Saul's Game

by Andrew Kaplan

  Living on a bayonet edge with Gunner Brody, the worst of it, knowing he was a coward. He had known that ever since one night when he was twelve. Something he had never told anyone except Jessica—and she couldn’t see it. But he could. And nothing could fix it. Not becoming a Marine, not Parris Island and Iraq. Not combat. Nothing.

  That night. The night he learned who he was. It was three days after his twelfth birthday. Gunner Brody had bought him a BMX bike, and for a few minutes, it was almost like they were a real family.

  “Who’s the best dad in the world?” Gunner Brody had said when he gave him the bike.

  “You are, Dad,” Nick had said, wanting it to be true. Then, seeing a sudden dangerous glint in his father’s eyes because his father always insisted on being treated like a Marine officer, added, “Sir.”

  Three nights later, Gunner Brody had fallen dead drunk asleep, his .45 service automatic just sitting there on the kitchen table next to the cleaning kit he hadn’t even started to use before he’d fallen asleep, head on the table, mouth open, spittle drooling from the corner of his mouth. Brody’s mother, Sibeal, was doing what she always did; keeping the bedroom door closed. She slept curled to make herself tiny as a snail in a corner of the bed, as far away from her husband as she could get.

  Gunner Brody had been celebrating the six-week anniversary of his unemployment benefit checks running out after he got his pink slip from the steel mill. (“They promised me I’d have a job no matter what,” he roared to his best friend, one-hundred-proof Old Grand-Dad. “I got the Silver Star. What’d they ever do, those jerk-offs? They promised me!”) Before he’d passed out, he’d used Sibeal for a punching bag, telling her if she hadn’t gotten pregnant with the little jarhead shit, he wouldn’t be in this stupid fix.

  And Nick finally couldn’t take any more. He grabbed his Little League bat from the closet and, coming from behind, swung it at his father, hitting him across the shoulder. Gunner Brody staggered, howling in pain. He turned around and rushed Nick, kicking him in the groin, followed by an elbow jab to the face and a leg takedown.

  “Hit your father, you little maggot!” he screamed. “Hit an officer, you little jarhead prick! I’ll teach you!” Banging Brody’s head by his hair against the floor, again and again.

  “Gunner, stop it! You’ll kill him! Stop! You’ll kill him. Your own son!” his mother screamed. “Marion, they’ll put you in prison. Is that what you want? For the love of God, stop. Sweet Mary, Mother of God, stop!”

  “You don’t get it, you little maggot,” Gunner Brody said, leaning close and whispering in Nick’s ear as he lay there on the floor, helpless, utterly beaten. “When I hit her, she likes it.”

  Later that night, something told him to wake up. Wincing, he tiptoed on bare feet to the kitchen, where he found Gunner Brody dead drunk asleep, the loaded .45 and the cleaning kit on the table in front of him, and for more than nine minutes, as he later told Jessica, he stood there in his underwear, holding the gun with both hands less than three inches from Gunner Brody’s head, trying to get up the guts to squeeze the trigger.

  “Because I hate him enough,” he told Jessica years later, the two of them walking together after class, walking down Center Street, in a quiet tree-lined neighborhood once you got away from the high school. “I don’t hate anybody in the whole world like I hate that son of a bitch. I want him dead. It’s the only way out for my mom and me. I came close, Jess. I started to squeeze the trigger. I swear to God. My hand was shaking and I squeezed. Another fraction of an ounce of pressure and it would have gone off. Only I couldn’t do it. And I don’t know why!” he screamed, running down the street as hard as he could toward the river, Jessica running after him, yelling, “Brody, wait! Wait!”

  A block or two later, he just stopped, standing on the sidewalk outside somebody’s house. A real house with a lawn and white columns like it had been plunked down there from a different world, but he wouldn’t look at her.

  “I’m a coward,” he said, knowing it was true. He should have pulled the trigger. A chance like that wouldn’t come again.

  “It’s because you’re a good person, Brody. Because you didn’t want to ruin your life. You were only twelve. A kid,” she said, holding him close.

