Chapter 18
Baghdad, Iraq
March 2004
The walls shook, windows rattling. Glass tinkled. Everyone looked up. Froze.
Beyond the Green Zone, a column of black smoke rose above a pillar of flame, a billowing fireball that stretched for the dusty sky. Three more columns of dark smoke, not yet put out from earlier conflagrations, dotted the horizon, just to the north.
“Another one.” The duty officer in the joint intelligence command center, inside Saddam’s Republican Palace in the heart of the Green Zone, called. “Mark it.”
One of the junior enlisted soldiers scurried to the main whiteboard front and center in the cavernous ballroom converted for the intel cell’s use. He dutifully ticked off another attack in the running daily tally, then marked the time in a separate grid. He waited, pen poised, for the radio to announce the target, the location, the victims. Facts, numbers, points on a map. Quantifiable costs in the insurgency.
David looked down. His fists clenched. Every column of smoke, every roaring fireball, was another broken life. Broken US soldiers and broken Iraqis, trying to keep going in the day-by-day hellscape the country had fallen into. Forty-three attacks, on average, every day, by the command center’s official ticker. Forty-three attacks, killing dozens, sometimes hundreds, wounding thousands.
Baghdad was a city of widows and orphans, of tears and shrieks and lamentations. The smell of death and rot hovered over the city, a festering, fetid miasma. The city, the country, was dying, day by day.
The White House pushed for the removal of the CIA station chief in Baghdad after Kris’s report. George took over running the CIA in Iraq, and his first act was to beg Kris to stay, beg him to lead the hunt for Saqqaf.
“You’re the expert in hunting these guys. You captured Zahawi. You wrote the book on how to hunt these guys. Everyone copies what you did there, in Pakistan. But this is Iraq. And you’re the one who predicted all this shit, predicted Saqqaf. We need you again. We need you, Kris.”
It was praise Kris hadn’t wanted, and David watched him seethe as he accepted it, and accepted the assignment.
“I really hate ‘I told you so’,” Kris had said. “It’s used against me too many times. ‘I told you he was gay. I told you he couldn’t do whatever, because he’s gay’.” He’d shaken his head, staring down over Saddam’s fountains, lips pursed, eyes narrowed. “But I fucking told you so,” he’d hissed. “And I fucking told the vice president, too!”
Kris went back on the hunt.
Saqqaf was his prey.
Being in Iraq was like being in a Salvador Dali painting, with reality melting on all sides, slipping and sliding away. Iraq, with its dusty air and faded light, the stench of rot and death and diesel, the concrete barriers that rose and rose and rose, dividing the city into siege zones, into sectarian crises and splinter cells. Life was cut off, constrained, checkpointed. Life was suspicious. Seething hatred filled the streets, as thick as Baghdad dust, heavier than the diesel fumes and the sweat. Hatred was a stench that couldn’t be washed away.
David existed within and outside the hatred. Driving in Humvees, in bulletproof SUVs, the glares on the streets turned hard and cold toward him. He was an occupier. He was one of them.
Walking on the street, undercover, dressed in jeans and a long-sleeved shirt, leaving behind the bulletproof armor and the polo emblazoned with the Blackcreek logo, and leaving behind the weapons strapped to his thigh and under his arms, he became human again.
It was his Libyan blood, his burnished skin, his dark hair. It was Arabic that came effortlessly to his lips, with an accent that couldn’t be faked. It was the way he moved and flowed with the Arab culture, slipping back into the tides of his youth, living in his memories in the present all over again. It was the thousand and one judgments that came at him, from a thousand and one stares. To be American, and to be Arab. To be a collaborator, and, later, to be one of the dirty Arabs on the street, sweating under the gaze of the American soldiers, hidden behind their sunglasses and their tanks. To be viewed, by everyone, as something other than what he was. A thousand and one stares. A thousand and one ways to be perceived. The kaleidoscope of his soul shifted, twisted. Who he was changed again.
He was a puzzle that the world constantly played with. His soul twisted and turned a hundred times throughout the day.
Every night, he returned to Kris’s arms. Kris was the one person in the world who didn’t demand something from him, didn’t judge him for the way he listened to the azan with his eyes closed. Who never asked him to choose, American or Arab, gay or Muslim, him or them. Kris let him exist, in all his mismatched parts, even if his existence felt like an ink blot stain or a bug splat against a windshield.
Kris seemed to want nothing from him except his blemished life, and his whole heart. He could give those to Kris.
Iraq demanded his anguish, his rage. The CIA and Blackcreek demanded his wrath, his fury, his vengeance.
Whispers from the desert scratched at his soul.
But his heart quieted when he returned to Kris, when they rejoined at the end of the day. Kris, exhausted after his hunting, his managing an intelligence operation that rivaled the size and scope of what they’d built in Pakistan, had time to smile at him, hold his hand. They drank Baghdad Martinis—boiled water—on their balcony and watched the sun set, listened to the call to prayer as they held hands.
