Intercept (2 page)

The iron men from Coronado hauled him into the open and pinned him against the wall. The commander stepped forward and demanded, “What’s your name?”

Ibrahim, a red mist of anger, resentment, and flaming hatred for the infidel, this intruder, this disgusting American, kicked out at the SEAL leader, who, in one movement struck back. He grabbed Ibrahim’s ankle and pulled it three feet above the ground. Then he grabbed the man by the balls and tipped him backward to the ground.

The Afghan never uttered a sound, crashed back onto the mud-dried road, shaken and slightly unhinged. When he refocused he found the SEAL leader’s boot on his throat. And then he was dragged up, right next to an overflowing rain barrel, and asked his name yet again. He made no reply and then the big SEAL asked him where he kept the explosive. Again there was no response, just a hard-eyed stare of pure hatred.

Ibrahim, silently enraged, pulled up his head and spat at his captor. He missed and too late recognized his mistake. The SEAL grabbed him by the beard and plunged him facedown into the rain barrel.

Ibrahim kicked and struggled, and almost resigned himself to a one-way trip into the arms of Allah when the American pulled him out and demanded to know the whereabouts of the explosive.

The half-drowned Afghani said nothing, and by now every eye was turned onto this one-sided confrontation. Again the SEAL leader plunged Ibrahim’s head into the water, ramming his head back to the bottom of the barrel. This time he kept him there for twice as long, finally dragging him into the air when the desperate struggles had ceased.

For a split second, it seemed that Ibrahim was dead, but two SEALs grabbed his feet, turned him upside down, and pummeled his back. Water gushed from his mouth. And Ibrahim breathed again.

“Listen, pal,” said the SEAL commander. “Right now, I’m going to kill you, right there in that goddamned barrel. I know you understand me, and you got just one last chance to save your own life. Where is the explosive? You got exactly five seconds to live. . . . ”

Ibrahim was only mildly afraid of death. He had been brought up to understand the glory of the martyr in the eyes of the Prophet. He had no
doubt whatsoever this brutal enemy would carry out his threat, and no doubt Allah would await him when he crossed the bridge. But there was terror in his heart at the thought of drowning in that deep rainwater. He could not tolerate that, and he trembled with fear, justifying his own cowardice by reasoning that these Americans were going to find the dynamite anyway.

He raised his right arm and said quietly, “Third house down there. Under the basement.”

The SEAL leader detailed four of his team to tie Ibrahim’s wrists and then march him to the house. Then he turned again to the crowd and shouted, “Guy in the orange vest. Over here, pal. And look real quick about it.”

And Yousaf Mohammed, the ex-London University chemical engineering student, the only other “tribesman” but Ibrahim, who had clean hair and fingernails, soft hands, and a groomed beard, stepped forward, betrayed by his personal hygiene, and, unknowingly, by his obvious comprehension of the English language. No goat-herder, this guy.

The four SEALs who had tied up Ibrahim now lashed the wrists of Yousaf together, and the six of them marched off down the street, directly to the third house, the one in which the half-drowned member of the village had been born. His cohort, the fanatical jihadist Yousaf, from across the border in Pakistan, was already wanted by the Americans for multiple acts of terrorism, including gunning down a U.S. diplomat and blowing up a hotel in central Baghdad.

The two men tethered together, walking in company with the warriors from SEAL Team 10, were among the most dangerous terrorists in the free world. But even if the explosive was discovered, there would be almost no evidence against them, no proof, no documents.

They were just a couple of unknown killers, without passports or identity, known perhaps only to Allah and their earthly families. The American military did not even know their true names, but they had tracked them for many months, and assessed that these were a couple of utterly ruthless characters from whom the public must surely be protected. The military had risked the lives of twenty SEALs and a gunship crew to make this insertion to either capture or kill the two men. And the U.S. military does not make such decisions without cast-iron reasons.

Now the six men reached the third house down the street, and the SEALs began the most dangerous part of their mission. For all they knew
the place was booby-trapped. Somewhere inside there could be a concealed detonator. The touch of a button could blow them to pieces. Like the marines. Like the two SEALs in Kabul.

