CI: Team Red

by David DeBatto, Pete Nelson

Genres: Literary Fiction; War & Military; Spy Thrillers

Synopsis

In a story so explosive that he can only tell it as fiction, former counterintelligence special agent David DeBatto takes us onto a new kind of battlefield, beyond the reach of reporters, and into the covert ops of elite tactical intelligence teams. Their number one job: to pierce the secrets of an enemy -- before the enemy reaches us . . . Staff Sgt. David DeLuca had a love/hate relationship with the Armed Forces. Then came 9/11. After a career as a street cop, he went to war-and put his skills to work in a secret army within an army. Part detective, con man, spy, and soldier, DeLuca is now hunting a Saddam loyalist Centcom thought was dead. To catch his prey, he'll have to outmaneuver him using microscopic forensic evidence, high-tech espionage tools, and gut instincts. But as he follows a deadly trail out of the Sunni Triangle into Iran, a horrifying picture is coming clear to DeLuca and his elite "red" team: a terrorist group already has its fangs in the USA -- and needs to be hunted down and eliminated right now . . .

Release date: September 3, 2007

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 464

Sample

Acknowledgments

To my lovely wife Brenda, who is still not exactly sure what a counterintelligence agent really does, and I want to keep it that way.

To all of the real-life Army CI agents fighting in the GWOT. Stay safe. We need you more than ever.

To my co-writer and mentor, Pete Nelson. I cannot thank you enough. The muses have surely thrown us together, for you are the perfect complement to my many literary shortcomings, which are legion.

To Dan Ambrosio and Warner Books. Thank you, thank you for taking a chance on an untested, unpublished writer in an already overcrowded genre. May your trust in me, Pete, and our concept bear the fruit we all feel it will.

Lastly, to my literary agent, Todd Shuster, of Zachary, Shuster, Harmsworth. You were there from the very beginning, held my hand and guided me through the crazy world of publishing. All that may come from this incredible journey will be mostly due to you my friend, and I will always remember that. Thank you.

—David DeBatto

Pete Nelson would like to thank Dave DeBatto, his collaborator, for all his hard work and input, comments, advice, e-mails, downloads, elaborations, speculations, and for tolerating me when I made him back up and explain all things military, and for his efforts to make this book as true to the experience of the Iraq war as a work of fiction can be —I would like to thank him as well for his sacrifice and for the contributions he made in Iraq. I’d like to thank Todd Shuster, the agent on this project who steered it in the right direction and shepherded the proposal through so many different versions and configurations—thanks for your endless patience, your foresight and your vision of where this could go. Thanks to editor Dan Ambrosio for his enthusiasm, his painless editing, and for his ongoing support during the writing process. I’m grateful for the feedback I got from my wise circle of critics, including Jeannie Birdsall, Bluey Diehl, Cammie McGovern, Sarah Metcalf, Karen Osborne, Tony Maroulis, and in particular for the read I got from David Stern, good friend and master of the macabre. Thanks to Gordon Bigelow and Dick Duncan for advice on sailing and sailboats, and thanks to Dr. Chris Otis for talking to me about pathology. Big big thanks to Samar Moushabeck for supplying me with Arabic translations (not to mention coffee and baked goods), and to her husband Gabby, whose bookstore, Booklinks, served as one of my primary resources (e-mail: [email protected]). Antepenultimate thanks to whoever invented Google, without which I could not have pretended to know half as much as I pretend I do, both in print and in real life. Penultimate thanks to my son Jack for keeping my spirits up and for sleeping through the night so that Daddy had some time to write, and finally thanks to Jennifer Gates, my finest collaborator, for all her reads, thoughts, insights, patience, support, and understanding.

—Pete Nelson

Prologue

OUT THE WINDOW, THE DOCKWORKER COULD hear children playing and laughing.