Words from the Quran came whispering back to him, out of nowhere, in the quiet moments he shared with Kris. And of everything, We created pairs. Heaven and Earth. Night and day. Sun and moon. Sea and Shore. Light and darkness. David gazed at Kris. You, for me.
Subhanallah, he loved Kris so much. Loved him for loving him, and never demanding. Loved him for knowing parts and pieces were broken or missing, tarnished or destroyed.
Kris had those parts within him, too. They’d never spoken about it, but it was just something they knew. He loved Kris for that, for the shared ways they’d moved through the world and had each gotten kicked a dozen times or more. Coming from nothing and fighting for more, being brown in a world full of white, being gay in a world full of straight. Kris had the same bruises on his soul that David had, all the sighs and side-eyes that came with growing up poor, brown, and gay. They’d both been outsiders, both been relegated to the margins. They’d both fought for everything they’d had, every single scrap. Like recognized like, it seemed. They’d never had to fight each other. They were survivors together, them against the world. The whole world seemed to be dividing into lines, into demarcations, into us versus them versus the other.
But not between him and Kris. They were the same, as if half of David had been split off and put into Kris, like the Quran said about the souls of lovers. That soulmates had known each other before life, before time, and once on the earth, they were searching for each other again. Kris was that, to him.
And Kris, like David, seemed to want nothing more than to be loved for who he was. And, by Allah, he loved Kris for all of who he was, and more.
He tried to care for Kris the best he way could, repay Kris for the peace his presence brought to David’s existence. He made love to Kris until Kris screamed his name, until he was limp and spent and grinning ear to ear. He rubbed his shoulders every day, tried to relieve the strain of carrying the weight of the CIA’s hopes and the White House’s fears on his shoulders. He held him every night, whispered I love you into Kris’s hair before he fell asleep.
If he could have, he would have bottled those days and nights, kept them hidden away, able to be lived in and remembered, like slipping into a dream as easily as one could slip into a lake.
But autumn turned to winter, and then to spring.
Ramadan came, and with it, the bloodiest surge of the insurgents. Fury boiled over. Hatred turned against everyone and everything.
Kris took command of a fusion cell, working in tandem with General Ramos and a joint task force of Special Forces operators responsible for finding and striking at the cells of fighters aligned with Saqqaf. David saw some of his old friendly teammates, and some who hated his guts. Every night, Kris and General Ramos sent teams into the cities, raiding houses, searching for fighters. Searching for Saqqaf.
David spent the mornings with Kris, working through the raw intelligence gained, assessing the men arrested during the night before they were sent to Abu Ghraib.
“We need more intelligence!” General Ramos constantly bitched. “We need more actionable intelligence. People to arrest and get off the streets. Terrorists to interrogate.”
“We need better intelligence,” Kris snapped back. “Not more garbage. Better quality intel. We need more people on the streets, more people building bridges. More people willing to talk to us.”
General Ramos snorted at him, and then called Abu Ghraib, demanding more information be extracted from the prisoners. “There’s eight thousand terrorists in that prison,” he barked. “Get them to talk!”
Interrogators flew in from Guantanamo Bay, from the CIA’s detention center and interrogation unit. Trainers arrived, sent to help at Abu Ghraib. Information began flowing.
Most of it was useless.
In the afternoons, David hit the streets of Baghdad and the Sunni triangle, sliding into the rhythms of the occupied city and the tides of fury, rage, and impotent helplessness. On the streets, he was Dawood, a displaced Libyan who used to work in the oil fields and in the refineries, but had been ousted, like so many others, thanks to de-Baathification. He listened to the rage, the street corner wailers, the coffee shop arguments with other out-of-work Iraqis and bitter denunciations of the occupiers and the Americans.
“The Americans, they’re rounding everyone up. Everyone. Not just the Islamists and the insurgents.”
“Dawood, you should be careful.” An old man, a former teacher, who smoked and sat in the same café everyday drinking coffee and chatting with the neighborhood men, called out to him. “The Americans, they’re arresting all unwed men! Anyone from this high up!” He held his hand just above his waist. A boy’s height.
He played soccer in streets overflowing with sewage alongside high school dropouts and smoked cigarettes on street corners, beneath gas hawkers bellowing their prices for fuel, a hundred times any affordable rate.
“I heard we’re not supposed to play on Karraba Street on Thursday.” One of the players passed him the ball. He juggled it between his feet, kicked it down the block. It bounced off a burned-out car, bounced in a pile of sewage.
“Where did you hear that?”
The player shrugged. “Around. Things get said, you know?” He chuckled. “I don’t want to get—” He made an explosion sound, and his hands burst open. “You should stay away too.”
