Chapter 19
Joint Strike Force
Sunni Triangle, Iraq
March 2006
2100 hours. Time for last checks, tightening the straps and checking gear. Jackson and Warrick, Special Forces guys from David’s old team, smoked their last cigarettes alongside David.
Kris had briefed the team an hour before. For months, their Special Forces strike force, with David attached, had hit Saqqaf and his fighters and hit them hard, crushing blows to his burgeoning Islamic State.
Most of the jihadis were now on the run.
Every night, they swooped in on another safe house, another location uncovered by meticulous hunting through emails, text messages, and cell phone calls. Every night, Kris stripped the jihadis they arrested of all their belongings, taking the pocket litter and the safe house computers and the jihadis’ notebooks, and spent the next twelve hours perusing everything, combining it with intercepts and drone overheads and human intelligence from on the ground. By afternoon, Kris had another list of targets, another night of work for David and the strike team.
General Carter and Kris had turned out to be a potent, formidable pair.
Tonight, Kris had told them to “expect resistance”, which meant “expect a firefight”.
Everything in David raced. His mind, his heart, the tapping of his finger against his rifle. Details thundered through his mind. The sequence of events, the breach order. The call signs, the signal to go. Where to set up perimeter locations. The targets.
Cool professionalism warred with nervousness. He’d been on a hundred raids, had been on a hundred different missions. But today, his skin was too small, his bones too large. Everything was ultracrisp, like the world had been sharpened before his eyes.
Kris stamped out his last cigarette and stood before David. His eyes ran over David’s blacked-out face, his black fatigues. A few hours ago, they’d woken up in Kris’s cot beneath his plywood table-turned-desk in a curtained-off section of the warehouse the strike team used as a base. The sun set and they ate breakfast for dinner, sitting side by side on the cot. Their workday started at sundown.
“You’ve got this.” Kris smiled. “You’ll get him.”
David nodded. They were going after Saqqaf’s senior lieutenant, a man named Mousa. A month before, Mousa and Saqqaf had ordered a pre-dawn raid on the Askari Shrine in Samarra, one of the most revered mosques in the Shia faith.
At dawn, as the sun splintered the sky, explosives planted by the fighters had ripped the mosque apart. The golden dome, a shrine in the hearts of millions, lay in a pile of rubble and dust, and all that remained was broken concrete, twisted rebar, and screams.
Blind rage followed, fury and anguish that split the city and the country. Reprisal killings rolled in wave after wave, bands of Sunni and Shia gangs murdering and beheading their way across the country.
Thousands were killed. Morgues started turning away the dead. There was no more room.
Bodies were left in the streets. Severed heads rolled in gutters, lay on their side next to piles of trash and bloodstained mud.
David wondered if the end times were upon the world. If the Apocalypse had truly come. Months of decimating cell after cell after cell, flipping low-level and mid-level fighters. Siphoning all phone calls, all emails. Everything they could scrape from any of Saqqaf’s associates. They’d choked off his ratlines into Syria, choked his supply routes. And yet, Saqqaf had managed to throw jet fuel on the bonfire of Iraq’s sectarian tensions. The end truly did seem nigh.
The radio crackled. General Carter’s voice rang out in David’s ear. “Everyone, form up. Prepare to move out.”
Kris grasped his hand. David squeezed his fingers. It was the most they allowed each other around everyone. Neither in nor out, they existed in the in-between space. Neither acknowledging nor denying it. Hiding, and yet not. Sharing a room, but never holding hands, never kissing in public. “See you in a few hours,” Kris said softly. He smiled, the same smile David saw in his dreams when they were separated, the same smile that lived in the center of his heart.
“Ya rouhi.”
Joint Strike Force
Sunni Triangle, Iraq
0230 hours
Mousa sat in a cell, hands bound behind his back, hood covering his head. Halogen lights burned down onto him, turning the night to the brightest day. David stood outside the cellblock, watching.
“You okay?” Kris frowned. He sucked down the last of his cigarette, blew out the smoke quickly. David had been quiet since the team had come back, since they’d dragged Mousa in, screaming curses and raging about hellfire and infidels.
David couldn’t tear his eyes from Mousa. “I’m fine.”
“You sure you want to do this?”
“I have to do this.”
Kris stamped out his cigarette. “Then we need to get started. It’s after zero two hundred already.”
Slowly, David nodded.
Kris led them in. He’d been the lead interrogator for the strike team, picking apart low-level fighters and senior commanders, breaking them down one by one. Mousa was the most senior commander of Saqqaf’s they had captured alive.
He moved behind Mousa. Gripped his hood. Waited.
David stood in front, feet spread, arms crossed. He nodded at Kris.
Kris ripped the hood off.
Mousa’s dark eyes shone with hatred, with pure, wretched fury.
David was stuck in Mousa’s stare, pulled in like gravity, falling into a black hole. He couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t look away. Couldn’t escape the clawing dread rising through him, a wave trying to pull him under—
Revulsion, like acid, tried to drench him, drown him. He wanted to gouge Mousa’s eyes out. He wanted to grab him and throw him down, punch him until he bled, until he choked on his blood, his tears. He wanted Mousa to feel one ounce of what he’d made so many others feel, taste the fear, the helplessness, he’d help unleash upon the world.
Twenty-six years. It had been twenty-six years since he’d felt that same touch of evil, wave after wave of hatred and despair. The raw whisper of twisted darkness reaching for him, grabbing onto his soul.
David clenched his hands into fists, dug his fingernails into his skin.
Mousa spat at David’s feet. “Kufir,” he hissed. “Traitor. You pretend to be Arab, yet you’re only a dog for the Americans. The blood of Muslims is on your hands. Hell awaits you, my brother.” He grinned, savage. “The abyss of al-Nar, the fires, awaits you and all hypocrites. All who have turned against the Prophet, salla Allahu alayhi wa sallam, and Allah.”
“Have you heard of the Amman message?”
“Do not speak to me, infidel—”
“The Prophet, salla Allahu alayhi wa sallam, said, ‘My ummah, the nation of Islam, will not agree upon an error.’ Do you know of this hadith?”
“Do not speak his blessed words, infidel! Your tongue is not worthy to speak his sayings!”
“Five hundred Islamic scholars and imams from over fifty countries have condemned your butchery. They have issued a binding ruling, a fatwa, against you. The ummah has spoken.”
“Lies, from a hypocrite. True Muslims know what we’re creating and believe in the struggle for our Caliphate.”
“Muslims around the world gag against your savagery, your barbarism. You do not speak for the ummah. The scholars have defined who a Muslim is, who a believer and follower of the Prophet, salla Allahu alayhi wa sallam, is. I have news for you, Mousa. It’s not you.”
“Do not dare accuse me of apostasy!”
“You have no idea what it means to be a Muslim. What it means to follow Allah, and to worship Him.”
Mousa sneered. “The Amman message. The Hashemite King of Jordan is an American puppet and a CIA spy! He has Muslim blood on his hands, too! He aligns himself with the infidels and allows Muslim blood to soak the world! He is takfir! A hypocrite and unbeliever! He will join you in al-Nar!” Mousa’s bellows bounced off the cell walls, physical blows that hit David in the center of his chest. “The Sheikh is the future, the head of the Caliphate!”
“The imams have turned against you. Muslims are disgusted by you. Before Saqqaf, no Iraqi cared about Shia or Sunni. Friends and families joined together. There was harmony—”
“The innovators, the bastard Shia, should be wiped from the earth with their apostasy!”
“Your Islamic State has no Shura council. No religious guidance. Your ‘Sheikh of the Slaughters’ isn’t even literate. He pulls lines from the Quran without understanding their meaning, their context. He has no idea what he’s saying. He sounds like an idiot, Mousa.”
“Lies!” Mousa tried to lunge at David. “The Sheikh has a guide. An allamah, a high scholar! He reads the signs of the end times! Guides the Sheikh’s designs!”
Behind Mousa, standing out of sight in the shadows, Kris stiffened. David kept his face impassive, tried to look bored, even. “And who is this allamah? This learned scholar?”
“He is known as Sheikh Jandal.” Mousa hocked spit at David’s feet. “Because he will bring the death of the infidels, the disbelievers, and the kufirs Like you!”
“You disgust Muslims. No one wants you, or your death cult.”
“We are loved!”
“La,” David shook his head. “I do not love you.”
“You are a dirty kufir,” Mousa spat. “You mean nothing. You should be killed where you stand.”
David’s throat clenched. His fingers dug into his folded arms, his elbows, again. The world spun, like a top out of control. “I had to postpone isha prayer because I had to capture you. I haven’t said my night prayers yet. But, as you know, the Prophet, salla Allahu alayhi wa sallam, prayed for the entire night, giving thanks to Allah as often as he could. So, I will go pray. You should pray too. Pray an istikhara. Ask Allah for guidance. Ask for his forgiveness.”
His words tasted like rot, like decay. Like lies.
