Saul's Game

by Andrew Kaplan

  “It’s only crows we’ll shoot,” Brody said.

  “Talk about it with my husband. But something has gone wrong,” she whispered.

  “What is it?”

  “I don’t know. I hope we won’t have to leave this place. This is a good place, isn’t it?”

  “Very good,” Brody said. In an odd way, thinking of Bethlehem and Gunner Brody, and now, his captivity—his Babylonian captivity—the struggles he and Jess had in Virginia, when they were barely keeping their heads above water, tough as those times were, they were the best he’d ever known. But peace, grace, had only come here, in captivity.

  He sat under a tree in the garden reading his Quran. Elsewhere in Iraq, it was burning hot, but here in the mountains, the air was still and clear, the temperature perfect. As he waited for the time to go pick Issa up from the madrassa, he looked for the crows, but they were gone.

  Good, he thought. That’s good.

  It was the last thought he had before the loud clap of an explosion rattled the garden door and shook the ground beneath him. Turning toward the sound, Brody could see a column of black smoke rising over the trees. Somehow he knew it was the madrassa. Without thinking, he tore open the garden gate and began to run.

  Running along the road, he could smell the explosive. As he got closer, he saw a tree on fire. At first he couldn’t comprehend what had happened. Then he understood. It had to be. There was no other explanation. A Predator drone. An Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), as the Marines called it, remembering his training; the Pentagon’s primary antiterrorist weapon. He squinted up at the sky as he ran. Of course he couldn’t see it, he told himself. It could hover over a target for hours and fire Hellfire missiles with a twenty-pound high-explosive warhead from twenty-five to thirty-five thousand feet high, too high to be seen or heard from the ground.

  Brody slowed as he approached the building, flames roaring up from its center. Black-and-gray smoke mushroomed out of the madrassa. He couldn’t believe his eyes. The ancient stone building that had endured for centuries was gone. All that was left were burning timbers and stones scattered on scorched earth. Books, bits of furniture, bodies and parts of bodies were everywhere. Impossible that there were so many bodies. Brody looked down at the ground. There were parts of people, arms and legs and pools of blood. Then he thought of the boy.

  “Issa!” Brody screamed.

  He ran into the burning ruins searching for the boy, jumping over a flame rippling across what had been a wooden beam. Everywhere he looked there were bodies. Nearly all were boys, of various ages and sizes. Many were burned or scorched by the blast. One body was torn in half. Only a headless trunk remained. Could it be Issa? he wondered, getting close, gorge rising, but there was no way to tell.

  He scrambled across a mound of bodies and shattered rocks, stepping through pools of blood. There were arms, legs, even a boy’s head, the face untouched, seeming oddly surprised, lying on its side on a pile of smoldering rubble. Brody stepped on something and recoiled. It was a boy’s hand, palm up, barely half the size of his. O Allah, he thought. What have you done? What have you allowed?

  “Musaad‘eeda!” Help! he screamed, racing from body to body, a dozen of them tossed in a stack, bleeding, missing limbs. He tore through, looking at their faces. No Issa. Where was the boy?

  “Issa! Issa!” he called, stepping past a boy groaning on the ground, twisted at an angle that suggested his back was broken. Then he saw a boy’s dark hair under a scorched desk. He flung the desk aside. It was Issa.

  At first, the boy appeared untouched. Maybe he was just in shock, Brody thought, shaking him.

  “Wake up! Issa, wake up! It’s Nicholas!” he shouted. Then he saw the wound in the side of his neck, the blood leaking out. And when he tried to raise Issa’s head, his hand, lifting the back of the head, became wet and sticky. Brody tried to find a pulse, but felt nothing. He wrapped his arms around the boy’s shoulders, pulling Issa to him.

  “Don’t die,” he pleaded. “Don’t.”

  Issa was dead. Brody picked him up and carried him back to the road. All around, people were running, coming from the village and out of houses along the wadi. Women in abayas screaming, covering their eyes, weeping; men rushing, some carrying AK-47s, their faces unbelieving. People shouting, calling out the names of their children.

