by Sean McFate
The second guard wasn’t as sure. He was almost sixteen, from the slums of Damascus, and he had joined ISIS primarily for food. And the promise of tawhid, mystical union with Allah. He wanted to be moved by faith. He wanted to believe there was a divine purpose to his life of crushing injustice. But for weeks, he had experienced only the daily grind of desperate people stumbling toward Turkey, just as his family had walked out of Damascus last winter when the rebels opened a gap. They were dead now, all but him.
So he watched the elongated figure emerge out of the grasslands, where no one had ever come from before, with a certain hopefulness. He countenanced the white robes against the dark night, and the corona of hair and beard. The stranger was bareheaded, save a white skullcap, and he carried no bags, but he had a jambiya—a curved dagger—tucked in his belt and a leather strap across his chest. He looked neither Syrian army nor Kurdish fighter nor fellow mujahideen.
“Madman,” the first guard said.
Prophet, thought Ish, the younger guard. He had been waiting for wisdom to emerge from this emptiness. He believed the teachings of his former imam: that the desert could drive men mad with the knowledge of Allah.
“As-salamu alaykum,” the older guard yelled when the stranger was less than fifty meters away.
The stranger kept walking toward them, slow and steady, holding their gaze until Ish looked away. When he looked back, the stranger was uncomfortably close. He had an empty look in his eyes, as if he didn’t know they were there. His hands were outstretched, palms up and cupped in supplication. He glanced up at the black ISIS flag above the former Syrian Army outpost, then stared straight into the younger man. Ish felt his heart explode with longing. Surely this was a holy man.
“As-salamu alaykum,” the older guard repeated, bringing his Kalashnikov across his chest as a threat, his finger on the trigger. The stranger stopped in front of him.
“Wa-Alaikum Salaam,” the stranger said calmly, his black eyes glittering like beetles but the rest of his face impassive. “I’m looking for a man,” he said in Gulf Arabic. “I believe he passed through here earlier today.”
“We were not here earlier today,” the guard replied.
The stranger reached behind his back with his left arm, pulled out a scimitar, and sliced the guard’s neck in one motion. The head fell one way; the body the other. Ish fell to his knees and began to pray, his forehead to the bloody ground, his body wracked with sobs.
“Then you cannot help me,” the stranger said, walking toward the city.
If Ish had looked up, he would have seen the smile of satisfaction on the formerly stoic face, the electricity of delight. Allah willed his arm to discipline and punish, but also to inspire. The Wahhabi had sensed the fear and longing in the second guard’s eyes, and he knew that he could give the young man what he desired: revelation.
The American white-knuckled his night-vision binoculars and watched the gaunt figure walk undisturbed into the Syrian night. He looked back at the outpost. The headless body lay crumpled on the ground and the second jihadi lay crumpled beside it, rocking back and forth in prostration.
“What was that?” he whispered, lowering the night-vision binoculars.
“Fuck if I know,” said his partner, lowering his, too.
“The guard didn’t even provoke him. He didn’t even have time to be an asshole. He just . . .”
“I know. I saw it.”
The second operative put the binoculars back to his eyes and watched the assassin walk along the road. The man wasn’t hurrying, and he never looked back. He was . . . Jesus Christ, the guy was strutting.
“You think that was our guy?” He was referring to the new intelligence requirements on the whereabouts of a missing Saudi princeling.
His partner, a former U.S. Navy SEAL turned CIA Ground Division, laughed. “No chance. We’re looking for a Saudi prince leading an ISIS death squad, not a lone sociopath with a sword. Not that one can’t be the other, but no sane person is going to just walk out of the desert alone.”
They set up the satcom array and called in the incident. Reporting bizarre murders wasn’t the assignment; the job was to keep eyes on the tactical situation and take out leadership, if the opportunity presented itself. But this was the first interesting thing they’d seen in days.
“I don’t get it,” the second commando said, still staring through his binos. “Three combat tours in Iraq. Two in Afghanistan, one in the Sahel. I’ve seen some fucked-up shit in my time, but I ain’t seen nothin’ like that.”
“FIDO,” his partner said. Fuck It Drive On.