Mousa tried to surge out of the chair, tried to rush David. His restraints held him back. He looked like a chained dog, foaming at the mouth, fury in his cold eyes. “You are no Muslim!”
“Taqabal Allah.” May God receive your prayers. “You need to repent, Mousa. The ummah has abandoned you. Allah has abandoned you. Why do you think you are here, with us, tonight? Allah delivered you to me.”
He walked away.
Mousa bellowed curses at David’s back, struggling to break free. He cursed David’s existence, called down Allah to burn him alive, condemned him to death. His shouts descended into blind wails, growls of fury, of frustration.
David watched from the observation room, waiting.
Kris, standing behind Mousa in the shadows, slipped around and stood in front of him. Mousa jolted. He’d thought he was alone.
Kris wore the same black fatigues as the strike team. He stared Mousa down, crossed his arms over his chest. “I am going to question you about your involvement with Saqqaf.”
“I have no involvement with Saqqaf.”
“I know everything about you, Mousa. I’ve listened to all of your calls. I’ve read all of your emails. I’ve listened to your wives’ phone calls. I listen to them call their mothers, their sisters, in secret, even when you’ve forbidden them to. I know things about them that you do not.”
Mousa bared his teeth. Pulled at his restraints. “I have nothing to do with Saqqaf,” he spat.
“I am trying to respect you. Honor your position as Saqqaf’s right hand. Did you not help plan the destruction of the Askari Shrine?”
Mousa’s eyes flashed, but he said nothing.
“Of course you did. Mousa, I know you. I’ve captured all your friends. Every one of your brothers has sat in that chair. They’ve all told me so much about you. So much, in fact, that it feels like we are brothers as well.” Kris let a tiny, wry smile curl his lips. “Tell me, how is Abu Abdel? Has he recovered from his injuries?”
Mousa shifted. The first crack appeared. Unease spilled over his features.
“You cared for Abu Abdel. Personally carried him from the battle. The brothers speak highly of you, you know. They say you are their leader. Their emir. That you are the Sheikh’s right hand, his favorite of all the brothers. But now, you’re telling me that you don’t even know him?” Kris feigned disappointment. He screwed up his face. “How loyal are you, truly? To turn your back on the Sheikh? On your brothers?”
“I love the Sheikh!” Mousa shouted. “Saqqaf is the future! He will lead the Caliphate to the final battle, to the day when Islam will triumph over the armies of the cross! Until all infidels are destroyed, and the rivers overflow with your blood!”
“Ah.” Kris smiled. “So you do know him.”
Mousa fumed.
“We will find your Sheikh. We will find him. We’re getting close. It’s only a matter of time. We’ll find him, like we found you. We’ll capture him. I’ll sit him in the same chair you’re sitting in.”
Mousa’s eyes blazed. His uncertainty vanished. A slow smile pulled his lips apart.
Outside the interrogation cell, David cursed. No, damn it.
“The Sheikh will fight you until his last breath. He will sacrifice himself in the battle against the kufir and the takfir and your infidel West. He will bathe in your blood and dance on the dust of your bones, spread the ashes of your body, and the bodies of those you love, across the corners of the world. You will never capture him alive.”
Kris tried to restart Mousa’s interrogation three times during the night. Mousa refused to speak any further, shutting down and retreating into himself. He chanted prayers, calling down Allah to punish the wicked and the infidels. Kris left him for the final time as Mousa asked Allah to strike Kris down where he stood.
David, exhausted, paced in Kris’s makeshift office. The strike team’s command center was quieting, the day shift coming in to monitor drone feeds and open-source intel, scoop up phone calls and emails and pick through the raw intelligence from the night’s raids. The strike team, and Kris and General Carter, were going to rest before it all started again at sunset.
“I slipped up. I gave him an opening to reinforce Saqqaf’s appeal for martyrdom.”
“He was always a long shot. Mousa’s a true die-hard believer in Saqqaf’s brutality.”
“We had him on the edge, though. You did. You rocked him hard with the faith angle.” Kris sat beside David on the cot, slumping against the warehouse wall.
David felt Kris’s stare on the back of his head.
“Did you actually pray?” Kris asked, his voice strained.
David twisted. He stared at Kris. “What do you think?”
Kris shrugged.
“No, of course not.” Snorting, David whipped around, paced faster. There was an itch in his bones, a heat in his blood. Four steps took him back and forth across Kris’s small office. The world was still spinning, had never stopped spinning, not since he’d fallen into Mousa’s gaze. Faster, faster. He was going to be sick. He was going to die.
