ASSASSINS

by Mike Bond

  When Jack thought of it the idea stunned him. The United States had invented the Nuremberg Principles. But never been judged by them.

  Losing Iraq

  MUQTADA AL-SADR was an enemy to the West but a hero to many Iraqis. He had united the Shiites of southern Baghdad and southeast Iraq into total opposition to US occupation and his Mahdi Army had fought the US to a standstill. Then, inexplicably, he ordered all his forces to cease hostilities, and reached out to “our Sunni brothers and sisters” to create a unified, democratic and peaceful Iraq.

  “This guy’s very dangerous,” Isabelle had quipped one night as they lay beside each other in the narrow bed, “he’s trying to stop the violence, bring people together, heal wounds...”

  “What could be worse?” Jack snickered.

  “But he’s still a wacko.”

  “They all are – Islam means I submit – why denigrate yourself like that?”

  “All religions are subjugation, pretending that some other force owns you.”

  “Until they give up the illusion that only they are right they’ll never evolve into the modern world.”

  “They don’t want to evolve into it. They want to destroy it.”

  “You’re not being politically correct, darling. We’re supposed to pretend that doesn’t matter.”

  WE’RE LOSING IRAQ,” he told the group assembled round the large walnut table in an Embassy conference room. “Afghanistan too. You have to decide if that matters to the future interests of the United States.”

  “What do you think?” said the Congressman from Oklahoma.

  How could he explain what he thought to this “task force” of arrogant innocents whom General Szymanski, Timothy and Levi Ackerman had brought to Baghdad to find ways to shore up GW’s eroding position?

  “Imagine,” Jack said, “you rob a bank. Maybe you got lied to, didn’t realize what you were doing. But it wasn’t a good idea, and great harm has resulted, to you and others. So what can you do now, to keep things from becoming worse?”

  “Worse?” Melanie Harper, the President’s National Security expert, snapped. “Things aren’t going to get worse!”

  “It’s worse everywhere. Every month worse than the previous one. We’re losing ground throughout Iraq, and in Afghanistan we’ve given up most of what we had.” He watched them. “There is no good way out. Without a huge land war. And even that would probably lose.”

  He saw their faces harden as they took this in. These politicians and generals who always found ways to polish things. Unless or until it was to their advantage to destroy them. “What I am saying,” he said, “is that it’s too late to make things good. The harm has been done –”

  “What harm?” the Oklahoma Senator said. He had a rolling twang he’d no doubt practiced for years, and it made him seem both comical and dangerous.

  “The Iraq Study Group recommended a phased withdrawal from Iraq and opening conversations with its neighbors, Iran and Syria, seek some kind of regional solution. While I welcome any idea that might lead to peace, I doubt it will work.”

  “Maybe we just say we’ve won,” the New Jersey Senator said. “And go home?”

  “I’m not here to argue with you. Just to present what I know. And that is we got into something we cannot get out of. Not with honor.”

  “Honor!” scoffed General Szymanski. “You can always buy honor with a big defense budget.”

  “Even with a doubled budget, even with fifty thousand more combat troops – not that we have them – it’s still likely we’ll lose. Their IEDs are getting more powerful and we can’t sniff them. Sunnis, Shiites, Baathists, ex-Army guys, everyone’s against us. We’ve lost most of the countryside and now we’re losing Baghdad.” He stared round at them. “Even the Green Zone is collapsing, just like the fall of Saigon.”

  “The President doesn’t want to hear that,” Szymanski said.

  “This isn’t one of his press conferences,” Ackerman said. “We can be honest.”

  “The President won a real mandate in his reelection.” Melanie Harper stared at Jack with the dislike of political appointees for those who go into the field and bring back news they don’t want to hear. “A reelection this war helped him win. And we’re here to see he makes the most of it.”

  “Our soldiers died,” Jack said, “so he could get reelected?”

  “What would most of them have been doing back home? Dying in drunk driving accidents, overdosing on crystal meth? You know the kinds of recruits we get, these days.” With her black eyes and smooth face Melanie seemed ageless, her wiry black hair unsilvered, her smile warming you with its false incandescence. When he’d first learned her name he’d thought Melanoma.

