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“Twenty-seven minutes to touchdown,” Chris Glenn, the SOG team commander said over the helicopter’s roar.
They were going in light and tight, he thought. Possibly outnumbered by hostiles in the compound. Two UH-60M helicopters with ten SOG team members each. Total twenty men plus the CIA woman, Carrie. The only advantage, the element of surprise, and after thirty seconds, that would be gone and all hell could break loose, unless they were able to eliminate the guards silently and take out the rest before they woke up. The key was planning. And Carrie being right about Abu Nazir and where he’d be in the compound.
And one odd thing he wanted to check out himself. Something opaque that had shown itself in the spy satellite infrared images. An underground cave or vault. They were hiding something.
Or someone. Or several someones, he thought.
“Keep it tight, guys. Nothing gets out. No light, no sound. Not even a fart,” Glenn said, moving over to Carrie. “You good to go, Mingus?” Per her request, they’d code-named her after jazz bassist Charles Mingus. Carrie and jazz. Everybody knew it was her passion. Back at FOB Delta, it became a team joke.
“Hey, Mingus, what’s wrong with Chris Brown?”
“Lil Wayne, yo.”
“Katy Perry, dog!”
“I’m fine. You watch your own ass, Jaybird,” she said to Glenn. His code name.
She clenched her hands on her knees so no one could see them trembling. Just being off her meds for two days was doing it. The only reason she wasn’t flying either on a high or a low with her bipolar disorder was that her system was probably so hopped up on adrenaline from the mission, she decided, shaking her head to clear it.
Glenn and the machine gunner opened the cabin door to a roar of wind. Through the open door, with the night-vision goggles, she could make out scrub on the desert floor speeding beneath them; it looked almost close enough to touch with her feet.
They were supposed to be in Syria one hour flying time in, maximum forty-five minutes on the ground, one hour back to the Iraqi border. Total: two hours and forty-five minutes. Hopefully finished before daybreak and before the Syrian Army knew they were in-country and could react. Once they were back in Iraq, the administration in Washington could deny they had anything to do with it—and nothing left behind but some dead bodies to prove otherwise.
And they’d either have Abu Nazir in custody once and for all or he would be dead. If Cadillac’s intel was solid. And till now, he’d been a hundred percent.
“Ten minutes. Everybody on night vision,” Glenn announced.
One by one, the team members put on their night-vision goggles and adjusted their helmets and communication gear. There was little talking among them.
For weeks, they had trained on a mock-up of the Otaibah compound in the desert near FOB Delta. Each team member had his specific assignment and every man had trained to back up the others in case they were hit. The keys to success were speed and silence in the middle of the night. Every one of them was a combat veteran, the elite of the elite, in incredible physical condition; hair-trigger-trained volunteers who had pushed themselves beyond what they ever thought they could do in order to do exactly this kind of mission.
“Five minutes to target,” the pilot called back over the sound of the rotor.
“Selectors to burst,” Glenn said as everyone moved their carbine safety selectors into firing position. Men started stretching their legs, getting ready to get up and move.
Carrie leaned over to look out the open door. Through the greenish field of night vision, she could see scattered structures on the outskirts of Otaibah. Small farms and shacks. These were poor people. Tribesmen who minded their own business. People who didn’t make it in the wider Syrian society, who didn’t want visits from the GSD, the brutal Syrian secret internal Security Forces. If this was where Abu Nazir really was, he had chosen well. She checked her watch one last time: 1:56 A.M. local time.
“Three minutes. Everybody ready for landing.”
The men in the helicopter got ready to get up. They were seated in the order they would exit from each side of the chopper. Carrie peered intently into the darkness.
And then she saw it. A pair of yellowish lights from a house on a street about a mile or two ahead. Was that the compound? What the hell were lights doing on at two in the morning? Then more lights. It looked like the compound was lit up. Oh God, she had led them into a trap! They were going in hot.
And streetlights too. Oh no! The satellites had shown no streetlights at night in this part of Otaibah. As if the government had deliberately neglected this part of the city.