  Then came wailing and ululating sounds from women like he had never heard, unbelievably eerie and despairing. Like cries from the damned in hell. And with it came an odd memory, some Catholic sermon about hell from when he was a kid. He shook it off.

  Now there were swarms of people climbing over the wreckage, looking for people, lining up bodies, searching for wounded survivors. From what Brody could tell, almost no one in the school had survived the direct missile hit.

  Brody, carrying Issa, staggered along to the road. As he did so, he saw Abu Nazir himself running toward him, followed by a dozen of his men, Afsal, Daleel, Mahdi, and the women, Nassrin and others. Daleel’s wife, Heba, had found her son dead too and was screaming “Allah, Allah, Allah” over and over.

  Brody stopped, panting, holding the boy in his arms as if offering him to Abu Nazir.

  “I tried, ya Allah, I tried. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” he said.

  “Is my son dead, Nicholas?” Abu Nazir said, his face stricken.

  Brody nodded.

  Abu Nazir stood there, his face twisted.

  “Now do you see, Nicholas? Now do you see who is the true enemy? Who makes war on children. On children! My son!” he cried.

  Brody was stunned, ashamed, sick to his stomach. His country had done this. America. Someone in a room thousands of miles away pressed a button. Because they could. How could it happen? Why? For the love of Allah, why?

  He handed the boy to Abu Nazir, who slumped to the ground, cradling his son, rocking him like an infant, saying in Arabic, “Now you’re with Allah, my beautiful son. Don’t be afraid. You’re a good boy. You’ve always been a good boy.”

  Brody looked around. The road, the sky, everything seemed different. As if every molecule in his body had suddenly realigned. If there was a mirror he could look at, he was certain he would look changed. All his life, he had been playing a part. Brody the football player, Brody the family man, Brody the Marine. That was over. He was filled with a hatred he hadn’t felt since a child, hating his father, Gunner Brody, with his entire being. Now he hated again. Allah had preserved him for a reason. He was beginning to see why. America had lost its way. Allah had saved him to help America find its way back to God.

  At last he understood.

  CHAPTER 39

  Hart Senate Building, Washington, D.C.

  29 July 2009

  02:41 hours

  “This drone strike, Bill. What the hell happened?”

  “What do you mean, Warren? There’s nothing new here. This administration, like the one before it, has a standing policy to eliminate the leaders of al-Qaeda, which in case anyone’s forgotten, attacked the United States on September eleventh.”

  “Take it easy. No one’s forgotten. But this report, eighty-two children killed. Is that possible? How could we ever authorize such a thing?”

  “First of all, let’s be clear, Warren. This drone attack was approved by the president’s national security advisor and the NSC. The target was Abu Nazir, the leader of the IPLA and al-Qaeda in Iraq and number three on our most-wanted-terrorists list. We had a solid lead—which, by the way, was developed in the course of Iron Thunder by the same CIA field operative, Carrie Mathison, that we’ve been talking about—that Abu Nazir was located in a jihadi masjid in the town of Aqrah, about a hundred and twenty kilometers northeast of Mosul. The NSC approved and we executed the attack with a single Hellfire missile from a Predator drone. And we didn’t kill any children. End of story.”

  “Did we get him? Abu Nazir?”

  “We’re not sure. We’re confident we got some IPLA terrorists in the attack. We have Predator images of three adult casualties. A
bu Nazir was not confirmed among them. These images—here are two of them I printed out—confirm the casualty count. As you can see from the photos, there were no children killed. The number eighty-two is absurd.”

  “Let me put on my glasses. All right, it looks like three bodies. Frankly, I can’t tell from this whether any were children or not. So where the hell did this story about so many children casualties come from?”

  “There was a staged photograph put out by al-Qaeda that purported to show a smoldering building, a madrassa, and a photograph of many dead children. First of all, the count in the faked image is only forty-one bodies. And our experts tell us this so-called photo was clearly Photoshopped. This image was displayed on a number of jihadi websites along with the number eighty-two. It’s a phony. Have a look.”

  “So this was faked?”

