“Really?” I said, surprised at the direction. “Okay. Don’t spare anything.”
“Roger out,” Steve said. He returned to the JOC, and I stayed in my office.
On the screens in both the JOC in Balad, and down with Tom D. and J.C. in Baghdad, they watched the Bongo continue up Sabbah Nissan. I came out a couple times to look at the feed. The JOC was buzzing. Normal operational coordination continued, but most kept an eye on the Bongo truck on the screen.
A little less than an hour later, Abd al-Rahman pulled into the capital city of Diyala Province, Baqubah. It was now late in the afternoon. The city the Bongo truck had entered had a mixed Sunni-Shia population of about five hundred thousand. The Sunni insurgency was deeply entrenched in the province around it, where Al Qaeda enjoyed alarming support. In the previous days, four Shiite mechanics had been gunned down, six Iraqi policemen had been attacked, and the heads of eight Sunnis had been found together in banana crates. Four days earlier, at a fake checkpoint on the road into the city, insurgents had killed twenty Shiite bus passengers, including seven students preparing to take their final exams at a university in Baqubah.
The Bongo pulled off the street into a parking area in front of a building, apparently a restaurant, in a commercial part of town. Abd al-Rahman got out and went in, past a figure who appeared to stand watch on the curb. A minute, maybe two, later, a pickup truck pulled into the lot. It parked nose to nose with the blue Bongo truck. This struck everyone as odd. After the kicked-up dust settled, the pickup’s coloring came into view—white with a red stripe. The JOC froze. They had seen that truck before or, rather, dozens like it. Zarqawi used a fleet of white pickups with red stripes, part of an unnerving countersurveillance shell game. Five or six white pickups would pull up, he would hop in one and climb through the cab to the next, and they would peel off in separate directions.
An odd figure emerged, dressed in full Gulf-like attire, with flowing white robes and kaffiyeh. He entered the building, walking past the guard without any visible exchange, as if they knew each other.
The Baghdad JOC was on edge. Here he is, dropped off outside of Baghdad. This is it; this is what we’ve been waiting for.
“What do you think?” Tom D. asked J.C.
“No, no, hold on,” J.C. said. “This isn’t it.” Not everyone there agreed. He’s in there, right now, meeting with Zarqawi. But the meeting spot didn’t feel right to J.C. Too congested. Too insecure.
Luck had slipped Zarqawi through countless checkpoints in the past two years. It had hidden him from our helicopters in Yusufiyah a few weeks earlier and had been there when our camera gyroscope locked up and spun out and lost him on the road between Ramadi and Rawah a year earlier. Luck helped every bomb that went undetected beneath a roadway or hidden behind clothing. But luck now swung to our side: Before we had to decide whether to move on the building, two figures walked out its front door.
No more than three or four seconds passed between when the two emerged into the sunlight from under the building veranda and when they got into the white pickup a few feet in front of it. In that time, both J.C. and one of his team members picked up his movements.
That’s Rahman, they said. Follow him.
The white pickup with a red stripe, which had deposited the sheikh-looking man with the flowing robes, peeled away from the building. The car began to look like a shuttle, ferrying between this building and, inevitably, somewhere else.
Steve came in again and told me Abd al-Rahman had left Baqubah. It was now late afternoon, and the JOC beyond the plywood wall was loud. People were on phones, coordinating the ISR that Steve had pulled in and that was flying high overhead toward Baqubah. Soon we had six, and then nine, orbits stacked in the sky, watching four targets—the silver sedan still in Baghdad, the way station in Baqubah, the blue Bongo still parked there, and now the white pickup hauling out of town. We needed that many eyes, but we risked spooking the targets as the airspace became congested. Inside the JOC, Steve’s team began to work out how it was going to go down. What are we hitting? What is Baghdad saying?