He lay back on the bed and threw his arm over his eyes to block the light that filtered in through the dirty window. He fumbled for his cigarettes on the nightstand. To say he felt terrible was an understatement. He found the remote and turned on the television, then turned it off again, too ill to watch it. On the end table next to the bed, he saw an empty bottle of tequila. He couldn’t remember finishing it. It probably explained a lot. Either that, or God was punishing him, but he couldn’t believe God would punish him for stealing one lousy bottle of olive oil—not after all the other times when God had looked the other way.

He didn’t feel much better when the phone woke him up again around four. This time he screened the call. A man’s voice said: “This is O’Brien down at the hall. Look, we got two ships coming in on Monday and we’re going to need a full crew so I was hoping you could make it . . .”

The dockworker had half a mind to pick up the phone and tell O’Brien to go screw himself, asking for favors after the way he’d ridden him all week. If he felt better by Monday, maybe he’d go in, but right now it wasn’t looking so likely.

He managed to walk to the bathroom, though he felt dizzy and leaned heavily against the sink. This was more than a hangover. He looked at himself in the mirror. The handsome devil he usually saw looked awful. His eyes were red, and his skin was the color of oatmeal. At six foot four and a muscular 250 pounds, only thirty-three years of age, he was a strong man who’d done a bit of goon work for the union from time to time, but right now he felt too weak to blow the fuzz off a dandelion. He popped two Alka-Seltzers in a glass of water, drank it, and immediately felt worse, barely turning in time to kneel before the toilet, where he vomited for the next ten minutes, including a violent series of dry heaves toward the end that left him feeling even weaker.

He went back to bed. His lower back ached, which he assumed was from all the lifting he’d done during the week, but soon the muscles in his arms and legs began to ache, and his head hurt. He felt utterly fatigued. When he took his temperature, he found he had a fever of 101 degrees.

“Well that’s fucking great,” he said to no one.

He didn’t have any health insurance, and he wasn’t about to blow the nine hundred dollars he’d earned that week on a doctor, so he covered himself with a blanket, took three Tylenol and went to bed. He had chills during the night, and he vomited several more times.

By noon of the following day, Sunday, he’d changed his mind about seeing a doctor. He was reluctant to call the hospital emergency room at Massachusetts General because he still owed them five hundred dollars for a prior visit, but he had to talk to somebody, so he placed a block on his phone to prevent the advice nurse from using caller ID and gave a fake name when she finally came on the line. He told her he felt like crap and wondered if she could prescribe him something.

“We’d really have to see you in person before we could do that,” she said.

“I don’t have any insurance,” he told her.

“Can you answer a few questions?”

“I guess,” he muttered.

“Do you have a fever?” she asked.

“Uh-huh.”

“Can you tell me what it is?”

“One hundred two point four.”

“How long have you had a fever?”

“It was a hundred and one yesterday.”

“Did it go down last night?”

“I don’t know,” he struggled to say. “I don’t think so.”

“Muscle aches?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Where?”

“Everywhere.”

“Backache?”

“Yeah.”

“Headache?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Vomiting?”

“Yeah.”

“How many times?”

“I don’t know. Twenty?”

“Diarrhea?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I was thinking maybe I had food poisoning.”

“What’s the last thing you ate?”

“Spaghetti with white clam sauce. Do you think it’s food poisoning?”

“It’s possible, with clams, though usually if it’s food poisoning, you feel better after you vomit. Anything else? Any other symptoms. Sore throat?”

“No,” he said. “I think I’ve got a rash, though.”

“Where?” she inquired.

“On my chest,” he said.

“How large is the area?” she asked.

“Maybe the size of my hand.”

“Is the area raised and slightly puffy or just red?”

“I don’t know. Just red, I think.”

“That sounds erythematous,” she said as if she was thinking out loud.

“What does that mean?” he asked.

“It could be a negative reaction to medication. Have you taken any drugs?”

“Not lately,” he said. The dog downstairs was yapping again.

“Aspirin? Motrin? Tylenol . . . ?”

“Tylenol,” he said weakly.

He waited while she added it all up. His head was pounding as he shivered beneath his blankets.

“And you said your fever is one-oh-two point four?”

“Uh-huh.”

“I think you should probably be seen by a doctor,” she said at last. “Do you think you’d be able to drive?”

“I don’t have a car,” he said. He had a car, just no license after his third DWI.

“Is there somebody you could call who could give you a ride?” she asked.

He told her there wasn’t anybody he could call. He thought again of the five hundred dollars he owed. If he paid it, he might as well not have worked at all the previous week. He told himself that it was just a bug of some sort, and that no matter how bad he felt, he could tough it out.

By Sunday evening, he realized he was wrong about that, but by then he was too sick to move, utterly prostrate and barely able to sit up. He’d brought a hand-held mirror to bed, and when he looked in it, he saw that the rash had spread up his chest and neck to the left side of his face. The rash on his face was simply red, but the rash on his chest had indeed become puffy and tender to the touch.

When the dockworker finally called a cab to give him a ride to the hospital, he got a busy signal. He tried again a while later, but with his fever raging at nearly 104 degrees, in a state of only partial lucidity, he dropped the phone on the floor and was too sick to reach down and pick it up. He never made it to the hospital.

By midnight on Monday, his rash had become vesicular, the red nodes distending into erumpent bladderlike sacs filled with pus and lymphatic fluids, each whitehead excruciating to the touch, the largest about the size of a dime, though they were fairly uniform in size and evenly distributed. His fever stabilized in the night at 102.5 degrees as his thymus, spleen, liver, lymph nodes, and bone marrow began to run out of the raw materials needed to produce antibodies. He spent the next day, Tuesday, lying in bed, groaning and wishing that someone would knock on the door and find him, the mailman, an errant pizza delivery man, anybody. He prayed to God for help, holding in his hands the Bible he’d found in the back corner of his bedstand drawer.

“I know maybe I never gave you enough credit,” he said in his prayers, “and I never done much for the church or whatever, but if you could do me this one favor and make me better, I swear I’ll change stuff . . .”

Tuesday night (though he could no longer tell how fast or slow time was passing) his condition worsened. His joints throbbed with pain, while lightning bolts of gastrointestinal anguish doubled him over, leaving him in a fetal position most of the time. The whiteheads on his skin began to split and burst. Within hours, full-blown lesions covered his entire body, seeping and staining the sheets upon which he was dying as his air passage narrowed, making him feel like he was suffocating.

In the final throes, he trembled and gnashed his teeth and shook violently, his skin a mat of bubbling rubber as he bled out, hemorrhaging both internally and externally, blood coming from his rectum, his fingernails, his nose, ears, eyes, mouth, and gums. Where he clawed at his skin, the skin tore as easily as tissue paper. The hair on his head fell out in clumps when he grabbed at it. The lining of his brain was inflamed with encephalitis, causing him to hallucinate. In his last uncontrolled thrashing, he knocked over the lamp and lacked the strength to right it. He lost consciousness entirely shortly before midnight. The smoke alarm went off half an hour later when the heat from the light bulb in the overturned lamp set fire to the pages of the Bible he’d hoped would be his salvation.

Firefighters blamed the intensity of the flames on the fact that the old couple they’d rescued from the first floor were packrats who hadn’t thrown out a newspaper or magazine in the last twenty years, providing fuel for the inferno. When firefighters finally got to the dockworker—his name was Anthony Fusaro—his body was burned beyond recognition and mostly ash.

