Homeland: Saul’s Game

“Funny you should say that. He isn’t even a Chris­tian. He’s an Orthodox Jew. An Orthodox Jew who doesn’t wear one of those yarmulkes on his head or follow any Orthodox Jewish practices. Go figure that one out, for starters. Let’s call him Saul.”

“What about this Saul?”

“You saw the docs we sent. It’s in there. Now that the president’s sitting here, I’ll admit it’s not full disclosure. We didn’t send even a third—­I’m sorry, Mr. President, but I couldn’t—­and maybe we fudged on what we did send, but, so help me, it’s there.”

“What? This … operation? Iron Thunder? Looks like a damn train wreck to me.”

“Wow, you really don’t get it. You are listening to Beethoven’s Ninth. You’re looking at the Mona Lisa, the Sistine Chapel, and you don’t have a clue. Senator, this was maybe the most brilliant and successful operation in the history of the CIA—­a work of genius—­and you don’t see it. This saved the Iraq War. Maybe the whole Middle East. If we hadn’t done this, we were projecting more than ten thousand American casualties and a gigantic loss of American prestige around the world, and that was just for starters. We’re talking about a worse disaster than 9/11. You should be handing out medals.”

“Stop right there, Bill. Since you and the president want to make me one of the bad guys, why don’t you walk me through it? Only let’s be clear, I’m not making any promises.Where do we start? With this operation?”

“Well, since you brought her up, let’s begin with the girl.”

CHAPTER 2 (#ulink_4c78ea10-8f8e-5be2-a121-e39e38e3c157)

Eastern Syrian Desert

12 April 2009

01:32 hours

The pair of Black Hawk helicopters flew low and fast over the desert. Skimming over sand and rock, less than seventy feet above the ground, barely forty meters apart in the darkness. The night sky was clouded over; only a single star and no horizon. For the pilots it was like flying blindfolded at nearly 160 knots and the only reason they didn’t crash was the AN/ASN-­128 Doppler radar that gave them the elevations of ground features: rock outcroppings, sand dunes, or buildings, although in theory, there weren’t supposed to be any habitations in this part of the desert. It would have been safer to fly at a higher altitude, but that would have been suicide. Within minutes, seconds even, they’d be picked up on antiaircraft radar. Once the Syrian fighter jets scrambled, they wouldn’t stand a chance.

Strapped into the hatch seat, Carrie Mathison tried to control her hands from shaking. It had been two days since she’d taken her meds. Clozapine for her bipolar disorder. She got them from the little pharmacy on Haifa Street in Baghdad’s Green Zone, where if the owner, Samal, knew you, you could get any drug on the planet, no questions asked so long as you paid for it in cash. “American dollars, please, shokran very much, madam.”

In the red glow of the helicopter’s interior combat lighting, she could just make out the silhouettes of the Special Ops Group team in full combat gear, humped with packs, cradling M4A1 carbines with sound suppressors. Ten of them plus her made up the Black Hawk’s normal complement of eleven. The distance to the target was inside the helicopter’s 368-­mile combat radius and the plan was to be back inside Iraq before daybreak. Through the window next to the hatch, where the door gunner stood manning his 7.62mm machine gun, there was only darkness and the roar of the helicopter’s rotor.

They had crossed the border into Syrian airspace some fifteen minutes ago, taking off from Forward Operating Base Delta, a sandbagged slab of concrete in the middle of nowhere desert outside Rutba in western Iraq. Except for the occasional stop along Highway 10, much of the desert between Rutba and Otaibah was uninhabited but for a few smugglers’ camps.

There had been smuggler routes in the region since before the Roman legions came tramping through these sands. When they had planned this mission, they’d figured that in theory, the local tribesmen were the last ­people on earth who would make a cell-­phone call to Syrian Security Forces. If the smugglers heard helicopters, they would assume they were Syrian army helicopters and hide. In theory.

She couldn’t stop her hands from trembling. Shit. She had stopped taking her meds because she needed to be super-­sharp for this operation. Already she was starting to feel strange, like an early warning. Focus, Carrie, she told herself.