“Even if—” His lips clamped shut. “There’s—There’s no one to pray to.”
Kris stayed silent.
“Not here. Not with these monsters.” David’s voice cracked, warbled. “They’ve ruined it. They all have! Mousa, Saqqaf, Bin Laden, Qaddafi, all of them!”
Memories tore at David. Sunshine and his father’s voice. His little djellaba, a miniature of his father’s. His father’s hand in his, teaching him the prayers. Every chapter opens with the love and mercy of Allah, ya ibni.
“None of this, this shit, is my father’s faith! None of it! He taught me about… submission and gratitude and love and thanking Allah for life and joy and living in peace—” His voice choked off. Heat rose in his chest, behind his eyes, a volcano erupting within his soul, so suddenly he couldn’t tamp it down. “Nothing here, none of what they’ve built, is from Allah. My father would never—”
His voice, his body, his soul, quaked. He couldn’t stand any more. The world was spinning out of control, spinning off its axis, spinning into space. He was ten years old, and his father was on the TV, in a basketball stadium Qaddafi had built in Benghazi.
“This isn’t Islam because Allah has abandoned us! He’s gone, he left, and we’re all just fighting over the Hell He left behind! And that’s fine! I want nothing to do with Him!”
Where was the world he’d glimpsed when he was nine years old? Where was the faith his father had taught him, had shown him through quiet devotion and whispered prayers? Where was the future of warmth, of his soul filled with light and gratitude, secure in the knowledge that he was loved, by his blood father and the Father of all? What had happened to that life? To that love?
Ten years old, and he’d watched his father’s faith, his peace, be turned into a crime.
Days and nights after his father was taken he’d spent in prayer to Allah to deliver his father back to him. To bring them together, to make them a family again. The prayers of a child, the simple pleading, the offers of exchange. He’d be the best Muslim, the best worshipper. He’d never talk back to his mother again, and he’d eat all his dinner, even the disgusting vegetables. He’d always listen to Baba, always. Just please, please, bring his father home.
His prayers were answered by a screaming mob in a basketball stadium and a rope tied in a noose, swinging from one of the bright orange hoops. Thunderous applause, shouts and cheers, thousands of Qaddafi loyalists screaming for his father’s blood. Over the TV, over the live broadcast he and his mother were forced to watch, guns held to the backs of their heads by the Mukhabarat, the roars had faded in and out, overpowering the tinny speakers, the shitty microphones.
His father had cried as they forced him to climb the ladder to the hoop. To the noose. He’d prayed, too, steadfast in his faith until the end, not even stumbling on his tears. David had watched his lips move, had recognized the shape, the movements.
He had memorized the shape of his father’s prayers as he sat at his side, his little body trying to grow into the image of his beloved father.
His mother had screamed when they shoved him from the ladder’s rungs, let his body swing. The Mukhabarat agents in their home had let her hide her face. But a ten-year-old boy was old enough to watch, to experience the seconds that stretched for hours, the minutes turning to years, to an eternity that still lived in the base of his brain. Hands had held his head forward, forced him to keep his eyes open.
The drop from the hoop wasn’t long enough. His father struggled to breathe against the noose. Someone grabbed his legs, hung from him. Pulled him down.
He’d watched the rope stretch.
And the crowd wailed, wild with exultation. With a mob’s delight, and the glee of being safe from the wrath of Qaddafi’s mercurial mercy. They screamed for his father’s death, and screamed for their own lives.
It was not the first, and was not the last, televised execution Qaddafi put on.
But it was his father’s.
He’d been murdered for the crime of loving Allah more than he loved Qaddafi. He’d loved Allah with his whole heart and soul, and the only thing he’d wanted in his life was to share that love with his son and his wife.
No one and nothing had saved him from the pain, the humiliation, of his murder. He’d lost control of his bladder, his bowels, as he died. David’s last image of his father, the best man in his life, was a piss-and-shit-stained djellaba swinging on the end of a rope, eyes bulging, tongue protruding, tears and snot smeared over his once-proud face.
No boy should see their father, their ideal, struck down, destroyed by hatred and violence.
Somehow, he fumbled enough words for Kris to understand, for Kris to get it. He watched the truth hit Kris, the weight of David’s confession, a truth he’d never spoken aloud, not once since sneaking out of Libya’s sandy desert, smother Kris’s soul.
Evil, the truth of it, was a weight that a soul could barely carry. They’d already shouldered so much together. When would they break? When would the world, and all of its evil, shatter them?