Both captives were now murmuring lines from the Koran, repeating constantly a mantra in Arabic that the SEAL 2I/C understood:
Allah is great. There is no other God but Allah. Guide us on the straight path. Light upon light. Allah be praised, for you are great.

One of the SEALs told them both to zip it. Ibrahim shut up, but Yousaf kept right on murmuring in praise of Allah, and the SEAL commander kicked him straight in the ass, sent him sprawling into the doorway. He climbed to his feet and there was hatred in his dark eyes and murder in his heart. One day he’d get his revenge. And silently he swore that to himself. Nonetheless, he held back on the prayers.

The stench in the house was overwhelming, which was not all that surprising since a half-dozen goats lived on the floor below. The pall of smoke hung in the air, for there was no chimney, and the stove in the middle of the room was alight and ready to bake the morning flatbread.

Ibrahim led the way through the suffocating air, down the steps, past the goats, and onto the mountainside. He moved carefully down a pathway to a rocky area and pointed at the boulder in the center.

Two of the SEALs grabbed it and heaved. It rolled forward revealing a stack of crates, low flat wooden boxes, more like gun cases than crates for high explosive. The hiding place was sensational. Anyone could have searched these mountains for a thousand years and never found them—unless they had the assistance of the still-waterlogged Ibrahim Sharif, bombmaker.

And so concluded the mission to capture the two terrorists and dispose of the explosive. The SEALs detonated it high on the mountain about a mile away. The Commander held the villagers under arrest, while he opened up the comms to Bagram and called in a big MH-47 army helicopter for the evacuation of his troops and their two prisoners.

The copter touched down on the edge of the village shortly before 0930. The SEALs’ commanding officer made the forty-five-minute ride up into the mountains to familiarize himself with this village, which was plainly so important to the remnants of bin Laden’s murderous secret army. He walked down the ramp to congratulate his mission commander. He shook his hand and said firmly, “Great job, Mack.”

FOR FIVE LONG YEARS
, Ibrahim Sharif and Yousaf Mohammed had never stepped beyond the razor-wire of the Guantanamo Bay Prison. They were separated immediately upon arrival, and spent the remainder of their captivity meeting only in the exercise area.

Both men were subjected to rigorous interrogation, but neither of them ever cracked again—not since the SEAL commander had held Ibrahim’s head under the water in the rain barrel and forced him to reveal the whereabouts of the local dynamite supply.

Routine waterboarding deep in the interior of the Guantanamo Bay complex did not have the same effect. It scared both Ibrahim and Yousaf, but not to death. They both understood that even the dreaded splashing of water on the back of their hooded heads was a whole lot better than having their necks severed in the time-honored traditions of al-Qaeda or the Taliban.

Neither man ever revealed his full name or identity, nor indeed his nationality and certainly not his link to Osama bin Laden. Inside the camp, with its rigid security and dozens of very defiant men, Ibrahim and Yousaf were standouts—revered hard men, of whom even the guards were extremely wary. The cage-like cells of both men were searched every few hours. No visitors were ever allowed.

There was no communication whatsoever with the outside world. And there was little doubt in any of the guards’ minds that, were the opportunity to present itself, either one of these two former al-Qaeda hitmen would have coldly murdered their captors.

No one had ever seen either of them smile. They were just there, two glowering permanent residents, brimming with hatred, waiting for their chance to get out and resume their timeless battle with the Western world, prepared with each passing hour to carry the fight to the Infidel, to murder and maim citizens of the West, whenever and wherever the winds of revenge took them.

They were both twenty-nine now and had taken enormous care of their physical strength, exercising in the soccer area, using the makeshift gym, and trying to retain their mountain-men fitness. They made few friends and spoke to the guards only in Arabic, with sentences so clipped and threatening they were rarely released from their ankle manacles. They were readily identifiable, by anyone, as two of the most dangerous men in the whole of Cuba, never mind Guantanamo Bay. And their chances of release hovered somewhere between zero and minus six.