  “Look, al-Qaeda can never defeat us militarily. Their war is waged via the media. That’s where they win or lose. They’ve become very sophisticated. So they had a bunch of kids splashed with fake blood lie on the ground, They Photoshopped in some additional duplicate bodies, which we noted here, and here, and—bingo! You’ve got eighty-two dead kids killed by those nasty Americans. It never happened. But if you hold a Senate hearing on this, Warren, this crap all comes out and we’ll spend the next ten years fighting the media, our allies, and a million new jihadis who will have signed up because of this. You’ll be doing al-Qaeda’s job for them, not to mention you’d be snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.”

  “Everything Bill says is true, Warren. This was a by-the-book drone strike approved by the NSC. Yes, there’s been noise on the jihadi channels about children killed. But that’s all it is, noise. What Bill is showing you are actual Predator camera images. You mustn’t ruin the international standing of the United States by giving our enemies a platform for these ridiculous lies. The damage would be irreparable.”

  “Point taken, Mr. President. Getting back to this Carrie Mathison, she obviously had no knowledge of the drone strike and she’s certainly no traitor. If anything, she’s a hero. She should be honored, not censured or investigated.”

  “Warren, here’s a handwritten note from General Demetrius to Saul. Note where he says that if she were in his command, he’d be proud to pin a medal for valor on her. For whatever reason, something to do with her psyche or whatever, the polygraph was off.”

  “Clearly. Will that letter go in her file, Bill? I’d like to write one myself.”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. President. I saved this to show you and the senator, but I’ll have to destroy it. In fact, I’d like your authorization to destroy the entire file. This Iron Thunder operation was Special Access Critical. Saul did it outside normal CIA channels. That’s why it worked so well and how we were able to catch de Bruin and Sanderson. That’s why we didn’t want to tell you about it in the first place, Warren. Putting this or something from the president in Miss Mathison’s 201 file would break security. In terms of her career, it doesn’t matter. Perry Dryer, the Baghdad Station chief, knows what she did. So does Saul. So do I, but I’ll never say a word.”

  “So that’s it, Bill? There was no Operation Iron Thunder? It was all a ploy invented by Saul to catch a mole?”

  “It never existed, except in Saul’s head. And he convinced everyone. Because of it, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards withdrew their Al-Quds forces from Baquba, aborting a civil war. And now no one will ever know what really happened, except the three of us in this room.”

  “What about our moles? Sanderson? And this Arrowhead, Ali Hamsa? What about them?”

  “The same night we grabbed de Bruin, Saul had SOG teams pick them up. Eric Sanderson is currently being held in the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, New York, where he’s been charged under the 1917 Espionage Act. I’m told he’s cooperating fully.”

  “And Ali Hamsa?”

  “After questioning, Warren, we turned him over to Sheikh al-Rashawi, leader of the Sons of Iraq. He betrayed his fellow Sunnis, it seemed best to let them deal with him. His mutilated corpse was found a week later on the banks of the Euphrates River in Ramadi.”

  “What happened with the Iranian MOIS officer, Khanzadeh; the one who questioned Carrie?”

  “He’s in Omaha. He has a new identity to protect his family back in Iran. I understand he’s applied to study petroleum engineering at Texas A and M.”

  “And this character de Bruin? Where is he?”

  “We extraordinary-renditioned him to an Agencja Wywiadu site in northern Poland, Warren. So far he’s being cooperative. He still asks about Carrie, if you can believe it.”

  “She got to him. Perhaps it was love after all.”

  “I don’t know what it was, Mr. President. These people live so far out on an edge, I’m not sure they know themselves what they feel.”

  “What about Saul? Where is he? Back at Langley? I’d like to meet him.”

  “Actually, Mr. President, he’s taking some well-deserved time off. He and his wife, Mira, are at a secluded resort in the Philippines. They’re probably snorkeling in the Sula Sea or clinking mai tais this second.”

  “They’re together again?”

  “So far as I know. The truth is, I’m not sure how serious the problem was between them. It might’ve been that she really did just go back to India to see her family. That’s the thing with Saul, you never know.”

  “He plays the game.”