David hid from American convoys and felt the burning gaze of a Humvee’s turret gunner zeroing his sights on the center of David’s forehead.
“Do you ever wish things would go back to the way they were?” Samir, another out-of-work young Iraqi, smoked with him on a street corner, hidden away from the American convoy blazing down the Baghdad street. Car horns blared, and the Americans fired warning shots into the street, forcing the Iraqis to drive over each other to get out of the convoy’s way. Cars crunched. Glass broke. Curses and shouts filled the air.
“There’s no going back.”
“There’s no going forward.” Samir shrugged. “What do we do? We have nothing. No country. No jobs. No pride.” He grabbed David’s shoulder. “At least we have today, and each other, my friend.”
Hatred, a palpable, pure thing, grew like cancer, like a tumor David could hold. Could taste, choking him and everyone in Baghdad.
He felt, with a surety of rage, what Saqqaf was tapping into on the streets of Iraq. There was a blood haze rising, a fury cresting, that was going to swallow the world.
Baghdad, Iraq
March 31, 2004
Where are you?
The text came in midmorning. David had slipped out of the Green Zone early, heading to one of his meeting points. He ducked into an alley, skipping over a puddle of sewage and discarded shell casings.
Kris kept texting. Where are you? Answer me. I need you to text back, right now. Right now.
[I’m here. I’m on Karada Road.]
Thank fucking God. Get back here. Now. Please. PLEASE.
[What happened?]
Get back here.
He pocketed his phone and turned around, heading for the Green Zone. He twisted and turned, ducked into a café for a coffee and smoked two cigarettes on two different street corners, making sure he wasn’t followed, before entering the Green Zone cordon. Half a mile of concrete barriers topped with razor wire funneled all pedestrians into a single file line. Barely anyone wanted to enter the Green Zone that morning. David, dressed in his Iraqi street clothes, moved quickly past the overwatch posts, the tanks and giant machine guns glaring down onto the pedestrians in the concrete tube.
At the first of three checkpoints, a soldier ordered him to his knees fifty feet from the sandbag barrier. “Get the fuck down! Hands on your fucking head! Now! Now!”
Twelve rifles centered on his head.
David slowly dropped to his knees. Placed his hands behind his head.
Four soldiers tackled him, pushing his face into the ground. One stepped on his cheek, the sole of his boot digging into his skin.
Old pain, the remembrance of his childhood, flared. You are worth less than the filth I step in every day. He winced and closed his eyes.
“What the fuck are you doing here?” One of the soldiers, a squad sergeant, bellowed. Hands rifled over him, roughly searching his body. They lifted his clothes, grabbed his chest, his stomach. Grabbed his crotch and fisted around his cock. “What the fuck are you doing here, huh? Come to blow yourself up? Come to kill more Americans? Huh?”
“Sergeant!” One of the soldiers searching him found the badge he kept sewn inside his jeans, his contractor badge and his CIA ID. The soldier passed them to his sergeant.
“Are these fucking faked?” The sergeant bellowed. “Did you fake these credentials?”
His cell phone, lying next to his head, buzzed. Every soldier whirled, pointing weapons at him and at the phone.
“It’s a CIA officer calling,” he said slowly. “Please answer it.”
“Shut the fuck up!” The sergeant gave him a love tap with the butt of his rifle, slamming the stock against his cheek. His face ricocheted off the ground, gritty sand coating his mouth, his nose, his eyes. He tasted blood. “You want us to pick up the phone and blow ourselves up?”
Another soldier had disappeared back to the Humvee with his credentials. David saw him on the radio, frantically gesturing to David and then to the creds, lying on the passenger seat. After a moment, he jogged back to the sergeant and whispered in his ear.
“You fucking wait right there,” the sergeant spat at David. “Fall back,” he grunted to his men. “Keep eyes on him.”
Nine minutes passed as David tasted his blood and smelled the fetid fumes of Baghdad’s streets. Felt the dirt and the filth seep into his body. Felt the hatred of the American soldiers burn into him, and felt the weight of their half-squeezed rifles pointed at his head. Never, in his whole life, from Afghanistan to Somalia to escaping Libya, had he felt closer to death.
He breathed in and out, keeping his eyes closed. Kris. You will come. You’ll always come. I didn’t answer your call. You won’t ignore that. You’ll come for me.
Another voice rose inside him, a voice he recognized, and yet did not. It sounded like his father, but not. Like the voices of a thousand old men and old women combined, like wisdom and experience and age. Like humanity, but more than humanity.
Call on me, and I will answer you.
His breath faltered. His gasp blew a puff of dust from the street. Sand collected on his bloody lips.
If Allah should aid you, no one can overcome you.
Years. It had been years and years since he’d prayed. The last time he had was before flying out of Egypt, before heading to America. He could barely mumble through the tears, then. He’d never had to pray without his father beside him.