Kris’s jaw dropped. He reached for David, stumbling, falling himself, as if they were now together in freefall, in the vortex of evil destroying the world. His lips moved soundlessly as he tried to find words, find something to say. “David…”
“I want—” Tears choked him. David grabbed Kris, tried to hold on. Tried to stop falling. “I want my father’s faith—”
I want my father.
There was a permanent hole in his soul, in his life, and nothing could fill it. His father had been ripped away from him.
He clung to Kris, burying his face in Kris’s chest, as his bones collapsed, no longer able to carry the weight of a man who hadn’t mourned his loss. His baba, the man he wanted to become, the man he looked up to more than anyone else in the world. His faith in Allah had shattered that day, and the pieces, the refuse of the first ten years of his life, had blown like litter through his existence, debris that kept piling up against his heart.
Had Allah been murdered that day as well? In David’s soul, and also the world? Were they just continuing to murder Allah every day since, every incarnation of evil in the world another blow against Allah and His love? Could even the Father of All stand against so much hate and so much evil? Something was broken, fundamentally broken, in the universe. What if it was Allah that they’d broken?
Had their hatred finally killed God? Was that why He was gone?
What would his father say about this world, if he’d lived? He needed to know. He needed that guidance, his father’s presence in his life.
What would his father make of the man he’d become? The choices he’d made? The man he loved?
Would his father have ever looked at him with hatred? Would he ever have called him a sinner, a kufir, a disbeliever? Set against the horrors of the world, all the ways big and small that people could inflict horror and anguish on each other, was David’s heart beating for Kris so evil? Had Allah made him this way? Or was it just emptiness and chaos, his genetics aligning in one of a million different possibilities?
David had always put his faith in biology, in genetics, in his high school science teacher who had belabored the point, over and over, that being gay was not a choice. It was who you were, how you were made. David’s friends on the soccer team used to joke that Mr. Whitley talked about gay stuff so much because he was gay, obviously gay, with his skinny body and his pastel button-downs and his lilting voice.
But what if he’d seen the truth about David, and maybe others, and he’d spent the nine months he’d been given as their teacher trying to give them a gift that they’d cling to for the rest of their lives?
How did anyone feel loved for who they were, in the face of so much agony? How did anyone reconcile the world with a dead and absent God?
He struggled to breathe, dragging in ragged breath after breath. He was shaking, quaking, as if his soul was about to burst apart. Kris stroked his hair, pressed his lips to David’s temple. He hauled David to him, pulled him into their cot. Wrapped his arms and legs around David, holding him as close as he physically could.
David wanted to crawl inside Kris, press their souls together. Reunite with Kris in the way they were meant to be, before time, when Allah had made them as one. He believed that, to the marrow of his bones, the center of the atoms that made his being.
But if he believed that, if he believed he and Kris were the same soul made by Allah, then what else was true?
Could Allah give him Kris and take his father?
Could both be true?
What did that mean?
Damn it all. Damn Mousa, and Saqqaf. Damn the president for invading Iraq. Damn Bin Laden, and Khalid Sheik Mohammed, and the nineteen men who hijacked four planes on September 11. Damn Qaddafi. Damn all of the hatred, all of the anguish, that had set the world on this path, had twisted lives and history and faith, had killed Allah and scattered all hope until no one could find the truth anywhere, no matter how hard their heart beat or their soul bled.
The one, the only man, who could have ever found the answers, who could have ever put the world back together, had lost his life in a basketball stadium, swinging from a rope as a crowd cheered. He’d loved too much, too strongly, for the world, especially a world that had killed God. His death had created a void, a black hole, and David imagined all the love, all the light in the world disappearing into the void his father’s life had left behind, like water disappearing down a drain, spiraling away into nothingness and infinity.
David had watched it through his tears on TV, the day the world killed the one man who held Allah in the center of his heart.
Joint Strike Force
Sunni Triangle, Iraq
June 2006
“Hey. We’ve got something on the drone feed.”
The sun was still up. Kris blinked, bleary eyed. He and David were tangled in his cot beneath his plywood desk. The Iraqi sunlight burned through the blinds, through the sheet Kris had tacked up to block out the spears of light.
Groaning, David face-planted in the cot as Kris struggled to his feet. Carter’s deputy, a Special Forces captain, kept his gaze purposely up, not looking at the two of them entwined, half naked. It was too hot to sleep in anything but the bare essentials. David wore his tiny running shorts, black nylon that hugged his upper thighs. Kris slept in his briefs, outrageously colored neon and brilliant patterns that cupped his ass and crotch. The captain turned in the doorway, giving him privacy.