The intel was bad. Cadillac must’ve lied. Or someone. It was all her fault. They would die because of her. She looked around wildly, trying to think of how to get the pilot to pull them out, to find some way out. But they were too low.
They were coming in fast now. Too late to think about it as they passed over a fence topped with barbed wire and over the compound’s courtyard, bumping down in a cloud of dust.
“Go! Go!” Glenn hissed, slapping her on the back as she stumbled out of the helicopter.
Jumping out, she felt the team moving around her. Every nerve in her body was screaming, anticipating an IED going off or men wearing kaffiyehs letting loose with automatic rifles any second. Everything was a swirling green haze in the night goggles, the lights over the courtyard like something in a van Gogh painting.
She ran behind Glenn, his M4A1 in firing position, toward the main building.
CHAPTER 3 (#ulink_d867ede9-247e-51a5-a5c6-28e5dfd344ca)
Otaibah, Syria
11 April 2009
23:31 hours (two hours earlier)
Brody was dreaming of Bethlehem. That first time with Jessica. They were in high school; she a sophomore, he a junior on the football team. He was a jock. Never a choice about that. Because the son of Marine chief warrant officer 02 Marion Brody aka Gunner Brody was going to damn well be a tough-as-a-mother-son of a bitch jock or he’d beat the shit out of the little knobhead prick until he was.
They were to meet outside the Brew on the corner of Broad and Main, the trees draped with lights for Christmas, the snowy streets toward Woolworth’s crowding up with people, everyone waiting for the lighting of the big electric Christmas star on South Mountain that could be seen across the Lehigh Valley.
Jessica was the prettiest girl in school. The prettiest girl he had ever seen. But it was more than that. There was something about her. He wasn’t sure what it was—he didn’t even know how to explain it or express it to himself because she wasn’t a slut or anything like that. Willing to explore. Curious. Willing. That was the word.
He knew she liked him and somehow he knew that it was more than sex. Although all they’d ever done was kiss. She really liked to kiss, closing her eyes and sticking out her chest just that little bit that made you want to grab her breasts, but he didn’t. He held back, knowing somehow that although she wanted him to touch them, it was part of whatever high school Catholic girl thing it was for her that he not be like the other boys.
So he waited. But that wasn’t the willing part. What he sensed was that she was the kind of crazy girl that if she loved you enough she would drive off a cliff in a car with you, which was something he thought about. A lot.
Because there was one thing he knew above everything else in the world. Surer than God, surer than money, surer than anything. He’d have to leave home as soon as he could, because either he’d kill Gunner Brody or Gunner Brody would kill him.
And then he saw her crunching through the dirt-webbed snow on Broad Street with her friends Emma and Olivia. She wore a red scarf, her cheeks rosy with the December cold, everyone’s breath coming out in clouds, and the girls started grinning and nudging each other when they saw him and Mike. Yeah, Mike was there. His best friend, Mike Faber, had always been there since the day the Brody family had moved into the upper half of a duplex on Goepp Street.
They had come to Bethlehem from California when he was seven, because his father had gotten a job at the steel mill; Gunner Brody apparently being the last man in the state of Pennsylvania who didn’t know that it was only a matter of another year or two before the plant closed and those jobs were gone forever. Except ex-Marine lifer Marion Brody didn’t have that many choices after an official inquiry into the accidental death of an eighteen-year-old private at the Air Ground Combat Center in Twentynine Palms, California, involving an M224 mortar, revealed Gunner Brody with a blood alcohol level of 0.29. The finding put the Corps in the questionable position of either a highly visible court-martial of a Marine chief warrant officer with a chestful of medals or the Marine gunner’s early honorable discharge, but without the full pension he’d been banking on. So they had moved from the Mohave Desert, where Nick had been born, to Pennsylvania.
But if nothing else, Marines know reconnaissance. From the minute they moved in, it took Gunner Brody less than twelve minutes to scope out the liquor store on the corner of Goepp and Linden. An hour later, Mike found Nick Brody squatting under the wooden stairs in the backyard of the duplex, his nose broken, lip split, ribs aching, and said, “I’m Mike. I live across the street. You want to come over, man? I got a Nintendo. You play Super Mario Brothers?”
