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– New Statesman [London], May 17, 2004, as reported by Stephen Grey

Anbar Province

Hunter lay with his eyes closed, half awake, half asleep. He was aware that he was dreaming in Arabic and that made him happy. The unconscious didn’t bother messing around with a language it hadn’t mastered. As he floated toward greater consciousness, he realized he wasn’t dreaming in Arabic, but was listening to it. His forehead throbbed and he remembered the concrete fragment coming at him. He couldn’t sense anyone’s presence nearby, but he didn’t want to take any chances, so he kept his eyes closed and tried to make out what was being said, but the voices were too distant and muted. Then he heard a loud thump and a voice shouting in English.

“Help me! I’m Jackie Nelson. If anyone can hear me, I’ll reward you. American dollars. Help me.” The voice was hoarse and it seemed to be coming from the next room.

Muj. The tangos had somehow snatched him and he knew far too well what they did to their American prey-internet beheadings, bodies dragged through the streets, and severed heads delivered to American bases. He had long ago vowed he would take his own life and as many of theirs as he could before they did anything like that to him.

Lying motionless so he didn’t alert any mujahedin guards that he had come to, Hunter peeped, but saw no one, so he opened his eyes and sat up on the stained sleeping mat on a filthy floor. He was still wearing the clothes he had stolen from the Iraqi carjacker. The room was empty and the door was shut, but the window had no bars and no glass. A warm breeze blew through it.

“If you can hear me, help me! Get the Americans. Reward. Dollars. Dinar.” The voice weakened as she repeated herself.

When Hunter stood, the blood rushed from his head and he saw swirls of flashing light and blackness. He sat down again, took a deep breath and waited for his blood pressure to rise. His lips were chapped, his mouth dry and he was hungry, but he was no longer zip-tied. Why had the tangos cut him free? At once he understood: the muj weren’t his captors-they were his liberators.

Hunter opened the door and stepped into the main room. Most of the outside wall was missing and the gnarled wreckage of a bombed-out car was visible through the hole. A sliver of a mirror clung desperately to the opposite wall, which was pitted with craters from the blast. A small perimeter had been cleared of debris around a makeshift table constructed from a door and saw horses. Scattered about one end of the table were a brick of plastic explosive, wires, detonators, pliers and a Colt long gun. Three men sat around it, each with an AK-47 at his feet, and a teenager leaned against a wall, an AK slung over his shoulder.

Hunter forced his thoughts into Arabic. “Marhaba.” He nodded his head in greeting as he waded through the rubble.

Marhaba,” they said, echoing one another as they looked up. Two were twins, probably in their late teens, no older than twenty, and the oldest of the three couldn’t have been more than twenty-two.

“Thanks be to Allah that you saved me from the Americans.” Hunter placed his closed fist over his heart and bowed his head. Cries from the trapped American woman drifted through the walls. He ignored the hostage’s desperate pleas and wished she would stop before she got them both killed. Any English he heard could break his concentration and cause a deadly slip of the tongue. “I am in your debt.”

“The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” the twenty-something one said. He avoided eye contact with Hunter. “Do you have a name? I am Fazul.”

“I go by Mu’tasim,” Hunter said. He had practiced this moment over and over, expecting to someday go deep undercover with the tangos. His Egyptian-accented Arabic was fluent, but he knew there were too many subtleties, too many opportunities to use an awkward word or the improper inflection. “But my given name is Sergei.”

The men laughed. “Sergei. You’re Russian?”

“I kill Russians. I am Chechen.”

“Chechen? So that’s why the Americans want you. I’ve trained with Chechens. They know no fear. I’ve seen a single Chechen with an AK-47 kill an entire platoon of Marines. They shot him, but he kept at them.” Fazul picked up the AK and pointed it at each of his friends, pretending to shoot them one by one. “He killed them all-even the Marines who ran.”

Hunter forced a laugh. “Allahu akbar. What else is there to say?” Other thanYou fucking lying muj. Marines do not cut and run.

“Who are you with, Sergei?”

“I’m on my way home, insh’allah-Allah willing. I’m no longer with a cell and if I were, you know I cannot say.”

“No. I mean, which leader do you follow? Abdullah or al-Zahrani?”

Hunter hated politics, but he knew enough about them to understand that he hadn’t been captured by ordinary insurgents, but by the much rarer al Qaeda cell-or at least al Qaeda wannabes. The last thing he wanted was to get trapped in the middle of the growing schism inside al Qaeda over bin Laden’s successor. He wasn’t even certain what that was all about. He had heard rumors that bin Laden had finally died, but those had been floating around for years and he was pretty sure bin Laden was still alive in the secret prison in Afghanistan where he had been held since Hunter’s team of operators had captured him in early 2002 in the mountains of Waziristan. The US government had wanted to avoid creating a martyr or rallying al Qaeda supporters into seeking his freedom by increasing attacks on American targets, so it instead made the al Qaeda leader fade away. Hunter wasn’t officially read into the project, but he knew that the CIA and Pentagon immediately took joint control of al Qaeda, feeding its lieutenants with useless orders which rendered the organization ineffective. It cost the Administration plenty in terms of political capital because the public believed it still hadn’t nabbed bin Laden, but the fiction was a small price to pay to keep the world and America safe.

Hunter didn’t know what had happened, but something with the plan had clearly gone wrong over the past year. The best he could figure out was that a couple of bin Laden’s more ambitious lieutenants either had figured out the American scheme or simply had sensed a weakened leader and staged a silent coup. Both Abdullah and al-Zahrani had declared bin Laden dead and were now fighting each other for control of al Qaeda. The internal violence in the organization had escalated so much in the past year that the two main factions were inflicting more casualties on each other than on the West, mirroring the Iraqi civil war between Sunni and Shi’a Muslims. Hunter took a deep breath as he looked around the terrorist safe house for clues as to which sect the tangos were with. He found none and said, “I follow the only true heir to bin Laden.”

“Of course.” Fazul smiled. “And his name is?…”

The teenager pushed himself away from the wall, stood straight and pointed his AK at Hunter.

“Long ago in Chechnya I pledged my life to bin Laden, may blessing be upon him. Now my loyalty is with…” Hunter studied them for signs that it was time to go on the offense. If he caught the right moment, he could use Fazul’s body to absorb the boy’s bullets while he reached for a weapon. He continued, “…al-Zahrani.”

Fazul put his hand on Hunter’s shoulder and held it there for a few moments. “You are a wise man, Sergei.”

And a lucky one.

Fazul’s cell phone started vibrating and a synthetic muezzin beckoned to midday prayers, “Allahu akbar. Allahu akbar. Ashhadu an la ilaha illahhah…”

Hunter knit his eyebrows, then smiled as he stared at the phone. Fazul picked it up, allowing it to finish playing the call to prayer. “It has a timer to play the adhan five times a day and it adjusts to the new time each day or if you move into a different location. It even has a direction finder for Mecca.”