  She took his hand and they walked down toward the tree-lined path beside the Lehigh River. He loved that she thought he was good, but he knew it wasn’t true.

  What was true were the nine minutes.

  But Afsal Hamid, that al-Qaeda piece of shit, he knew, Brody thought, lying there, his hands tied, head covered with the hood in the back of the SUV. Dizzy from the ride and being hit, for a moment it was as if he had lost all sense of reality because he heard a distant sound of helicopters, and for one crazy second, he could’ve sworn they sounded like U.S. Black Hawks. But that was impossible.

  He must be hallucinating, Brody thought inside his hood in the SUV. He tried to think. They’re on the move. Why? Had to get out of Dodge. Must be a long trip, though. It seemed like it was taking forever.

  He froze. They were talking about him.

  “What about the American, Afsal?”

  “Shut up, brother.”

  “He’s a Muslim. He prays with us.”

  “Your mother! He’s an American. A Christian crusader. He only pretends to be a Muslim.”

  “Why’d we keep him so long?”

  “He has his reasons,” Afsal said, and Brody knew they meant Abu Nazir. “He always has his reasons.”

  Now he understood. Afsal meant what he said. This time they were going to kill him. So why did they take him with them?

  Because they didn’t want to leave the body behind. Not with his red hair and pale white skin and Made in America face. Might raise too many questions. Better to bury the body out in the desert where it would never be found. Like Tom Walker. His Marine Corps buddy, his scout sniper teammate. Oh God, Tom. I didn’t mean it. At first, they just said, “Hit him!” Hit him again. And again. And again. Crying as he did it, shouting, “I’m sorry, Tom. I’m sorry. Jesus. Help me, Jesus.” Until his hands felt like they were broken and he couldn’t hit anymore and Tom Walker was dead.

  Now finally, they were going to kill him too, Brody thought, lying there in the back of the SUV. Something else he learned on that ride, along with the endless bumping and heat and smell of gasoline. You can doze off, even in your last few precious hours on earth. Because he only woke up when they stopped moving. His last thought as he heard them open the back of the SUV was: I’m sorry, Jess. I tried. Six years a prisoner of war. I really tried.

  “Get out!” Afsal barked.

  Hands grabbed him and Brody stumbled out. He fell to his knees and they lifted him up and pulled off his hood. He was blinded by the light and had to squint to see.

  It was no longer night. The SUV had pulled about two hundred yards off a concrete road through a sandy desert. The convoy was gone, their SUV the only vehicle in sight.

  Afsal pushed Brody to his knees and took out his pistol.

  “Now we finish. Finally,” he said.

  “Can I say the shahadah?” Brody said, looking up. The desert was utterly empty. The early-morning sun was just rising over a distant dune, turning the sand and everything to gold, even the faces of the men who were about to kill him. O Allah, this world is so beautiful, he thought.

  “Let him. It is required,” Daleel said as Afsal stepped behind Brody and pointed the pistol at the back of his head.

  “Ash-hadu an laa ilaaha illallah.” I bear witness there is no God but Allah. “Wa ash-hadu anna Muhammadan rasulullah,” Brody said. I bear witness that Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah.

  He braced for the shot, his eyes open, aching to see the beauty of the sunrise till the last instant.

  CHAPTER 4

  Damascus, Syria

  12 April 2009

  02:09 hours

  The compound in Otaibah was deserted. As the SOG team searched, it was clear that although it had been recently occupied, everyone
was gone. Left behind were the odds and ends of hasty departure: bits of food, crumpled clothes, empty AK-47 magazines.

  “Mingus, look,” Little D, a six-foot-four Texan, said, leading Carrie to what looked like the main dining room, with two long wooden tables. He handed her a crumpled Arabic newspaper they found on the floor. Although most of them could speak some Arabic, she was the only one on the team who could read it. She held it up to the light. Al Bawaba, a Damascus newspaper that only came out in the afternoon, she remembered. It had yesterday’s date. So at a minimum, Abu Nazir or at least some of his people had still been here as of yesterday afternoon.

  Glenn came out of the kitchen.

  “Check this out,” he told her, and touched her hand to the teapot. It was still a little warm, as was the kitchen stove. “We just missed them.”

