My Share of the Task (40 page)

They prepped the F-16 with the right command, and it circled back around.

At 6:12
P.M.
, a laser-guided, five-hundred-pound GBU-12 bomb traveling nine hundred feet per
second hit the house. The explosion flashed, turning our screens in the JOC white for a split second, as smoke and dust burst up and out laterally in three columns, like the prongs of a toy jack. The F-16 circled again, and a minute and thirty-six seconds later, using GPS coordinates, a GBU-38 hit the same spot.

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.

*   *   *

A
t 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.

*   *   *

N
ot 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.

I returned to the SAR and continued to work until Steve came by and we walked over together with Mike Flynn. The low sun darkened the compound's dun walls and pathways and turned the dust-choked horizon and stray clouds orange.

At the screening facility, they had placed the bodies of Abd al-Rahman and Zarqawi in one of the exploitation rooms. Two guards outside the door let Steve and me in. Inside, Zarqawi and Abd al-Rahman had been laid on separate tarps spread on the cement floor. The room was empty except for two other operators. I walked over to the edge of the tarp and looked down. Killed by overpressure, Zarqawi's skin was unbroken. Even in death he looked stunningly like the figure we had seen weeks earlier in a propaganda video—soft and ashen.

It had been two and a half years since that first night in Fallujah, when we thought he leaped out the window. It seemed a long time ago. Since then, the war had twice ripped through that city. Zarqawi had gone from an important but stock jihadist operative slipping through our fingers to the most feared, active, deadly, and controversial Al Qaeda leader. We were only a few meters from my command center, and even closer to the small wooden hut where my command sergeant major and I had lived for most of the past two years—working toward this moment.

I looked at one of the operators, Luke,
*
kneeling on the other side of the body. I watched him as he quietly examined equipment captured in the operation. His chiseled face was drawn tight in focus as he sifted the material, his fingers smudging the film of dust on the phones and computers. His curly hair was still damp and matted with sweat—he had been a member of the assault force that had gone out to Hibhib and brought back the body. I had first served with him a decade earlier, when he was a staff sergeant squad leader in the Rangers. He was now about thirty-eight and a sergeant major in Green with almost five years of combat experience since 9/11. In a few hours, he would go back out into the night for another raid.

As our eyes met and we exchanged nods of recognition, respect, and friendship, I thought about what he saw when he looked at me. I'd been a forty-year-old Ranger battalion commander when we'd first met at Fort Lewis. I had technically still been a one-star general when I had joined him and his comrades in this fight in October 2003. Now, two months short of my fifty-second birthday, I wore the three stars of a lieutenant general and commanded a deployed force that had grown from a few hundred to many thousands on multiple continents, backed up by an even bigger structure in the United States. What had been impressive but rudimentary was now a relentless counterterrorist machine. In a honeycomb of rooms adjacent to the room in which I stood, teams of analysts pored through material recovered from the house in which Zarqawi was killed. In the hangar next door, screens were showing the first of the raids going out against the Arcadia targets. Similar processes were under way in ten different nodes worldwide.

I looked back at the body. Seeing him as a man, I couldn't exult in his death. Nor did I wring my hands. I took satisfaction, standing there, knowing that this work, our work, was necessary. Tonight, it had moved us closer to being finished.

“What do you think, Luke?” I asked the operator.

“Oh, that's him, sir,” he said.

I nodded.

With Steve, I returned to my office to phone George Casey. I had called him prior to the strike, and he now knew we were waiting on the FBI to run the fingerprints back in the States. Until it did, we could not definitively say it was Zarqawi. But we'd shared this fight together for two years and I told him what I thought.

“Sir, I've seen the body, and I think it's him.”

“How sure are you?” he asked.

“I'm sure, sir,” I said, my voice cracking from fatigue or emotion.

Elsewhere in the screening facility, Amy, Paul, and Jack gathered outside Mubassir's room. They had agreed they would do this part together. They entered, closed the door, and told Mubassir about the strike. The information he had provided, they said, was correct. Zarqawi had been killed. What about Abd al-Rahman, his friend? Mubassir asked. They told Mubassir and stayed with him in the room as he sobbed.