Chapter One

IT WAS ONE OF THOSE DAYS THAT STARTED lousy and went rapidly downhill, beginning when DeLuca was called in to meet with Lieutenant Colonel Stanley Reicken in a conference room at the Tactical Operations Center for a briefing. The desert sun had yet to rise, but even at that predawn hour the TOC was jamming, a fifty-foot-square canvas enclosure ringed by armored transports and Bradley fighting vehicles backed up to form a protective cordon, the whole structure roofed with heavy dark green canvas tarps dating back to the Korean War, full of techies, aides, assistants, staff flunkies, translators, and brigade combat team leaders, as well as a handful of DeLuca’s fellow counterintelligence agents. He paused before entering to blouse his boots, because Reicken cared deeply about such things, grabbed a cup of coffee from the five-gallon pot by the door, then made his way to the brightly lit room at the far end of the expansive hall, taking care not to trip over any of the cables duct-taped to the floor. The “Star Wars Tent,” as some people were calling it, was always impressive to him, perhaps because he was something of a technophobe, with banks of computers crunching numbers and accessing databases, the latest communications equipment with satellite uplinks, electronics of all kinds, the walls alive with real-time UAV imagery sent from drones no bigger than model airplanes, streaming 24/7 on an array of flat-screen plasma televisions, the main screen a four-by-six-foot job hanging at the far wall. A tech officer had told him they had more computer power than NASA had when they put a man on the moon. DeLuca had been led to believe he was going to meet to discuss security needs for the day’s mission. Instead, Reicken surprised him by throwing a crude wanted poster down on the table, a photocopy of a pencil drawing of DeLuca that, to his mind, wasn’t all that close a resemblance, with the words “MR. DAVID” and “$10,000 AMERICAN” and “CIA” written in inch-high block letters.

“Apparently you’re a marked man, DeLuca,” Reicken said with a kind of smirk on his face. “Looks like you’re doing your job a bit too well. Take it as a compliment. Probably put out by some Ba’ath party poohbah who’s getting tired of you arresting all his boys.”

DeLuca picked up the drawing and looked at it. The drawing took a good fifteen or twenty years off him. His hairline was wrong, his jaw a bit squarer, his nose not bent where an angel-dusted punk he’d arrested in Chelsea had broken it, and it wasn’t an accurate enough rendering that anybody could pick him out of a crowd from it, but it gave him the willies all the same.

“Where’d you find this?” he asked. It would make a nice keepsake, assuming he got home in one piece. Something to frame for the study, assuming he still had a home, back in the world.

“Somebody brought it in,” Reicken said casually. “You know, I wouldn’t get a big head about it, but I think ten thousand may be a new record for a guardsman.” Reicken hated guardsmen. Most of the guardsmen DeLuca knew found the feeling mutual. DeLuca had half a mind to call his old friend Phil—General Phillip LeDoux, to Reicken—and tell him what a horse’s ass Reicken was, though that would be operating outside of channels, and he’d gotten in trouble for going outside channels on both his previous enlistments. DeLuca had known the general since the two of them had sat in a freezing cold Quonset hut on the German border back in the late seventies, listening to frantic East German government officials making telephone calls about how the Americans were going to call off the Olympics. DeLuca had joked, over the years, that Phillip only got into Officer’s Candidate School because DeLuca turned them down. LeDoux was an excellent example of what good a man could do committing his life to the military. Reicken was a paper-pushing bureaucrat who couldn’t carry LeDoux’s shorts.

“Anyway,” Reicken said, “I thought you should have a heads-up. It’s up to you if you want to go out or ride a desk for a few days until we find out who’s doing this.”

DeLuca decided not to react to the insult. As MacKenzie had told him before, “You’re older than him, you’re smarter than him, you’re better looking and you’re six inches taller than he is—he’s totally jealous of you, and if you let him get to you, he pulls you down to his level.” She was right, at least the part about not letting Reicken get to him.

“No thanks, but I’d appreciate it, Colonel, if we could keep this between ourselves for as long as possible. I wouldn’t want to worry anybody on the team.”