Chapter 11
Two hundred fifty kilometers away, Jase Campbell stepped onto the tarmac, the props of the Airbus military transport plane lashing his desert fatigues. The land was flat and dusty, but he could see the black outline of distant mountains against the deep purple of the midmorning sky. Iraq. It had been four years. God, he’d missed it.
“Get those Sand Vipers off the bird,” he shouted over the prop wash to the three mercs standing on the rear loading ramp. “Square that shit away,” he yelled to Black Jack Burns, his lead sniper, who was fiddling with a tie-down. “Get a move on!”
The Erbil airport terminal was a few hundred meters away, bright white against the black sky. It was sleek and modern, one of the nicest buildings he’d seen in Iraq, but he wasn’t going there. He was headed in the other direction. Into the Jazira.
“Let’s go, go, go!” he shouted, because if he didn’t shout over the sound of the plane, no one would hear him. “I want to be in those mountains before first light.”
Campbell had a nine-man team, all Tier One, all outfitted to destroy. Their equipment was next-generation, beyond anything U.S. Special Operations Command possessed. The three strike vehicles, currently being unchained by the plane’s loadmaster, were kitted out with a mini Gatling gun turret, reactive armor, Stinger missiles, antitank rockets, and enough demolitions to carve a new face on Mount Rushmore. They even had a recon drone. The vehicles would never pass unnoticed on the open road, but Jase Campbell had no interest in staying low profile. And he had no interest in shooting through his supplies. If this job took a week, he would consider himself a failure. And Jase Campbell never failed.
He had been in this region before, starting in 2004 in Tal Afar, when he had taken part in Operation Black Typhoon as part of a U.S. Army Stryker Brigade. He returned to Tal Afar in 2005 for Operation Restoring Rights, sweeping out al Qaeda as a paratrooper in the Eighty-Second Airborne Division. After that, he “hopped the fence” and joined the Combat Applications Group, also known as Delta Force. His next tour in Iraq was at Balad Air Base, seventy-five kilometers northeast of Baghdad, where he was assigned to the Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC, or simply “the Task Force.” It was America’s hunter-killer machine, and he was at the pointy edge of its spear. When the war ended, JSOC changed. Campbell went home, got a job, hated it, missed the action. One of his buddies from the Task Force recruited him to “the dark side,” as the old soldiers called it—private contract work. The pay was good. Very good. So were the missions.
God damn, it’s good to be back, Campbell thought.
“Ready,” Luke Murphy yelled over the prop blast, sliding up beside him. Murphy had also served in the Task Force, one of three he’d recruited to work with him when he went private sector. Murphy knew this country like the back of his ass: by feel, if not necessarily by sight.
“Then get a move on,” Campbell yelled. The Vipers’ honeycomb wheels spun and vehicles leapt out of the plane and onto the tarmac, lined up and ready to prowl. If a Humvee, a Porsche, and a tank had an orgy, it would produce a Sand Viper. They were quicker than a Hummer, more maneuverable than a tank, and could take a hit in battle. They were the opposite of the armed dune buggies U.S. SpecOps favored, which had zero armor protection. Campbell always felt like he was riding around in an eggshell in those things; they were only good for running the wrong way rather than closing with the enemy. The Vip
ers could eat a dune buggy and shit it into the dirt.
God damn, it’s good to be back, Campbell thought again, as the Vipers lined up. The aircraft’s rear ramp retracted, and he returned the crew chief’s thumbs-up. The pilots throttled the engines, and Campbell saluted as the bird rolled down the runway and into the sky.
“Adios, dipshits,” he said, swapping his salute for the middle finger. In Vietnam, the soldiers loved their combat pilots, because combat pilots landed in enemy fire to save their asses. For mercs, the pilots were nothing more than bus drivers. They took the men close to where they needed to go, then got the hell out.
Campbell watched the plane disappear, its silhouette fading into the dawn sky as he removed his ear plugs. The air felt heavy after standing inside a sonic event, but damn if it didn’t feel good. This place, Iraq, had forged a generation of warriors, for good and for bad. It was their place: the professional members of the gladiatorial class, millennial generation. Whether that was a moral thing or not, Jase Campbell didn’t much care. He wasn’t a politician or a philosopher. He just came to kick ass until there was no more ass to kick.
