Hunting Down Saddam (37 page)

Seems like he never learns there's such a thing as a critter who'll just keep comin' on. We'll find 'em in the end, I promise you. We'll find 'em, just as sure as the turnin' of the earth.

Fate itself was about to take another turn. As Hickey fitfully slept and his analysts soldiered on over in the brigade's Tactical Operations Center (TOC), Murphy and the brigade operations officer (S-3), Major Brian Reed, were developing a briefing for the 4th Infantry Division Commander, Major General Raymond Odierno to show where they were and where they believed they needed to go. Murphy kept thinking to himself, “We're on the right track, nothing has changed. It's just a matter of getting those last couple of pieces to bring it all together.”

Meanwhile, Special Forces troops in Baghdad were sorting through the latest prizes from their sweep that night. One of them would turn out to be the Fat Man.

Lucky 13

Hickey awoke December 13 remarkably refreshed, and with a strange excitement and renewed confidence burning within him. He couldn't explain the feeling of anticipation.

Murphy, Santana, Gray, Engstrom, and the others were changing shifts, preparing for another cycle of sifting through the relentless search for clues. The humvee and Bradley drivers were working through their daily PMCS (Preventative Maintenance Checks and Services). It seemed like just another day in Tikrit for them.

Specialist Matthew Drish was Hickey's driver. Both his father and grandfather were decorated combat veterans who received purple hearts for wounds in combat. That morning Saddam was the furthest thing from Drish's mind. He was finally going home on leave to see his family. Specialist Esteban “Bo” Bocanegra, the Brigade Operation Officer's driver, was receiving last-minute instructions from Drish to take over as Hickey's driver until his return.

Hickey and CSM Wilson made their usual morning rounds, checking soldiers and receiving reports on the status of the task force. SPC “Joe” was preparing to accompany Hickey as usual. When he came by their vehicle, Drish and Bo were surprised at how talkative the normally reserved Hickey was. That strange, positive feeling was becoming infectious. Hickey began to believe his mood was more than the start of a good day, once he got the phone call at 1050 hours. Special Operations Forces had snared Hickey's long-sought-after target, the Fat Man. He was on his way.

Instinctively, Hickey knew they had to take action based on the source of the information. Even before the Fat Man arrived, Hickey was putting the units and staff of Task Force RAIDER on alert to conduct a raid in or around Bayji or Tikrit. He ordered the return of G Troop of the 10th Cavalry Regiment. The previous night, G Troop had come out of a grueling week of reconnaissance in the desert, but Hickey pulled them back to his headquarters with orders to stand by for a raid that could start at any time. Although the G Troop had little sleep the night before, Hickey felt they needed to be ready, and ready fast. The command drivers got the word as well, and SPC Drish outfitted Hickey's command vehicle with ammunition and other equipment to be sure it was ready to go. When he was confident his boss was taken care of, Drish handed the vehicle over to Bo Bocanegra and prepared to go on leave. Murphy and his team also got the word and they prepared for the Fat Man's arrival.

As they went about their preparations, SPC Tom Ribas thought about his close friend SPC Richard Arriaga from Ganado, Texas. They'd met in Fort Hood about fourteen months prior and came to Iraq together, where they worked the system to get Arriaga assigned to Ribas' unit. When the transfer was approved, the two friends were overjoyed. Arriaga was a great friend and always a pleasure to be around. As Ribas explained, “You could talk to him. He was always there for you. He was always there for me.” No matter how bad things got Arriaga was always smiling, always joking. He had a right to be happy. He was assigned with his best friend and back home his new wife was expecting their first child. On September 18, Arriaga was killed when Saddam's insurgents ambushed G Troop. He would never see his newborn daughter. Ribas kept a picture of the two best friends together in his pocket. Saddam would pay.

The Source

Once called the Fat Man by Hickey, he's known now only as “the source,” a man whose identity and family are a highly guarded secret. Special Operations Forces scooped up “the source” in a Baghdad raid on December 12, but did not immediately realize he was one of the top names on Murphy and Hickey's list. “The source” was a senior officer in Hussein's elite Special Security Service (SSS), a key protector of Saddam Hussein, and a charter member of “the 42-inch waistband club.” He was one of the enablers on Murphy's matrix, perhaps the crucial one who enabled Saddam to continue eluding capture. Saturday morning he arrived by helicopter at Hickey's headquarters, under heavy guard.

