“I think to Muhammad Khudayr’s house.” I thought back to Basim’s insistence that our target for last night had been at that exact location. It was time for a consultation. I left Muslit and went back to the room where my three homeboys were bunking.
“Hey, Basim,” I told the driver as I came through the door. “Maybe you were right. Muhammad Ibrahim may have been at Khudayr’s place last night.”
“Of course he was,” Basim replied smugly.
“Okay,” I continued. “So I’ll give you that one. Tell me where he is now.”
Basim shrugged. “He could be anywhere. At a hotel or an abandoned building or maybe at another relative’s house.”
I thought for a moment. “What did he do for relaxation when he was in Samarra?” I asked.
“He went fishing,” Luay chimed in, wanting to be helpful. It was confirmation of what Muslit had just told me: that his dad was an avid fisherman.
“Where does he go?” I asked Luay.
“They have a fish pond,” he replied. “Muhammad Ibrahim and Muhammad Khudayr own it together. They have stocked it with fish from the river. The pond is right next to the river.”
“Have you ever been there?” I asked, turning to Basim.
He nodded. “They go there all the time. I have driven them. They fish and drink whiskey.”
That pissed me off. “Why didn’t you tell me that before?” I demanded.
“You didn’t ask,” he replied, grinning. “Mister, my brain doesn’t work like yours, but if you ask me I will tell you what I know.” It was hard to stay mad at the guy.
“So where is this pond?”
“It’s behind Muhammad Khudayr’s house,” Basim explained. “There’s a dirt road there. You can follow it for about five kilometers and you will see it. There is a little shack by the shore.”
“You think they might be hiding there?”
“Sure,” Basim replied. “Hiding from their wives.”
The three of them had a good laugh. Then Amir looked me straight in the eye, put his hands on my shoulders. “I know this pond,” he said. “My father has been there many times. It is their sanctuary. You will find them there. I am sure of it.”
I didn’t need any more guarantees. It made sense. There was a curfew in effect across the entire region. If Muhammad Ibrahim had left the rental house last night he wouldn’t have gone far. He had to be somewhere close by to avoid the roadblocks and patrols. An isolated fishing hole outside of town sounded about right. And I was ready to cash in on the credibility that $1.9 million had earned the team.
“We missed Muhammad Ibrahim by two hours,” I told Kelly as soon as I got back to the house to brief him. I wanted to start out with fresh intelligence before I made my pitch for another raid.
I watched as the same emotions I’d experienced crossed Kelly’s face: frustration, followed by the elated realization that we were hot on the trail of the bodyguard. “So what’s our next move?” he asked.
“Kelly, we need to do another raid.” As exasperation clouded his expression, I hurried on before he could object. “Just listen for a minute. Muhammad Ibrahim was staying at his brother Sulwan’s rental house in Samarra. Sulwan doesn’t stay at that house. He goes somewhere else, almost every night. Where does he go?”
“You tell me,” Kelly answered skeptically.
I plowed on. “Basim told me that he has seen Sulwan at the market buying quantities of food. Who’s that food for, Kelly?”
“Get to the point, Eric,” he snapped.
“All right,” I said. “I think that Sulwan is taking that food out to Saddam. I think he stays the night there to guard him and comes back in the morning.”
There was a pause. “So where is he?” Kelly asked at last. “Where’s Saddam?”
“Wait,” I pleaded. “Just hear me out. Remember that I told you how Saddam is partial to a certain kind of fish, prepared a certain way?”
“Yeah,” he answered. “I remember. Mazgoof, wasn’t it?”
“Very impressive memory,” I joked before getting back to business. “So suppose you’re a dictator who is used to having whatever you want, whenever you want it. Are you going to go without your daily serving of Long John Silver’s?”
“What are you getting at, Eric?” Kelly was losing patience fast.
It was time for the payoff. “Muslit, Muhammad Ibrahim’s son, told me that he used to fish with his father. They don’t do it anymore, but that’s another story. Muhammad Ibrahim likes fishing so much that he bought a pond with Muhammad Khudayr and stocked it with fish. They’ve even got a little cabin out there. Fish, Kelly. You see where this is going?”
“You want to raid a fish farm?”
“Does that sound crazy?”
He thought for a moment. “Not any crazier than any of the other shit you’ve told me. I’m just glad we found that money. That’s going to give us some clout when we try to sell this raid.”
“What happened to all that cash?” I asked.
“We’re going to hand it over to Civil Affairs. The 4th ID is due to pick it up, and Bam Bam will brief them on how we found it.”
“Why?”
“Because they’re going to take credit for it,” Kelly explained. “They’ll have a press conference and may even take the reporters out to the site. They get the glory and we stay under the radar. That’s the way we like it.”
I laughed. “And the way they like it, too. Pretty soon they’ll start believing it themselves.”
“It’s not their fault. We asked them to do it.” He stood up. “Come on. Let’s see if we can get a hit on this fish farm.”
We found Bam Bam sitting with the rest of the shooters in the dining room. As Kelly and I started to brief him, they all stopped what they were doing to listen in. An eerie silence fell over the place. At that moment, we were all thinking the same thing: there might actually be a shot at rolling up Saddam. No one said as much, but you could feel it in the air. I think Bam Bam felt it, too. He agreed immediately to raid the fish farm that night.
I had hoped to go on that hit. I was certain that this would be the one that would bring in Muhammad Ibrahim. I wanted to be on hand for the occasion, but it was also just part of my control freak nature. It was one of the hardest lessons I had to learn from my months in Tikrit. In a house full of Type A personalities, I wasn’t the alpha dog. The fact was, I didn’t need to be on the hit. They had already decided to take Luay as a guide, and I would have just been extra baggage. I had told the team everything I knew about the targets they were going after. Most of them had already studied the link diagram in detail. They had a good grasp on Muhammad Ibrahim and his network. They were totally up to speed.
In the hours before the raid, I hung out with Basim, Amir, and Luay. It wasn’t an active interrogation, just a way of keeping the connection between us active. These three had been more help to me than most of the other detainees combined and we all had a vested interest now in seeing this through.
Joining us that afternoon were all the terps who I had come to depend on over the past several weeks. Jimmy, Samir, and Jafar had learned to function like a well-oiled machine, trading off sessions with one another and even working together to make sure the translations were accurate. As the days and weeks of intense work had progressed, I had moved from the main house to a cot in the guesthouse. The terps settled in there, too, making sure one of them was available day or night. It wasn’t a requirement of the job, but I think as time went on they had begun to realize that Muhammad Ibrahim was a key figure in the insurgency that was tearing their country apart. They wanted to be a part of the effort to bring him in, and they realized how important to the mission they were.
As evening fell, I could smell the aroma of steaks being cooked on a makeshift barbecue grill the team had set up on the front porch. Cookouts were a regular part of the routine. I rounded up my three terps and took them with me for dinner. I found myself wishing I could bring the three roommates, too, but they were still prisoners. Regardless of how much I might have liked those guys, that was one barrier that couldn’t be crossed.
As I sat eating my meal, Kelly came over to run down the plan for the night. “We’re going back to hit Muhammad Khudayr’s house,” he told me. “But they’re going to send the team up from Baghdad for the fish farm.”
