No more. Now the place was a disaster, dying a little more every day. On the streets the men walked slow, with slumped shoulders and angry faces. Not just unhappy. Hopeless, like life had been getting worse for so long that they couldn’t even dream it would ever get better. And the resentment in their eyes was impossible to mistake. In some of the neighborhoods the 2–7 patrolled, the stink of sewage and burning garbage filled the streets. Little boys without shoes begged for candy every time they stopped. After a car bomb a couple months before, the Mad Dogs had wound up at Kindi Hospital in western Baghdad. The place was covered with blood and J.C. had seen flies in an operating room, hovering over a girl whose face was cut to pieces. Even the guys who joked about everything didn’t have much to say that day. Baghdad was poorer than Juárez, poorer than any place in Mexico he’d ever seen. J.C. couldn’t understand. These people had all that oil, and they lived like this. J.C. knew he was thinking too much. His buddies kept it simple: Bank your checks, stay down, and hope your girl is keeping her legs shut back home. And they were right. His job was keeping himself and his fellow Mad Dogs alive. Let the hajis take care of themselves. But sometimes, playing dominoes after dinner in the palace, J.C. felt the doubt sneak up: How did this place get so messed up? Is it our fault?
in the humvee below, Captain James Jackson Jr. was hoping for a little luck. The tip had come in three days before from the battalion’s best informant, a college student named Saleh who wanted an American visa to join his cousins in Detroit. He hadn’t led Jackson wrong yet. In fact Jackson worried that Saleh was giving the battalion too much; his life expectancy would be measured in hours if his friends realized that he was ratting them out. But Jackson figured that Saleh knew the risks better than anyone. Anyway, if this raid panned out, Saleh would be one step closer to 8 Mile Road. He had claimed that several “488s”—military slang for high-value targets — planned to meet tonight at a barbershop in Ghazalia, a suburban Baghdad neighborhood that had become a center of the resistance. Saleh didn’t have any names, but he promised they weren’t the usual criminals and street fighters. One was a foreigner nicknamed “the Doctor” who had just arrived in Iraq, he said. If military intel had confirmed the story, the raid would have been handed off to Task Force 121, the Special Forces/CIA operating group responsible for top-level targets in Iraq and Afghanistan. But
“the Doctor” didn’t show up in anyone’s database. So the Special Forces, who couldn’t be bothered going after anybody less important than they were, turned the job down. Which was fine with Jackson. The Mad Dogs had five tanks, six Bradleys, and four armored Humvees, enough firepower to take out a small town. He didn’t expect any problem grabbing a couple of guerrillas. He just hoped it was worth the trouble. Saleh had been right so far, but there was a first time for everything.
jackson need not have worried. The Doctor’s real name was Farouk Khan, the fat man who had met John Wells in the apartment in Peshawar five months before. Although he had earned his title, Farouk was no M.D. He was a physicist, the third cousin of A. Q. Khan, who had overseen the development of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons. Farouk had worked for the program too, until he was fired for attending an Islamabad mosque whose imam preached for the overthrow of Pakistan’s government. A year later, Farouk found his way to Osama bin Laden’s lair in the North-West Frontier. There the sheikh offered him the exalted title of “director of atomic projects,” and Farouk set about trying to pry a bomb out of Pakistan’s arsenal. Even with his old connections, Farouk found his mission difficult. Pakistan’s generals knew that if al Qaeda blew a Pakistani nuke in New York the United States might respond with its own bomb on their villas in Islamabad. An attack on Delhi would be even more dangerous, inevitably provoking a full-scale nuclear war that would turn India and Pakistan to dust. Farouk had to move cautiously.
Nonetheless, he eventually found three lower-level technicians whose sympathy for al Qaeda had escaped the government’s security checks. They could not deliver him a working bomb, but they provided equipment that Farouk found very helpful. Then he discovered Dmitri Georgoff, an out-of-work Russian nuclear scientist looking for hard currency. Farouk and Dmitri attended their first meeting with great caution, Farouk because he feared a CIA sting operation, Dmitri because he preferred that his head remain attached to his body. But both men found the meeting satisfactory, and after some negotiations, Dmitri agreed to provide Farouk with two lead-lined steel boxes filled with useful material. Their cost:
