The Secret Soldier jw-5

by Alex Berenson

  “Are you ready to tell me about the camp?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I think you should. The sheikh wants to know.” Wells still couldn’t believe he was using bin Laden’s name.

  “Have you met him?”

  “A long time ago,” Wells said truthfully. “He has to hide now. Because of the Americans, the drones. But he’s in charge. And he wants to know about the mission you were training for. He’s worried it will interfere with his plans.”

  “I don’t believe you, but even if it’s true, you’re wasting your time, because I don’t know anything.” Meshaal let out a world-weary sigh, a sound that teenagers from London to Los Angeles would have recognized.

  “You know more than you think. Start with something easy. How many men were at the camp?”

  “It changed.”

  “At the most.”

  Meshaal counted slowly on his fingers, his lips moving. No wonder his fellow jihadis had picked on him. “Thirty-four,” he said finally. “Or thirty-five.”

  “There were only thirty cots. Don’t lie, Meshaal. I won’t get mad at you, but you have to tell me the truth.”

  “I am. Some slept at the house.”

  “And how many men in all passed through?” The finger counting began. Wells quickly added, “You don’t have to tell me exactly — just guess.”

  “Fifty-five, maybe.”

  “Who was in charge?”

  “You don’t know? You told me you watched us.”

  “But not all the time. So tell me.”

  Meshaal seemed to realize that whatever his reservations, he had no choice but to talk. “He called himself Aziz. I don’t think that was his real name.”

  “He was in the Saudi military.” Wells guessing now.

  “I think so. He liked to be called Major.”

  I think so. Meshaal was drawing distinctions between what he’d seen firsthand and what other people had told him. Whatever his tics, he might be a good witness. “But Aziz wasn’t there all the time.” Wells guessing again, trying to move the conversation forward.

  “He came every few weeks.”

  “From where?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Riyadh? Jeddah?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How old was he?”

  “Old. Maybe your age.”

  Ouch. “If you saw his photo, would you recognize him?”

  “Of course. I saw him lots of times. He lived in the house upstairs.”

  “In the front room?”

  “Yes. Mostly he stayed there or in the office at the back. A few times he spoke to us in class. He said the men against us were strong soldiers, and if we weren’t careful they’d kill us. Sometimes he prayed with us. He knew the whole Quran by heart. He never made a mistake.”

  “Did he say the soldiers would be American?”

  “Yes. Sometimes he watched us train. He yelled at me once for holding my AK the wrong way. He told me to respect it.”

  “He was right. Did he tell you the mission?”

  “No. I thought maybe it would be attacking a place where the Americans live, but he never said.”

  “You mean a housing compound. Like in Riyadh or Dhahran.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why did you think that?”

  “We practiced with car bombs. How to make them. Twice we blew them up. What do you need such a big bomb for? Only to attack a place that’s very well guarded.”

  “But he never said the target?”

  “I told you. He never talked to me. Only yelled at me for the AK. And one time when I made a mistake at dinner and spilled date juice. He said to me, ‘This camp is expensive, and the people who are paying, they don’t want to waste money, so be careful.’ You could see he wasn’t nice. And that was even before—”

  Meshaal broke off.

  “Before what?”

  “Nothing.” But Meshaal wouldn’t meet Wells’s eyes.

  Wells decided to let the question go for now. “That time in the kitchen, Aziz didn’t say who those people were, the ones paying for the training?”

  “No. But one of the men — his name was Talib, he was one of the ones you killed — he said something like, ‘Even though they might not like what you learn.’ I didn’t know what he meant, but Aziz didn’t like him saying that. He looked at Talib like he wanted to slit his throat.”

  Wells pulled out the Saudi passport he’d taken from the upstairs bedroom at the farmhouse. “This was Talib?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you ask Aziz why he was mad?”

  “Of course not. I was just happy that he wasn’t mad at me anymore.”

  “Did he ever say anything about King Abdullah?”

  “He hated Abdullah. He told us Abdullah makes peace with the Jews and lets the infidels into Mecca.”

