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CHAPTER 2

Eastern Syrian Desert

12 April 2009

01:32 hours

The pair of Black Hawk helicopters flew low and fast over the desert. Skimming over sand and rock, less than seventy feet above the ground, barely forty meters apart in the darkness. The night sky was clouded over; only a single star and no horizon. For the pilots it was like flying blindfolded at nearly 160 knots and the only reason they didn’t crash was the AN/ASN-­128 Doppler radar that gave them the elevations of ground features: rock outcroppings, sand dunes, or buildings, although in theory, there weren’t supposed to be any habitations in this part of the desert. It would have been safer to fly at a higher altitude, but that would have been suicide. Within minutes, seconds even, they’d be picked up on antiaircraft radar. Once the Syrian fighter jets scrambled, they wouldn’t stand a chance.

Strapped into the hatch seat, Carrie Mathison tried to control her hands from shaking. It had been two days since she’d taken her meds. Clozapine for her bipolar disorder. She got them from the little pharmacy on Haifa Street in Baghdad’s Green Zone, where if the owner, Samal, knew you, you could get any drug on the planet, no questions asked so long as you paid for it in cash. “American dollars, please, shokran very much, madam.”

In the red glow of the helicopter’s interior combat lighting, she could just make out the silhouettes of the Special Ops Group team in full combat gear, humped with packs, cradling M4A1 carbines with sound suppressors. Ten of them plus her made up the Black Hawk’s normal complement of eleven. The distance to the target was inside the helicopter’s 368-­mile combat radius and the plan was to be back inside Iraq before daybreak. Through the window next to the hatch, where the door gunner stood manning his 7.62mm machine gun, there was only darkness and the roar of the helicopter’s rotor.

They had crossed the border into Syrian airspace some fifteen minutes ago, taking off from Forward Operating Base Delta, a sandbagged slab of concrete in the middle of nowhere desert outside Rutba in western Iraq. Except for the occasional stop along Highway 10, much of the desert between Rutba and Otaibah was uninhabited but for a few smugglers’ camps.

There had been smuggler routes in the region since before the Roman legions came tramping through these sands. When they had planned this mission, they’d figured that in theory, the local tribesmen were the last ­people on earth who would make a cell-­phone call to Syrian Security Forces. If the smugglers heard helicopters, they would assume they were Syrian army helicopters and hide. In theory.

She couldn’t stop her hands from trembling. Shit. She had stopped taking her meds because she needed to be super-­sharp for this operation. Already she was starting to feel strange, like an early warning. Focus, Carrie, she told herself.

How many years had she been chasing Abu Nazir, the leader of the IPLA, the Islamic ­People’s Liberation Army, an affiliate of al-­Qaeda in Iraq and the CIA’s most wanted man after Osama bin Laden? It had become very personal. Ever since U.S. Marine captain Ryan Dempsey was killed outside Fallujah three years ago. Someone she had cared about very much.

She’d almost caught Abu Nazir back then, in Haditha, but he’d slipped away like some conjurer’s trick. The man was a ghost. Still, they worked it. Her, Perry Dryer, the CIA Baghdad Station chief, and Warzer Zafir, presumably a translator for the U.S. embassy, actually her operative, and of course, back in Langley, her boss, Saul Berenson, the CIA’s Middle East Division chief.

A year and a half after Dempsey died, Warzer left his wife. He showed up with a single suitcase at Carrie’s apartment in the Green Zone. A tiny second-­floor flat with a window overlooking the traffic on Nasir Street: black-­market stalls under the palm trees on the street’s center divider selling car parts, plastic jugs of gasoline, guns, even condoms to passing cars.

“I’m not Dempsey,” Warzer told her that first night, the smell of someone cooking masgouf, fried fish, coming through the open window of her apartment. Standing there, hands in his pockets, looking like a boy on his first date.

“I don’t want you to be,” she said. She hadn’t been with a man since Dempsey. She knew then she didn’t love Warzer. But there was a gentleness in him, something she needed.

“I’m Iraqi. Of the Dulaimi from Ramadi. What I’m doing is haram, you understand? Forbidden. My mother cried. She turned her back on me. My own mother. My wife said, ‘First finish with your American sharmuta. Even after, don’t speak to me. I don’t know if I can forgive. I don’t know if I want to.’ You understand, Carrie?”

She nodded. Sharmuta. Arabic for whore.

“All I know is I had to have you,” grabbing her in his arms, the first time he’d ever done that. “The two of us. Alone in this war. This insanity. And Abu Nazir, who shames me as a Muslim, sick at what he makes of us.”

And then there was only the two of them, Warzer with her, inside her, the first man she’d been with in so long, because that’s what the hunt for Abu Nazir had done to them. The two of them like lost children in a storm, the sounds and smells of Baghdad coming through the open window of her apartment.

“Up and over,” the pilot said, and the helicopter rose to clear an obstacle. They were flying dangerously low to the ground, but then, everything about this mission, three months in the making, was insanely dangerous. It was all on her. She was the one who had insisted on it, had forced the issue.

Putting together a CIA Special Operation like this had required approvals all the way up to the vice president and the national security advisor to the president. When it got to his desk, Vice President William Walden himself had yanked her back to Washington from Baghdad. She had gone into Walden’s office in the West Wing with her boss, her mentor, the one person in the CIA she totally counted on, Saul Berenson; the first time she had ever been in the White House.