In America, his mother turned deeper into her faith while David spun out into the waters of MTV and football and his first fumblings with another boy.
Allah, he whispered. How did he even begin? What did he even say? What did you say to someone you had ignored for decades? Had turned your back on? What did you say to your God who had let your father be taken and killed?
Tears burned through him following a burst of rage, white-hot agony at the memory. The afternoon when the men had come, had dragged his father out of their house. His mother, sobbing, trying to plead with them. The Mukhabarat had backhanded her, pushed her down. His father had tried to break free, tried to run back. He was like an animal, desperate to get to his wife, to get back to his home.
“Dawood!” He’d screamed. “Dawood! La hawla wala quwwata illa billah!” There is no power nor strength save in Allah.
The Mukhabarat had punched him, knocked him down again.
A week before, his family had celebrated David’s tenth birthday. His father had given him prayer beads and a djellaba, a mini replica of his father’s, to wear to the mosque. He’d loved it, had worn it night and day, trying to look like his father. All he wanted, when he was nine years old, was to be the perfect replica of his father when he grew up.
“Dawood…” His father had locked his gaze on him, lying on the sandy ground, blood splattering his white djellaba. “Habibi…”
Those were his father’s last words to him. The men, the Mukhabarat, had grabbed him and shoved him in their car, driven away.
He had become his father, beaten and bloody in the street, put on the ground by another man.
“What the fuck!” Kris’s shrill screech, his outrage, shredded the memory. David’s eyes flew open. He was still on the street, still cheek-down in the blood and the sand.
But not in Libya. In Iraq.
And Kris had come for him.
“Put your fucking rifles down,” Kris shrieked. “Put them fucking down, now!” He held his ID in front of him like an indictment, like a warrant for the soldiers’ souls. A proclamation, declaring they had done fucked up. “He’s fucking CIA, you assholes!”
One of the soldiers, a young private, helped David stand. The kid was maybe eighteen. Maybe younger. He had baby fat in his cheeks and pimples on his nose. When David looked like that, he’d been at football practice, watching the track team in their running shorts. He’d gone to high school dances. He hadn’t held a rifle.
“Sorry,” the kid mumbled. He wouldn’t look at David.
Kris appeared at his side, his hands everywhere, putting David’s clothes back to rights, running over his skin, holding his face.
“You fucking assholes hit him,” Kris snarled. “What the fuck!”
“We’re on high alert,” the sergeant growled. “You know that. You put it out.”
“He’s fucking one of us.” Kris smoothed back David’s hair.
David held his wrists. “What happened?” Sand and blood smeared on his lips as he spoke.
Tears simmered at the edges of Kris’s eyes. His lips moved, but nothing came out. He cupped David’s cheek, his thumb stroking over David’s growing bruise, the knot from the sergeant’s love tap. “Fallujah,” he whispered. “Everything has changed.”
The command center was deathly quiet.
Sixteen video cameras played different angles of the same scene. Two dilapidated SUVs, burning to a husk. Their metal frames were ashy skeletons, engulfed in an inferno.
Charred bodies, Blackcreek contractors, pulled from the flames. Beaten. Dragged through the streets.
“Oh God, they were Blackcreek contractors,” Kris whispered. “They were Blackcreek! Do you have any idea what I thought, when the first reports came in? Do you have any idea—”
He grabbed Kris and pulled him into his arms, held him as Kris sobbed, his muffled cries against David’s chest the only sound in the command center. Kris clung to him, his fingers digging in to his skin, as if David would disappear, as if he wasn’t really there, was only a figment of Kris’s imagination.
“I’m okay,” he breathed into Kris’s hair. “I’m okay, Kris.”
The screens kept playing, revealing the barbarity of the morning. Blackened bodies dragged across the road. A riot had formed around the bodies. Chanting, cheering, faces bursting with excitement. The madness of a mob. Insurgents, jihadis, masked men in black, in the center. Taking the burned bodies, the corpses. Dragging them to a steel lattice bridge, notated on the military’s maps as landmark “Brooklyn”.
Sometimes, it looked just like America, like looking at the steel girders of the Big Apple, and it was easy to imagine the Hudson or the East River was just beyond, instead of the endless wash of desert.
Ropes were thrown over the girders.
Kris squeezed his eyes shut. He wouldn’t watch. His lips thinned, pressed together until they went white.
David had to see. He had to see the swing, the strain in the rope. Had to see the crazed crowd cheer, chant wildly, convinced they had just done something wonderful, something to celebrate. He had to see the bodies, broken and suspended, left for all to stare at, to judge. And for the world to judge them, in return.
He had to see.
He’d seen bloodlust consume people’s soul, their humanity, until there was nothing left.
He’d seen a man hung before.