Two hours later, DeLuca was riding in an up-armored Humvee next to a man who apparently hadn’t showered since the first Gulf War. They were fifteen klicks from base, headed for a compound on the outskirts of the town of Ad-Dujayl. The raiding party, operating out of the Balad Army Air Field, popularly known as Camp Anaconda, fifty kilometers north of Baghdad, consisted of three Bradley fighting vehicles and seven Humvees. Each Humvee carried five MPs, two in the front and two in the back, armed with M-16s and 9mm Beretta semiautomatic pistols, and a Squad Automatic Weapon or SAW gunner protruding from a hole in the roof, seated in a canvas sling between the rear passengers with only his upper torso exposed, manning a roof-mounted M-60 machine gun. DeLuca reached across his flak jacket to check his revolver, hoping he wouldn’t have to use it. He wasn’t one of the gunslingers. Counterintelligence didn’t do security. That’s what the MPs and the Bradleys were for.

“Eyes on,” he radioed to MacKenzie in the lead Humvee.

“Gotcha,” she chirped back. “Too bad Doc and Dan have to miss the party,” she added, referring to the two other members of DeLuca’s team, currently interviewing the mayor of Balad to see if he could explain why they’d found two hundred mortar rounds in the basement of the police station. It was called a THT, or Tactical Human-Intelligence Team, though sometimes he thought Strategic Human Intelligence Team might have made for a more apt acronym. He didn’t like it when the team was split. They’d been working well together for months, and had started to anticipate each other’s thoughts and needs. He’d said it a million times, beginning when he’d been the top instructor at Intelligence School at Fort Huachuca: “Counterintelligence is a state of mind.” Splitting the team disturbed the collective state of mind.

DeLuca thought about the wanted poster. Maybe he could turn it into a positive—having a little celebrity status might help, the next time he was negotiating with a sheikh or tribal leader. MacKenzie had told him he was better looking than Reicken. Was that a flirt? Colleen was attractive, no question, but she was also twenty years his junior, and half the time, he pissed her off. Doc was probably right. “Dave,” he’d said, “if you knew half as much about women as you know about counterintelligence, your marriage wouldn’t be in the trouble it’s in.”

“Is bad road,” interrupted the man with a thick Arab accent sitting next to DeLuca. The man’s name was Adnan, and he’d been with the battalion since they’d left Kuwait, an Iraqi exile and former Intelligence Service liaison with the Republican Guard who’d surrendered during the first Gulf War, after Saddam Hussein’s regime had killed his wife and family. He’d worked for the past ten years as a houseboy for a wealthy Kuwaiti family, but he’d jumped at a chance to go back as an informant. Adnan was filled with hatred for the regime, that was clear, but that didn’t mean DeLuca trusted him.

“What?” DeLuca could hardly hear Adnan over the din of the Humvee’s engine and the rocks and gravel pounding beneath the vehicle.

“Bad road,” Adnan shouted again. “The people who live here are all thieves, I think.”

DeLuca checked his weapons again. He was armed with a regulation 9mm fifteen-round Beretta model 92S, which he carried in a “Mr. Mike” leg rig, but just in case, he also carried, in a shoulder holster, the same six-inch stainless-steel Smith and Wesson model 66 revolver, loaded with .357 magnum full-jacketed hollow points, that he’d carried during his twenty years on the Boston police force. He carried the revolver because he knew it worked, and because he had a relationship with the piece, a feeling something like, “We’ve done this before, and we can do it again.”

“They’re all bad roads,” he told Adnan.

The countryside was actually rather lovely, the road lined with date palms and vineyards, and irrigation canals with their water pumps sounding a steady chik-chik-chik. Every house they passed made him nervous, because you never knew who was peeking from the windows, or what sort of arms they might be aiming at you.

“I am ready to die,” Adnan said, more or less out of the blue.

“Oh yeah?” DeLuca said.

Adnan nodded.

“Well I’m not,” DeLuca told him. “I’m still paying off a dining-room set we got at Filene’s.”

