The Profession

  “Brothers, we can learn much from our guest,” says el-Masri. “I have seen him take the head off a man, like this”—he pantomimes two backhand hacking blows—“and blast an entire village down a mountainside into a river. He is a one-man wrecking crew, believe it!”

  I assure el-Masri that I have come only to talk and to deliver an offer of employment. We sip John Collinses—the English version of a Tom Collins—on a shaded terrace that overlooks a court where el-Masri’s two children play around a fountain. Temperature, I’m guessing, is 105. El-Masri speaks English with a New Jersey accent. He says “tie-yid” for “tired” and “ma-fack” for “matter of fact.”

  El-Masri tells me about tough times in Egypt. In place of his former profession in the Awn al-Dawla, the secret police, he (and his brothers) now work in the furniture business; they own a factory at a town called Damietta, which is the artisanal center of the country for hand-carved chairs, desks, cabinetry. “Ninety percent of our shit is for export, but with gas through the roof, we’re fucked. Then the tariffs. Don’t get me started!” He tells me he’d give anything to get back to Jersey.

  “Go,” I say. “You’re an American citizen.”

  “Tell that to Homeland Security. Why do you think I was with you in Yemen in ’19, Gent? Because my name came up on a list. The CIA promised they’d get me home after that hump. Guess what? I’m still here. I can’t go near the States, me or my brothers.” He waves as if to say, What are ya gonna do?

  “Well,” I say. “Maybe I can change that.”

  There’s a festival in Egypt called the “Ascent,” commemorating the overthrow of the secular state. The Islamic calendar is lunar; this year the date falls on August 7. But for those in government service who cannot celebrate at that time, there’s a second feast called “Little Ascent” two weeks later. That’s tonight. Before el-Masri can quiz me about Salter’s proposition, or I can offer it, we must celebrate. Everyone in the clan shows up.

  “I have fallen down in my faith,” shouts el-Masri above the festive din, pouring me a normal-sized Red Label while supersizing one for himself. He has invited William in. William is more of a believer, but he doesn’t turn down a drink either. There’s a phrase you hear all the time in Afghanistan: “Close to Islam.” A man who is proud and brave, honorable, generous to strangers but also humble and God-fearing is said to be close to Islam. I admire that.

  The feasting room at el-Masri’s is all men. The women do the cooking and serving, which comes through the kitchen door, so that you only see their hands as they pass the dishes in and out. As each course is served, a toast is offered. It’s an insult not to drink. There must be at least thirty courses. I’m sitting next to el-Masri, on the carpet, with our backs against the wall. This is handy, he says, because if you pass out, you won’t hurt yourself when you fall. As he drinks, he tells his life story.

  “I was born in North Bergen in 1990. My father was an Egyptian immigrant, my Mom is Tajik from Afghanistan. The old man had his own dry cleaning business, plus he ran limos to the airport; we were doing good, or so he told me later when we landed back in Cairo begging on the street. The old man had fought in ’67, the Jewish War, the Six-Day War. Israeli jets wiped out the Egyptian Air Force on the ground. This was al-Nakbah, ‘the Disaster.’ The Jews kicked the crap out of us, even though we had the newest and most advanced Soviet tanks and guns. Dayan took all of Sinai. My father bolted for the States, he was so ashamed. Then came ’73, the Ramadan War—the Israelis call it the Yom Kippur War—which started out great but ended up even worse.”

  As soon as el-Masri and his sister were old enough to travel, in ’96, their father packed up the clan and moved home to Cairo.

  “We Egyptians are a proud people. We built the fucking pyramids. You cannot imagine the shame we felt. How could we be beaten by these Jews, who had been our slaves and who knew nothing, now, but how to eat shit and march into gas chambers like sheep? And how did I feel, landing back in the old country? I’m six years old and can’t speak ten words of Arabic. Worse, I’m an American! My best friends, who I’m missing like hell, are Harvey Dinnerstein and Marshall Weiss. I hate this freakin’ place.”

  The host’s tale is being narrated to the entire room, whose denizens listen in various states of patriotism and inebriation.

  Egypt in the aftermath of defeat, el-Masri says, split into two factions, each burning with shame and the passion to restore national honor—the pan-Arabists under President Gamal Abdel Nasser, who wanted more technology, more Westernization, more Russian MiGs and tanks; and the Islamists who saw this humiliation at the hands of the Hebrews as the justified punishment from God for straying from the path. This was the start of the Muslim Brotherhood, the dissident movement, which later, allied with al-Jihad after Nasser’s death, was responsible for assassinating his successor, Anwar Sadat.