He took out his satellite phone as he hopped into the lead vehicle and dialed the Apollo Outcomes tactical operations center outside Washington, DC. His mission officer, Rodriguez, picked up.
“We’re here,” Campbell confirmed. He waited. He nodded. “Got it.”
“Move out,” he called to his team, drawing circles in the air with his right hand, and then pointing forward like he was chopping air.
Twelve minutes after hitting the ground in Erbil, they were gone.
Chapter 12
We left the kid on the edge of the wadi in the last dry field before Mosul. He had guided us, slowly, for nearly an hour, around a series of half-completed minefields and abandoned trenches. At one point, we passed a bulldozer sitting idle in a field and a pile of plastic pipe and wood. Someone in ISIS had planned on building defensives, but the energy of the men gave out. The fanatics weren’t an army; they had come to cleanse with fire, not dig holes.
Boon gave the boy an energy bar, and then a sniper bullet as a memento. Wildman promised to kill some ISIS for him, and I gave him a thumbs-up. I’d taken a chance on the kid, and he’d done right by us, but the horizon was turning purple, and that meant it was time to go.
One oxbow later, the farmland turned into neighborhoods. We were inside Mosul now, but still hidden ten feet deep. During rainy season, this river would swell to the width of a four-lane highway, but right now it was less than half that.
“Cross the water here,” the old Kurd said.
Everyone except the drivers clambered atop the Humvees and held on as the vehicle inched into the water and snorkeled across. The passenger compartment flooded, and I could hear Boon inhale as cold water engulfed him up to his chest. The engine was breathing through an extended air intake and exhaust system that rose to the cab’s rooftop, above the water. Still, our Humvee slowed at the center of the small river, its tires clawing the mud. For a moment, I thought we would have to use the bumper winch, but then the Hummer staggered free and came up on the other side. Humvees were beasts.
“Everyone back inside.”
We drove up the bank and onto a hilly plain in the middle of Mosul. Six square kilometers of darkness right in the heart of the city, and a perfect shortcut. These were the ancient ruins of Nineveh, seat of the Assyrian empire from the Bible. Now it was just dust and a few marble edifices, reminding me of Ozymandias’s hubris, the pathetic Pharaoh of Shelley’s poem. ISIS had blown up what was left, including the ancient tomb of Jonah, who escaped a whale but not the fanatics.
“Drive west through the ruins,” the old Kurd said, as we continued in blackout drive.
It was nearly dawn, and the adhan, or Muslim call to prayer, would soon sound. Our time was limited. Mosul had the ubiquitous Arab city feel: two-story cinder-block buildings, tangles of electrical wires, parched ground, litter. Thank goodness the Kurds knew the way; it all looked the same to me.
“Here we are,” the old man said. I recognized the automotive garage, owned by a friend of the Mosul resistance, from previous trips into the city. The Kurds got out, opened the garage doors, and swung them shut behind the Humvees.
“Stay here,” I said. “We’ll be back.”
“When?” the old man asked.
“I don’t know.”
We’d come to trust each other, the old Kurd and me. Battle does that.
“Time to put on the man-jammies,” Wildman said, taking off his night-vision goggles. We each put black tunics over our fatigues and wrapped a black turban around our heads, a jihadi disguise that could be ripped off if we got into a firefight. We set out on foot, just Wildman, Boon, and me.
This was the most dangerous part of the journey. We were at the epicenter of ISIS in Iraq, without the firepower or speed of our Humvees. If we were discovered, we would be captured, tortured, and publicly beheaded. There would be no rescue or ransom for men like us.
We walked as casually as we could muster. The morning call to prayer was imminent, and we had to find our contact, Nassib, before the city awoke. I had called in Farhan’s details yesterday, after the Saudi left but before heading to the T-Top. If he was in Mosul, Nassib would know.
“Where should I leave the mark?” Nassib had asked.
“Same place as last time,” I said, hanging up. That was eighteen hours ago. The mark better be up.