  “By how much?”

  “Two, three hours.”

  “Of course. It was dark. They left the damn lights on,” she said. “Let’s get airborne. There’s at least fifteen, twenty of them, plus women and children. There has to be cars, SUVs, pickup trucks. They’d stay together. A convoy. Maybe we could spot them from the air.”

  “We can’t,” Glenn said, shaking his head. “For all I know, somebody in a house across the street is on the phone calling the local cops right this second. Clock’s ticking, Mingus. We go airborne to look for these guys, I’ve got to get high enough to spot them. We light up the radar—we’re just sitting ducks for the Syrian Air Force. They scramble jets, and in a couple of minutes, bam, every last one of us is dead. And Washington has to pick up the pieces.”

  Carrie didn’t say anything. The mission had failed. She felt nauseous.

  “Anybody find anything?” she asked.

  “Just some clothes and stuff. Ammo magazines. What looks like Muslim Brotherhood and al-Qaeda propaganda.”

  “Take all of it.”

  “Already taken care of. We’ll fine-tooth-comb it,” Glenn said.

  Time was becoming critical, so he didn’t mention the underground concrete cell he’d found. The spot from the satellite recon. A six-foot enclosure with an iron door and chain shackles where they had obviously kept a prisoner. He’d make a note in his report. At the moment, all he could think about was getting his men out of Syria.

  “Time to perform the classic military maneuver of getting the hell out of here,” he added.

  Lousy way to end my career, Carrie thought, standing there in a dimly lit al-Qaeda kitchen, feeling like she’d been kicked in the stomach, her brain ping-ponging a million miles all over the place. She wasn’t sure whether it was because of what was happening in front of her or because she hadn’t taken her meds, but this was a game changer. No way to paper this one over. It was total mission failure. And they had only missed by a couple of hours.

  How was that possible? How could Abu Nazir have known?

  She watched Glenn signal his team to get ready to pull out. Covering each other, they began to move outside and back to the choppers, rotors still slowly turning. She ran to a dark corner to strip off her clothes, changing out of her combat gear and into a full-length black abaya, complete with the hijab head scarf and veil.

  Time to initiate the fallback plan she and Saul had worked out, the worst-case scenario. She wasn’t going back with them.

  She racked her brain. Who had tipped Abu Nazir off? Because it had to be a tip-off, and very recent. No one walks out of a compound they’ve been living in for a couple of years in the middle of the night just hours before a CIA raid from another country unless they’ve been tipped by a source they consider pretty damn solid.

  Cadillac? Was he a double?

  Possible. True, Cadillac had given her the lead, but he hadn’t been told about the SOG raid on Otaibah. Zero. He had no knowledge of any kind about what they might do with his intel about the compound or anything else. Certainly not how or when. He couldn’t possibly have known. If someone had tipped Abu Nazir, it wasn’t Cadillac. Not to mention that it wasn’t in his interest to do so.

  Because it wouldn’t have been hard for Carrie to burn him to the Syrian GSD. And then it would have been Cadillac screaming his guts out in some prison torture cell, and Assad’s bully boys would do it whether his wife, Aminah, was a shopping girlfriend of President Assad’s wife or not. So if not Cadillac, who the hell was it? And how could they have possibly known that the raid was set for tonight?

  Who knew? Could it have been someone in Rutba? FOB Delta? Could one of the SOG team . . . ?

  Unlikely. None of them knew the target before they arrived at FOBD—and once they did, standard protocol was no talking about the mission with outsiders, or even among themselves, except as necessary. They were isolated. Out in the desert, in the middle of nowhere. She didn’t believe it. Not the SOG team. Once at FOB Delta, there was no interaction with the locals. That was part of the protocol, although she was sure Saul and Perry would have analysts go over every second of security camera footage of their time at Delta just to make sure.

  She’d have to try to figure it out later, she realized. Hurry, Carrie. Change and get moving, she told herself, putting her combat outfit and gear into her assault backpack.