Baghdad, Iraq
April 28, 2004
“This is a picture of an Iraqi prisoner of war, and according to the US Army, Americans did this to him.”
The man stood on a crate, hooded, with wires stuck to his fingers, his penis, and shoved up his ass.
His image went around the world in four seconds.
More pictures followed. Iraqis in dog collars and on leashes. Naked, and forced to masturbate. Naked, and staked in pyramids. Covered in feces. Bound and stretched against metal bars. Hooded, and forced to simulate sex with one another.
Humiliation screamed from the images. Ravaging, aching, burning humiliation.
Every Arab felt it, in their bones. The past and the present, eternally connected in the Arab soul, twisted again. A thousand years of Western aggression distilled into a series of photos, proof positive of a thousand years of mistrust, betrayal, and anguish.
Iraqis flooded the streets. Riots erupted around the Middle East. US Embassies locked their gates.
“It’s Abu Ghraib,” David breathed, watching the news report for the fifteenth time. “We walked down that hallway. We saw those prisoners.”
If Kris hadn’t come for him that day he was on the ground at the military checkpoint, would he have been taken to Abu Ghraib? He was nothing but an Arab to the soldiers, and Arabs were just targets. Humiliation had washed his soul on the street, shoved to the ground and stepped on, treated like an animal. They would have thought nothing of sending him to Abu Ghraib, where he would have been treated the same way.
David rewound the tape and watched the news report again.
Once, when he was a boy, he’d looked at the United States of America with hope. His tearstained soul had lost his father, and he’d been promised that things would be better in America. Everyone told him, America is free. America is good. America is where you will have a better life.
He’d had so much hope, flying cross the ocean to a land that seemed almost mythical. If it was true, if he could really live a free life in America, then he’d give everything back to America, he’d promised as the plane slowly descended into New York City.
Thirty-four years old and a lifetime later, it was next to impossible to resurrect that same hope he’d once felt. His soul felt dirty, tarnished with the buildup of things he’d done, the things he’d seen. Things he’d condoned, for being a part of the silence.
He froze the video, staring at the image of the hooded man on the crate.
Could his father be under that hood?
Could he?
What was the difference between that man and him?
Was he—were they—on the wrong side of history?
Where had everything gone wrong?
Abu Ghraib was the chip in the dam, the first domino to fall.
George, ashen and shaking, called them to his office nearly every day.
They didn’t like each other, not really. David looked at George the way he looked at most spineless bureaucrats. Medical marvels, humans capable of existing without spines or the guts to do anything meaningful at all. Afghanistan, all they’d been through there, was a distant memory, Pakistan and Thailand far more vivid.
“There’s been a leak,” George told them. His voice shook. “Director Thatcher called. Said it’s going to hit tomorrow’s papers.”
“There are a thousand leaks, George.” Kris smoked inside George’s office, blowing his cigarette smoke over George’s desk. “What are you talking about now?”
“I’m talking about what doesn’t exist!” George snapped. “The detainee program! I’m talking about Zahawi.”
Kris’s chuckle was dark, the kind of laugh the devil made when he came for Faust. “Out of everything that is leaked, that deserves to be made public. It deserves a Congressional inquiry and a fucking indictment.”
“Are you so Goddamn naive that you think it was just a handful of people? Some cabal of evil that needs to be taken down? It fucking went to the top!” George trembled, from his fingers to his toes. He tried to clench his hands, ball them up. His fists shook on his desktop. “And you were there. You both were.”
Kris blew smoke in George’s face.
Washington DC
May 2004
The president admitted the detainee program existed.
He admitted to enhanced interrogation techniques.
He admitted to waterboarding detainees in the CIA’s detainee program.
Director Thatcher resigned from the CIA, in the outcry that followed.
But it was the vice president who came out swinging, insisting that the United States did not torture anyone. “Look, waterboarding is not torture. Based on the legal definition of torture, we do not torture anyone.”
“The legal definition as defined by this administration?” the interviewer asked.
The vice president ignored him. “We use aggressive interrogation techniques. And I do not apologize for that. Not ever.”
Baghdad, Iraq
May 2004
The video was five minutes and thirty-seven seconds long. It was uploaded to a jihadi website that had been a clearinghouse of Saqqaf’s. They watched it together in George’s office.
The video opened on a man dressed all in black, his face covered in a balaclava, standing over a pale man in an orange jumpsuit, his arms and legs bound.
“Nation of Islam, great news!” the man in black boomed. He read from a script that he held in both hands. “The signs of dawn have begun and the winds of victory are blowing!”
“It’s him.” Kris fought back a gag. “I know the voice.” He reached for David.
“You’re sure?” George hovered over Kris’s right shoulder, General Ramos over his left. “We have to be sure.”
“It has all the hallmarks of Saqqaf’s messaging. It’s his style.”
