Deep Black

by Sean McFate

  “Tactical update,” Suleimani ordered.

  “Sir, ISIS is thirty kilometers from Baghdad, from here to here.” The aide swept his hands from the seven o’clock to the one o’clock position. “They could break through Baghdad’s last ring of defense in days.”

  “Start with their reserve, then tell me about their flanking maneuvers.”

  “The Zab River Triangle in the north is an ISIS stronghold, with Mosul their capital. They continue to push east, into Kurdistan, but the Peshmerga have stopped their advance at the Great Zab River. For now.”

  “How long will the Kurds hold?” Kurdistan was a narrow buffer zone between ISIS and Iran, and the general didn’t like assuming strategic risk, especially when it hinged on the amateur Peshmerga forces.

  “Unknown. The United States is secretly arming the Kurds, but Turkey is secretly undermining them.”

  Suleimani chuckled. That was not so secret. “Continue.”

  “Our eastern flank is in crisis.” The aide pointed to a wedge of land south of Kurdistan and north of Baghdad, an open avenue for ISIS to the Iranian border. That threat was why General Suleimani had been rushed here from the Syrian quagmire. “Only one Shia town is left,” the aide said. “Amerli. It has been under siege for three months.”

  And the feckless Iraqi Army is cowering in its barracks, Suleimani thought, rubbing his beard. It was a nervous habit; his only outward tell.

  “What are we doing to relieve them?”

  “We are massing our Shia militia to break the siege.”

  “What units?”

  “Mostly the Badr Corps.”

  “When do we initiate the attack?”

  “Ten days. The Americans may even support us with air strikes. Not on purpose, of course.”

  The enemy of my enemy, the general thought. It had been the calculus of war in the region for the last fifteen years. A multisided conflict—Iran, Iraq, the Great Satan, the corrupt Saudis, the Kurds, the rebels, the Israelis, the Turks—produced strange alignments, to say the least.

  “Sir, we have multiple reports of U.S. Special Operations Forces in Kurdistan,” said another aide.

  Suleimani nodded. Quds commandos battling ISIS in the same grid square as American special forces. He wondered what his American counterpart, Gen. John Allen, thought of all the possibilities in this secret, perennial shadow war.

  Allen would kill me, Suleimani thought, if he had the chance. And I him.

  That was why Suleimani had set up living quarters in the Al-Askari mosque in Samarra, one of the most sacred Shia shrines. The Americans wanted him dead. So did the Israelis and the Sunnis. But only ISIS would dare bomb the Al-Askari shrine to kill him. Al Qaeda blew the ancient gold dome off the mosque in 2006. It sparked a Sunni-Shia civil war right under the Americans’ noses, a struggle that Suleimani helped the Shia to win.

  That’s what the West didn’t understand about the Middle East, Suleimani thought. War wasn’t about countries; it was about faith. Since the death of the Prophet, the Sunni and Shia Muslims had locked in a 1,400-year-old civil war over the soul of Islam. Today they battled as “deep states”—states within states—with a front line that stretched from the Mediterranean to the Arabian Sea. The Shia deep state, led by the Ayatollahs of Iran, included Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Alawite regime in Syria, the Shia in Iraq, and the Houthis in Yemen—the “Shia Crescent.” The Sunni deep state was led by the royal house of Saud under the watchful eye of the Wahhabi clerics of Saudi Arabia. Their allies included the Gulf States, Jordan, Egypt, Pakistan, North Africa, and Sunni strongholds in Asia. ISIS was a monster of their making. And then there was the third, unwelcome deep state: America and Israel. They were the most profane trespassers, just like the Crusaders a millennium before.

  “It’s confirmed, sir,” an aide interrupted, pushing a report in front of him.

  “What now?”

  “Six hundred seventy Shia prisoners executed,” the aide read. “ISIS militants entered Badoush Prison in Mosul. They took out the prisoners and sorted them into two groups, Sunnis and Shias. The Shiites were lined up in four rows and told to kneel. The Sunnis were told to shoot them in the head, or be shot themselves.”

  Someone mumbled a prayer for the dead, but Suleimani preferred not to picture the scene. He’d seen enough over the years.