In the early morning, as we waited for the FBI to call, I sat down with Mike and Kurt and Jody at our horseshoe desk in the SAR. The farewell ceremony for Bill McRaven had been planned for that evening at Fort Bragg. After three years as one of its assistant commanding generals, Bill was preparing to move on to become the commander of all special operations forces in Europe. But tonight he was at Fort Bragg, where they were holding a dinner for him. As we often did for ceremonies we couldn't attend, we cued up our VTC cameras so we could participate from afar. A projector screen at the front of the auditorium at Bragg showed us from the front, sitting at our horseshoe desk. From our side, we could see a wide angle of the room, with rows of tables and people. After scanning the figures, I saw Annie, sitting toward the front. In the public venue, I didn't try to speak to her, but I caught myself staring.

No one in the audience knew about the strike. Annie watched on the screen as every few minutes someone walked behind our chairs, leaned down, and whispered in my ear. Each time they said, still nothing back from the FBI. We grinned as teams at various outposts, connected by VTC, performed skits, and friends and colleagues in the auditorium at Bragg gave toasts as part of Bill's farewell. A few
minutes after 3:30
A.M.
, a member of the task force staff walked briskly over and leaned in.

“FBI's come back, sir,” he told me, “It's a match. PID.” This was the abbreviation for positive identification.

As the audience watched one of the skits, Annie saw me get up and walk out of the frame. I went a few paces to my office and called George Casey again. The FBI had confirmed it, I told him. The man lying in our screening facility was Zarqawi.

Down at Baghdad, J.C. was still up. He would be for a little while longer, until all the teams called in “objective secure” near 4:00
A.M
. Only then did he retire for his first real night of sleep in weeks.

*   *   *

J
ust before noon the next day, June 8, George Casey, Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, and Prime Minister Maliki held a press conference in Baghdad
announcing Zarqawi's death. Prime Minister Maliki began, speaking in Arabic in front of a glossy wood-paneled wall. In a scene that evoked the Saddam announcement two and half years earlier, members of the audience broke out in cheers and clapping, eventually together in unison,
clap, clap, clap
. But the triumphalism on the podium was far more muted this time around. “
Although the designated leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq is now dead, the terrorist organization still poses a threat,” said General Casey. “Iraqi forces, supported by the Coalition, will continue to hunt terrorists that threaten the Iraqi people until terrorism is eradicated in Iraq.” Shortly after the press conference ended, dueling factions in the Iraqi
parliament dropped their vetoes and approved Maliki's outstanding cabinet nominations, putting the ministries of national security and interior under Shiites and the ministry of defense under a Sunni.

Later that day, Steve gathered everyone inside the JOC in our Balad hangar and gave much-deserved awards to five members of the task force screening facility—the three interrogators, Jack, Amy, and Paul, as well as two analysts who had worked side by side with them. The three interrogators continued to deploy back to Iraq for the rest of my time in command.

That night, I went from Balad down to meet with Tom D.'s squadron at their villa. A small group of us gathered in their conference room, a few paces from where J.C.'s team had spent the past few weeks watching Abd al-Rahman. Inside, I gave J.C. a bronze star medal. Everyone in the squadron liked and respected J.C. They knew how much he had contributed and how much he had staked his considerable reputation in the process. In many ways, his work and all the operations leading up to the strike was the culmination of what Steve and Wayne Barefoot had begun two years earlier in the lead-up to Big Ben, when they sat analysts and operators together to patrol the skies over Fallujah. He accepted the award in his typically humble, subdued way, speaking immediately of his team—who were at that moment riffling through the unprecedented trove of intelligence we had collected from the safe house in Hibhib and the seventeen other targets.

We then moved to the backyard, where the rest of the Green operators, pilots, intelligence officers, and other members of the task force who lived and worked at the villa gathered in a half circle. The grounds backed to the Tigris, the river's slick black surface reflecting the orange-ish glow of nighttime. The backyard was otherwise unlit. I could make out only darkened features or pairs of eyes when they caught the ambient light from the house or the city across the river.

“Listen, a lot of people are talking about all of this, what a big deal it all is,” I said. “Let me tell you, I know what it took to get here. I know the price you have paid to do this. We have been at this a long time. We all know how important this was, and I just want to thank you.” I spoke about Tom D.'s leadership and that of Major Jason. I talked about the work of J.C. and his team.