It had been the last piece of an elaborate effort to ensure that no one could follow Nassar’s movements across the Middle East. Even he had to admit that the thoroughness of Halabi’s protocols was impressive and almost certainly sufficient to defeat the efforts of even the Americans.
The stone roof rose again and he straightened his injured body, grinding his teeth in response to the pain. The natural cavern was roughly cylindrical, two meters in diameter, and descended at a shallow angle into the earth. The ground was covered with a thick layer of sand, muffling their progress as they continued forward by the glow of a single flashlight.
The passage turned left and Nassar used the opportunity to glance back. The man behind him had stopped, posting himself at the bend and fading into the darkness as they moved away.
It was impossible to judge distance, but Nassar counted off another three minutes before he heard voices filtering to him from ahead. Individual words were muddled by poor acoustics, but the gravity of the hushed tones was clear.
The passage finally opened into a cave more than ten meters square, illuminated with battery-powered work lights. Mullah Halabi was sitting on a stone outcrop, elevated above a group of middle-aged men kneeling in two lines in front of him. At the edges of the space, younger men armed with assault rifles melded into the shadows. Undoubtedly, they were members of Halabi’s famously devoted private guard.
Nassar recognized a number of the older men from information shared by the Americans and Europeans—soldiers from Saddam Hussein’s disbanded army. Most of the high-ranking officers had been either captured or killed, but in many ways these lower-ranking officers were more useful. Their superiors had left the details of war to them while they focused on the much more critical activity of currying favor with Hussein.
Halabi’s predecessor had begun recruiting these men in an effort to turn his motivated but undisciplined forces into an army capable of holding territory. After he died in a drone strike, Halabi took over with the much more ambitious goal of standing even against the powerful Saudi and Egyptian militaries.
“Welcome, Aali. I trust your journey wasn’t too uncomfortable.”
“Not at all,” he said, hiding the pain that speaking caused him.
“I understand that you have something for me?”
The thumb drive Nassar was carrying had been discovered when he was searched for tracking devices in Mecca. He’d been allowed to keep it and now he retrieved it from his pocket. When he stepped forward to hand it to the ISIS leader, the men at the edges of the cave came to life.
“Don’t give it to me,” Halabi said, pointing to a man to Nassar’s right. “Give it to him.”
He did as he was told and watched the man slip the drive into a laptop.
“It’s asking for a password.”
“Of course it is,” Halabi said. “But I suspect that the director will be reluctant to give us that password.”
“The intelligence and bank account information on that drive are yours,” Nassar said.
The mullah smiled. “A meaningless response. Perhaps politics was your true calling.”
“Perhaps.”
“Can we break his encryption?” Halabi asked.
The man shook his head. “Unlikely. Torturing him for it would have a higher probability of success.”
Halabi nodded thoughtfully. “I wonder. It seems likely that there’s a password that would put the information forever out of our reach. Isn’t that so, Aali?”
“It is.”
Halabi rubbed his palms together in front of his face. “The money that drive gives us access to will quickly slip through our fingers, and the intelligence will just as quickly become dated. Is it the information it contains that’s valuable, or is it the guile and experience of the man who brought it here?”
The question was clearly rhetorical, but one of Halabi’s people answered anyway. “Do those qualities make him valuable or do they make him dangerous? He’s betrayed his king and country. Why? For the cause? For Allah? Or is it for personal gain? Can he be trusted, Mullah Halabi? Is he here to assist you, or is he here to replace you?”
“I had power,” Nassar responded. “I had wealth. I had the respect of the king and the Americans. But I jeopardized it all. I—”
“The king is old and weak,” the man interrupted. “You feared the collapse of the kingdom and were playing both sides. The Americans discovered your treachery and now you’ve had to run.”
Once again they were better informed than he’d hoped.
The man who had spoken did so with an arrogance that suggested he had the confidence of his leader. Someone like Nassar would be a significant threat to his position in the ISIS hierarchy.
“They discovered my allegiance to Mullah Halabi, yes. Regrettable, because while I can be of great assistance to you from here, I would have been much more effective at the king’s side. The effort that went into gaining his trust isn’t something that I’d expect a simple soldier to understand.”
The man stiffened at the insult, but Nassar ignored it. “I’ve worked closely with the Americans on their homeland security protocols and in preventing terrorist attacks on their soil. It’s given me an intimate knowledge of their borders and immigration policy, their power grid and nuclear plants. Even their water supply. If we strike surgically, we can turn the tide of the war. We can make the Americans lash out against all Muslims and turn your thirty thousand soldiers into a billion.”
*
Rapp strapped his night-vision goggles to his CamelBak and slid a combat knife from the sheath at his waist. The darkness inside the underground passage was too deep for light amplification, and the sound from even a silenced pistol would bounce endlessly off the walls.
He passed through the cavern’s entrance and found himself completely blind. His other senses strained to compensate, but there was nothing for them to cling to other than the scent of earth. He kept his pace agonizingly slow, dragging his fingers along the left wall for reference. There was a significant risk of slamming his head into a rock outcropping and he had to test every footfall to ensure complete silence.
Despite these precautions, he cut his face on something jutting from a wall and nearly tripped twice, barely managing not to fall. He still hadn’t plummeted down a thousand-foot shaft, though. So that was something.
Because of the sensory deprivation and the focus necessary to remain silent, it was impossible to track time. For some reason he wanted to know how much had passed, but illuminating his watch was out of the question. In this kind of darkness it would look like an explosion.