  “We’re getting additional reports,” the aide continued. “More of the same. Do you want to read them?”

  “No. I want to stop them.”

  He stood up and strode to the front of the room, where he could examine the map board. Outside, the new dome of the Al-Askari shrine glittered in the morning sun.

  “We must break the siege of Amerli,” he said. “Muster all available Quds and militia. I will personally lead the assault.”

  The aides nodded. Suleimani was known to lead from the front.

  “But we need to secure our flank. Send word to Colonel Hosseini,” he said, choosing out his favorite Quds commander. “I need him to scout northwest, looking for a soft spot where we can cut off ISIS reinforcements. I need all Quds with me. What militia force can accompany him?”

  Silence, as the aides checked their rolls.

  “Badr Corps is sending a contingent to Amerli,” someone said, “and also defending the shrine in Karbala.”

  “That’s fine. We need them there.”

  “The Sadrists won’t leave Baghdad, and answer only to Muqtada al-Sadr. Kataib Hezbollah has battalions in Baghdad and Samarra, but they aren’t strong.”

  “Who else?”

  “Asaib Ahl al-Haq”—the League of the Righteous—“has just redeployed from Damascus. Right now, they are refitting in Baghdad.”

  The League of the Righteous, the general thought, rubbing his beard. They were one of his fiercest Iraqi militia, which was why he had sent them to fight in Syria, and why he had recalled them to Iraq when Mosul fell. He sat back, nodding.

  “Sir?” one of the aides asked.

  Suleimani stared at the map board. He was never hasty, but he never wasted time, either, especially when there was no time to waste.

  “Sir, what are your orders? When do we move?”

  “Tonight.”

  Chapter 5

  Prince Abdulaziz frowned at his son Mishaal, who was sitting across the aisle from him in a plush red leather seat. Around them, the curved walls of the private airplane were gold-plated, polished, and etched with an intricate, interlocking pattern. The red and gold were echoed in the prayer rug on the floor, which quivered like a compass needle on a rotating platform. To a Western eye, the jet was gaudy, like red lipstick had exploded inside its gold tube, but in Saudi Arabia, the look was only slightly out of date. The prince’s primary plane was more stylish, but he had brought his smaller jet, since this trip was only for father and son, not his important contacts. Still, even in the smaller space, it felt like the two men were miles apart. Or more accurately, Abdulaziz was cruising at thirty thousand feet, while Mishaal was sinking into the ground.

  “It was simple,” the father said.

  Mishaal shook his head. “So you keep saying, but that doesn’t make it true.”

  “All you had to do was pick up a briefcase.”

  “I picked up the briefcase.”

  “I paid five billion dollars on your promise that all was in order.”

  “All was in order.”

  “And less than one hour later, you bury our family in shame.”

  “It’s only money . . .” The younger prince sighed, although he knew money wasn’t the point.

  “There’s no such thing as only money,” the older prince said, glaring at his son. When Abdulaziz was a boy in the 1960s, $5 billion would have been his family’s entire net worth. He’d worked hard all his life to turn that pittance into a fortune, and it seemed his eldest son had been working his whole life to squander everything he’d accomplished.

  “I understand.”

  “You don’t understand,” Abdulaziz snapped. “There are fifteen thous
and members of the royal family. Ten thousand are like you: fools. I have outmaneuvered, outstrategized, and outmuscled most of the others to give our family this opportunity. I worked for a year to put this deal in place. I have spent considerable capital, Mishaal, the personal kind, the kind you have never bothered to accumulate, calling in favors. I have been to Bangladesh. Do you understand that sacrifice? You should have seen the squalor. The streets were crawling with vermin.”

  Abdulaziz paused, remembering the grubby beggars and the neediness of the middlemen. It was preposterous that they called themselves patriots.

  “I trusted you with one task,” he continued. “One. To bring a briefcase from Paris to Riyadh. Our future rests on the contents of that briefcase, and I could trust only a member of our family to make the pickup. That person was you. And what do you do? What do you decide to do? You decide to fail.”

  “They had guns.”

  “So did you.”

