With a nod to me, Basim took over the interrogation, as the terp translated their conversation for me. “You are in big trouble, Amir,” he said. “There is no way for you to leave here without telling this man everything he wants to know. I have already told him everything. Now you must do the same.”
Amir’s fear turned to something like relief. He was depending on Basim now to guide him through the process.
“Don’t fuck with me, Amir,” I said, moving in close. I knew he was about to break and I needed to give him one last push. “This is your chance to help your father and your brother. Your only chance.”
He looked at me and Basim and back again. He took a deep breath and let it out. “Mister,” he said, his voice trembling, “they run everything out of my father’s store. All the attacks. My father couldn’t stop them. Muhammad Ibrahim owns the store. He can do as he wishes.”
“So he operates the insurgency from your father’s place?” He nodded numbly. “And who comes to see him at the store?”
“Everyone,” Amir admitted. “His brothers and his cousins.”
“What are their names?”
“I don’t know.” He turned to Basim. “Ask him. He knows them all.”
Basim looked as if he’d been kicked in the front of the shorts and threw Amir a dirty look. “Muhammad Ibrahim is not in Tikrit anymore,” he said scowling. “Tell him.”
Amir nodded. “He left when Basim was arrested, a month ago.”
“Where is he now?” I pressed. Amir was silent. “Look,” I said in my most persuasive tone of voice. “What has Muhammad Ibrahim ever done for you? He’s the reason you and your dad and maybe even your brother might spend the rest of your lives in prison. Why are you protecting him?”
That seemed to get through. The kid straightened in his chair. “I have seen him driving into town.”
“With who?”
“A man from Samarra.”
“What man?”
“The brother of Abu Sofian.”
I quickly scanned the link diagram I had embedded in my mind. Abu Sofian was the Samarra insurgent leader who Basim had acted so proud to know. He had died a few weeks earlier. “What’s the name of Abu Sofian’s brother?”
“Muhammad Khudayr,” Amir replied. I shot a quick glance at Basim. He looked as if this was all news to him.
“Where does he live?” I asked Amir.
“In Samarra,” he told me. “Close to the parents of Sabah. I don’t know exactly where.”
New names were coming at me quickly now. Muhammad Khudayr was the brother of a known insurgent, seen in the company of Muhammad Ibrahim. But who was this Sabah? I turned to Basim.
“Sabah also works for Muhammad Ibrahim,” he told me. “He came often to the cement store to get money for their operations in Samarra.”
“I delivered cement to the house of Sabah’s parents,” Amir said. Basim started talking to Amir, trying to figure out which house in Samarra he had delivered the cement to. Then the driver turned to me.
“I know Sabah’s parents,” he said. “If you take me to their house I can show you where Muhammad Khudayr lives. It is very close.”
I liked the way this was going. For the moment, the three of us were working together, unraveling the connections that might lead to Muhammad Ibrahim. It certainly wasn’t standard procedure to have one prisoner talking with another, but I’d given up standard procedure a long time ago.
“Is Muhammad Ibrahim in Samarra?” I asked, returning to the primary objective.
“I don’t know,” Amir replied. “But I know that his brother Sulwan Ibrahim has rented a house there.”
Sulwan was another of Muhammad Ibrahim’s brothers, the one Basim had seen buying quantities of food at the market, food that was possibly meant to feed Saddam. Suddenly, from the utter failure of the previous night, I had all sorts of new directions to follow. The random list of names and places I had kept in my head for so long were beginning to link up and intertwine. I was drawing in, tighter and tighter.
“This rental house,” I continued. “Where is it?”
“I don’t know,” Amir replied. “But Muhammad Khudayr will know.”
I backed up and replayed what I had just learned. Amir could take me to the location in Samarra where the parents of the insurgent operative Sabah lived. From there Basim could locate the nearby house of Muhammad Khudayr, the brother of the late Abu Sofian, another insurgent commander. Khudayr, in turn, might be able to take us to a house rented by Sulwan, the brother of Muhammad Ibrahim. It was a complex and challenging task. But it was also the last best hope I had of accomplishing our mission.
I got Amir to draw as exact a map as possible of the Samarra neighborhood where Sabah’s parents lived, and Basim showed me the proximity of Muhammad Khudayr’s house. Then I went back to deliver this major data dump to Kelly and Bam Bam.
This time Bam Bam didn’t need more than a minute to make his decision. “We’ll take Basim and the kid to show us the Sabah house this afternoon,” he told us. “Then we’ll hit it tomorrow along with Khudayr’s place.” He turned to me. “Muhammad Khudayr is going to take us to Sulwan’s rental house, right, Eric?”
I nodded a lot more confidently than I felt.
“I’ll hold you to that,” he replied, and left to get the preparations for the upcoming hits under way.
“That sure was easy,” I said to Kelly. Up until this point, it had been almost impossible to get a hit approved based solely on intelligence gained from an interrogation. But events were moving quickly now and Bam Bam had proved his readiness to stay out in front of the curve. We were all invested now in reaching the goal we had worked so hard to achieve.
“We need to turn up something fast,” Kelly told me. “The situation with Basim and the security chief is going to get serious sooner than later. And all those raids we did yesterday came up with exactly nothing. Tomorrow night needs to pay off. It may be the last shot we have at this thing.”
“Let me ask you something, Kelly,” I said, almost afraid to hear his answer. “Do you think we’re getting closer to Muhammad Ibrahim?”
“It doesn’t matter what I think,” he responded. “We’ve got to come up with something to justify what we’ve been doing all this time. We pissed off our Sunni friends, and have a link diagram full of names nobody’s heard of outside of this house. Our asses are on the line, bud.”
Chapter 14
1.9
Basim and Amir went with the team to Samarra to recon the Sabah house for the raid the following night. The two had become quite a team. When we had finished our questioning for the day, I left them alone, removing their handcuffs and supplying them with cigarettes. I wanted them to talk together, to get comfortable with each other and accustomed to the idea of cooperating with me. There was an element of mutual motivation that was working to my advantage. The two of them could share information, filling in the blanks in each other’s knowledge. At the same time, I was hoping they would see that only by working together could they achieve their freedom.
I didn’t try to win them over by being overly polite or accommodating. I was just honest. I had explained the situation they were in and how they could improve it. I made it clear that I would do everything I could to help them out because, by gaining their cooperation, I was furthering my mission. We needed each other and that, in turn, created a strange kind of friendship that would last as long as our mutual dependency existed.
But at the same time, I never fooled myself into thinking they were actually on our side. I had, for instance, debated whether to take Amir’s father, Thamir Al-Asi, and Amir’s younger brother back to the 4th ID prison. I had no further use for them at that point. But I quickly decided that I needed to keep them around to remind Amir why it was a good idea to continue working with me. They would remain at the guesthouse.