  Outside the bulletproof window behind Timothy a thick morning haze covered the Green Zone. In the Red Zone beyond it the smoke of bombing runs tilted in wind-twisted columns to the south. Contrails bled rosy streaks northward across the pasty sky.

  “Problem is,” Ackerman said, “no one’s enlisting. Or re-enlisting.”

  “So?” Szymanski countered. “We bring back the draft.”

  Timothy shook his head. “Not till after next elections. For the Republicans to keep the White House we can’t piss anybody off.” Timothy had grown even more flabby and flushed, Jack noticed, as if dying of something.

  “In the first years after the invasion,” Jack said, “we had secure provinces. Three and a half years later we have none. After the invasion some Iraqis supported us, now they all hate us. We sweep an area and they vanish; the moment we leave they’re back again. While Al-Qaeda in Iraq is massacring whole villages of men, women and children. Cutting their throats one by one in front of the camera. And the longer we stay at reduced force the more casualties we take, and not one dead or maimed soldier would tell you it was worth it.”

  “Whose side are you on?” Melanie hissed.

  “Do you remember 9/11?”

  “Don’t make an enemy out of me, you prick!”

  “You’re everybody’s enemy, Melanie. That’s how you get ahead.” He stared furiously at the others. “We went into Afghanistan to crush Al-Qaeda and the Taliban. We had them on the run, then Bush and Cheney switched to Iraq for no reason. And now we’ve lost Afghanistan, goddamit, and you know it!”

  “Absolutely not,” Melanie said.

  “All we have left is Kabul and part of the north. The Taliban controls the south, east, and west. Even if we put all our Marines into Helmand we’re not going to control it. We’re putting no money into reconstruction and social change...”

  “How many times,” Szymanski sighed, “have you been told President is’n into nation-building.”

  “I promise you,” Timothy said, “Iraq won’t be another Vietnam.”

  “It already is.” Jack felt incurable weariness, the inability to communicate the obvious. “But don’t worry – if it gets too tough you’ll cut and run. Then al-Qaeda in Iraq takes over and kills the Shiites and Christians, or Iran moves in and then we have a huge oil power with nuclear weapons run by fanatic world-hating Shiites.”

  Timothy tskked. “The Iraqis’ll get behind us. Anyway we’re not here for them –”

  “Do you remember,” Jack said to Ackerman, “after 9/11, you told me how many times you and the others had told the President, the Principals, that an attack was coming? Remember how many times you told them? Forty-two times, you said. Forty-two times you warned the people responsible for the safety of our nation. You remember what they said?”

  Ackerman nodded, glanced at Timothy, Melanie.

  “They blew you away. GW went fishing. You said you didn’t know why, you didn’t understand how he could ignore this... Do you understand now?”

  “Jack,” Timothy said, “you’re way out of line here...”

  “Do you understand now? Do I have to spell it out? Or do you have the guts to say it?”

  Szymanski stood. “I think this meeting’s over.”

  “C’mon, Levi,” Jack said. “Tell the truth f
or once in your life.”

  Ackerman cleared his throat. “I don’t think you can prove it, Jack. I don’t think it’s something the nation wants to hear.”

  “Remember the words out front at Langley? The truth shall make us free?”

  “The truth is what we make it.” Timothy smiled. “What we say it is.”

  See You in New York

  THE NEW BAGHDAD station chief, Jordan Feist, had a nervous abrupt manner like someone unsure of himself in public, a shy technocrat with long pale skinny fingers and a narrow nose. But he spoke seven Arabic dialects, including the classical in which the Koran had been written. He knew the region’s history and culture, and seemed to have a deep resolve to deal with Iraq honestly and directly, and an ironic realization of what we had done and what had resulted.

  “Where are we going in all this?” Jack asked him, the same question Isabelle had asked him when he’d come back from the dead.

  “We’ve been at this war four years,” Feist said. “We’d have to be nuts to think we’re winning.”

  “Some people still do.”