  “They were going to cut off my hand. With a saw.”

  “It would have shown your faith.”

  “It would have killed me!”

  “Better to be a martyr than a fool!”

  Mishaal turned away, appalled but not surprised. His father was always ruthless, never kind, forever ambitious. Certainly not a father.

  “I’m not going to die,” Mishaal muttered, staring out the window like a teenager, even though he was forty-two, “simply because I’m your son.”

  Abdulaziz felt the plane shifting, banking toward home. He watched the prayer rug rotate, finding its true direction facing Mecca. Why did they keep having this conversation? Why did it have to be so hard? He had given so much for his children, his whole life, and yet he had received nothing in return.

  Why had Allah cursed him? How could a man with five wives have only two worthless sons?

  “The older generation is dying,” he said, trying to control his anger. “When King Abdullah dies there will be no more sons of al-Saud to take the throne. And his health is failing. For the first time in my life, there will be meaningful change in the Kingdom. Generational change. And our family will be part of it, Mishaal. We have been given this opportunity, through my hard work, to set the Kingdom on a new course. And we will succeed. Salman will become King of Saudi Arabia, Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques and Head of the House of Saud. This is not a debate. We are Sudairi blood, just like Salman, and we will help him outmaneuver his rivals for the throne. In return, he will grant the Abdulaziz family a place on his Foreign Council.”

  “You mean Farhan.”

  “I mean the family, Mishaal.”

  “Farhan is your chosen,” Mishaal said, slumping in his seat. “No matter what he does, you forgive. With me . . .”

  Abdulaziz turned away, a gesture both symbolic and disrespectful. He didn’t have to listen to Mishaal and his petty grievances against his younger brother. He never had. Farhan was superior in every way, even if Farhan had let him down. But fanaticism in the young was far better than degeneracy in the old. He could turn Farhan’s passion; he could do nothing with Mishaal.

  “None of this is your concern anymore,” he said, allowing the anger in his voice to kill the rising regret. “You are going to Ha’il, to the desert, to be cleansed.”

  Mishaal shot out of his slouch. Ha’il meant drug rehabilitation in one of the notorious Wahhabi religious institutions, and the thought of living without his medicine was unbearable. The Wahhabis were unkind to men like him; his time in Ha’il would be torture. But he knew the sentence was worse than that. This was exile. From the family. From his father’s influence. And maybe, because Abdulaziz was a cruel man, from his wealth.

  “You can’t—” he stammered, but Abdulaziz raised his hand.

  “Prince . . . Father.”

  Abdulaziz bowed his head. The midmorning call to prayer had started over the jet’s sound system. The elder prince lifted his considerable bulk and knelt on the prayer rug. He touched his forehead to the golden silk, in a pose of supplication. The plane banked, and Abdulaziz’s rotund figure rotated on the rug, his head bowed toward Mecca in humility before the vast numinousness of Allah.

  Mishaal watched, his lip curling in disgust. He hated this false piety. But more than that, he hated this man.

  The man curled his torso to the ground as the midmorning prayer call rose toward its conclusion. As a Wahhabi Muslim, he was more pious than most, some might have said extreme. But the judgments of man did not concern him; only submission to God mattered.

  He held his hands in front of him, his forehead nearly touching the carpet in supplication. The exact position had taken him more than a year to perfect, but now it was a part of him. That was the nature of ritual. It became automatic to the body, something that existed beyond the need to think or consider. Then you could free your mind to understand tawhid, the oneness of God. Or to size up your fellow worshippers.

  The Wahhabi sat up, his eyes calmly scanning the eight other men in the mosque. The women had their own worship corner behind the cubbyholes for shoes, but he never concerned himself with them. In fact, for all his practiced watchfulness, he didn’t know if there were women present at all.

  The Rüstem Pasha Mosque of Istanbul was small but old, accessed by one nondescript door and a dark flight of stairs. Thousands walked past without realizing it was there, because the mosque was in the middle of the downtown spice market, and merchants’ stalls covered the ground floor, while pigeons and their filth obscured the windows. Many who found the mosque considered its blue-tiled dome the most beautiful in Istanbul, especially in the softer morning light, but as the Wahhabi raised his head from prayer, he didn’t even glance at the artistry above. He studied the men instead, searching their lack of piety. They were small and poor, from the underclass of Turkish society, but that was no excuse. The Wahhabi had once been small and poor himself.