How many years had she been chasing Abu Nazir, the leader of the IPLA, the Islamic ­People’s Liberation Army, an affiliate of al-­Qaeda in Iraq and the CIA’s most wanted man after Osama bin Laden? It had become very personal. Ever since U.S. Marine captain Ryan Dempsey was killed outside Fallujah three years ago. Someone she had cared about very much.

She’d almost caught Abu Nazir back then, in Haditha, but he’d slipped away like some conjurer’s trick. The man was a ghost. Still, they worked it. Her, Perry Dryer, the CIA Baghdad Station chief, and Warzer Zafir, presumably a translator for the U.S. embassy, actually her operative, and of course, back in Langley, her boss, Saul Berenson, the CIA’s Middle East Division chief.

A year and a half after Dempsey died, Warzer left his wife. He showed up with a single suitcase at Carrie’s apartment in the Green Zone. A tiny second-­floor flat with a window overlooking the traffic on Nasir Street: black-­market stalls under the palm trees on the street’s center divider selling car parts, plastic jugs of gasoline, guns, even condoms to passing cars.

“I’m not Dempsey,” Warzer told her that first night, the smell of someone cooking masgouf, fried fish, coming through the open window of her apartment. Standing there, hands in his pockets, looking like a boy on his first date.

“I don’t want you to be,” she said. She hadn’t been with a man since Dempsey. She knew then she didn’t love Warzer. But there was a gentleness in him, something she needed.

“I’m Iraqi. Of the Dulaimi from Ramadi. What I’m doing is haram, you understand? Forbidden. My mother cried. She turned her back on me. My own mother. My wife said, ‘First finish with your American sharmuta. Even after, don’t speak to me. I don’t know if I can forgive. I don’t know if I want to.’ You understand, Carrie?”

She nodded. Sharmuta. Arabic for whore.

“All I know is I had to have you,” grabbing her in his arms, the first time he’d ever done that. “The two of us. Alone in this war. This insanity. And Abu Nazir, who shames me as a Muslim, sick at what he makes of us.”

And then there was only the two of them, Warzer with her, inside her, the first man she’d been with in so long, because that’s what the hunt for Abu Nazir had done to them. The two of them like lost children in a storm, the sounds and smells of Baghdad coming through the open window of her apartment.

“Up and over,” the pilot said, and the helicopter rose to clear an obstacle. They were flying dangerously low to the ground, but then, everything about this mission, three months in the making, was insanely dangerous. It was all on her. She was the one who had insisted on it, had forced the issue.

Putting together a CIA Special Operation like this had required approvals all the way up to the vice president and the national security advisor to the president. When it got to his desk, Vice President William Walden himself had yanked her back to Washington from Baghdad. She had gone into Walden’s office in the West Wing with her boss, her mentor, the one person in the CIA she totally counted on, Saul Berenson; the first time she had ever been in the White House.

“Are you out of your mind?” Walden had said. “This is the riskiest thing anyone’s ever brought to me. You realize if there’s a screw-­up, a single mistake, a helicopter malfunction, a barking dog, a neighbor calls the cops, some asshole fires a shot at the wrong time, we’re toast. The country, the Agency, everything. We’d be invading another country. What the hell, Saul, you don’t think anyone would notice?”

“It’s Abu Nazir. It’s him. We’ve been chasing him for years. We got him,” she said.

“How do you know? This Cadillac? I don’t trust it, Saul. I can’t go to Higgins with something this risky.” Mike Higgins was the president’s national security advisor.

“It’s actionable, Bill. Ninety percent probability. You know she’s right,” Saul said.

Cadillac was the code name they’d assigned to Lieutenant General Mosab Sabagh, second-­in-­command of the Syrian Army’s elite Presidential Guard Armored Division. Sabagh was a trusted Alawite clan relative of President Assad and a member of the ruling military inner circle in Damascus.