It was plainly beyond the comprehension of either Ibrahim or Yousaf that their lives would have improved if anyone in authority had the slightest idea who they were. But they had been extricated from that almost inaccessible Afghani village with absolutely nothing in their possession. Not one single document. Thus, devoid of passports, cell phones, credit cards, driving licences, or even a letter from a loved one, they were utterly bereft of identity or nationality.

And in the great scheme of things, this made them ineligible to face a U.S. military tribunal, where experienced officers could decide what to do with them. The mind-blowing five-year silence of Ibrahim and Yousaf had rendered them outcasts even in one of the strangest communities on earth—making them no-hope prisoners too defiant to take advantage of the normal course of justice.

There was nothing to do with them, save to lock them up indefinitely, in the certain knowledge that if either of them received even half a chance, they would probably commit some diabolical crime against humanity. No one was prepared to take that kind of chance.

The years had rolled by. In the swamp-green, hard-wired corridors of the camp, hundreds of prisoners lived out some kind of twilight existence. In each cell, copies of the Koran were slung from the wire in surgical masks, mostly to prevent the Christian guards from touching the holy book.

Every few weeks, Ibrahim and Yousaf were subjected to interrogation of the most rigorous type. They were deprived of sleep, kept out in eighty-degree heat, marched in and out of cells specifically designed for questioning, always wearing both leg and hand shackles. They were zipped
into orange jumpsuits, seated in chairs, and robbed of any form of sensory sensation, blindfolded and masked, with ear-muffs and mittens—the classic methods of the U.S. and UK military, designed to break down totally any man’s resistance.

There were hundreds of al-Qaeda and Taliban terrorists in Guantanamo, and the U.S. interrogation techniques mostly worked—in the end, detainees would answer truthfully the questions fired at them by seasoned military personnel.

This did not, however, apply to men like Yousaf and Ibrahim, who seemed to accept their fate that they would live and die in this hell-hole, unloved, unknown, except unto Allah and to their surviving relatives and colleagues in the faraway Hindu Kush. For them there was no calendar, no time frame, sometimes there was no night and no day. There had long ceased to be any normal frame of reference whatsoever.

The best life offered them was a living space eight feet by six feet eight inches, and eight feet high. There were twenty-four of these cells to each “detention block”—and there were several blocks in each of Guantanamo’s six camps. Yousaf and Ibrahim both lived in solitary confinement in Camp Five, a place most often described as “utterly inhuman” by various world human rights agencies.

But, as one U.S. Army general succinctly phrased it, “Well, where the hell do you want us to put guys who for two cents would blow up the Empire State Building with everyone in it? The fucking Waldorf Astoria?”

There were no windows in these cells. The front wall on the block corridor was built on a solid, reinforced steel frame with heavy wire mesh through which prisoners could stare at the empty throughway. They slept on mattresses and were issued a blue blanket, pillow, and prayer mat. Yousaf and Ibrahim usually fell asleep dreaming of the verdant green slopes and fast-flowing rivers of their mountainous homes, half a world away from this baking hot United States internment center at the rough eastern tip of Castro’s Cuba.

The U.S. Navy Base at Guantanamo Bay is the oldest overseas base ever occupied by U.S. forces. Its position on this rugged deep-water coastline creates a perfect set-up for a supply-line directly into the only U.S. base in the world located on Communist soil. The camp is peppered with stark and sinister-looking watchtowers, equipped with laser-strength searchlights and staffed by heavily armed guards.

Anyone trying to make a break for freedom would be lucky to survive for thirty seconds. This place is high-security to a degree worthy of
Stalin’s archipelago, with perhaps an even more ruthless edge. The U.S. military considers the inmates of Guantanamo to be a potential menace to the health and well-being of all its citizens. For years, the accepted creed wa :
No one gets out of here. No one
.

And it was a creed that pervaded the quiet, lonely corridors of the camp down all the years since first the prison was constructed back in the winter of 2002. Since then, they closed down the most primitive sections of the original facility, the dreaded and feared Camp X-ray, where the most disturbing images of Guantanamo had been photographed.