  Prayers ended. The Wahhabi bowed one last time. Allahu Akbar. Dear Father. Raise up your son.

  He rose. Another man rose with him. Neither looked at the other. They walked to the back of the room to retrieve their shoes. The Wahhabi put his on slowly, with deliberate care, as he did everything now. He was a tall man, long and angular in every way, from his skeletal fingers to his thin face. He wasn’t young or old but of indeterminate age. It was a number that didn’t matter to him anyway, and was in fact something he’d begun to forget. He preferred not to think of his childhood or young adulthood, but only of his rebirth, after he’d found his purpose and awoken into the joys of submission to God.

  The small man bumped him, fumbling with his shoes. The Wahhabi stared down his nose at him. The man was inefficient, full of unnecessary movement. He was unworthy. Or worse, an apostate.

  The Wahhabi reached over and, in one smooth motion, snatched the purse and a piece of paper from the other man’s hands. The paper was a photograph, but the Wahhabi didn’t bother to look at it. There was no escape. If the man in the photograph had been given to the Wahhabi, the man was dead already.

  “Allahu akbar,” the informant said, lowering his eyes. God is the greatest.

  True, little man, the Wahhabi thought. And I am his instrument.

  Chapter 6

  Half a world away, Brad Winters was being escorted into the appalling CIA cafeteria in the basement at Langley. He was a member of both the Cosmos Club and the Metropolitan Club, the most prestigious social clubs in town; he kept a cigar locker with a bronze nameplate at Morton’s steakhouse on Connecticut Avenue; and the Palm had his caricature over his favorite booth. After all, a man will not be defined by the food he eats, but he will be defined by the places where he eats it.

  The CIA cafeteria was not prestigious, despite its exclusivity. Unlike the Pentagon or White House, there were no tours. Visitors had to be invited. They had to be on the right list at the main gate, ride a bus to the New Building, go through a second security check, get an escort, and walk through those ridiculous white “wave tunnels”—security passages in the shape of an “S.”
On the other end was a multistory atrium with half-size models of U-2 and A-12 spy planes suspended from the ceiling.

  Then you had to descend. At the bottom of the escalator sat the world’s most pointless gift shop. Next to it was the world’s most pointless museum, just one hallway long. On exhibit was bin Laden’s AK-47, snatched during the Abbottabad raid. Other war trophies included trinkets taken from Saddam Hussein, Pablo Escobar, Fidel Castro, the KGB, and other villains of freedom. At least it was better than the ridiculous modern art that adorned the atrium. Brad Winters hated modern art.

  The subterranean cafeteria had a wall of glass facing the sunken atrium garden. Depressing, Winters thought. All of it is depressing. Still, the atrium was the only sky most of these cave dwellers ever saw, since analyst offices were windowless vaults. Who said the CIA wasn’t glamorous?

  Winters’s escort, a young Mormon fresh out of Brigham Young University, smiled and motioned toward the entrance to the cafeteria. The Agency loved Mormons. They had foreign-language skills, lived abroad on their two-year proselytization mission, and, most important of all, could pass a CIA polygraph. But they sucked at infiltrating terrorist organizations. Obviously.

  “Thanks,” Winters said, with a Dick Cheney–ish smile-scowl. No use wasting charm on the young.

  Disgusting, he thought, as he eyed the food stations. He did a circuit twice before finally settling on a “jazz salad.” Christ, he thought, who names this stuff? He would have to stop at the Metropolitan Grill for real food on his return to the city.

  Winters strode aggressively across the cafeteria to his friend Larry Fitzhugh. Larry was a “Washington friend,” meaning a friend of convenience. Winters knew no other kind. As the CEO of Apollo Outcomes, a multi-billion-dollar private military company in deep with the national security establishment, he could have lunched with the director of the CIA, but it would have been useless. Larry was a better source, because Larry actually knew things.