Nick Brody looked at him like he was from another planet.
“Your lip’s bleeding,” Mike said.
“I fell.”
“Sure.” Mike nodded, tapping him on the shoulder with his fist, and just like that they were friends. “There’s this girl,” Mike had said that first day as they headed across the street. “Her name’s Roxanne, but everyone calls her Rio Rita. Sometimes she leaves the curtains open. When she turns around to put her bra on, you can see her ass.”
“Gosh, I can’t believe it’s almost Christmas,” Jessica’s friend Olivia said, the girls joining them at the corner for the Christmas star lighting.
They wound up at Olivia’s house. Olivia produced a bottle of her parent’s J&B scotch, the music was Whitney Houston and Janet Jackson, and somehow it was just the two of them, Jessica and Brody, in Olivia’s sister’s bedroom, on a tiny single bed, kissing so hard it was as if kissing was the only known form of sexual expression, and then she pulled off her skirt, telling him: “I’m not wearing any panties.” She handed him a Trojan still in its wrapper from her purse. And all he could think was, she had thought it all out, this was her idea.
He remembered how excited they had been on that narrow bed, how beautiful she was in the slanting light coming through the venetian blinds from the streetlight outside, the exquisite feel of her—when suddenly blinding light and someone shaking him hard.
For an instant, he thought he was back in the house on Goepp Street and it was Gunner Brody, shaking him awake, shouting at him, “Thought you could sneak your report card past me, you little maggot jarhead.” But it was his guard, Afsal Hamid, shaking him awake, hissing, “Wake up, you American piece of shit! Do you know what’s happened? Of course you know. Because of you we have to go. Because of you, you motherless bastard.”
“What’s going on?” Brody asked.
“You know why, you dog. We have to leave because of you,” unchaining Brody and throwing clothes at him.
“You pig-faced son of a whore!” Afsal kept saying. For a minute it was like six years ago when they first captured him. That time they kept beating him until they nearly killed him. And Brody remembered at one point in those first weeks screaming back at Afsal through bloody teeth, “You think you hit hard, you raghead prick? The Marine gunner used to hit me harder with his service belt every freaking time he got drunk, just because he wanted to make sure I didn’t grow up to be a pussy. Harder than that every day, you son of a bitch. I’m immune to you, you bastard. So hit me harder! Harder! Harder! Harder!”
“What are you doing?” Daleel, one of the others, said to Afsal. “We have to leave. Get him ready.” By now, Brody had learned enough Arabic to understand some of what was said, though not all the nuances.
“This isn’t over,” Afsal hissed, pulling Brody close. “First we leave. But today, I promise. Today is the day you die, American.”
He quickly dressed and washed, hurried along every minute by Afsal saying, “You fool the others, pretending to be a Muslim, Nicholas Brody. But you don’t fool me. This will be the last time you will be a problem for us.”
What had gone wrong? he wondered. All around him, everyone was moving, stripping away everything they owned down to the walls—clothes, furniture, pots, bedding, laptop computers, weapons, explosives—and packing them away into a caravan of pickup trucks and SUVs lined up in the street outside the compound. All the lights were on and Brody didn’t know why they were leaving so suddenly and in the middle of the night.
“Ahjilah! Ahjilah!” Hurry! Hurry! Everyone kept telling each other; all of them, men, women, even the children, moving with purpose.
At the last minute, Abu Nazir himself came in and everyone had a quick communal breakfast. Only hot tea and pita bread. When someone started to clear the breakfast dishes, Abu Nazir told them to leave it and headed out to the lead SUV. Afsal and Daleel stayed with Brody.
When they got to the SUV, its engine running, Afsal took out a pistol and put it to Brody’s head. He ordered Brody to turn around so Daleel could tie his hands with plastic cuffs. Although it was the middle of the night, the street was bright from the headlights of the vehicles lined up and Brody could see the heads of people watching from the windows of nearby buildings.