Reeling him in had been Saul’s op. He had long ago identified Sabagh as a potential CIA asset. So when a watcher tracking Sabagh at the London Club in the Ramses Hilton in Cairo signaled that the Syrian had gotten in over his head at the tables, Saul made his move. Sabagh had gone to Cairo while his wife, Aminah, was off with President Assad’s wife, Asma, shopping on the rue du Faubourg Saint-­Honoré in Paris. Her trip was something a lieutenant-­general’s salary could never afford, so Sabagh had tried to win the money. “A dubious idea even in Las Vegas, much less at Egyptian tables,” Saul had remarked.

When the watcher reported how much money Sabagh was losing, Saul needed someone to close him fast. He sent an emergency Flash Critical message via JWICS, ordering Carrie to grab the next flight from Baghdad to Cairo to make the approach. JWICS was the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System, the CIA’s special Internet network designed for highly secure encrypted Top Secret communications.

Carrie had walked into the private high-­stakes salon in a skintight dress, with eyes only for Sabagh, now Cadillac. She made brief eye contact with the target, Cadillac, in the gambling salon, then tracked him to his hotel room, where he tried to solve his money problems with a bottle of Russian vodka, a pretty Ukrainian prostitute, who later had to be whisked out of the country, and a Beretta 9mm pistol, that Carrie had to pry out of his hand, finger by finger, never knowing till the last second which of them he was going to shoot, her or himself.

She packed Cadillac off back to Damascus the next day with his debts taken care of and $10,000 in American taxpayer money in his briefcase. In the six months since then, with his wife, Aminah, happy in Dior and, more importantly, in Asma, President Assad’s wife’s good graces, everything Cadillac had given them, every piece of intelligence, had been twenty-­four karat. He had become the CIA’s most important asset in Syria.

Walden studied the file again, although he’d already read it.

“Okay, so Cadillac says blah-­blah and the satellite shows a compound in Otaibah, a suburb east of Damascus. Could be Hezbollah? PFLP? Hamas? Could be President Assad’s grandmother? Could be anybody.”

“We’ve been watching it for two months by satellite and a local team,” Carrie jumped in. “I was there two weeks ago myself at the makhbaz, the local bakery, pretending to be a Circassian. You’d be surprised what you can learn just standing there in an abaya, listening to other women buying bread. There are approximately fifteen to twenty men with families in that compound. Police don’t go on that street. Assad’s security goons never come by. This, in the most paranoid, security-­conscious dictatorship in the Middle East. Are you kidding me? Why is that?” she said.

“Satellite infrared confirms the number of ­people inside,” Saul said.

“Only nobody ever comes out of the compound except to go to the market or the mosque. There’s no telephone landline, no Internet, and they never make cell-­phone calls. Just whatever contacts they might have at the mosque or the market,” she said.

“Still doesn’t make sense. Why would Assad, an Alawite allied with Hezbollah and Iran, give sanctuary to Abu Nazir? Head of IPLA. It’s Shiites versus Sunnis? They’re deadly enemies. They hate each other,” Walden said.

“Abu Nazir’s doing it because it’s next to Iraq yet it’s the one place he knew we wouldn’t look for him—­and he had to get out of Anbar because we were getting too close. We suspect Assad’s doing it, because in exchange, Abu Nazir’s willing to keep the Sunnis in Syria from what they’re dying to do, which is assassinate him,” Carrie said.

“How do you know this? Cadillac?”

She nodded.

“So forget the raid. Instead we go in with a drone. Low risk. Flatten the place. Complete deniability. End of Abu Nazir. Period,” Walden said.

Saul leaned in on Walden’s desk.

“We’ve had this conversation before, Bill. We can’t get intel from a corpse,” he said. “We need an SOG.” He meant a Special Operations Group. Only ever used for the highest-­risk missions.

“If you blast him to smithereens with a drone, they’ll say he’s still alive. He could become more dangerous dead than alive. Last week he had a suicide bomber in Haditha lure children on their way to school with candy and then blow them up into a million pieces,” Carrie said. “Little children! We need an SOG to make sure it’s him and to get the intel to finish this filthy war. So do it, dammit. Before the son of a bitch moves and we lose him again.”