For a military that had beaten out modesty in basic training and that treated nudity as commonplace as being fully clothed, the privacy granted to David and him felt like a shun. Carter had insisted that he be given a private office and private space to sleep and had quietly put out a gag order on discussing him and David. It was the biggest open secret in the strike force. The man leading the hunt for Saqqaf was as gay as the day was long.
“Imagine Saqqaf’s face when he finds out it was a gay guy who tracked him down,” Kris heard once in the mess, two Special Forces soldiers with their heads together, eyes flicking toward him.
Kris grabbed his black fatigue pants and pulled them on, threw on a black t-shirt. “What’s going on?”
“We have movement on the spiritual advisor.”
Kris tossed David’s pants at him. “Gotta move, babe.”
Since Mousa’s slipped confession about Saqqaf having a spiritual advisor, Kris had devoted a huge amount of the strike team’s intelligence collection and targeting toward finding the allamah.
Sheikh Jandal was a kunya, a jihad name that translated as the Sheikh of Death. They went through everything, every phone call, every email, every possible lead. Religious leaders across Iraq were fractured, most decrying the savagery and violence of Saqqaf, his bloodlust and his fanaticism. But some celebrated the ‘Son of the Desert’, the ‘Emir of the Resistance against the West’. They focused in on those imams, put them under the microscope of the US intelligence machine. Undercover officers went to their mosques, listened to the sermons. Watched them, everywhere they went, followed by the drones that hovered over the country.
The captain filled them in on the way to the command center. “One of our drones monitoring imam delta-seven tracked him leaving his house this morning. He ran his errands, dropped his kids off at his wife’s mother’s house. Standard behavior.”
“Until?”
“Just past noon, the imam diverted from his usual path and started driving through four separate Baghdad neighborhoods. He executed a series of turns and curbside stops, backtracks and pauses.”
“He was checking for surveillance,” David said.
The captain nodded to David. “We think so. He drove onto the Baghdad highway, but pulled off on the onramp. One minute later, a blue pickup truck pulled in behind his original car. He drove away in the blue truck.”
“A car swap.” Kris’s heart pounded.
“Yes sir. We’re following the truck now. It’s heading north, leaving Baghdad.”
They badged through the electronic locks and swept into the command center. The lights were dim, but the monitors along one wall were bright with live video. Black-and-white images, thermal scans, high-def video footage. All feeds showed the same image. A blue pickup driving along the highway.
Banks of analysts and drone operators worked in long lines before the main monitors, tapping away at their laptops and working the radios. David peeled off, heading to the back where five coffeepots percolated twenty-four hours a day. Kris joined General Carter, still shaking off his own sleep. He’d rushed in, wearing his PT shorts and his Army undershirt, crisply tucked in. Kris had never seen the general so underdressed.
“Caldera.” Carter nodded to him. “What do you think?”
“The behavior is consistent with someone attempting to shake surveillance and throw off a tail. Whatever he’s doing, he doesn’t want anyone to know.”
“Think he found our undercover agents? Think he’s spooked and is running?”
“He could be. But someone on the run doesn’t spend hours trying to shake a tail. They run, as fast as they can.” Kris watched the pickup drive on, miles of highway disappearing beneath its tires. The sun blazed down on Iraq, burning away shadows. Everything was brilliantly lit, perfect clarity. A desert day beneath the harsh sun. A day for revelations.
David appeared at Kris’s side with two cups of coffee. They watched, expectancy hushing their voices, their breaths, as the truck pulled off the highway and wound through the countryside northeast of Baghdad. Palm groves and farms blurred past the monitors.
“Maybe he’s just going to visit a farm,” one of the analysts offered.
“And shake a tail to do so?” Kris scoffed.
“Maybe he’s going to the Iranian border. It’s only seventy miles away.” Carter arched one eyebrow.
“Saqqaf despises the Shia, and this imam supports him. He’s stirred sectarian violence for months. No way he goes to Iran.” Kris pursed his lips. “He’s going to meet Saqqaf.”
Carter hmmed.
The truck turned, heading for Baqubah. Analysts sprang into action, pulling up all information that they had collated on Baqubah. Who was who, who was there, what attacks the city had suffered. How many informants they had on the ground.
“He’s stopping,” David said. “Another vehicle is approaching.”
A white sedan pulled alongside the truck. The imam hopped down from the truck and slipped into the backseat of the white sedan. Both vehicles drove off, sand arcing behind their tires as they sped away in opposite directions.