DeLuca saw women harvesting crops under the hot sun, cultivating with hoes, swinging sickles, even wielding shovels to dig trenches while covered head to toe in full burquas, with only the faces of girls under twelve showing. He saw young boys in shorts or dishdashas herding goats or sheep. Everybody had ugly feet. It was a nation of people with ugly feet.

“Commence waving and smiling, everybody,” he said into the radio. “Sunglasses off if you’re looking at anybody. Pearly whites, front and center. Hug hug hug . . .”

Two of the younger boys working in the field waved back at him. It was silly to a lot of people, to Doc and to Dan in particular, but DeLuca firmly believed in presenting a friendly face to the people whose hearts and minds it was their task to win over. Getting tough only created more enemies, and as his mother used to say, “You catch more flies with sugar . . .”

“I think you should ask the CIA for a raise,” Adnan said. DeLuca operated “sterile” on CI missions, in a uniform devoid of any insignia that might indicate name, rank, or even branch of service. Most of the people he met, including American officers, assumed he worked for the CIA, calling him only “Mr. David.” It was a common misconception that invariably worked in his favor.

“Maybe if we find Saddam’s fortune, we can split it,” DeLuca said in jest.

“I would spit on Saddam’s money,” Adnan said.

“So would I,” DeLuca said. “Then I’d wipe it off and spend it.”

He checked his weapon again. On his very first raid, DeLuca had compulsively double-checked his automatic to make sure he’d chambered a round, imagining fedayeen gunmen with RPGs popping up from behind the stone walls and palm trees like the bad guys in the Desert Storm video games his son played during his sullen teenager period. He was slightly more used to it now.

“Hey Joan-Claude,” he radioed to VanDamm, using his nickname for her. “Ask Khalil there how much farther.” Khalil was a Kurd, younger than Adnan by ten years and smaller, thin and wiry where Adnan was more solidly built. Khalil was from Sulaymaniyah, on the Iranian border, and a bit of an entrepreneur who’d worked for his uncles smuggling cigarettes and alcohol into Iran as a teenager, leading pack trains through the Zagros mountains, but he’d come south after Operation Iraqi Freedom made it safe for him to do so, looking for opportunities. Khalil supposedly knew the area and had been to Ad-Dujayl before. DeLuca looked ahead, where Mack (“Miss Colleen”) and his translator, Sergeant Linda VanDamm, rode in the lead Humvee.

“You should have thought of that before we left,” she radioed back. “I’ll ask him.” She’d served in Frankfurt at the same time DeLuca had, though he hadn’t known her there. She was in many ways a seasoned professional, yet she hadn’t brushed up on her Arabic since graduating from the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California. She was married with three kids and should have been home making sandwiches, not pounding down a dirt road between Iraq and a hard place, DeLuca thought.

“He’s not sure,” she finally said.

“He’s not sure how much farther it is?”

“That’s what he just said,” she replied.

“Ausgezeichnett,” DeLuca said. “Sagt wir sind nicht verloren.”

“Wir sind nicht verloren,” VanDamm radioed back, matching his pidgin German. “Nür ein bischen upgefucked. Look at it this way—we don’t know where we are, but at least we’re making good time.”

It was too hot to laugh, nearly 115 degrees in the shade, with a wet-ball of 96 on a 1-100 scale, according to the weather station set up opposite the circle of tents they called home. Everybody had to carry extra water if the wet-ball was above 85. One of the MPs, an undersized kid with a bad complexion, had already taken a bag of glucose just to get himself started. DeLuca had worked as a cop in Yuma, Arizona, after getting out of the service the first time, and thought he knew heat. He didn’t. He was dark enough that he didn’t sunburn easily, but Colleen, with her fair Scotch-Irish complexion, had to slather on sun block four or five times a day, which made her smell surfer-girlish and reminded DeLuca of all the hotties he’d lusted for as a kid at Jones Beach during summer breaks. The flak vest DeLuca wore only made it worse, adding another fifteen to twenty degrees.

