I put in a call to Lee, my old friend who was still stationed at the Baghdad airport. I had had occasional conversations with him over the last five months. But I hadn’t seen him since that day in late July when I hopped a chopper ride to Tikrit. On a secure Army line I asked him now to check on the status of the two detainees and to let me know as soon as he found out who they were and what they had been doing at the pond.
A few hours later he called me back. “Hey, brother,” he said. “Those two fishermen you were asking about? They’re just fishermen.”
“Did you question them yourself, Lee?”
“No,” he replied. “I’m not in charge around here anymore. All the interrogators get randomly assigned. But I talked to the guy who questioned them. He seems pretty sure they’re just a couple of civilians. It’s pretty crowded down here, Eric. We don’t have a lot of time or space to waste. They want to let these guys go as soon as possible.”
“Lee,” I begged, “I’m coming up there tonight. Can you hold on to them for that long? I really need to talk to those guys.”
“I’ll do my best,” he replied. I think he could hear the strain in my voice. “But if you have anything on them, tell me what it is. That will make it easy to keep them around for a while.”
“I’ve got nothing,” I admitted. “They were supposed to be two different targets. Muhammad Ibrahim and Muhammad Khudayr.”
There was silence on the other end of the line. “Never heard of them,” Lee said at last. “And my guess is, nobody else up here has either. Who are they?”
“It’s a long story,” I sighed. “Just please make sure you hang on to those fishermen as long as you can. I’ll take responsibility for them as soon as I get there.”
“Consider it done, brother.”
I hung up. Talking with Lee had given me an idea. If Baghdad wasn’t going to let me stay in Tikrit, maybe I could take Tikrit with me to Baghdad. I went to find Kelly.
“Look,” I told him as we sat together at the dining room table. “I have to leave tonight. You’ll be left here with all these prisoners we’ve rounded up over the last few weeks. Why don’t I take them to Baghdad with me? I’ll be there for a couple of days. Maybe I can get something out of those fishermen.” What I left unsaid was that I also wanted to have Basim and a few others on hand when I talked to the fishermen. Now that I understood the value of using one prisoner against another, I didn’t want to give it up.
“Which ones do you need?” Kelly asked me.
“Basim,” I said immediately.
“What about Thamir Al-Asi’s son, Amir?”
“No,” I replied. “I think we should cut the kid loose. He’s just trying to survive. Let’s give him a break.”
“And Luay?”
I thought for a moment. “He sat in on all those meetings with Muhammad Ibrahim. We found him in the house with all that money. He may still have something more to tell us. Besides, he’s highly motivated. He’s supposed to get his cherry popped in two days.”
“As long as you’re at it,” Kelly said, “why don’t you take Abu Drees and Thamir Al-Asi? We could use a little more room in the prison.”
I shrugged. “I’ll take them all, Kelly.”
“Then I’ll get the approval,” he said. There was a long pause. We both knew that this was the end of the line for our working relationship. We had been thrown together in an uncertain and unpromising situation and, through it, become a team. I’d asked him to take some real risks and he’d backed me up when it counted. We had accomplished a lot. But we hadn’t finished the job. It was a realization we both shared as we sat one last time at the table where we had spent so many hours together.
I reached over and slapped him on the back. “It was great to work with you, Kelly,” I said.
He looked over and smiled. “Dude, you’re gay,” was all he said.
It was getting dark by the time I stood at the helicopter pad with a motley crew of prisoners waiting for the flight back to Baghdad. We must have made an odd sight: one guy in a faded blue shirt with a duffel bag escorting a gang of handcuffed prisoners ranging from a teenager to an old man. It was like I was bringing back souvenirs from my stay in Tikrit.
I’d already said my good-byes to the shooters. If they were sorry to see me go, they didn’t exactly show it. I expected as much. They were consummate professionals trained to not show emotion. I’m sure they liked me well enough and had even come to respect the work that I did. But for them, Tikrit was just another mission in a war that brought people together and pulled them apart with no regard to friendship. They didn’t get too close to anybody except each other. They were an elite fraternity I would never be a part of. I accepted that. I was just grateful that they had let me be a part of their world for a little while.
As I waited for my ride, a figure came out of the dusk to see me off. It was Bam Bam. “We gave them a run for their money,” he said, as the lights of the chopper appeared in the distance. “We were really close to getting this thing done and we know that. You worked hard. Don’t think that wasn’t appreciated.”
“Thanks, Bam Bam,” I said as we shook hands. Whatever else might have been said between us was lost in the roar of the descending chopper. I climbed on board with the rest of my human cargo and watched as the ground shrank below me. I could see the guesthouse where I had spent so much time and effort and the lights from the kitchen where someone was preparing dinner. It had been my home for the last five months, the place where I learned a lot, about human nature and about myself. It had marked an important passage in my life, and the most significant mission of my career.
Sure, I thought as we peeled off to the east. We gave them a run for their money. But in the end, did any of it really matter?
Chapter 16
BACK TO BAGHDAD
We arrived at BIAP just after 2200 on Monday night, December 8. Lee was waiting at the runway with a truck. From the minute we saw each other, we just picked up where we had left off five months ago. He was my best friend and although we were glad to see each other, there was no need to express it in words.
With a raised eyebrow, Lee looked over the gang of prisoners. “Too attached to your new buddies to leave them behind?” he joked.
I laughed, but my mind was on something else. “You still have the fishermen?” I asked.
He nodded. “They’re waiting for you. The interrogators who talked to them have got new guys to deal with. They’re all yours.”
“Can I get a terp?”
“Use mine,” he offered. “He’s the best one here.”
After I handed off the detainees for in-processing, Lee introduced me to the other interrogators. The whole operation was completely different from Tikrit. There were six interrogators working on a tight schedule in a building specially modified for the purpose. They were about to have what is called a shift change meeting and invited me to sit in. After five months of working on my own, it was hard to see the point of going around a table where every interrogator reported on what they had been doing for the last twelve hours. It felt like a waste of time, but I kept my opinion to myself.
One of the interrogators explained how he had spent the last three days trying to get a prisoner to sign a written confession. He was convinced that a confession meant that his subject had been broken. I thought back to my own experience. If I had depended on signed confessions, I would have been sitting with a pile of paper and no actionable information. You know a prisoner is broken when he tells you something you can use.