  Feist perched his long chin on a slender hand, elbow on the table. “GW? Cheney? If a Democrat gets in next year, those guys could get brought up for war crimes.”

  “Never happen.”

  Feist poured himself another coffee and sat back down opposite Jack. “You don’t want more?” he nodded at Jack’s cup.

  “If your coffee is like how we’re going to fight Al-Qaeda we’re in deep shit.”

  Feist grinned. ”My Dad used to take me hunting – I grew up in Idaho – and he’d put the coffee grounds in the pot the first morning and just keep adding more every morning. By the end of the two weeks you could’ve killed an elk with it.” He glanced at the pot. “I’ve been here a week, so it’ll be another week or so before I change it.”

  “I stayed in a cabin in the Sawtooths a while, few years ago, made my coffee like that.”

  “I know. About your being the Sawtooths, I mean.” Feist tipped forward, elbows on the table. ”I know a fair bit about you. You’ve always gone where the trouble is, never feared to do the recon and say the truth. And you’ve been right.”

  Jack shrugged. “Doesn’t matter you’re right if nobody listens.”

  “Just like here. Iraq is, in my opinion, totally fucked. But the top guys won’t admit it. So all their strategies and tactics –”

  “Are off target.”

  “That old Sun Tzu thing – if you don’t know your enemy –”

  Jack took a breath. ”We don’t. And we don’t really know ourselves.”

  Feist leaned forward suddenly. “So why are you still here?”

  “I keep thinking I should leave, that if Isabelle and I are going to have kids we better do it soon, that I can go back to the States or Europe or anywhere and make plenty of money and live a happy life. But Osama... Till we get Osama, maybe I can make a tiny difference in finding him, and if I’m not trying we might lose him, you know, the straw that breaks the camel’s back. I owe it to Sophie and the kids. And Isabelle owes it to her husband.”

  Feist poured more of the thick oily coffee into his cup. ”I know some amazing things about Isabelle.”

  “Stuff she can’t tell me.”

  “You have no idea how brave she is.”

  “Yeah I do.”

  “And she’s not even ours.”

  “Nor am I, completely.”

  Feist gave him an amused look. “Tell me.”

  “I’m never again doing something immoral, or bad for our country. Or the world.”

  For such a slender acute physique Feist had a huge barrel laugh. “Holy Christ, an ideologue. Are you becoming PC?”

  Jack laughed. “Imagine your wife and kids are going to be executed by terrorists tomorrow, and you have a terrorist prisoner and know if you torture him you can find the other terrorists and save your family, would you?”

  “Of course.”

  Jack thought of Sophie and the kids falling in the North Tower – he would’ve tortured as many terrorists as it took to avoid that. “We don’t have the politically correct folks with us on that one.”

  “That’s because their families have never been in danger.”

  IN THE DESERT time passes slowly. But when you look back you can remember little because it seems unchanging. The desert negates time, Jack decided, because it’s timeless.

  In three more trips to Afghanistan he’d found no leads on Osama Bin Laden. “Maybe he’s dead,” Isabelle said. The possibility gave him a weird letdown, as if somehow he’d failed.

  “We should leave,” she said. “Get out of this.”

  “Osama’s not dead. He’s in Pakistan somewhere. I can feel it.”

  “Bloody ISI’s hiding him.” She looked out the window through the walls of buildings toward the silvery slice of the Tigris. “We must get out of here.”

  “The new chief wants to see me tomorrow.”

  “What for?”

  “Christ if I know.”

  “Don’t do it.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t do what he asks you. Tell him we’re getting out of this.”

  “He seems a good guy, dropped into the middle of this insane mess...”

  “It’s not your responsibility.”

  “Your people don’t want you going either.”

  She exhaled. “I almost don’t know where I’d go... we’d go...”

  “As long as we can do some good, how can we leave?”

  JORDAN FEIST SEEMED more confident and relaxed, having survived, politically, his first year as station chief. And he served better coffee.

  “What happened to the Idaho hunting coffee?” Jack said.

  “I think you were the only one who liked it.”

  “So what’s up?”