He wiped the sweat from his eyes with his sleeve and opened the Velcro strips on the front of his vest to let the marginally cooler air blow across his drenched DCU blouse. It was standard operating procedure to keep your flak jacket closed on missions, but nobody did. It was also SOP that everybody was supposed to wear their seat belts, but nobody did that either, the common wisdom being that if your vehicle were to come under attack, the faster you could get out of it, the better.

They turned off the main highway and vectored south on a dirt road that paralleled an irrigation canal that drained the Tigris. DeLuca studied his map, trying to figure out where they were. He was tempted to use the sat phone to call his son at IMINT and ask him where they were. Lieutenant Scott DeLuca led a team monitoring imagery collected by one of the many surveillance satellites the Defense Department had quietly placed in orbit above the Middle East after the first Gulf War, and could give DeLuca a precise fix if he wanted one, but DeLuca didn’t want to abuse the privilege.

“You look a bit like Tony Orlando,” DeLuca told Adnan. “Anybody ever tell you that? You remember Tony Orlando and Dawn? Tie a yellow ribbon . . . No? You ever been to Branson, Missouri?”

“No,” Adnan said, shaking his head apologetically.

“You’d love Branson,” DeLuca said. He’d taken a vacation there with his wife and hated every minute of it, a fake smile plastered to his face the entire time. “Tony Orlando has his own theater there. People would treat you like a big shot, but you’d have to wear a tuxedo.”

They’d dressed Adnan, for his own protection, in an American uniform complete with a camouflaged Kevlar helmet and full battle-rattle and American sunglasses, cheap Ray-Ban knockoffs. DeLuca felt sorry for him, considering what he’d been through. He couldn’t imagine losing your wife and child. Adnan had been brought along today because he’d spied for the Iraqi Intelligence Service or “Mukhaberat” back when he’d been a member of the Republican Guard, reporting on any officers showing any disloyalty to the regime. Today they were looking for a man named Omar Hadid, a high-ranking Ba’ath party member and former Mukhaberat official. Hadid was also a sheikh, the tribal leader in Ad-Dujayl and the grandson of the great sheikh Husseini Hadid. DeLuca did not want Omar as much as he wanted the information he could provide. DeLuca’s team’s mission, for the month since he’d left Kuwait, had been to dismantle what remained of the Mukhaberat—find them (or anybody else on the army’s blacklist he happened to come across), arrest them, and start them on their way to Abu Ghraib or Gitmo as captured enemy combatants or, if appropriate, offer them leniency in return for more useful information. He’d popped forty-one former blacklist members so far, including eight faces from the fifty-five on the famous “Deck of Cards.” In the opinion of CENTCOM, putting away the Mukhaberat leadership was as crucial to rebuilding Iraq as finding Saddam had been, because of the reputation the agency had earned during Saddam’s rule. The head of the Mukhaberat, Izzat Mohammed Al-Tariq, had been killed in the opening days of the war, his compound near the center of Baghdad reduced to a sunken pile of rubble when a half-dozen JDAMs and cruise missiles slammed into it. “The Butcher of Kuwait” was responsible for half the bodies that were still being found in the mass graves surrounding Baghdad. He’d given the order to gas the Kurds during the Anfal campaign in 1988 that killed over one hundred thousand people when Saddam wanted revenge against the Kurds who’d sided with Iran during the Iran-Iraq War. Al-Tariq had personally ordered the torture of thousands of individuals, particularly during and after the invasion of Kuwait in 1990, such that the government of Kuwait had put a bounty on his head, one-365th of Kuwait’s gross national product, or about $30 million, to the man who assassinated him. His preferred method of torture, according to reports, was to disembowel his victims in front of their families. Another story, unconfirmed, said Al-Tariq had kept thousands of his victims’ body parts preserved in formaldehyde jars in a private collection, and t