“Why didn’t the prince snatch these guys at the beginning?” Yael asked as she scanned the transcripts.
“That’s on me,” said Pritchard. “I advised him not to move too quickly. I was sure we could keep close tabs on these guys and that hopefully they would take us to the Baqoubas and then to Khalif himself. I was wrong. Less than two weeks after these e-mails were intercepted, both men gave us the slip. We’ve been hunting them ever since. When Ari Shalit sent stills of your suspects from Istanbul, Prince bin Zayed and I instantly recognized two of them. So here I am.”
“Guess you’re about to get a second bite at the apple,” I said.
“That’s the plan,” Pritchard said.
“What about the third guy?” I asked.
“Sorry; I’m afraid we don’t have anything on him,” Pritchard admitted.
“Actually, we do,” Yael said. “I just got an e-mail from the king in Amman. The moment Ari sent him the images from Istanbul, His Majesty called him to say he recognized one of the faces. The guy’s a Jordanian. He was with Zarqawi from the earliest days of AQI. When Zarqawi was killed, he became loyal to Khalif. According to His Majesty, the guy is one of Khalif’s personal bodyguards.”
These were promising leads indeed. If all this was true, the evidence suggested some of Khalif’s most loyal aides had been dispatched to pick up one of Khalif’s most trusted friends. The chances we were getting closer to the emir had just grown exponentially.
Suddenly Dutch’s phone rang. It was Nadia, the leader of the Mossad unit Dutch had assigned to track the young woman who had broken off from the others. About twenty minutes after Al-Siddiq and the team had departed the airport, she’d walked out of the terminal and gotten into a dusty old Chevy with an older woman who appeared to be in her fifties. Rather than heading north on D850 into Gaziantep, however, they’d taken a right onto D400 and headed east until they’d reached Nizip, a city of about a hundred thousand located about fifty kilometers east of where we were.
“Nizip? Why Nizip?” Dutch asked.
“We have no idea,” Nadia replied.
“What are they doing now?”
“They’ve arrived at some sort of estate. It’s a huge, sprawling compound.”
“Like a hotel?”
“No, it’s some sort of private home, I’d guess. The weird thing is, there aren’t any men—just women and children.”
“Give me the coordinates—we’ll task a satellite over it.”
“Sending them now.”
“Good. Keep me posted.”
“Will do.”
Al-Siddiq wasn’t taken to Aleppo or anywhere else that night. Instead, he and his handlers hunkered down in the hotel and did nothing. In fact, they did nothing for the next four days. No calls. No text messages. No e-mails. They barely even had any conversations. Nor did they leave the suite. Not once. They didn’t go out to eat. They didn’t go buy a newspaper. They did open the door once to get more towels from housekeeping, but that was it.
We could hear them eating every few hours. They munched on apples and cracked nuts, and we could smell fresh oranges on our casual walks past their closed doors. This suggested their suitcases and backpacks had been filled more with food than with clothes and other personal effects. It also suggested they had been anticipating hiding out in these hotel rooms for the better part of a week.
We, on the other hand, had not been anticipating doing nothing for so many days. We had to send members of the team out to restaurants and grocery stores to get supplies, even though we knew Al-Siddiq and his band could bolt at any hour of the day and we could get caught shorthanded. We also risked someone spotting us and getting suspicious, reporting us to the local police or to ISIS itself. Why were these guys—and the women in Nizip—sitting around doing nothing? Why weren’t they moving? Why weren’t they linking up with others? Why wasn’t Al-Siddiq being taken to Khalif?
One possibility was that they were waiting to receive word that it was safe to take Al-Siddiq into Syria. That was quite plausible, we concluded.
Another possibility was that ISIS had a team in the hotel, possibly even among the hotel staff, watching to see if anyone was following Al-Siddiq. Pritchard even suggested there could be an ISIS team operating out of nearby hotels and apartment buildings, watching around the clock, trying to determine if there was anyone suspicious, anyone who might be a foreign agent. If this was true, the longer we stayed, the longer we left vehicles on nearby side streets ready to move at a moment’s notice, the longer we sent people out to get takeout and groceries, the higher the risk we could be spotted and attacked.