“Is this really necessary, Afsal? I don’t even know where I am,” Brody said over his shoulder.
Afsal didn’t answer, but instead pulled a black hood over his head so he couldn’t see.
“Somebody help me with this infidel,” Afsal said, and Brody felt himself being heaved up and shoved on his side. They squeezed him into the back of the SUV, the compressed air pressing the hood against his face as they slammed the hatchback shut, banging his skull.
It made his ears ring and he was felt dizzy, maybe concussed. And blind inside the hood. For a second or two, he might have blacked out. Then the SUV started up. He could smell the exhaust. They were moving through the streets. Through it all, something told him, this time they weren’t going to hold Afsal back. Why? What had changed? Why did they have to leave? Wherever they were going, he had the sudden realization that he was extra baggage, deadweight they could no longer afford to carry. This time, they would kill him. But it had always been that way with him.
Living on a bayonet edge with Gunner Brody, the worst of it, knowing he was a coward. He had known that ever since one night when he was twelve. Something he had never told anyone except Jessica—and she couldn’t see it. But he could. And nothing could fix it. Not becoming a Marine, not Parris Island and Iraq. Not combat. Nothing.
That night. The night he learned who he was. It was three days after his twelfth birthday. Gunner Brody had bought him a BMX bike, and for a few minutes, it was almost like they were a real family.
“Who’s the best dad in the world?” Gunner Brody had said when he gave him the bike.
“You are, Dad,” Nick had said, wanting it to be true. Then, seeing a sudden dangerous glint in his father’s eyes because his father always insisted on being treated like a Marine officer, added, “Sir.”
Three nights later, Gunner Brody had fallen dead drunk asleep, his .45 service automatic just sitting there on the kitchen table next to the cleaning kit he hadn’t even started to use before he’d fallen asleep, head on the table, mouth open, spittle drooling from the corner of his mouth. Brody’s mother, Sibeal, was doing what she always did; keeping the bedroom door closed. She slept curled to make herself tiny as a snail in a corner of the bed, as far away from her husband as she could get.
Gunner Brody had been celebrating the six-week anniversary of his unemployment benefit checks running out after he got his pink slip from the steel mill. (“They promised me I’d have a job no matter what,” he roared to his best friend, one hundred-proof Old Grand-Dad. “I got the Silver Star. What’d they ever do, those jerk-offs? They promised me!”) Before he’d passed out, he’d used Sibeal for a punching bag, telling her if she hadn’t gotten pregnant with the little jarhead shit, he wouldn’t be in this stupid fix.
And Nick finally couldn’t take any more. He grabbed his Little League bat from the closet and, coming from behind, swung it at his father, hitting him across the shoulder. Gunner Brody staggered, howling in pain. He turned around and rushed Nick, kicking him in the groin, followed by an elbow jab to the face and a leg takedown.
“Hit your father, you little maggot!” he screamed. “Hit an officer, you little jarhead prick! I’ll teach you!” Banging Brody’s head by his hair against the floor, again and again.
“Gunner, stop it! You’ll kill him! Stop! You’ll kill him. Your own son!” his mother screamed. “Marion, they’ll put you in prison. Is that what you want? For the love of God, stop. Sweet Mary, Mother of God, stop!”
“You don’t get it, you little maggot,” Gunner Brody said, leaning close and whispering in Nick’s ear as he lay there on the floor, helpless, utterly beaten. “When I hit her, she likes it.”
Later that night, something told him to wake up. Wincing, he tiptoed on bare feet to the kitchen, where he found Gunner Brody dead drunk asleep, the loaded .45 and the cleaning kit on the table in front of him, and for more than nine minutes, as he later told Jessica, he stood there in his underwear, holding the gun with both hands less than three inches from Gunner Brody’s head, trying to get up the guts to squeeze the trigger.