“Why the orange jumpsuit? Saqqaf doesn’t keep prisoners,” Ramos asked.
“It’s because of Abu Ghraib.” David, finally, spoke. “In Abu Ghraib, you put prisoners in orange jumpsuits. He’s drawing a direct line between the two.”
Ramos glowered at David. “When you say ‘you’, do you mean the military, or do mean Americans? Because I thought you were American.”
David blinked at Ramos.
The video kept playing, churning onward in George’s office. Saqqaf issued a blistering tirade, berating the Americans and their occupation.
“How can a free Muslim sleep soundly while Islam is being slaughtered, its honor bleeding and the images of shame in the news of the abuses of the Muslim men and women in the prison of Abu Ghraib? Where is your zeal and where is your anger?”
David’s gaze bored into Ramos.
“O, to the president of the Great Satan, I deliver this warning. Hard days are coming to you. You and your soldiers are going to regret the day that you stepped foot in Iraq and dared to violate the Muslims. The dignity of the Muslim men and women in the prison of Abu Ghraib and others will be redeemed by blood and souls! You will see nothing from us except corpse after corpse, casket after casket, of those slaughtered in this fashion.”
Saqqaf drew a machete from his belt and grabbed the prisoner’s hair—
Kris slammed the laptop shut. “I’m not fucking watching this.”
He shoved back from the desk, toppling his chair. Ramos and George jumped out of his way, giving him space. He ran to the line of garbage cans by the door and heaved. Gagging filled the office, retching.
David stared at the marble floor, the cream and beige tiles.
Kris rose, wiping his lips. He glared at George. “I fucking told you,” he hissed. His voice shook. “I fucking told you we shouldn’t torture anybody. I fucking told you, I fucking told Director Thatcher, and I fucking told the Goddamn vice president!” His shaking finger pointed at George’s closed laptop. “You, and everyone who sanctioned the detainee program, who sanctioned torture, caused this. This blood is on you.”
General Ramos stared out the windows, his eyes narrowed as he watched the setting sun beyond the Tigris. George’s jaw pulsed, clenching and unclenching.
Kris ripped open George’s office door. David followed him down the marble hallway.
“He’s got a new nickname,” George called after them. “The ‘Sheikh of the Slaughterers’. We’ve got to take him out, Kris. I’m fucking begging you. We’ve got to get this son of a bitch.”
“I can’t unfuck what’s been fucked, George.” Kris stilled, but didn’t turn around.
“The White House is serious now. And the president wants to hear what’s going on, from you. We’re going to DC. They are going to put everything behind you, Kris. Everything.”
Washington DC
June 2004
“Do not, under any circumstances, shoot your mouth off.” George growled into Kris’s ear. “Do not make a scene in front of the new CIA director. Do not, for the love of fucking God, say ‘I told you so’.”
“I wasn’t going to say it. My plan was to do a tap number on the center of the table, belt out, ‘I fucking told you so’ at the top of my lungs, and end in the splits in front of the VP. So he could suck my dick.”
George gaped at him.
“Do you think I should do an opera rendition, or should I stay more along the lines of Bernadette Peters? More Broadway, you think?”
George’s face slowly turned purple. David smirked behind his hand.
“What do you think the VP’s face will be like when he sees me walk in?”
“You are your own worst enemy. I swear to God,” George finally choked out.
“I didn’t invade Iraq and fuck up the entire Middle East. I didn’t fulfill the hopes and dreams of al-Qaeda, and a prophecy they cling to.”
“Caldera, I swear—”
The door to the Situation Room opened. The new director of the CIA, Christopher Edwards, stepped out. His gaze bounced from George to Kris.
“You must be Kris Caldera.” Hand outstretched, Edwards smiled broadly.
Kris shook his hand, coy smile on his face. Just what had the new director, ushered in after Thatcher’s fall and the conflagration of the prisoner abuse scandal, heard about him? His head tilted. “My reputation precedes me? Or my fashion?”
To really stick it to everyone, just everyone, he’d bought a new suit for this, a charcoal Brunello Cucinelli, on a layover in Rome. A fuchsia pocket square puffed out of his chest. David had helped him pick it out, and had nearly torn the suit off him in the dressing room, fire in his eyes as he dropped to his knees.
That was a memory to carry while wearing the suit. While meeting the new CIA director. Briefing the president.
Instant swagger.
Edwards chuckled, and, not missing a beat, said, “A bit of both. Director Thatcher warned me about you on his way out.”
“Warned you about me?”
An aide poked her head out of the Situation Room. “The president and the national security council are ready for you.”
Edwards led them into the president’s Situation Room, the storied command center of presidents waging war.
