Thick billows of smoke streamed diagonally up from the house and frontage road, thinning over the tops of the palm grove.
“Tom D.’s boys are eighteen minutes out,” said someone.
* * *
At 6:40 P.M., the skis of the Little Birds skidded into the dirt of a clearing four hundred meters from the house’s driveway. Before the helicopters rocked forward and settled, the teams had bounded off. Leading them was Major Jason,* a physics-Ph.D.-turned-soldier who had been a Ranger first lieutenant for me years earlier. As the operators burst through the brown curtain of dust kicked up by the rotors, they moved quickly up the frontage road. Up ahead, parked in the driveway leading from the road to the crater, the operators saw an Iraqi ambulance. As they neared, they saw a group of Iraqis in police uniforms. A few of them were at the back of the ambulance, struggling to lift a stretcher into the trunk.
The Iraqi policemen turned to see our teams approaching in fast, coordinated movements, as if on rails. Very quickly the Americans had fanned out and claimed the geometry of the scene. With rifles poised, they yelled at the Iraqis. Step away from the vehicle! An Iraqi police lieutenant, standing separate from his men, eyed our operators. He put his palm on the pistol at his hip. Put your arms up! Our Green team moved closer with steady shuffle steps. The Iraqi lieutenant paused, then slowly lifted his hands to match the men around him, already holding their arms up around their ears. The operators swarmed in and took their weapons.
They quickly went around to the back of the ambulance and saw a gurney halfway out of the ambulance’s swing doors. On top was a heavyset man in black clothes. They pulled the stretcher out and set it down into the dirt.
“Do you know who this is?” an operator asked one of the policemen.
“We do not know the Jordanian,” the Iraqi said. That was unlikely. He was the only person at the scene they were evacuating.
Our medic leaned over the Man in Black, who was alive, but barely. Under the medic’s forefingers, Zarqawi’s carotid artery was deflated. His breathing was shallow, and blood seeped out of his nose and ears. The pressure caused by the blast waves had cascaded through the concrete walls of the house and pulsed through his chest cavity, bursting vessels and air sacs in his lungs. Behind the kneeling medic, members from the rest of the troop methodically searched the crater for evidence. Five other bodies were in the rubble, including Abd al-Rahman, another man, two women, and a young girl.
The medic continued to work on Zarqawi. When he cleared his airway, Zarqawi gurgled blood. The damage was fatal. Twenty-four minutes after the Green team had descended, under an orange evening sun and the long shadows of palm trees extending across the crater, beneath the clenched faces of the operators standing over him, Zarqawi’s lungs failed. At 7:04 P.M., our medic called it. Zarqawi was dead.
* * *
Not long after, the ground team arrived at Balad, along with the bodies of Abd al-Rahman and Zarqawi, so we could definitely confirm their identities. I did not meet the operators on the tarmac when they touched down outside our hangar. I told Steve to let me know when he had a free moment, and we would go over together to the screening facility, where they would place the bodies. He nodded. Around us, the JOC was still electric. On-screen, we were still tracking the three vehicles that had shuttled Abd al-Rahman to the house. Ground teams were launching shortly, in Little Birds and Black Hawks, to interdict the vehicles. They would soon appear on-screen, swooping in behind the cars and cutting them off.
“We need to pull the trigger on the other targets,” Steve said. By plan, making a movement on Abd al-Rahman was the trigger to take down the fourteen other sites in Baghdad, Arcadia 1 through 14, that had become targets based on Abd al-Rahman’s suspicious activity. In addition, teams would interdict the vehicles that had ferried Abd al-Rahman to the safehouse. TF 16 was activating its strike teams from around the country so we could hit the targets within twenty-four hours, before Zarqawi’s network heard about the strike and scattered. The machine was about to hit a fever pitch, and the JOC buckled down.