jock or he’d beat the shit out of the little knobhead prick until he was.

  They were to meet outside the Brew on the corner of Broad and Main, the trees draped with lights for Christmas, the snowy streets toward Woolworth’s crowding up with people, everyone waiting for the lighting of the big electric Christmas star on South Mountain that could be seen across the Lehigh Valley.

  Jessica was the prettiest girl in school. The prettiest girl he had ever seen. But it was more than that. There was something about her. He wasn’t sure what it was—he didn’t even know how to explain it or express it to himself because she wasn’t a slut or anything like that. Willing to explore. Curious. Willing. That was the word.

  He knew she liked him and somehow he knew that it was more than sex. Although all they’d ever done was kiss. She really liked to kiss, closing her eyes and sticking out her chest just that little bit that made you want to grab her breasts, but he didn’t. He held back, knowing somehow that although she wanted him to touch them, it was part of whatever high school Catholic girl thing it was for her that he not be like the other boys.

  So he waited. But that wasn’t the willing part. What he sensed was that she was the kind of crazy girl that if she loved you enough she would drive off a cliff in a car with you, which was something he thought about. A lot.

  Because there was one thing he knew above everything else in the world. Surer than God, surer than money, surer than anything. He’d have to leave home as soon as he could, because either he’d kill Gunner Brody or Gunner Brody would kill him.

  And then he saw her crunching through the dirt-webbed snow on Broad Street with her friends Emma and Olivia. She wore a red scarf, her cheeks rosy with the December cold, everyone’s breath coming out in clouds, and the girls started grinning and nudging each other when they saw him and Mike. Yeah, Mike was there. His best friend, Mike Faber, had always been there since the day the Brody family had moved into the upper half of a duplex on Goepp Street.

  They had come to Bethlehem from California when he was seven, because his father had gotten a job at the steel mill; Gunner Brody apparently being the last man in the state of Pennsylvania who didn’t know that it was only a matter of another year or two before the plant closed and those jobs were gone forever. Except ex-Marine lifer Marion Brody didn’t have that many choices after an official inquiry into the accidental death of an eighteen-year-old private at the Air Ground Combat Center in Twentynine Palms, California, involving an M224 mortar, revealed Gunner Brody with a blood alcohol level of 0.29. The finding put the Corps in the questionable position of either a highly visible court-martial of a Marine chief warrant officer with a chestful of medals or the Marine gunner’s early honorable discharge, but without the full pension he’d been banking on. So they had moved from the Mohave Desert, where Nick had been born, to Pennsylvania.

  But if nothing else, Marines know reconnaissance. From the minute they moved in, it took Gunner Brody less than twelve minutes to scope out the liquor store on the corner of Goepp and Linden. An hour later, Mike found Nick Brody squatting under the wooden stairs in the backyard of the duplex, his nose broken, lip split, ribs aching, and said, “I’m Mike. I live across the street. You want to come over, man? I got a Nintendo. You play Super Mario Brothers?”

  Nick Brody looked at him like he was from another planet.

  “Your lip’s bleeding,” Mike said.

  “I fell.”

  “Sure.” Mike nodded, tapping him on the shoulder with his fist, and just like that they were friends. “There’s this girl,” Mike had said that first day as they headed across the street. “Her name’s Roxanne, but everyone calls her Rio Rita. Sometimes she leaves the curtains open. When she turns around to put her bra on, you can see her ass.”

  “Gosh, I can’t believe it’s almost Christmas,” Jessica’s friend Olivia said, the girls joining them at the corner for the Christmas star lighting.

  They wound up at Olivia’s house. Olivia produced a bottle of her parent’s J&B scotch, the music was Whitney Houston and Janet Jackson, and somehow it was just the two of them, Jessica and Brody, in Olivia’s sister’s bedroom, on a tiny single bed, kissing so hard it was as if kissing was the only known form of sexual expression, and then she pulled off her skirt, telling him: “I’m not wearing any panties.” She handed him a Trojan still in its wrapper from her purse. And all he could think was, she had thought it all out, this was her idea.

  He remembered how excited they had been on that narrow bed, how beautiful she was in the slanting light coming through the venetian blinds from the streetlight outside, the exquisite feel of her—when suddenly blinding light and someone shaking him hard.

  For an instant, he thought he was back in the house on Goepp Street and it was Gunner Brody, smacking him, shouting at him, “Thought you could sneak your report card past me, you little maggot jarhead.” But it was his guard, Afsal Hamid, shaking him awake, hissing, “Wake up, you American piece of shit! Do you know what’s happened? Of course you know. Because of you we have to go. Because of you, you motherless bastard.”

  “What’s going on?” Brody asked.

  “You know why, you dog. We have to leave because of you,” unchaining Brody and throwing clothes at him.

  “You pig-faced son of a whore!” Afsal kept saying. For a minute it was like six years ago when they first captured him. That time they kept beating him until they nearly killed him. And Brody remembered at one point in those first weeks screaming back at Afsal through bloody teeth, “You think you hit hard, you raghead prick? The Marine gunner used to hit me harder with his service belt every freaking time he got drunk, just because he wanted to make sure I didn’t grow up to be a pussy. Harder than that every day, you son of a bitch. I’m immune to you, you bastard. So hit me harder! Harder! Harder! Harder!”

  “What are you doing?” Daleel, one of the others, said to Afsal. “We have to leave. Get him ready.” By now, Brody had learned enough Arabic to understand some of what was said, though not all the nuances.

  “This isn’t over,” Afsal hissed, pulling Brody close. “First we leave. But today, I promise. Today is the day you die, American.”

  He quickly dressed and washed, hurried along every minute by Afsal saying, “You fool the others, pretending to be a Muslim, Nicholas Brody. But you don’t fool me. This will be the last time you will be a problem for us.”

  What had gone wrong? he wondered. All around him, everyone was moving, stripping away everything they owned down to the walls—clothes, furniture, pots, bedding, laptop computers, weapons, explosives—
and packing them away into a caravan of pickup trucks and SUVs lined up in the street outside the compound. All the lights were on and Brody didn’t know why they were leaving so suddenly and in the middle of the night.

  “Ahjilah! Ahjilah!” Hurry! Hurry! everyone kept telling each other; all of them, men, women, even the children, moving with purpose.

  At the last minute, Abu Nazir himself came in and everyone had a quick communal breakfast. Only hot tea and pita bread. When someone started to clear the breakfast dishes, Abu Nazir told them to leave it and headed out to the lead SUV. Afsal and Daleel stayed with Brody.

  When they got to the SUV, its engine running, Afsal took out a pistol and put it to Brody’s head. He ordered Brody to turn around so Daleel could tie his hands with plastic cuffs. Although it was the middle of the night, the street was bright from the headlights of the vehicles lined up and Brody could see the heads of people watching from the windows of nearby buildings.

  “Is this really necessary, Afsal? I don’t even know where I am,” Brody said over his shoulder.

  Afsal didn’t answer, but instead pulled a black hood over his head so he couldn’t see.

  “Somebody help me with this infidel,” Afsal said, and Brody felt himself being heaved up and shoved on his side. They squeezed him into the back of the SUV, the compressed air pressing the hood against his face as they slammed the hatchback shut, banging his skull.

  It made his ears ring and he felt dizzy, maybe concussed. And blind inside the hood. For a second or two, he might have blacked out. Then the SUV started up. He could smell the exhaust. They were moving through the streets. Through it all, something told him, this time they weren’t going to hold Afsal back. Why? What had changed? Why did they have to leave? Wherever they were going, he had the sudden realization that he was extra baggage, deadweight they could no longer afford to carry. This time, they would kill him. But it had always been that way with him.