“He buys food, mister. Lots of food.” Basim answered as if the information was irrelevant.
“What does he do with it?”
“He loads it in his truck and heads out of town.”
“Where out of town?”
“Over the bridge to the east.”
“Basim, who is Sulwan buying that food for?”
Now it was his eyes that were fixed on me. “Maybe he is buying food for Saddam, mister,” he said.
I had been going at Basim for six hours. We all needed a break. I rushed back to the house to find Kelly and Bam Bam. They needed to know what I had learned as soon as possible. The insurgency network that we’d been painstakingly tracking had suddenly broken wide open. We had to make our move before the window of opportunity closed again.
“Muhammad Ibrahim is running the whole thing,” I told them as we sat down at the dining room table. “The whole insurgency is under his control.”
“All of Tikrit?” Kelly asked in disbelief.
“No,” I replied. “All of Iraq.”
I gave them a moment to absorb the information. While Bam Bam sat calm and collected as usual, Kelly got up and returned a moment later with a copy of our link diagram.
“Okay,” he said, taking out his pen. “Let’s go over this step by step. Who is Muhammad Ibrahim working for?”
“Saddam.”
Once again there was a long silence. “Basim told you that?” Kelly said at last.
“Yeah. He’s got leaders in different regions, but Muhammad Ibrahim’s giving the orders. And paying the bills. Basim used to carry around hundreds of thousands of dollars in the trunk of his car.”
“Who are the men under Muhammad Ibrahim?” Kelly asked, quickly sketching out new squares on the link diagram.
“One of them was Radman,” I said.
“What was his territory?”
“Baghdad, Tikrit, and the west.”
Kelly gave a low whistle. “That’s quite a territory. Who else?”
I glanced at Bam Bam. He was listening intently, but it was hard to read his expression. I was unloading a lot of information that could save a lot of lives. Or turn out to be complete bullshit. It was going to be up to him to act on what I was telling him. “Farris Yasin, Muhammad Ibrahim’s cousin, was in charge of Kirkuk. And there was a guy named Abu Sofian who was running the operation in Samarra. He’s dead now, but Basim is sure they’ve found a replacement.” There were a few other names Basim had given me that I passed along. Kelly assigned them places on the link diagram. When I was done, the three of us sat looking at the new chain of command. Bam Bam still hadn’t said a word.
“So what’s our next move?” Kelly asked.
“I think we need to go after Thamir Al-Asi,” I replied. I knew that Bam Bam had previously turned down a hit on the cement store owner. Being a friend of Muhammad Ibrahim wasn’t grounds enough to arrest him. But I hoped now that things were different. We were getting closer and I could feel the unspoken excitement between the three of us.
“Why Thamir Al-Asi?” Kelly asked. He pointed to the link diagram. “We’ve got all these new targets now.”
“But our main target is still Muhammad Ibrahim,” I reminded him. “And Basim said he sleeps at Thamir’s place.”
“‘Sleeps,’ as in sleeping there now?”
“I don’t think so,” I admitted. “Since Basim was first arrested a month ago he’s lost contact with Muhammad Ibrahim. He’s probably made changes to his daily routine to cover himself.”
“So why are we hitting Thamir’s place?”
“I don’t think Muhammad Ibrahim has many options left, Kelly. Besides, I think Basim may be trying to protect Thamir. He keeps insisting that Muhammad Ibrahim wouldn’t be there anymore. I say we find out for ourselves.” I stopped abruptly, realizing I’d overstepped my bounds. This wasn’t my decision to make. Kelly and I turned to Bam Bam, the only person at the table whose opinion really mattered. I saw something on his face I’d never seen before. A smile. “We’ll hit him, we’ll hit them all,” he said in an unnervingly calm voice. “Anyone else we need to go after?”
I could hardly believe what I was hearing. Bam Bam wasn’t just approving a hit that he had previously rejected. He was letting me know, in his own quiet way, that he trusted what I was telling him, that I had gained his confidence. His decision to arrest Basim had been a huge risk. But it was beginning to pay off. He was ready to take it to the next level.
So was I. I swallowed hard and answered his question. “Well, since you asked,” I said jokingly, “Basim can also take us to Muhammad Ibrahim’s father-in-law. That’s where his wife is staying with their three-month-old baby. He also knows about his old boss’s favorite hooker. He might be hiding at her place. And there’s a driver who took over from Basim after he was arrested. I’d go after all of them.”
Bam Bam thought for a minute. “Forget the father-in-law,” he said. “I don’t want to hear about some stray round killing a baby, especially since we know the baby’s in the house. But if I were on the run, I might hide with a hooker. Besides, he probably thinks we wouldn’t dare hit a woman’s house.” That made sense. As much as possible, coalition forces in Iraq tried to keep women out of danger. We never arrested them or used them as sources. It would have gone against every moral code in the culture and would have been useless anyway. Arab women would never dare speak out against their men.
In the end Bam Bam decided to go after four targets: the locations of Thamir Al-Asi, the hooker, Muhammad Ibrahim’s new driver, and, for good measure, another random Al-Muslit brother whom Basim had talked about during our interrogation. The 4th ID would handle the hits on the brother and the driver. Our team would go after Thamir Al-Asi and the hooker. The raids were set for midnight the following evening.
Chapter 13
AMIR
It was early morning, December 3 and the simultaneous raids were under way. I went to find Kelly in the communications room to wait for the status reports.
As the minutes ticked by, the tension mounted. There was a lot riding on these hits, not the least of which was the validity of my theory that Muhammad Ibrahim and his cronies were directing the entire insurgency, working directly under Saddam’s command. I needed to bring him in, and the targets that Bam Bam had approved were my best shots at pinning him down. It all depended on where Muhammad Ibrahim decided to sleep that night. If he was in Tikrit, I had a pretty good feeling it would be at one of the locations we had targeted.
Since both the team from the house and the 4th ID’s unit had been thoroughly briefed on where to go and who to look for, it wasn’t deemed necessary for me to go on any of the hits. Instead I would stay back, waiting to begin the interrogations as soon as any detainees were brought in. At the last minute, the 4th ID was also given the mission of raiding a farm to look for another Al-Muslit brother. Bam Bam wanted to cast as wide a net as possible.
At about 0130 words started coming in. Thamir Al-Asi had been at his house along with his two sons. No Muhammad Ibrahim. The Al-Muslit brother had been at home with his wife. No Muhammad Ibrahim. At the farm there had only been hired hands. No Muhammad Ibrahim. At the house of the driver, only the driver’s elderly parents. No Muhammad Ibrahim. And finally, the hooker was at home, sleeping alone. No Muhammad Ibrahim. Five hits. Five dry holes. It was not shaping up to be a good night.
Worse still, each raid was producing exactly what you’d expect to find if you raided the houses of completely innocent people: frightened and bewildered people who had no idea what you were looking for. All we had