Murphy, Gray, and the others watched as “the source” entered interrogation, and waited restlessly for anything that came out. They knew the next few hours would be crucial. The longer “the source” took to break, the less chance there was that any information they got from him regarding Saddam's location would be timely. The stakes were higher than ever. Murphy's team knew “the source” was close to Saddam and they knew he had personal contact with him.

As information slowly trickled out from the interrogation, Murphy and his team compiled and assessed it. At 1530 Hickey contacted MG Odierno to notify him Task Force RAIDER was going to conduct another raid against Saddam that night. The information was “pretty good, but still nothing definite.” All “the source” initially gave up were several general locations where Saddam might be hiding. He then suggested that Saddam was likely underground, but little was specific. Murphy began to worry. The more time that elapsed, the greater the potential was that Saddam would learn of the Fat Man's capture and move to a new location.

At 1700 hours, the source cracked, blurting out Saddam's location as ad Dawr. He was hidden in one of two farmhouses on the edge of town. He gave the names of two men who would be guarding Saddam. Murphy and Hickey knew the area well. Six weeks prior, the 4th ID strung barbed wire around the small farm village of Owja, where Saddam had lived as a boy, questioning or arresting about sixty percent of the village's thousand or so men. It was only five kilometers from the farm where the source said Saddam was hiding.

It all made perfect sense to Murphy and his team. In 1959, ad Dawr was where Saddam hid after his unsuccessful attempt to assassinate the prime minister of Iraq, Abdul Karim Qassim. That time, Saddam escaped by swimming across the Tigris River to exile in Syria, one of the only times he ever left his country.

Once the source gave up the location, Hickey moved quickly to assemble Task Force RAIDER. Special Operations forces prepared the joint Delta Force, SEAL Team, and Special Operations aviation force. Hickey scrutinized satellite imagery and maps of the area with his staff and Special Operations commandos. The team of Hickey, his staff, and the Special Operators quickly developed a very rough plan for air and ground Special Operations actions. Murphy secretly worried that the information had managed to stall just long enough to ensure that Saddam would be gone when the task force arrived, leaving them another
dry hole
, the term often used when raids failed to turn up their elusive prey.

Red Dawn

They called it Operation RED DAWN after the 1984 Patrick Swayze/Charlie Sheen movie of the same title, in which the Soviets invade hometown America via parachute, aided by Central America and Cuba. The film's teenage heroes were called the “Wolverines,” the name of their high-school football team. The two sites the source gave as Saddam's possible hiding places were designated WOLVERINE 1 and WOLVERINE 2. With the added information that Saddam was hiding in an underground facility, they also selected some small palm groves north and west of WOLVERINE 2 that seemed likely locations to conceal such a hiding place.

The raiding force was a combined 4th ID Task Force consisting of 600 personnel from Task Force RAIDER (1st Brigade, 4th ID); specifically 4-42 Field Artillery Battalion; G Troop, 10th Cavalry Regiment; HQ, 1st BDE, 4th ID, elements from 1st BN, 4th Aviation Regiment; and A Troop, 1st Battalion, 10th Cavalry Regiment (TF Reserve) together with an elite joint Special Operations force consisting of air assets and ground elements from 3/10th SFG (A), Delta Force, and Navy SEALs who all formed Task Force 121. The plan was simple: Hickey's force would isolate and control the area while Special Operations Forces went after Saddam.

It was a formidable fighting force, but Hickey was not about to chance a repeat of the raid that killed Saddam's sons, Uday and Qusay. There, U.S. forces found themselves entangled in a four-hour gun battle against three men and a teenage boy who managed to hold back a U.S. force of about two hundred soldiers aided by heavy weaponry and assault helicopters. If Saddam was at ad Dawr, Hickey was going to get him, dead or alive. If Saddam or anyone else chose to put up a fight, Hickey was going to make sure it would be over quickly and the enemy would all be dead.

There was no time for high-tech hardware, fancy briefing slides, complex digital visualization or lengthy operations orders. Hickey rapidly prepared and distributed a fragmentary order (FRAGO) using photos and sketches. Within an hour of the source cracking, they were ready to move. At 1715, Hickey climbed in his vehicle with Bocanegra and started issuing orders over the radio to his executive officer LTC Troy Smith. Smith and the staff developed and disseminated a quick digital field order using pictures and simple graphics. Hickey got on the radio and told each commander directly that he wanted everything moving at 1800 hours toward the attack position east of Tikrit.