The only reassuring news was that if we’d been spotted already, we would probably have already been attacked. The fact that we were still alive suggested we had not been spotted.
At least not yet.
92
At just after nine Thursday morning, one of our silent alarms went off.
It was our fifth day in Gaziantep. Someone had just opened the door of the suite and was headed down the hallway. Yael alerted the rest of the team. Mustafa was on duty on the first floor, buying a Pepsi from a machine in the lobby, when one of Al-Siddiq’s men suddenly burst out of the stairwell, brushed by him, and headed to the parking lot behind the hotel. Mustafa immediately texted the team and our four drivers, all of whom were positioned on various streets many blocks away, having been ordered by Dutch to remain even farther away from the hotel after Pritchard had raised his concerns. Now they fired up their engines and prepared to roll.
Ten minutes later, Al-Siddiq and his two other men came down the elevator and bolted out the front door. When the VW Caravelle pulled up, they jumped in and roared off.
Dutch and his men went to work in the cars. Pritchard quickly caught up to them on his motorcycle. They were trailing the Caravelle visually and via the tracking beacon while carefully watching their backs to make sure they weren’t being lured into a trap.
The team had briefly debated attaching an additional tracking beacon to the VW. In the end, however, Dutch had decided against it. He believed the van should be neither tampered with nor even approached, on the theory that it was likely being watched closely for just such a development. Pritchard agreed, and that was that.
Yael and I did not roll with the trackers. Rather, we joined Mustafa and two of his agents upstairs to break into the terrorists’ suite and adjoining rooms before housekeeping could get to them. It was a risky move, especially if there were ISIS operatives still in the hotel watching the rooms. But Mustafa insisted it had to be done.
We spent the better part of an hour going over each room with a fine-tooth comb, but the men had left nothing useful behind. There was no luggage. No personal items. Not even any trash. If that weren’t discouraging enough, the rooms had been wiped down so thoroughly that not a single fingerprint—even from previous guests—could be lifted. This suggested neither Al-Siddiq nor his handlers were planning on returning to the hotel. They were moving on. But where?
We went back downstairs to the war room and waited. We played cards and paced and drank instant coffee. We didn’t hear from Dutch or his team for more than an hour, and with every minute that passed, Yael’s and my anxiety grew. We didn’t dare call or text the guys. They were in the midst of a high-stakes operation, and the last thing we wanted to do was distract them, even for a moment.
Then, just before noon, Yael received a call. But it was not Dutch. It was Ari Shalit, and he had news. President Mahfouz had just called Prime Minister Eitan. The Egyptians had been carefully reviewing the photos Shalit had sent them of the young woman in the hijab who had been traveling with Al-Siddiq. It had taken several days, but they now had a positive ID.
She was an Egyptian, born and raised in Alexandria, the daughter of a prominent leader of the Muslim Brotherhood who had been jailed and later executed after Mahfouz came to power. At that point, she and her three brothers had all become radicalized. Two had gone to Iraq to join ISIS and had blown themselves up i
n a joint martyrdom operation that killed 179 people at a church in Baghdad. Her remaining brother had died during the battle of Dabiq back in December. Now she was the only one left. According to Mahfouz, the young woman had been with ISIS rebels on the outskirts of Aleppo as recently as four weeks ago.
As Yael related the details to the rest of us, I couldn’t help but be intrigued. Did these new tidbits suggest we might soon, in fact, be heading into Aleppo, however chaotic and dangerous the situation on the border?
But Shalit wasn’t done. According to Israeli intelligence, the paramilitary forces of the Syrian Kurds had been engaged in heavy fighting with ISIS in recent days along the Syrian-Turkish border. By all accounts, the Kurds had gained the upper hand. They were taking significant swaths of territory from ISIS, and there were now only a few corridors between northwestern Syria and Turkey still under ISIS control. Shalit said his analysts were telling him it might no longer be possible for any ISIS personnel to get from Gaziantep into Syria or from Aleppo into Turkey. If Abu Khalif was in Aleppo, he might be stuck there.