  “Do you hate Abdullah?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did Aziz say he was planning a revolt against Abdullah?”

  “Not really. No.”

  “Besides Aziz, were there other Saudi soldiers in camp?”

  “Yes. Plus one from Iraq. I didn’t like him. He was crazy. He punched me when I couldn’t do enough push-ups. It wasn’t my fault.”

  “How many push-ups can you do?”

  “One time I did twenty-eight. How about you?”

  “A few more,” Wells said. “And how did you get to the camp?”

  “I drove through Jordan—”

  “I mean, how did you find out about it?”

  “My cleric at home asked me if I wanted to fight in the jihad. I said yes, and he said he would help.”

  So Aziz — whoever he was — had recruiters who reached into the Saudi heartland and plucked off teenagers in ones and twos. Between the passports Wells had found, the paper trail that the camp must have produced, and Meshaal’s testimony, the Saudi mukhabarat should be able to roll up the network. But if Abdullah and Miteb were right, the muk—or at least Mansour and Saeed — already knew about the camp.

  On the other hand, Duto and the CIA would have to pay attention now that Meshaal had confirmed that the jihadis were targeting American soldiers. The United States couldn’t ignore that warning, no matter how much it wanted to stay out of the fight between Abdullah and Saeed.

  Which led to the obvious question: If Saeed and Mansour were focused on Abdullah and succession, why would they target the United States? Why wake the dragon? Maybe Talib had blurted out the answer that day in the kitchen. Maybe Aziz — whoever he was — had grander plans than his paymasters knew.

  FOR HOURS, WELLS ASKED Meshaal about his recruitment and training, what weapons he’d used, what tactics he’d practiced, the other jihadis. The biggest surprise came when Wells asked about Princess Alia’s bombing. He didn’t expect Meshaal would know anything, but Meshaal told him that one jihadi had frequently dressed in a burqa.

  “He slept in a little room behind the farmhouse, because no one liked him. They hated him even more than me. But Talib told us to be nice to him. He left a while ago, and when we heard that Alia blew up, we all knew it had to be him.”

  Eventually Meshaal’s energy flagged, and he went below and lay in the narrow bunk where Wells had stowed the duffel bag from the farmhouse. He lay beside the bag and closed his eyes and fell asleep almost immediately. He looked very young.

  Wells came back up, sat beside Gaffan at the helm. The sun was strong now, the glare high off the water. Gaffan had run them westsouthwest to get away from the main shipping lane between Lebanon and Cyprus. Still, the waters were busy with diesel-belching trawlers from Beirut and container ships that ran between Tel Aviv and Istanbul.

  “You were talking to him awhile.”

  “He knows a lot. He was there five months, and he’s not stupid. And because they didn’t care about him, they talked in front of him. He already told me he’s sure that someone from the camp assassinated Alia. And he says the commander talked about targeting American soldiers.”


  “I still wish there’d been another way to do it.”

  “There wasn’t.”

  “This is the place where the numbers don’t add up.”

  “You think chain of command makes it easier. The last thing I was involved with, some good soldiers, they did some things I’ll bet they wish they could take back. But they had a colonel in charge, and authorization. They told themselves it was okay. Just following orders.”

  “And what happened to them?”

  “They died. Most of them.”

  “You saying what I think?” Gaffan said.

  “No. It wasn’t me. It’s complicated. But what I’m trying to say, you operate the way we do, you can never lay it on somebody else. You answer to yourself.”

  “And if you answer wrong?”

  “Then you pay. One way or another.”

  Gaffan was silent for a while.

  “John.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You mind if I ask you about religion? Islam?”

  “Ask away.” Though Wells didn’t like talking about his faith. Too often, Muslims saw him as an impostor, and non-Muslims a curiosity.

  “I just don’t understand how you say you’re Muslim when all the guys we go after — it’s not like they’re Buddhists.”

  “World War Two. We and the Germans were both Christian.”