“Are you out of your mind?” Walden had said. “This is the riskiest thing anyone’s ever brought to me. You realize if there’s a screw-­up, a single mistake, a helicopter malfunction, a barking dog, a neighbor calls the cops, some asshole fires a shot at the wrong time, we’re toast. The country, the Agency, everything. We’d be invading another country. What the hell, Saul, you don’t think anyone would notice?”

“It’s Abu Nazir. It’s him. We’ve been chasing him for years. We got him,” she said.

“How do you know? This Cadillac? I don’t trust it, Saul. I can’t go to Higgins with something this risky.” Mike Higgins was the president’s national security advisor.

“It’s actionable, Bill. Ninety percent probability. You know she’s right,” Saul said.

Cadillac was the code name they’d assigned to Lieutenant General Mosab Sabagh, second-­in-­command of the Syrian Army’s elite Presidential Guard Armored Division. Sabagh was a trusted Alawite clan relative of President Assad and a member of the ruling military inner circle in Damascus.

Reeling him in had been Saul’s op. He had long ago identified Sabagh as a potential CIA asset. So when a watcher tracking Sabagh at the London Club in the Ramses Hilton in Cairo signaled that the Syrian had gotten in over his head at the tables, Saul made his move. Sabagh had gone to Cairo while his wife, Aminah, was off with President Assad’s wife, Asma, shopping on the rue du Faubourg Saint-­Honoré in Paris. Her trip was something a lieutenant-­general’s salary could never afford, so Sabagh had tried to win the money. “A dubious idea even in Las Vegas, much less at Egyptian tables,” Saul had remarked.

When the watcher reported how much money Sabagh was losing, Saul needed someone to close him fast. He sent an emergency Flash Critical message via JWICS, ordering Carrie to grab the next flight from Baghdad to Cairo to make the approach. JWICS was the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System, the CIA’s special Internet network designed for highly secure encrypted Top Secret communications.

Carrie had walked into the private high-­stakes salon in a skintight dress, with eyes only for Sabagh, now Cadillac. She made brief eye contact with the target, Cadillac, in the gambling salon, then tracked him to his hotel room, where he tried to solve his money problems with a bottle of Russian vodka, a pretty Ukrainian prostitute, who later had to be whisked out of the country, and a Beretta 9mm pistol, that Carrie had to pry out of his hand, finger by finger, never knowing till the last second which of them he was going to shoot, her or himself.

She packed Cadillac off back to Damascus the next day with his debts taken care of and $10,000 in American taxpayer money in his briefcase. In the six months since then, with his wife, Aminah, happy in Dior and, more importantly, in Asma, President Assad’s wife’s good graces, everything Cadillac had given them, every piece of intelligence, had been twenty-­four karat. He had become the CIA’s most important asset in Syria.

Walden studied the file again, although he’d already read it.

“Okay, so Cadillac says blah-­blah and the satellite shows a compound in Otaibah, a suburb east of Damascus. Could be Hezbollah? PFLP? Hamas? Could be President Assad’s grandmother? Could be anybody.”

“We’ve been watching it for two months by satellite and a local team,” Carrie jumped in. “I was there two weeks ago myself at the makhbaz, the local bakery, pretending to be a Circassian. You’d be surprised what you can learn just standing there in an abaya, listening to other women buying bread. There are approximately fifteen to twenty men with families in that compound. Police don’t go on that street. Assad’s security goons never come by. This, in the most paranoid, security-­conscious dictatorship in the Middle East. Are you kidding me? Why is that?” she said.

“Satellite infrared confirms the number of ­people inside,” Saul said.

“Only nobody ever comes out of the compound except to go to the market or the mosque. There’s no telephone landline, no Internet, and they never make cell-­phone calls. Just whatever contacts they might have at the mosque or the market,” she said.

“Still doesn’t make sense. Why would Assad, an Alawite allied with Hezbollah and Iran, give sanctuary to Abu Nazir? Head of IPLA. It’s Shiites versus Sunnis? They’re deadly enemies. They hate each other,” Walden said.

“Abu Nazir’s doing it because it’s next to Iraq yet it’s the one place he knew we wouldn’t look for him—­and he had to get out of Anbar because we were getting too close. We suspect Assad’s doing it, because in exchange, Abu Nazir’s willing to keep the Sunnis in Syria from what they’re dying to do, which is assassinate him,” Carrie said.

“How do you know this? Cadillac?”

She nodded.

“So forget the raid. Instead we go in with a drone. Low risk. Flatten the place. Complete deniability. End of Abu Nazir. Period,” Walden said.

Saul leaned in on Walden’s desk.

“We’ve had this conversation before, Bill. We can’t get intel from a corpse,” he said. “We need an SOG.” He meant a Special Operations Group. Only ever used for the highest-­risk missions.

“If you blast him to smithereens with a drone, they’ll say he’s still alive. He could become more dangerous dead than alive. Last week he had a suicide bomber in Haditha lure children on their way to school with candy and then blow them up into a million pieces,” Carrie said. “Little children! We need an SOG to make sure it’s him and to get the intel to finish this filthy war. So do it, dammit. Before the son of a bitch moves and we lose him again.”

“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.