IN THE HUMVEE below, Captain James Jackson Jr. was hoping for a little luck. The tip had come in three days before from the battalion’s best informant, a college student named Saleh who wanted an American visa to join his cousins in Detroit. He hadn’t led Jackson wrong yet. In fact Jackson worried that Saleh was giving the battalion too much; his life expectancy would be measured in hours if his friends realized that he was ratting them out. But Jackson figured that Saleh knew the risks better than anyone.
Anyway, if this raid panned out, Saleh would be one step closer to 8 Mile Road. He had claimed that several “488s”—military slang for high-value targets — planned to meet tonight at a barbershop in Ghazalia, a suburban Baghdad neighborhood that had become a center of the resistance. Saleh didn’t have any names, but he promised they weren’t the usual criminals and street fighters. One was a foreigner nicknamed “the Doctor” who had just arrived in Iraq, he said.
If military intel had confirmed the story, the raid would have been handed off to Task Force 121, the Special Forces/CIA operating group responsible for top-level targets in Iraq and Afghanistan. But “the Doctor” didn’t show up in anyone’s database. So the Special Forces, who couldn’t be bothered going after anybody less important than they were, turned the job down. Which was fine with Jackson. The Mad Dogs had five tanks, six Bradleys, and four armored Humvees, enough firepower to take out a small town. He didn’t expect any problem grabbing a couple of guerrillas. He just hoped it was worth the trouble. Saleh had been right so far, but there was a first time for everything.
JACKSON NEED NOT have worried. The Doctor’s real name was Farouk Khan, the fat man who had met John Wells in the apartment in Peshawar five months before. Although he had earned his title, Farouk was no M.D. He was a physicist, the third cousin of A. Q. Khan, who had overseen the development of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons. Farouk had worked for the program too, until he was fired for attending an Islamabad mosque whose imam preached for the overthrow of Pakistan’s government.
A year later, Farouk found his way to Osama bin Laden’s lair in the North-West Frontier. There the sheikh offered him the exalted title of “director of atomic projects,” and Farouk set about trying to pry a bomb out of Pakistan’s arsenal. Even with his old connections, Farouk found his mission difficult. Pakistan’s generals knew that if al Qaeda blew a Pakistani nuke in New York the United States might respond with its own bomb on their villas in Islamabad. An attack on Delhi would be even more dangerous, inevitably provoking a full-scale nuclear war that would turn India and Pakistan to dust. Farouk had to move cautiously.
Nonetheless, he eventually found three lower-level technicians whose sympathy for al Qaeda had escaped the government’s security checks. They could not deliver him a working bomb, but they provided equipment that Farouk found very helpful. Then he discovered Dmitri Georgoff, an out-of-work Russian nuclear scientist looking for hard currency. Farouk and Dmitri attended their first meeting with great caution, Farouk because he feared a CIA sting operation, Dmitri because he preferred that his head remain attached to his body. But both men found the meeting satisfactory, and after some negotiations, Dmitri agreed to provide Farouk with two lead-lined steel boxes filled with useful material. Their cost: $675,000. That sum represented a serious investment for Farouk. Sheikh bin Laden himself had to approve the deal.
Al Qaeda still had nothing close to a working nuclear weapon that could vaporize a city. But one didn’t need a nuke to panic the enemy. A conventional bomb laced with radioactive material — a dirty bomb — could devastate the infidels. Radiation frightened people. They couldn’t see it, smell it, or feel it, yet it could kill them years after it hit them. Some radioactive isotopes could contaminate an area for decades, making it worthless even if the buildings remained standing. In the proper place — midtown Manhattan, say — a dirty bomb would cause hundreds of billions of dollars in damage and kill thousands of
Now he hoped for more. Three weeks before, the man who called himself Omar Khadri had given Farouk a new mission. Iraqi villagers in the desert south of Falluja had found a secret underground building in an abandoned military base. They believed that the building contained radioactive material. They hoped to give their find to Sheikh bin Laden.
So Farouk had made a most dangerous trip, two thousand miles west, from Pakistan to Afghanistan to Iran and then over the mountainous border of Iran into Iraq. Along the way he dodged both the infidel troops in Afghanistan and the Iranian secret police, who did not look kindly on al Qaeda. Farouk could have flown to Jordan and driven to Baghdad, but on a mission as sensitive as this he preferred to avoid leaving tracks on any airline manifests. Besides, he would have had difficulty explaining the equipment he carried to customs agents.
Farouk had warned himself not to get too excited. The men he was meeting tonight were fighters, not physicists. All he had seen so far were blurry pictures of rods and steel drums that looked promising but proved nothing. Still, he couldn’t help but hope. If they had truly found new material…and under the nose of the United States!
The Americans were fools, Farouk thought. Decades before, the Jews had blasted Saddam’s nuclear reactors and destroyed Iraq’s effort to build an atomic bomb. The material he would see tonight, Allah willing, represented the remains of that program, exhumed from a grave in the desert. At best it would be nuclear trash, iodine and cesium that could never have made a real atomic weapon. No government would bother with the stuff. But it would do just fine for al Qaeda’s purposes. And al Qaeda would never have had a chance at it if the United States hadn’t invaded Iraq. For Saddam had never shared his secrets with Sheikh bin Laden. He was a godless devil, the most useless of the infidel Arab leaders. But America had taken care of Saddam. Iraq’s doors had opened to al Qaeda’s holy warriors.
Yes, the Americans were fools. You invaded Iraq because you said it was full of “terrorists,” Farouk thought. Well, now it is. Allah works in mysterious ways.
THE SUN HAD set when the Mad Dogs rolled up to the concrete blast walls that blocked the entrance to the Khudra police station, a pitted two-story building marked by a tattered Iraqi flag. Suicide car bombs had hit the station three times. Now most cops wouldn’t leave the station even to patrol, much less arrest anyone. But a few officers still worked with the 2–7 Cav; Jackson wasn’t sure if they were brave or crazy. In any case, they knew the streets of Ghazalia better than he ever would. He hoped to take a couple of them out tonight.
Jackson strode to the station’s front gates, where Lieutenant Colonel Ghaith Fahd stood, cigarette in hand. The men tapped their hands to their chests, then shook hands. Fahd was the only officer at Khudra whom Jackson really trusted.
“You heard us coming?”
Jackson was not surprised. His tanks ran on huge engines, modified jet turbines, that announced their presence long before they arrived. Noise was their biggest tactical weakness. But tonight he hoped to turn that flaw to his advantage.
“Cigarette?” Fahd said, offering Jackson his pack.
“Dunhills? Fancy, Colonel.” Jackson shook a cigarette onto his palm.
“My raise came through,” Fahd said, and laughed.
Jackson lit up and gratefully sucked on the cigarette. Though he didn’t smoke. At least he hadn’t before he came over here. “You know those things will kill you,” he told Fahd.
“No quicker than anything else, Captain.”
Jackson marveled at Fahd’s cool. For an Iraqi officer in this neighborhood, even to be seen with an American was an act of supreme courage. Yet Fahd never seemed tired or tense, much less afraid. They walked into the street, out of earshot of the station.
“You have plans tonight?” Fahd asked.
“Yes. A raid.”
“How many men do you need?”
“Only those you really trust.”
Fahd nodded. “Five…no, four. Ehab is home today.”
“Just four men?” Fifty officers were on duty.
“Yes.”