  “As do we all, Mr. President. So, are we done? No investigation, Warren? No Senate hearing? And no one will ever know of this meeting or anything we discussed?”

  “You have my word, Bill, Mr. President. But you were wrong about one thing.”

  “What was that?”

  “I wasn’t doing it for politics, or for grandstanding. Well, maybe a little. I won’t be running for reelection. I’m retiring. The thing is—and I’m asking you to keep it as confidential as I’m going to keep everything I now know about Saul and Miss Mathison and Iron Thunder—I have prostate cancer. It’s spread. I won’t be able to campaign in the midterms even if I wanted to. And I don’t. I want to use what time I have left for myself, my family.”

  “I’m so sorry, Warren. Truly. So who gets the committee chair next? Andrew Lockhart?”

  “Probably. And if it is Andy Lockhart, you won’t find him as accommodating. He has a thing about the CIA. Personally, I think he wants to be director, Mr. President. But you didn’t hear that from me.”

  “I hear you. Damn, what time is it?”

  “Almost three, Mr. President. We’ve been at it for hours.”

  “God, I’ve got an eight A.M. dog and pony at some company in Pennsylvania on the economy. I’ll have bags under the bags under my eyes. Are we done?”

  “We are, Mr. President. Senator, we have your word, none of us will ever speak of any of this again. This meeting never happened?”

  “What meeting?”

  CHAPTER 40

  Observatory Circle, Washington, D.C.

  29 July 2009

  Riding in a town car back to his official residence at the U.S. Naval Observatory, Vice President Bill Walden rubbed his eyes. The meeting had gone on longer than he’d wanted and he was bone tired.

  The good news was that Senator Warren Purcell was shutting down the inquiry. No one on the Senate Select Committee or anyone else would ever hear about Saul, Carrie Mathison, or Operation Iron Thunder. The only loose end was the drone attack and the Photoshopped photographs he had shown Purcell and the president.

  How the hell were they supposed to know that the target building they’d been told was a jihadi mosque in Aqrah was actually a damn religious school full of kids? He’d thought of putting the blame on the girl, Carrie, even though she hadn’t picked the target, just the town, but decided against it because she was the heroine of the story he was selling to the president and Purcell to get them to shut it down. And he couldn’t put it on Saul Berenson, because he needed him at Langley, he thought as the town car drove up Connecticut Avenue,
the streets dark and empty this early in the morning .

  So the only loose ends were the drone pilot, Lieutenant Chris Chandler, and the CIA technician, Jake Azarian, who’d substituted the photos of a strike on a compound in Helmand Province in Afghanistan for the real drone photos of Aqrah.

  The first thing he’d done after the drone strike was to order Lieutenant Chandler from Cheech Air Force Base in Nevada to his office in the Pentagon, where he laid it out for the young lieutenant. Either a career-ending dishonorable discharge and possible prison time or a promotion to captain and a reassignment for him and his family to Washington.

  “A mistake was made,” he’d told Lieutenant Chandler. “Either the whole country pays for it, especially you, or we accept the idea that in war there is sometimes collateral damage, and get on with the job of defending our country.”

  After Chandler swore he’d never utter a word to anyone about Aqrah, not even to his wife, as long as he lived, he’d told the young man, “Congratulations, Captain. I’m sure you and your family will like Washington. Oh, and if you ever see me in the halls of the Pentagon or anywhere else ever again, you don’t know me. This conversation never happened.”

  As for Azarian, he was pure CIA. He knew better than to ever say a word. The original photos and digital records of the Aqrah drone strike were destroyed and replaced with the Photoshopped ones and the digitally revised records he’d shown Senator Purcell and the president. No one would ever know.

  After Dupont Circle, the town car turned up Massachusetts Avenue, Embassy Row, heading toward the Naval Observatory. From his official residence he had a view of the observatory grounds and buildings, but the view he wanted was the White House Rose Garden. If the economy didn’t pull out soon, even if the president ran for reelection, there was a chance the party out of desperation might look elsewhere. In which case, good old Bill Walden was ready to step in. A lot of people in the party owed him favors, he thought, smiling to himself as they passed Rock Creek heading who knows where.