Then, just as the sun was going down, Yael’s satphone rang again. This time it was Dutch. He and his team had tracked the VW all day. There was no question Al-Siddiq’s men were trying everything they could to spot and shake anyone trying to tail them. Their tradecraft was spectacular, he said, but with the tracking beacon in place, Dutch and Pritchard and the rest of the team had ultimately followed the men to a compound high up in a mountain range not far from Nizip.
“Is Khalif there?” Yael asked.
“I don’t know,” Dutch said. “Maybe.”
“What do you mean, maybe?”
“We haven’t seen him. But it’s possible.”
“Where are you guys exactly?”
“I’m hiding in a cave near the crest of a ridge. Pritchard is on another ridge, off to my right. The rest of the team is watching the cars and maintaining a perimeter.”
“What can you see?”
“I’m looking down at a huge walled compound—huge. The whole thing is about the size of a soccer stadium. It looks like an ancient Ottoman fortress of some kind. Pritchard thinks it’s from the sixteenth century. The walls have got to be fifteen or twenty feet high, and thick—two or three feet thick at least. There’s an enormous mosque in the back left corner with a big marble dome and a stone minaret probably thirty, thirty-five feet high.”
“What else?”
“There’s a two-story row of stone buildings along the left side of the compound. I can see through some of the windows. It looks like classrooms. Could be a madrassa, though there aren’t any kids around. On the right side of the compound, there’s a similar two-story wing. Pritchard says from his angle it looks like a dormitory—bunk beds, dressers, lavatories, that kind of thing. In the middle there’s a giant courtyard.”
“Security?” Yael asked.
“Airtight,” Dutch replied.
“How many men?”
“There’ve got to be at least two hundred ISIS fighters down there, maybe more if some are inside or downstairs—we’ve seen stairwells that seem to go to an underground level.”
“You’re sure they’re ISIS?”
“Absolutely—the black flag is flying from the top of the minaret.”
“In the middle of Turkey?”
“Well, I’d hardly call it the middle. We’re 1,200 kilometers from Istanbul by road and a good 750 kilometers from Ankara. Believe me, this is the frontier—rural, rugged, and only ten or twenty miles north of the Syrian border.”
“Would you hide an ISIS emir there?” I asked.
“I might,” Dutch said.
“What are the men doing now?” Mustafa asked.
“Several dozen are patrolling the perimeter or hunkered outside the gates in huge APCs with a lot of weaponry. The rest are sitting in the courtyard, eating dinner.”
“Who else is there?” I asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Do you see any women?”
“No.”
“And you said no children?”
“Not any that I can see.”
“What about elderly?”
“Not from my vantage point.”
“So it’s just young men?” I pressed.
“I don’t see anyone older than forty—most look like they’re in their twenties. Big. Strong. Good shape. Fighters. And they’re Arab, not Turkish.”
“All armed, I presume?”
“Heavily.”
“Okay, so what’s your gut tell you?”
“Well, there’s no question Al-Siddiq is there, along with the three ISIS operatives who brought him.”
“You can see the van?” Yael asked.
“Affirmative,” Dutch replied. “And the tracking signal from Al-Siddiq is still strong and clear, but . . .”
His voice trailed off.
I was about to ask him to finish his sentence, but Yael held up her hand, motioning me to be quiet. She knew Dutch better than any of the rest of us. She knew how he thought, how he operated. She knew he’d speak when he was ready and not a moment before. And sure enough, a few seconds later, he finished his thought.
“But if Khalif is in there or if he’s coming,” he said, “we’re going to need a lot more men.”
93
As evening fell, we headed for Nizip.
