I suggested, “Let’s see if anyone is home.”
We scrambled down the rock pile as quietly as possible and continued along the route.
There was nothing moving in this dead zone except us, and the night was silent, except for the crunch of brittle rock beneath our feet. The high terrain around us made me start to imagine that there were people looking down on us, and I was expecting the silence to be shattered any second by blasts of submachine-gun fire. Whose idea was this?
We were spread apart as we walked, but I moved closer to Kate and gave her an encouraging pat on the back, then continued on.
Zamo was on point now and he raised his arm, indicating halt. We stopped and everyone got down on one knee, rifles at the ready.
Brenner moved up to Zamo and they took turns looking through the nightscope.
Brenner motioned me and Kate forward, and we moved in a crouch to where he and Zamo were kneeling.
About fifty meters in front of us was the gorge we’d seen, and sitting in the gorge was the stone hut.
Brenner whispered, “I’ll check it out.”
Well, if you insist, go ahead. But I remembered whose idea this was so I grabbed Brenner’s arm and made it clear that I was going. Kate wanted to come along, but that wasn’t happening. I whispered, “Cover me.”
I moved forward quickly in a crouch and got to the edge of the gorge, keeping my eyes on the stone hut. I flattened out on the ground and looked through my four-power scope to the right where the gorge descended between two hills. The moon was higher in the southern sky, and it cast good light on this south-facing slope. Nothing seemed to be moving uphill, and to my left was the hut at the bottom of the gorge.
I focused my scope on the hut. Like most of these huts it had no windows, only a narrow, doorless entrance. There was a crude ladder going up to the flat roof, and from here I could see that there was no one on the roof, so if this was a sentry post, the sentry was inside, which didn’t make much sense in terms of vigilance.
I made my way on my butt down into the gorge, dividing my attention between the hut and everything else.
At the bottom, I crouched between two rocks and looked at the hut. There is the cautious approach, favored by most, and the let’s-do-this-fast approach, favored by me. I sprang out of my crouch and charged across the rocky ground directly for the door of the hut.
I really didn’t expect to find anyone inside, so when I tripped over a body lying on the dirt floor, I was as surprised as the guy I tripped over.
It was pitch dark inside the hut, except for a little light coming through the door, and I saw the guy getting to his feet at the same time I did. He’d just been rudely awakened, so he wasn’t at the top of his game, but he instinctively kicked out and caught me in the gut. I grabbed his bare foot, twisted it, and he fell to the floor, then scrambled toward the door, grabbing what looked like his rifle on the way.
I dove on top of him, and he collapsed to the ground, but then he tried to lizard-crawl out the door. I gave him a roundhouse punch in the face, then another that broke his nose, and he was down for the count.
I stood, yanked his AK-47 away from him, and smacked the butt against his head to see if he noticed.
I heard something outside the hut, and I flattened my back to the left side of the door and held my M4 by the pistol grip.
It got quiet outside, and I waited, knowing that my team was covering me from the top of the gorge.
“John?”
“I’m here. Abdul is on the ground.”
My teammates came into the hut, stepping over the other guy.
There wasn’t much to say except that the guy on the ground was probably Al Qaeda and not an innocent civilian, and that he had been sleeping on the job.
We pulled the guy away from the doorway and sat him up in a corner.
Zamo frisked him while Brenner held a red-filtered flashlight on him. The guy had a 9mm Browning automatic and a sat-phone on him. He also had a cracked nose and a split lip, and his face was bloody. Before Brenner shut off the light, Kate took it and shined it closer to the guy’s face. She’s really good with faces, even when they’ve had a nose and lip job, and she said, “Nabeel.”
Indeed it was. That called for a drink. Zamo opened a bottle of water and splashed it in Nabeel’s face, then poured some between his lips as he slapped him around.
Nabeel coughed up some water, then half opened his eyes.
We didn’t have a lot of time to get to the point, so I drew my jambiyah and put the blade to his throat, noticing the bandage on the left side of his neck, like he’d cut himself shaving, or maybe someone else had tried to get his attention with a knife. I said to him, “You owe me for that bagel.”
He focused on me and there was real terror in his eyes, which made me feel bad, like
I said to him, “Here’s the deal, Nabeel. You have your choice of living or dying, and by dying I mean I’m going to open up your throat like a ripe melon. Understand?”
He nodded his head without moving his neck.
I asked him, “Where is al-Darwish?”
He knew that was coming, and he said, “Please not to kill me and I say where is he.”
“No, asshole,
“He… he is in… maghara…”
Brenner said, “Cave.”
“Where is this cave?”
“Here. Close.”
“Can you be more specific?”
“I tell you… not far. You go… go to where sun go-”
“West?”
“Yes. West. You see where to go. Up.”
Brenner took over in Arabic, then said to us, “He says there are two people with al-Darwish. A sentry who he says sits on a rock, and a person inside the cave with al-Darwish.”
Hopefully the sentry didn’t have a nightscope, though he probably did, but maybe he, too, was asleep on the job. If not, we had to put him to sleep.
I said to Brenner, “Do you believe him about only two guys?”
Brenner replied, “We’re about to find out.”
Brenner asked Nabeel a few more questions in Arabic and English, and Nabeel claimed he’d never actually been to the cave, but he did confirm that the entrance to the cave was on the hill with the distinctive ship’s sail peak. So that jibed with what Altair had said, making it a little less likely to be bullshit.
I was surprised that Altair and Nabeel gave up the boss, and I was getting the feeling that those who knew Bulus ibn al-Darwish did not love him. Just like back in the States.
Zamo asked, “Is this guy supposed to make a sit-rep?”
Brenner asked in Arabic, then told us, “He says yes, and he’s happy to make that call now to al- Numair.”
We all agreed that it was better if The Panther didn’t hear from Nabeel that all was well, because there was a chance that Nabeel would give the code word for “I have a gun to my head.” No news from the sentry sometimes just means the sentry is asleep.
Nabeel, trying to firm up his life-or-death deal, also offered to help us find the way to his boss’s hideout, but it’s never a good idea to take the enemy with you on a stealth mission.
Anyway, if we had time, we could have happily tormented Nabeel with the news about his buddies getting vaporized at the Sheik Musa meeting. Not to mention his camp being turned into a toxic waste dump. I would also have liked to take those photos of the Belgians, which I had with me, and shove them, one by one, down Nabeel’s throat. But bottom line on Nabeel al-Samad was that he’d come to the end of his usefulness.
Well, the moment that we would have liked to avoid had come, and it was time to say good-bye to Nabeel.