Down by the River

If Saddam was in ad Dawr, he could look out at the Tigris at nightfall, and remember swimming that river to freedom years ago. But now he was a tired, haggard, and hunted man lacking both the strength and the desire. Perhaps it was pride that kept him in Iraq, moving from place to place, hiding in taxicabs, holes and hovels. Perhaps he'd convinced himself the Americans would tire of the chase or that he could elude them as Bin Laden has. Regardless, as night fell on the Tigris. Saddam Hussein prepared for another night in hiding. Soon it would be time to move like before. Whether out of fear, arrogance, or delusion, he stayed where he was that night.

Meanwhile, Hickey's forces and their Special Operations partners moved out and rehearsed the plan at a granary in Tikrit.

It was the thirteenth time the task force had headed out after Saddam. This time, the mood was more than routine pre-battle excitement. Hickey's positive feeling that morning had blossomed to full optimism. Murphy and his intelligence team could feel it, too. As they prepared to move out to their final attack positions Hickey gathered the drivers and Joe together to personally brief them. He did this as a matter of routine whenever he moved in his armored Bradley fighting vehicle, so the drivers of the lighter wheeled vehicles knew what to do if there was enemy contact. But this time, the humvees were in the lead and the Bradleys were to follow. Hickey told his men he felt especially good about the operation, that the information was particularly reliable this time. He was extremely excited, and imparted a greater sense of urgency. To the soldiers of Task Force RAIDER, it seemed that everywhere they looked they could see small Special Operations aircraft, Little Birds, darting across the sky. The Task Force's Bradley Fighting Vehicles and M1A2 tanks were all moving into position, as were Special Operations white Toyota Hi-Lux pickup trucks and other specialized vehicles.

As the task force was about to roll out for their final assault positions, SPC Euresti was told he was replacing Ribas, the driver of the gun truck guarding Hickey's command group, so that Ribas could go on leave. They told him it was “a big mission to capture Saddam,” but to Euresti it was another “hey you” tasking, to do yet another raid just like they had done countless times before. As he climbed into the driver's seat and prepared to head out, it was no big deal to him until he saw the size of the task force assembled and the serious looks on their faces. Suddenly Euresti realized, “This time it's for real.”

Hickey and CSM Wilson moved to their vehicles. If things got rough, the soldiers knew the command drivers would be in the thick of it, just as they had been before, in Bayji. Just a few months prior to the raid, Hickey had received reports of a demonstration there and took his command group to investigate. When they arrived, Hickey, Wilson, and the drivers found themselves in the middle of what was more a firefight than a demonstration. The roads were blocked off, so they moved forward slowly. As some of them dismounted their vehicles, the group began taking fire. It came from all directions, from vehicles, buildings, and from the mob itself. Iraqi flags were flying in the crowd and from the buildings, and the mob was advancing. Although outnumbered, Joe, Drish, and the others stood their ground, putting the humvees on line facing the threat and continuing to slowly advance. They took more fire but did not return it because of the women and children the insurgents used as human shields. They held out, continuing to push to the middle of the town until Hickey's reinforcements arrived and quickly dispersed the crowd. If Saddam was at the objective that night, intelligence over the past months said he would probably be guarded by thirty to forty heavily armed hard-core loyalists, making it potentially more intense than the last incident in Bayji. Hickey and Wilson weren't worried. They could all be counted on when the time came.

Operation RED DAWN was set for 2000 hours. At the granary Bo Bocanegra methodically conducted the last-minute checks on his vehicle and equipment. The added pressure of now being responsible for the brigade commander's safety, and ensuring he got to where he needed to be, weighed heavily on him. CW2 Gray knew the source was worthy. His gut and his analyst instincts told him this was what they'd all been waiting for. Not wanting to give up a chance to go on the raid, he requested Murphy's permission for him and CPT Terrell to participate. Murphy, a true professional, knew his place of duty during raids was in the TOC, so he selflessly gave up his seat to CW2 Gray and CPT Mark Terrell. Gray and Terrell served together in DESERT STORM and they wanted to be together when Saddam was finally brought down. In Murphy's view they both contributed greatly to developing the Mongo link and all the work that brought them to the verge of capturing Saddam. They deserved to be out there. At 1800 hours they put on their battle gear and met Hickey's combat patrol. Gray rode with COL Hickey and Terrell rode with the gun truck, driven by Euresti. Special Operations elements linked up with Task Force RAIDER at approximately 1900 for the rehearsal. The force departed Raider base and headed out, making final plans as they went. Back in the Brigade TOC, Murphy was already shifting his focus to develop an update to his intelligence estimate and project what they would do next if this raid hit another dry hole.