Thought it would be bigger. The room was cramped, dominated by the conference table and a bank of monitors along one wall. Kris recognized everyone in the room, all the big names and faces of the administration. Secretaries of state and defense, the national security advisor, the joint chiefs. Other generals and admirals. Military aides and officers squeezed beside their generals, and civilians in suits juggled calls and emails on Blackberries and bulky laptops balanced on their knees.
They were given three seats near the head of the table. George sat along the wall as David and Kris settled next to Edwards. Dim lights hummed above while the wall monitors were on, illuminating the table but keeping the occupants’ faces bathed in shadow.
The president stood behind his chair, talking fast and furiously with someone who looked like they wanted all of their bones to liquefy and to drop to the ground, and then slink out of the room.
The seat across from Kris pulled away from the table. Hands appeared in the light, holding a coffee cup, and then arms, a body, sitting down. A face.
Kris stared as the vice president sat across from him.
It took a moment for the vice president to recognize Kris. He frowned, like he was sifting through his memories. The frown shifted, turned to a scowl. His lip curled. He looked away.
George sighed, just loud enough for Kris to hear. Edwards, next to Kris, turned and gave him a slight—very slight—grin. The ghost of a smile.
David squeezed Kris’s hand beneath the table.
“We all here? What are we waiting for?” The president settled into his leather seat at the head of the table. “Let’s talk about Saqqaf.”
Edwards guided the room through Saqqaf’s biography, a report Kris had written the month before. He stopped, though, just after Saqqaf’s move to Afghanistan. “I brought the agency's Saqqaf targeteer here today. He’s the CIA’s expert on Saqqaf. I look for his reports first, every day.” Edwards looked at Kris. “Mr. Caldera.”
All eyes were on him. No pressure. Kris’s eyes flicked from the president to the vice president. Did the president remember him, smelly and sweaty and unwashed after September 11?
David laced their fingers beneath the table.
“Mr. President.” Kris nodded his hello.
“Go on, Mr. Caldera. If Christopher here thinks you’re all right, then we want to hear what you have to say.”
Kris walked everyone through the timeline of Saqqaf’s rise, from his backward days in Jordan to his sideshow days in Afghanistan, kept at arm’s reach from al-Qaeda, a curiosity more than an asset. His flight to Iraq, and the administration's use of him to help justify the invasion. His subsequent rise, following the invasion, in the lawless, hopeless wasteland that Occupied Iraq had become.
His savage butchery since, and his stirring of a sectarian civil war that was pushing Iraq to the brink of collapse.
David spoke next. “Mr. President, my name is David Haddad. I work with Mr. Caldera on the ground in Iraq. Saqqaf has taken over the global jihadist movement where Bin Laden has fallen short. Bin Laden has been relegated to near obscurity, issuing dry pronouncements from caves and spending his days in hiding. His claim to fame, after nine-eleven, is that he’s evaded us. Saqqaf, on the other hand, is captivating the world with his brand of jihad. Where Bin Laden looks old and dreary, Saqqaf is seen in videos as a young man, actually fighting. He looks like a John Wayne jihadi, and his violent rhetoric, his promises of freedom and revenge, and his slick propaganda are pulling the disenfranchised to him.”
The vice president’s gaze narrowed. “How many do you believe are with Saqqaf?”
“About ten thousand active fighters, pulled from around the world. Iraq, the near east, north Africa, Saudi and the Gulf states, Afghanistan, Chechnya, even as far as Tajikistan. About half of those are designated for martyrdom operations, suicide bomber training. He preys on feelings of guilt and shame, promising recruits who martyr themselves they’ll be forgiven for everything. That martyrdom will also avenge the shame of the entire Muslim community from the occupation. For people, youth especially, who are attracted to the promise of a better world, but feel they’ve broken the strict moral code of the jihadis, the promise of a cleansing martyrdom and a rich afterlife is a potent recruitment tactic.”
“They’re just kids?”
“Many of them are. Teenagers and young adults. College age. After arriving in Iraq, they’re sent to suicide bomber schools and kept purposely isolated from everyone and everything. The first time they see an Iraqi or an American soldier is right before they blow themselves up.”
The president’s eyes narrowed. He shook his head, lips thinning. “We’ve got to stop this.”
Shouldn’t have created the problem to begin with. Kris kept his thoughts to himself, though. “Saqqaf’s silent support, the Iraqis who have welcomed him and his men, are the people we need to reach. They’re stuck, forced to pick a side in this ongoing civil war, and we haven’t given the people of Iraq enough to want to pick our side.”
“We Goddamn got rid of Saddam for them,” the vice president growled. “We gave them their country back. What the hell else do they want?”
“To not be tortured,” Kris snapped. So much for keeping quiet. “They wanted us to bring electricity back, but they didn’t want us to shoot it up their asses. I don’t think that’s too much to ask for. They want to live in a secure country. To not have to face a sectarian civil war, an occupation, and a rising jihadi army all at the same time. Safety. Security. Jobs.” He started listing off the country’s woes until he ran out of fingers. “Should I keep going?”