“It’s him. It’s definitely him.” Kris’s blood turned searing, burning the inside of his body. This is it. We’re going to get Saqqaf. His gaze met David’s. David’s eyes were wide, as round as dinner plates. I’m going to get him. For you.
Carter shouted orders, calling for air support and for the Special Forces team on standby to get in their choppers and get ready to go. It was a thirty-minute flight from their base to Baqubah, if they left now.
Every monitor was filled with the white sedan driving along the desert road. “He’s still heading north,” an analyst narrated. “Moving at thirty-three miles per hour.”
“What’s out there?” Carter barked.
“Three villages. A handful of ranches. Not much, sir. We haven’t spent much time looking. There was nothing strategic there, we thought.”
“Well, we thought wrong.”
The white sedan pulled off the desert road at the village of Hibhib. Built around an oasis, the village was a shock of green situated in the rocky hills and dusty north of Iraq. Palms and ferns crowded the ground, jockeying for position. Houses were low, whitewashed and blocky. The car kept driving, passing through the village.
Until it turned up a narrow drive, lined with thick palms that towered overhead. The car disappeared from the feed, lost in the foliage.
“Get the visual back!” Carter barked. “We cannot lose this car!”
The images bucked and wove as the drone pilots swerved, changing altitude, axis and orbit, searching for a better angle. Images appeared through the mess of palm fronds. A two-story house with a flat roof. A long, gravel drive. The sedan, parked in front of the entrance.
Two men embracing in greeting. The imam was one of them.
And a stout and stocky man in black combat fatigues, with a short beard and a black taqiyah was the other.
Carter’s gaze flicked to Kris.
“It’s him,” Kris breathed. He knew that shape. Knew that man. Knew everything there was to know about him without having spoken a word to his face. He knew Saqqaf, from the inside of the man out. “It’s him.”
Carter’s deputy spoke up, bracketing Carter. “We don’t know that for sure. We can’t get a definitive visual verification from this angle.”
“Get the strike team in the air and on target, now!” Carter barked. “We are not losing this opportunity.”
David leaned into his side. “I’m going with them.”
A thousand different half thoughts poured through Kris. There wasn’t time to think, wasn’t time to talk. “Go.”
David tore out of the command center as they kept watching the house. Kris imagined the frenzy of activity as the team prepared to launch from the airfield.
David… be safe.
“General, the chopper pilot is reporting engine trouble. They need time to fix the problem.”
“They don’t have time! They need to get in the air, now!”
Minutes turned to years.
The two men on the monitors went inside the two-story house, talking amiably, warmly.
Silence filled the command center.
Grainy images of the house filtered through the palms, disappearing and reappearing.
“How long will they spend together?” Carter leaned into Kris and asked softly.
“We have no idea. Could be minutes. Could be hours.”
“We could miss him, then. If we don’t get on the ground immediately. If he thinks we’re onto him, he could duck out into the palms and we’d never find him. He could run and disappear. We could lose this chance.”
Kris nodded. “We do have fighters overhead.” Two F-16s held position over Iraq twenty-four hours a day in case any US forces needed immediate air support.
“Do you want to capture him or do you want to kill him?” Carter asked. “What’s the CIA’s position on this?”
Kris’s eyes slipped closed. Mousa’s viciousness, his rabid brutality, replayed behind his eyelids. David’s shattered faith. A hundred bombs exploding, a thousand scenes of carnage. Beheaded bodies and destroyed mosques. The shattering of a nation, of a region. A faith ripped apart with every act of savagery. The slow march of time toward a final point, Saqqaf’s plan to bring about the end of days. Anguished families on both sides of the world, mourning the loss of their loved ones.
He’d been Saqqaf’s specter, his judge and jury, and his shadow confessor. He’d become as close to Saqqaf as another human could be, peering inside his skull, his mind, his psychology. Reading his emails, snooping through his laptop. He dreamed of Saqqaf at night, long dreams where they spoke across a river of blood as the world burned and airplanes crashed into the ground, but they were speaking different languages and nothing made sense.
Was he to be Saqqaf’s executioner, too?
“Sir, there’s movement in the house.” An operator zoomed in on the thermal scan. Two figures inside. One was moving toward the door.
“We need to go. Now.” Carter’s eyes blazed. “Caldera. What’s your call?”
He breathed in. Sounds faded, blurred together, smeared. He stared at the monitors, but all he saw was David. There is no Allah, not anymore. “Get the fighters. Bomb the son of a bitch.”