“Because I hate him enough,” he told Jessica years later, the two of them walking together after class, walking down Center Street, in a quiet tree-lined neighborhood once you got away from the high school. “I don’t hate anybody in the whole world like I hate that son of a bitch. I want him dead. It’s the only way out for my mom and me. I came close, Jess. I started to squeeze the trigger. I swear to God. My hand was shaking and I squeezed. Another fraction of an ounce of pressure and it would have gone off. Only I couldn’t do it. And I don’t know why!” he screamed, running down the street as hard as he could toward the river, Jessica running after him, yelling, “Brody, wait! Wait!”
A block or two later, he just stopped, standing on the sidewalk outside somebody’s house. A real house with a lawn and white columns like it had been plunked down there from a different world, but he wouldn’t look at her.
“I’m a coward,” he said, knowing it was true. He should have pulled the trigger. A chance like that wouldn’t come again.
“It’s because you’re a good person, Brody. Because you didn’t want to ruin your life. You were only twelve. A kid,” she said, holding him close.
She took his hand and they walked down toward the tree-lined path beside the Lehigh River. He loved that she thought he was good, but he knew it wasn’t true.
What was true were the nine minutes.
But Afsal Hamid, that al-Qaeda piece of shit, he knew, Brody thought, lying there, his hands tied, head covered with the hood in the back of the SUV. Dizzy from the ride and being hit, for a moment it was as if he had lost all sense of reality because he heard a distant sound of helicopters, and for one crazy second, he could’ve sworn they sounded like U.S. Black Hawks. But that was impossible.
He must be hallucinating, Brody thought inside his hood in the SUV. He tried to think. They’re on the move. Why? Had to get out of Dodge. Must be a long trip, though. It seemed like it was taking forever.
He froze. They were talking about him.
“What about the American, Afsal?”
“Shut up, brother.”
“He’s a Muslim. He prays with us.”
“Your mother! He’s an American. A Christian crusader. He only pretends to be a Muslim.”
“Why’d we keep him so long?”
“He has his reasons,” Afsal said, and Brody knew they meant Abu Nazir. “He always has his reasons.”
Now he understood. Afsal meant what he said. This time they were going to kill him. So why did they take him with them?
Because they didn’t want to leave the body behind. Not with his red hair and pale white skin and Made in America face. Might raise too many questions. Better to bury the body out in the desert where it would never be found. Like Tom Walker. His Marine Corps buddy, his scout sniper teammate. Oh God, Tom. I didn’t mean it. At first, they just said, “Hit him!” Hit him again. And again. And again. Crying as he did it, shouting, “I’m sorry, Tom. I’m sorry. Jesus. Help me, Jesus.” Until his hands felt like they were broken and he couldn’t hit anymore and Tom Walker was dead.
Now finally, they were going to kill him too, Brody thought, lying there in the back of the SUV. Something else he learned on that ride, along with the endless bumping and heat and smell of gasoline. You can doze off, even in your last few precious hours on earth. Because he only woke up when they stopped moving. His last thought as he heard them open the back of the SUV was: I’m sorry, Jess. I tried. Six years a prisoner of war. I really tried.
“Get out!” Afsal barked.
Hands grabbed him and Brody stumbled out. He fell to his knees and they lifted him up and pulled off his hood. He was blinded by the light and had to squint to see.
It was no longer night. The SUV had pulled about two hundred yards off a concrete road through a sandy desert. The convoy was gone; their SUV the only vehicle in sight.
Afsal pushed Brody to his knees and took out his pistol.
“Now we finish. Finally,” he said.
“Can I say the shahadah?” Brody said, looking up. The desert was utterly empty. The early-morning sun was just rising over a distant dune, turning the sand and everything to gold, even the faces of the men who were about to kill him. O Allah, this world is so beautiful, he thought.
“Let him. It is required,” Daleel said as Afsal stepped behind Brody and pointed the pistol at the back of his head.
“Ash-hadu an laa ilaaha illallah.” I bear witness there is no God but Allah. “Wa ash-hadu anna Muhammadan rasulullah,” Brody said. I bear witness that Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah.