  Feist pulled his chair closer. “What do you know about Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi?”

  “He’s a fucking Salafist. Wants to kill us all.”

  “He’s in Bucca.”

  “Oh Christ.” The largest US military prison in Iraq, Fort Bucca was a breeding ground of fanaticism, where thousands of former Iraqi soldiers and other captives were radicalized by Al-Qaeda, and where to simplify operations the US had let them impose the deadliest form of Sharia on other prisoners.

  “We want to keep him there forever. But it’s a new Administration in Washington, and somebody very high up wants him released.”

  “He’s insanely dangerous. They must be nuts.”

  “We’ve been asked to do a report. We’re supposed to recommend release, but what if you have a good look, and say what you think?”

  Jack felt a surge of admiration for Feist. “Puts you on thin ice.”

  Feist shrugged: maybe. “With a new administration you never know.”

  “I can’t understand why they’d want to let him go –”

  “We have a few files on him -- can you look at them, go down to Bucca and interrogate him, tell us what you think?”

  “I want to get back to Afghanistan,” Jack answered. “And find Osama.”

  “Maybe this piece of shit al-Baghdadi knows something that could help you.”

  THE FIRES OF HELL couldn’t match the summer heat at Bucca. Nor could they warm you in its bitter winter. A vast corral of twenty thousand Iraqi prisoners, some here since the 2003 US invasion, most caught in the battles and sweeps since. A well-managed but dangerous POW camp on the flat desert just inland of the Gulf.

  All the way down on Highway 1 he’d scanned the passing wind-scoured desert and tried to figure who at the top wanted Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi free. It would be like having a viper loose in your home. A viper that wanted to kill you.

  Who was it?

  What was the tradeoff? With whom?

  A CITY OF TENTS and concrete buildings behind rolls of concertina and barbed wire, watched over by machine gun posts in guard towers, Camp Bucca was like a vast Siberian gulag transported to the desert. Thousands of prisoners dressed in orange jump suits
staring across the barbed and concertina wire, or being marched, hands on head, between tall concrete walls by Army guards, or sitting in the shade of their tents under the hot white sun.

  It had been a British prison called Camp Freddy left over from the 1990 Gulf War which the Brits had gladly ceded to the Americans after the 2003 invasion. The US soon filled it with captured Iraqi Army soldiers, Baathist Party members and anyone else who seemed suspicious.

  As things got worse in the US occupation, more and more suspected Iraqi militants and jihadis were jailed there. After a report by US Major General Antonio Taguba described US abuses of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, many of the most abused prisoners there were quietly transferred to Bucca and disappeared from view.

  Inside the confining pressure cooker of Camp Bucca, the soldiers and jihadis began to work together. We have a common enemy, the jihadis said. Let us kill our enemy and not each other.

  “You’re creating a terrorism university at Bucca,” Jack had told Timothy way back in 2005.

  “They can be terrorists all they want,” Timothy had answered. “Because we’re never going to let the fuckers go.”

  “Someday,” Jack had said, “what if we have to?”

  ABU BAKR AL-BAGHDADI stood at five nine, swarthy and direct, a man so insanely sure of himself that no human voice could intervene in the dialogue he had with the Devil he took for God.

  He emanated hatred like an athlete does sweat. The hatred of someone very smart and faithful to his own psychotic rules.

  “Have you ever met Osama?” Jack asked him.

  “Osama is a great man,” Abu Bakr said. “But he made a mistake.”

  “What’s that?”

  “He tried first to kill you infidels.” Abu Bakr shook his head. “First we need to clean ourselves of Shiites. Then we kill you.”

  “You have no idea where he is, Osama?”

  “He is everywhere. He is waiting. You cannot escape him.”

  Four National Guardsmen had led Jack through the prison visitor center past a long row of stalls where blackcloaked women spoke through bulletproof windows to prisoners in orange jump suits. The Guardsmen unlocked a steel door to a concrete room with a steel table and two benches bolted to the floor. They returned with al-Baghdadi in ankle and wrist chains and clamped him to one bench. “You want us to stay or leave?” a Guardsman said to Jack.