Carter gave the order, an immediate redirect for the fighter pilots on standby to the tiny village. The pilot’s voice crackled over the command center’s speaker. “ETA, three minutes,” she said. She repeated the coordinates of the house. “Confirming target.”
“Target confirmed.”
The house wove in and out of the palms, circled on the monitors. Kris held his breath. Everyone leaned forward, eyes peeled to the screen. No one spoke. No one moved.
The radio crackled. “Bombs away.”
Drones didn’t transmit sound. One minute the house was there, between two palm fronds. The next moment, it was a plume of dust, shattered concrete and broken trees, a cloud of debris rising and rising into the sky.
“Target destroyed.”
Cheers erupted, soldiers and analysts bursting from their seats, pumping their fists and screaming. In the center of it all, Carter stared at the monitors, his jaw clenching, his arms crossed over his chest. Kris sagged, bracing his hands on the table in front of him before he collapsed.
“Sir! The strike team is ready to go!”
“Get them to the location right away. We need to confirm it was him.”
Dust choked the air, miles outside of Hibhib. David and the others pulled their scarves up, checkered keffiyehs worn around their necks. Iraqi police from Baqubah were on the way to the destroyed house, police sirens wailing as the chopper overtook their convoy.
They set down at the end of the gravel drive. Where the house had been, only a crater remained. Palms that had encircled the house had toppled, shattered in half and splintered apart like broken toothpicks. A thousand years of sand and dust hung in the air, upturned by the fighter’s twin bombs.
“Start searching. Gotta find the body.”
They sifted through the rubble, stamping out fires as they turned over broken chunks of concrete. Smoke made David’s eyes water. Six Iraqi policemen showed up, but hung back at the driveway. No one wanted to interfere with the Americans sifting through the rubble of a bombed house. No good came from that.
David saw it first. A hand poking out of the ruins, blackened by soot. “Over here!”
They flipped concrete like they were flipping Lego bricks, cleared the debris from Saqqaf in under a minute. He lay half buried in the crater, covered in dirt. Soot and burns painted his face, his body. Blood poured from his ears, his nose, his mouth. The bombs’ pressure wave had ripped apart his internal organs, liquefied them inside his bones.
Saqqaf’s eyes flickered open. His gaze landed on thirteen American Special Forces soldiers standing in a circle over him. He mumbled something. Blood trickled past his lips.
David crouched next to him. “Nam?”
Saqqaf reached for David, his hand trembling. He shuddered, coughed blood. David leaned closer. An observant Muslim would whisper the shahada before they died, the statement of faith. Allah is the one God, and Muhammad is his messenger. It was supposed to unite the faithful’s soul to Allah at the moment of death. Would Saqqaf speak the words? Did he imagine, somewhere in that twisted brain, that he was on the way to eternal Paradise?
“Ayree feek,” Saqqaf bubbled. He coughed again and went limp. His last breath shuddered form his chest.
David shook off Saqqaf’s hand and stood. No Paradise for Saqqaf. But David had already known that.
The strike team’s sergeant frowned. “What’d he say?”
David snorted. “He said, ‘Fuck you’.”
When the team got back, they brought Saqqaf’s body bag into the operations center. A gurney waited, and the strike force’s medical staff.
General Carter and Kris waited while the captain of the team unzipped the bag. Carter had a sat phone in one hand, connected to the Situation Room. The president, Director Edwards, the national security advisor and the secretary of defense hovered on the other end of the line.
“It’s him.” Kris nodded. “It’s him.”
He thought he’d feel something. Anything. The satisfaction of a job well done. The joy of removing a mass murderer, a butcher, from the world. Revulsion, finally seeing him face to face. He thought he’d feel a hundred different things.
He felt nothing.
Carter spoke to the waiting Situation Room. “Confirmed, Mr. President. Saqqaf is dead.”
The medical team wheeled Saqqaf away for an autopsy and a full investigation into his death, and what they could learn about his life. The strike team headed back to their part of the base. General Carter marched into the command center, still on the phone with the Situation Room.
What would happen next? When would the announcement of Saqqaf’s death be made? What kind of reprisals would his fighters, the children of Saqqaf, attempt? What would happen to Saqqaf’s movement, his death cult that wanted to remake the world in shades of hatred and gore?
What would the president do? What was the US’s role now? What could they do to right this U-turn of history and despair?
David interrupted Kris’s swirling mind, taking his hand and drawing him close. Dust from Saqqaf’s death house clung to his black fatigues. Blood stained his sleeve, his knee. Saqqaf’s blood. David pressed their foreheads together.
“Let’s go home,” he whispered. “Let’s get the hell away from here.”