On the evening of the raid, my two prisoners and I stayed up talking for almost four hours. I finally suggested that we all try to get some sleep. It was going to be a big night.
“No,” Basim insisted. “I will start a fresh pot of tea. We need to keep working.”
Amir agreed. “If we are ever going to get out of here, there are many more things you need to know.”
I smiled to myself. You know a detainee is completely broken when he insists on continuing an interrogation session.
And I needed all the help I could get. By December 6, the morning of the Samarra raid, my tour of duty in Tikrit was winding down. No one had actually given me a date for my departure and I wasn’t about to bring it up. But I was pretty sure I’d be hearing from Baghdad within a few days at the most.
The idea of leaving before the mission had been accomplished was unthinkable—I couldn’t just pack up and move on before I had seen this thing through. I was the one who had put Bam Bam, Kelly, and the rest of the team on the line in the first place and I was convinced that we were closing in on something very big and very real. Muhammad Ibrahim was running the insurgency in Iraq under orders from Saddam Hussein. That meant he was in direct contact with Black List #1. If we captured him, he wouldn’t necessarily reveal where Saddam was hiding, but taking him down would be like cutting off Saddam’s right hand.
As night fell I did my best to get Basim and Amir ready for the hit. Since life inside the guesthouse was dull and uneventful, Basim had initially been excited by the prospect of a real combat raid. But as the hours wore on, I could see him getting progressively more nervous. I wanted them both to stay focused and, above all, to understand how much was riding on the success of these hits. If we found Muhammad Ibrahim, I guaranteed them they’d be released within forty-eight hours. But if we came up with more dry holes, their future prospects would become a lot more problematic.
So would mine. I could probably serve out the rest of my enlistment in the Army and go back to civilian life knowing that I tried my best. But how was I going to live with the realization that my best wasn’t good enough?
It was 0030 on December 6 when the Samarra raids got under way. Once again Kelly and I were waiting in the communications room for word to come in over the radio. It seemed to take forever. Finally, at 0100, we got word that the team had kicked down the door where Sabah’s parents lived. An hour later Bam Bam made his first report.
“Dry hole at first objective,” he told us. My heart sank. “We are moving on second objective.”
Confused, Kelly and I looked at each other. Did that mean they were moving on the Muhammad Khudayr location?
“Confirm location of second objective,” Kelly requested.
“We’re going to the rental house,” Bam Bam replied.
“Thank you, God,” I whispered. Whatever had happened at the Sabah hit, it had given them enough information to locate Sulwan Ibrahim’s rental house. But if they hadn’t rolled up anyone at the first hit, how did they know where to go now?
Ten minutes later Bam Bam called in to report that the rental house was being assaulted. We waited tensely for another thirty minutes before we heard the results.
“Dry hole at second objective,” Bam Bam said, his voice betraying no emotion. “RTB, with two PAKs.” RTB was “Return To Base.” PAKs were prisoners. The raids were over, and sitting in that cramped room crammed with communication gear, I felt totally confused. What just happened? We hadn’t found our targets, but they were returning with two prisoners. It seemed like we’d reached another dead end. Was Muhammad Ibrahim real or was I chasing a ghost? I could find his buddies, his driver, his business partner, everybody but the man himself. My time was almost up. So were my options.
The team arrived just as the sun was coming up and the two new detainees were brought in for processing. The first was a guy named Luay, the brother of the Samarra insurgent leader Sabah. He’d been the only adult male at his parents’ house at the time of the raid. Luay was the one who had revealed the location of the rental house to the shooters. Since it seemed more likely that Muhammad Ibrahim would be hiding there, Bam Bam had made a quick decision to skip Muhammad Khudayr’s house and go directly to the new location. There they had captured Muhammad Ibrahim’s eighteen-year-old son, whose full name was Muslit Muhammad Ibrahim Omar Al-Muslit.
I began to breathe a little easier. The raid hadn’t been a total failure. We had actually found the rental house and rolled up the son of our prime objective. I was still in the game.
Before I started interrogating my new charges, I checked in with Basim to get his perspective on the night’s events. I could tell as soon as he walked in the room that he had something on his mind. I asked him what was wrong.
“I will tell you what is wrong,” he snapped back. “They did not go to Muhammad Khudayr’s house. I know Muhammad Ibrahim was there and we did not go to get him.”
I was caught off guard by Basim’s agitation. It surprised me to see him so invested in the raid’s success. Of course, he had everything to gain from the capture of his old boss. But right then, it seemed as if he was really rooting for our side. I realized that, in spite of myself, I kind of liked Basim.
“What about this guy we got at the Sabah location?” I asked, trying to calm him down. “Is it Sabah’s brother?”
He nodded. “Yes. I have seen him before, but I don’t know him.”
“I need to talk to him now, Basim,” I continued. “But if he doesn’t cooperate I may need your help.”
“You won’t need my help,” Basim assured me. “You will make him talk.”
“What makes you so sure?” I couldn’t resist asking.
He grinned. “I wasn’t going to tell you anything, and look what you have gotten out of me.”
I headed over to the room where Luay was being held. As usual I started with the preliminary questions establishing his background. But before I could get too far into it, I got a call from Kelly.
“You might want to come over here,” he said.
Shit, I thought. What now? “Am I in trouble?” I asked.
“Just get your ass over here,” Kelly replied. “There’s something you should know before you start interrogating Sabah’s brother.”
I went back to the house and entered through the kitchen door. There I was stopped dead in my tracks. Kelly and the team were standing at the table, where neatly piled bundles of hundred-dollar bills had been stacked in an impressive pyramid. It was more money than I had ever seen in my life. Hell, it was more money than any of us, put together, had seen.
“Thought you might like to know what 1.9 million dollars looks like, Eric,” Kelly said with a huge grin.
I just stared. “Where did it come from?” I asked at last.
“After we hit the Sabah place, we were in a hurry to get to the rental house,” one of the shooters explained. “We just piled everything we could find into the Humvees and headed out. We got a safe that we didn’t open until we got back.” He gestured toward the money. “That’s where we found this.”
“We needed this,” I said, turning to Kelly. “I hope it means we can keep going now.”
“You just bought us 1.9 million dollars’ worth of time,” he replied.
“How long is that?”
“Longer than we had a few hours ago.”
I headed back to the guesthouse, feeling great, talking to myself, and not caring who might be listening. “We ain’t done yet,” I said out loud. “Are we done, Casey? Hell no, we ain’t done, brother. We’re just getting started.” With $1.9 million, my theory suddenly had a lot more credibility. More important, it went a long way toward justifying what we’d been doing in Tikrit since the team arrived. We were obviously after the right guys, with the means to finance and carry out the insurgency. We’d proved that much. Now all we had to do was find them.
I was reenergized and on the top of my game when I continued my interrogation with Sabah’s brother, Luay. I was ready to work all day to get anything and everything he knew. But I didn’t have to. He collapsed like a house of cards within five minutes.
While falling short of an outright admission that his brother was a terrorist, Luay did acknowledge that the nearly $2 million we had found was used to fund the insurgency. Muhammad Ibrahim, he said, had given it to his brother Sabah as a slush fund for the Samarra operation. Luay also revealed that he had sat in on several meetings between his brother and Muhammad Ibrahim, as well as Abu Sofian, before the coalition forces had killed him. The whole crew would drink tea as they planned out attacks and reported on their latest recruits.