  That left either Langley or Baghdad Station, she thought, heading outside. They had kept it tight at Baghdad Station. Perry had strictly limited who had knowledge of the raid. Still, you couldn’t run an op like this without some coordination. But it had been very closely held. Maybe ten people. Mostly Americans. But a couple of Iraqis. Including Warzer. God, she didn’t want to put Warzer under any suspicion. He was having a tough enough time as it was, working both sides as a Sunni double for her and dealing with an increasingly hostile Iraqi government.

  Standing in the courtyard, her abaya flapping under the draft from the rotors, she handed Glenn her assault backpack. At the last second, she handwrote a quick note for him to send via JWICS when he got back to Rutba. A number quartet and just four words. The number was the private IP address of a computer at Langley whose location was untraceable—if a hacker tried, each time he would find a different inaccurate location in the world. The computer belonged to Saul and the four words, with letters scrambled in a way that only Saul would know how to unscramble, read:

  “We have a leak.”

  Carrie hid in the shadows of a house a block away, watching as the Black Hawks rose up over the compound. First one, then the other. No flying lights, their dark shapes barely skimming over the roofs of the houses, they headed east toward the desert, watched by one or two cautious heads peeking out from nearby open windows.

  The sound of the helicopters faded, lost in the dark, starless sky. Carrie stood frozen, waiting, till one by one the curious windows closed.

  She was alone.

  She waited, counting minutes, until, certain no one would see or hear her, she began to walk, her footsteps sounding faintly in the dark, empty streets. She walked till she was well away from the compound, and then found a place to hide behind a shed at the back of a house with a yard and a chicken coop.

  She was tired, but knew she couldn’t sleep. She waited silently, not moving, till even the chickens that she’d heard clucking got accustomed to her presence. In the gray light before dawn, she used a compact mirror to put on brown contact lenses and used a brown tint to color her eyebrows. During her time in Rutba, she’d used enough sunscreen to get a slight tan beyond her normal reaction to sun: beet red. Enough for her face and hands, the only things that would show.

  A little after dawn, roosters crowing, the streets started to stir. Wearing her veil, she walked to a nearby souk and bought a basket of fruit from a farmer just opening his stall. Carrying the basket and looking like a local Arab woman, she caught a servee, a battered microbus from the souk to the bus station. There she sat with several other women and a few students to wait for the morning bus. To the world, she was just another Arab woman running errands in the city. She boarded the bus, which took about an hour and a half to do the twenty miles to the central b
us station in Damascus.

  She was running the backup plan. What she and Saul had talked about and hoped they’d never have to do, because it meant something had gone very wrong.

  From the bus station she caught a taxi to Martyrs Square, with its Ottoman pillar, palm trees, and cheap hotels bordering the square. Walking as quickly as she could without attracting attention, she doubled back, then went around several other blocks in opposite directions to flush any tails. When she was sure she was clean, she went to the safe house, a top-floor apartment on Al Nasr Street, a block from the Palace of Justice.

  There she finally cleaned up and changed into jeans and a top—got rid of the contact lenses; no more abaya and veil, thank God—and took out her new cover ID from a book safe and went over the paperwork. It was all there: driver’s license, passport, visas, entry stamps—which, if anyone checked, would be in the Syrian immigration and security computers; the Company, as they called the CIA, was always very good about that—were in order.

  She was now Jane Meyerhof, a travel agent for Midwest Continental Travel, out of Cincinnati. She called and booked a room at the Cham Palace Hotel, then used the drop to contact Cadillac.

  It was a dual-contact approach. First she called his work from a pay phone at a tobacco kiosk. She left a message from a Captain Maher Dowayih asking him to call, but gave no return phone number. That was the emergency signal to Cadillac to urgently check the drop within two hours.

  The drop itself was a rug shop in the maze of the Al-Hamidiya Souk, the immense iron-roofed market that bordered the legendary Umayyad mosque. The shop was owned by an asset Saul had pinched from the Israeli Mossad, a one-legged Syrian Kurd, Orhan Barsani, who sat in his shop all day, smoking an apple-tobacco shisha and playing tawla, a form of backgammon, with his fellow merchants, and anyone else he could sucker into playing, because, as rumor had it, he never lost.