I started, alerted by the sound of movement. Twenty meters in front of us, a dog walked out of an alley. It was a stray, the feral kind that crowded cities across Africa and the Middle East. He stopped and studied us. I reached for a Powerbar, hoping to bribe our way out of this, but my cargo pockets were empty. The dog’s curiosity roused, he approached, hair up. My right hand slowly found my knife’s handle under the tunic, but Wildman stepped in front, leaned forward, and stared. The dog stopped, ears flattened backward. Wildman moved forward, and the dog trotted off.
“Allahu akbar, allahu akbar, allahu akbar, allahu akbar.” The drone of the morning prayers whispered over a loudspeaker. All at once, the call erupted from every corner of the city. One by one, lights turned on. The city was awake.
Keep it together, I told myself.
“Hayya’alas-ṣalāh, hayya’alas-ṣalāh!”
We flipped our weapons’ safeties off.
Two more blocks. We double-timed it, running in the shadows.
“There it is,” Boon whispered. The small number 42 was chalked on the side of the building. A normal person would take no notice, and it would soon fade in the sun or wash away in the rain. But to us, it was clear.
“That’s only a few blocks,” I said. Each number corresponded to a prearranged meeting place in the city. Nassib was a member of Mosul’s underground resistance, and he was paranoid of the hisbah, ISIS’s secret police, who were cruel, vicious, and everywhere. Let the CIA have its fancy gadgets. Old-school spy tradecraft, like dead drops and code, never went obsolete.
Using backstreets, we cut our way to our 42: a shuttered Internet café. The first things ISIS did when they took over Mosul, besides convert everyone to Sunni fundamentalism on pain of death, was take over all the bakeries (social control) and cut off access to the Internet.
I gave two knocks. Pause. Three knocks.
A bolt slid open and the door cracked ajar. A bearded face greeted us with a blank smile. Nassib. Before the war, he had been a professor of English. Mosul was a university town, one of the most important in the Muslim world. Now Nassib, like Mosul, was a shell of his former self.
“As-salamu alaykum,” he said. Peace be unto you.
“Wa-Alaikum Salaam,” I replied. And unto you peace.
We followed him inside the abandoned café, which smelled of food. I hadn’t realized how hungry I was. The room was bare, as our meeting places always were, except for a large platter of rice and lamb on a nice carpet.
“Welcome, friends. Eat!” Nassib said, spreading his han
ds generously, although he could not hide his nervousness.
We sat cross-legged on the floor and ate, out of both respect and hunger. Next to Nassib were two resistance fighters and a slight, uneasy man. The stranger was young, probably midtwenties, with the golden complexion of the Arabian Peninsula, an unscarred face, and good teeth. He was dressed in the local style, but he was clearly from the Gulf.
“The prince is not in Mosul,” Nassib said. “But this is . . . I’m sorry. No names. This man knew Prince Farhan.”
“I am honored,” the young man said in English, although his primary emotion was clearly nervousness. “You are well-known here. They fear you as Zill Almaharib, Shadow Warrior.” I nodded to acknowledge the compliment. “But I know you are kind. You helped a friend of mine last month. Her father was sick, too weak, and . . . notorious to go to the hospital. You carried him out.”
The phrases weren’t metaphors. We had killed a lot of jihadis in our two months, and I had carried an old man half a klick to our waiting Humvee. He was a scholar, I was told, a world-renowned expert in seventeenth-century Persian poetry. That seemed like something ISIS had no reason to hate, but of course, they hated everything.
“I remember,” I said. “How is he?”
“Dead.”
“And your friend?”
The man looked at the floor.
“Let no good deed go unrewarded,” Nassib said sadly. He had no doubt dragged this young man in to settle his debt to me, even though my efforts had been futile. Maybe Nassib was hoping to settle his own accounts as well. He didn’t need to worry. I wasn’t keeping a tab.
“Why are you looking for Farhan?” the man asked.
“I’m being paid.”
“To bring him home?”
“Probably.”
The young man waited. “Do you know his father?”
“No.”
“He is a leader in the Kingdom’s spy agency, the General Intelligence Directorate. He runs the terrorist capture and interrogation program for the Saudi and American governments.”