  “Yeah, but the Germans weren’t quoting the Bible when they attacked us. This is a religious war. That’s the way they see it, anyway. I don’t have to tell you. You know the Quran better than me. Jihad, killing unbelievers. It’s all in there.”

  “Brett. You’re Christian.”

  “Sure.”

  “You pray.”

  “I’m kind of a Christmas and Easter guy, but yes.”

  “Do you really, truly believe that Jesus Christ rose from the dead?”

  Gaffan looked away from Wells and onto the Mediterranean, as if the water might have the answer. “I don’t know. I’d like to.”

  “There’s plenty in the Quran that I don’t believe. But all those years in Afghanistan, I accepted the brotherhood of Islam. I learned the words, and at some point I started to hear the music. Maybe because there was nothing else for me over there, maybe for my cover, but I did. And I believe in one God. As far as I’m concerned, putting those two things together makes me a Muslim. And most Muslims don’t want suicide bombs and jihad. They want to live their lives like everybody else.”

  “They have a funny way of showing it.”

  “You know better than that. Back to World War Two, the Japanese and their kamikaze pilots. Suicide for the emperor. We killed them, and they killed us. Now Japan’s one of our closest allies. It’s situational.”

  “I hope you’re right, John. But I don’t think either of us is going to be out of work for a long time.”

  “Then we better get to it.”

  WELLS SPENT THE NEXT three hours examining the notebook and helicopter manual and engineering textbook and other papers and passports he’d taken from the farmhouse. Nothing jumped at him, but he did notice a few subtle points. The passports had been recently issued and looked genuine. The men in them were in their teens and twenties, from Saudi towns Wells didn’t know, presumably similar to the village where Meshaal had grown up. The passports had hardly been used. The only entry stamps Wells found were from Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Dubai. He saw no visas from Europe or the United States — or from Pakistan, Afghanistan, or Iran. The lack of travel to those countries was more proof that this group operated independently of Al Qaeda and the Iranian government.

  Wells’s Arabic wasn’t good enough to let him fully understand the engineering textbook. But it seemed to focus on building infrastructure, heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning systems. Inside, Wells found two folded-up pages that held detailed schematics for truck bombs. The third was covered with what looked like a hand-drawn map of a highway. A section near the top was circled. But the map lacked any description or heading, and Wells couldn’t figure out where it was.

  As for the name tags and patches, they were either genuine Saudi military badges or very good replicas. If the jihadis were as well trained as they seemed, they had a real chance of successfully breaching security at a Saudi military base, maybe even one of Abdullah’s palaces. Again, though, Wells found no evidence of a specific target.

  Finally, he looked at the notebook he’d found in Talib’s room. It was filled with neat Arabic script, to-do lists that appeared routine. Buy three hundred gallons diesel… Liban Telecom mobile phones… send F for B at airport 17 March. Toward the back the phrase “42 Aziz 3” was circled in Arabic. Aziz. That was what the man who’d run the camp had called himself. A code, Wells imagined, but for what? With any luck, the NSA or the analysts at Langley would find a connection that he had missed.

  DOWNSTAIRS, THE CRANCHI’S AIR-CONDITIONING had given out. The cabin was as stifling as Bourbon Street in July. Wells hoped the engines were more reliable than the boat’s other mechanicals. Meshaal’s face was slick with sweat. When Wells walked in, he jerked awake, lifting his hands protectively. He lowered them as he realized where he was. “How much longer before we get to Gaza?”

  “A while.”

  “How come we haven’t prayed yet today? At camp we prayed five times a day.”

  Wells didn’t want to pray now, with a dead man’s blood under his fingernails and Gaffan wondering about his faith. “There’s a special rule about being at sea. You don’t have to.”

  “I don’t think that’s true.”

  “We’re not praying, Meshaal. Come on, let’s go up. It’s too hot here.”

  The interrogation continued topside.

  “Did you ever see the office in the farmhouse? The room with the computers?”

  “A few times,” Meshaal said. “I brought food to the pilot.”

  Meshaal hadn’t mentioned anything about a pilot before. “How do you know he was a pilot?”

  “It was my job to take lunch to him. Once I came in and he was playing a flying game on his computer, turning the plane upside down. I asked him if I could play. He said, ‘No, you have to be a real pilot to play.’ I asked him if he was a real pilot, and he said yes, a helicopter pilot. Then Aziz came in and told me to get lost. I didn’t talk to him again.”

  “What was his name?”

  “I don’t know. And he left — I don’t know when, exactly — maybe a month ago. After he left, other people started to leave. Before that, if someone left, someone else usually came, but not anymore.”

  “The people who left, did they say they were leaving for good?”

  “They didn’t say, but yes. They didn’t leave any of their clothes behind. They left in twos and threes. They were going to Riyadh, and some to Jeddah and even a few to Mecca.”

  “They told you?”

  “No, but I heard.”

  “Did they take weapons?”

  “Some did. The ones who were flying didn’t.”

  “Did Aziz ever say anything about Mecca? Attacking the Grand Mosque?”

  “I told you a bunch of times. He never said anything to me.”

  “When was the last time you saw him?”

  “Ten days ago. He told us the mission was coming soon.”

  “Do you know what he wanted, why he came back?”

  “It had to do with the special room.”

  The kid was full of surprises.

  “Meshaal. You never said anything about a special room.”

  “You never asked. It was next to the little cabin behind the house. It was dug into the ground, made of concrete. Maybe three meters square, four meters deep.”

  “A cell.”

  “Yes. We dug it and put a metal roof on it and covered it with dirt, so it was hard to see. It had a special pipe with an engine to blow air inside so it wouldn’t get too hot and someone in it could breathe. The night Aziz came back, he made me and some others dig up the pipe and the engine and put it in a truck. Then two men drove i
t away.”

  “Did they hold anyone in the cell?”

  “One time they put someone in for four days.” Meshaal shook his head as if trying to rid his mind of the image. “His name was Ayman.”

  “This is what you didn’t want to talk about before.”

  “Yes.”

  “He was a friend of yours?”

  “Not a friend, not really. But we looked out for each other. People thought he was stupid. Like me. They said he was a traitor. He wasn’t a traitor. He asked if he could leave, and they said no, and he left anyway. They caught him the next day and brought him back.”

  “And put him in the cell.”

  “Yes.”

  “And didn’t give him any food.”

  “No food, okay. He had no water. On the third day, Aziz made us watch. This is what I didn’t want to say before. We lifted the lid, and Ayman was begging for water. Begging and promising he would tell. Whatever Aziz wanted. His face. His lips. They were black. And his eyes—” Meshaal stopped. “And Aziz told us, this is what happens to traitors. Then we put the lid back on.”

  AZIZ HAD BEEN TESTING the ventilation equipment. Wells was certain. He needed to make sure the cell wouldn’t suffocate the captives he planned to hold. By running away, deserting, Ayman had made himself the test case. But Aziz hadn’t needed to kill him. He could have provisioned the cell, plucked Ayman out a week later, lesson learned. Death from dehydration was pure cruelty, a dark fire far worse than the slow twilight of starvation.

  Wells wondered if Aziz had prayed the night he’d put the lid back on. Probably. Probably with special fervor. Like the Bible, the Quran was filled with tales of man’s cruelty to man. And yet Wells couldn’t believe that Allah wanted the prayers of a psychopath.

  Wells had never met Aziz, never seen the man, didn’t even know his real name. But for the first time in years, a righteous fury burned his blood. He wanted to strike down this man who had amused himself by torturing one of his own soldiers. The word was smite. He wanted to cast lightning upon Aziz.

  “Stop the boat,” he said to Gaffan.

  Gaffan brought the engines to idle. They were about fifty miles south of Cyprus, out of the main shipping lanes, no other ships within five miles. Wells stripped down and dove into the sea. The water was cool and dark and briny, almost medicinal, and Wells scissors-kicked and then dove as deep he could. With the boat beside him, he was a fearless swimmer.