Behind them, Kris heard George’s heavy sigh. Edwards looked down at his notes, shuffling papers.
“What does Saqqaf want? The end of America? To get us out of Iraq? He want to be the next Iraqi prime minister?” The president looked tired.
“No, Mr. President. Saqqaf isn’t even Iraqi. He’s Jordanian. He doesn’t care about Iraq, not like you think. He wants to destroy Iraq, because after the country is destroyed, he can take over and institute a new way of life. He wants to fulfill the prophecy. Bring about the end times and usher in the Islamic Caliphate.”
“Don’t the Iraqis have a problem with that? They want their country back. Not some medieval Islamic empire.”
David nodded. “Yes, they do. There’s some evidence of resistance. An awakening, of sorts, against the brutalities of Saqqaf. No one wants suicide bombers in Iraq. No one. But, there just isn’t enough safety on the ground for people to turn against Saqqaf and his people. He’s controlling the areas he and his fighters hold through brutal repression, a firebrand fundamentalism that is holding the Iraqis hostage.”
“Mr. President,” Kris said, “We’re looking at post-al-Qaeda terrorism now, led by Saqqaf. It’s not just targeting us. It’s targeting everyone. Once Iraq, as a country, as an idea, collapses, Saqqaf will attempt to create an Islamic Caliphate from the ashes. He believes that by pushing Iraq to fail through civil war and through terrorism, he can control and shape the chaos that will follow. And it’s working.”
“They’ve started referring to the cities and the desert they control as the Islamic State,” David said.
The president sighed. “So, what are we going to do about him?”
Farther down the table, a general stood. “Mr. President, General Terry Carter, sir. I’ve been assigned to join with the CIA in hunting, capturing, or neutralizing the Saqqaf threat. Please allow me to present our strategy.”
Carter, a picture-perfect military officer, spit-shined and polished, starched and stacked, delivered a slide-by-slide presentation on his new counterterrorism strategy. “We developed this strategy after reading the intelligence supplied by the CIA, by Mr. Caldera.” Carter’s words were bullets, his movements as precise as a drill sergeant’s. Kris felt like saluting. He sat up straighter. Carter was a man to whom details mattered, he could tell. His underwear was probably all the same brand, folded and organized in his drawer, his socks rolled neatly beside his squares of white briefs.
“Saqqaf, up to this point, has been in control of the tempo of battle. He sends out attackers. We respond. He strikes civilian targets. We attempt to harden them. We cannot be reactionary any longer.” Carter spoke directly to the president, as if the room were empty. “We have to be faster, stronger than his people.
“I propose the formation of a joint operations unit, led by Mr. Caldera and myself, where we strike Saqqaf’s people every single night. Relentless pressure and constant attacks that will keep Saqqaf and his fighters off their game. We press them, continuously, until they’re consumed with just trying to stay alive. Until that’s all they can do; be on the run, trying to escape. But we’ll keep coming. We will exhaust them. And then we will destroy them.”
The president and Edwards’s heads swiveled to Kris. “What do you say, Mr. Caldera?” The president asked. “Think this will work?”
Kris shared a quick look with David. “Yes, Mr. President. We think it will work.”
“Then you and General Carter are in charge of the hunt. Form this joint strike force. Take out this son of a bitch.” The president stood, and everyone followed, waiting while the president buttoned his jacket and strode toward the door. The vice president followed, but not after giving Kris a long, hard glare.
The rest of the room scattered, officers and aides slipping out or pulling out their cell phones to make a dozen calls each. Edwards and Carter stood apart, discussing shared resources and budgets for the joint strike force. George leaned forward, poking his head between them.
“This is huge, Kris. Bigger than me, even. If you take this guy out, you’ll probably end up taking my job.”
“I don’t want your job. I want this all to end.”
And, he wanted David, and a home of their own. A place to go to that wasn’t a tiny room in a fracturing country. He wanted to not have to conceal their relationship all the time in public. He wanted the CIA to recognize them. He wanted to be heard, listened to the first time. Not have to pick up the pieces of a broken country, not have to sing ‘I told you so’ at the top of his lungs. He wanted a lot of things, but none of them were George’s job.
George appraised him, peering at him the way a parent might look at their grown child, surprised to see an adult for the first time. “You’ve always been made for more than what the CIA could give you. You take this guy out, and you’ll save Iraq. Maybe the whole region.”
“It’s that kind of thinking that got us in this mess in the first place. One person isn’t the key to anything. Ever. Everything’s connected, George. Saqqaf has set off a movement, and even after we kill him, we’ll be dealing with his children, his devotees, in ten years. It’s all just a circle, a never-ending circle.”