Mustafa and the rest of his team brought food, water, blankets, more weapons, and additional ammunition to Dutch and his team up in the mountains. Yael and I, on the other hand, checked into a dusty, grungy old hotel, once again posing as a Muslim husband and wife, she in her abaya and me in my skullcap. The moment we found our floor and our chambers, we locked the door behind us and slid the dresser in front of the door. It would hardly stop jihadists from bursting into the room if they found us, but it might slow them down enough to give us a fighting chance.
Using the small desk in the room and the two nightstands on either side of the small double bed, we again set up a mini war room with our laptops, digital recording equipment, state-of-the-art headphones, and a slew of satellite phones and chargers. We kept two MP5 submachines always within reach.
Meanwhile, up in the mountains, Mustafa would soon be giving Dutch and Pritchard cases of sophisticated directional microphones and video cameras equipped with high-powered zoom lenses, night vision, thermal-imaging technology, and the ability to broadcast encrypted signals back to us. Our job was to pinpoint Al-Siddiq and listen to his conversations in the hopes that this might lead us to our prey.
By one in the morning, Mustafa had delivered the equipment, and Dutch and Pritchard had it all up and running. The encrypted signals were coming in. Yael and I were recording everything, and we’d located Al-Siddiq in the compound. He was not in the dormitory. He was in the other wing, in one of the classrooms located on the second floor of the madrassa. The shades were drawn, so we could not see him, but we could hear him, and we were stunned by what we were listening to.
Rather than being welcomed, the Saudi professor was being grilled. The interrogators—two of them—sounded significantly younger than Al-Siddiq, and they were asking questions in rapid fire, barely giving him time to answer. Whom had he told that he was leaving Medina? Who else? What did his wife know? Who had booked his tickets? Why hadn’t he followed the precise instructions he’d been sent? Whom had he spoken to on his journey? Why had he worn Western clothes? Didn’t he understand that was forbidden? Had he been followed? How could he be sure? What precautions had he taken? Why hadn’t he brought his laptop? Where was his laptop? Was it secure? Did his wife have access to it? Didn’t he know the risks?
The interrogation continued until just before 3 a.m. Then the men left, slammed and locked the door behind them, and all we could hear was heavy breathing and sobs and the sound of clanking metal, like chains.
What in the world was going on? Why was Al-Siddiq being treated like a spy, a traitor, a mole, rather than a guest of honor? Yael and I sent urgent flash text messages to Dutch
and Pritchard and back to Ari—all encrypted, of course—telling them what we were hearing. They didn’t get it either. I looked at Yael, stricken with the rapidly rising fear that this was not only a mistake but very well could be a diversion. Had Al-Siddiq been bait? Had he been cleverly dangled in front of us to distract from Khalif’s real movements? The very thought sickened me. But for the moment, I could think of nothing else.
Yael texted our concerns to Shalit, who urged us not to give up hope.
Take a break, he wrote. Try to get some sleep—a few hours at least. And we’ll go back at it when the sun comes up.
Yael and I looked at each other and then around the small, musty room and at the creaky double bed. This was hardly the five-star accommodations we’d had in Cairo or in Dubai, and we were both exhausted. For much of the past few weeks, we’d been operating off of sheer adrenaline. I had, anyway, and now it all seemed to have drained out of my system.
“I’ll be out in a minute,” Yael said, breaking the silence as she grabbed her MP5 and ducked into the tiny bathroom to change and brush her teeth.
I sat down on the bed, holding my MP5 and praying I’d never have to use it. I also prayed for something else, something far more important—the strength to let Yael go. We’d been spending an awful lot of time together, and though we weren’t talking about personal things—and though we were often with the rest of our team, completely focused on our work—I was simply intoxicated to be in her presence. I’d never met anyone as strong and yet as sensitive, as funny and yet as intellectually stimulating. I loved watching her mind work. I loved seeing her process information, seeing her direct the team. And I also loved how she looked in every piece of clothing she put on. It was killing me to be so physically close to her, all day, every day, knowing she was engaged. She wasn’t available. She’d chosen someone else. I’d lost my chance, before I’d even realized I had a competitor, before I’d even known I needed to fight for her.