  “I joined the Home Guard in ’08,” el-Masri said. “They put me in the military police. In those days the army was riddled with dissidents. Every other private soldier was either a member of the Brotherhood or a sympathizer. They had no power but they believed. God was on their side; they were not afraid to die. When you caught one, you couldn’t make him talk. Arabs lie. Let me tell you this, Gent, if you don’t know it already. We lie for fun, we lie for profit, we lie all the time, and we don’t even know why.

  “I became an interrogator. I have seen and done things that God will judge me for. And it got us nowhere. But once you are part of the secret police, you can’t get out. It’s like the Mob. The only way you can go is in deeper, which is what I did: I volunteered to work undercover. I had a commanding officer named Hani Salem, Colonel Salem. A shrewd fellow; he became my mentor. I was what, nineteen? My waist was twenty-eight inches!”

  El-Masri is telling the story in English and Arabic, to me and his brothers and uncles. They interrupt, wanting to know who I am and how el-Masri knows me. “How did I buy this house?” he asks. “With money made from General Salter, chasing a certain motherfucker named Razaq into the mountains of Yemen in the company of my dear friend Gent! Is this true? I would not lie.”

  And he raises another toast and returns to the main saga.

  “Colonel Salem said he would protect me. Any time I wanted out, I just had to whistle. Can you believe how stupid I was? I said yes. Charges were trumped up, I was thrown in jail, the big one at Saladin’s Citadel where hundreds of the Brothers were being held. The last thing Colonel Salem promised me was that the guards would only pretend to torture me. But once I was behind bars, it became clear that this would not work. So they gave me the business, just like they did to the Brothers.

  “I had read the Koran before but never studied it. Now I made friends among the Brothers who were going through the same hell as me. I have to tell you, it helped. The guards would tie us to doors set on the floor and beat the soles of our feet with iron rods. You cannot imagine what that pain is. We cried verses from God’s Holy Book. They hung us by hooks, they electrocuted us; they poured acid onto our flesh, they burned us with cigarettes and with blowtorches; they strapped us over tables and raped us. Look around you, Gent. Many in this room have endured worse.

  “When the guards got tired of beating us, they threw us back into our cells, which were not cells but large rooms with one concrete runway in the floor for piss and shit and no beds, not even pallets of straw. We tended each other. Will you believe me when I tell you this was the most joyous time of my life? Yes! For we were brothers, united in the holy cause. Death held no fear for us. We prayed for it. We slept in each other’s arms as Jacob did with Esau and when our torturers came for us again, we cursed them and pitied them, devils that they were, while we were holy warriors, whose martyrdom would raise us to heaven. The human mind is a beautiful thing. For here I was at nineteen years old, sent in to spy upon these seditious fellows, and now I had become closer to them than to my own flesh. Friends who died, I still cannot speak of them. Love and faith flowed through our veins like the blood of the Prophe
t. What need had we to fill our bellies? We sustained ourselves upon God’s holy writ, the succor of his verses, and on our own virtue, which we tested every day and which every day grew stronger.

  “There was a boy in my cell named Qazi Ahmed Razaq. He was the closest to my age, only a couple of years younger. A guard named Ephur used to sodomize him every night, sometimes in a room they had for showers (though no one was ever permitted to shower there), sometimes in the corridor outside our cell, where we could hear the boy’s screams and we shouted back through the wire mesh door, cursing this Ephur and vowing to murder him. Young Razaq was Tajik; I could speak the language, and I became his friend. He was a good kid, educated; he spoke English. His father was Habibullah Mohammed Razaq, who had been one of the legendary Afghan mujahideen during the fight against the Soviets. Why do I tell you this, brothers? Because this Razaq, like I said, is how I came to meet our American friend, Gent—and, I will bet, Razaq is also why Mr. Gent is here right now. But I am getting ahead of my story.

  “In prison, there was a group called Takfir Wal Hejira. They were Salafists, hard as iron. Takfir means excommunication, Hejira means to leave, to depart in an exodus. I became a Takfiri, as did Razaq, who we called ‘Razz.’ To be Takfiri was to be purest of the pure, sternest of the stern. We declared this man a true Muslim and that man false. The false knew no protection. They were worse than Jews or Crusaders because they undermined the holy faith from within. Takfirism fell from grace years ago, but many in this room—sons and grandsons of men I knew in those days—many of them still believe.”

  El-Masri’s friends rapped the tabletops and acclaimed him with the “koo-koo” sound that Egyptians make to signify approval.

  “One night they came for me—the guard Ephur and two of his thugs. They knew I was Razz’s friend; they knew we had declared them heretics and apostates. And they just wanted to fuck with me. They took me to the shower room. What they did to me I will never tell, except to say that worse has been suffered by many. The guards got tired and wandered off. Ephur never got tired. He was naked, with his trousers around his ankles. It was just him and me in the dark.

  “I killed him with the faucet from a shower. I pulled the fitting off—a four-pronged hot-cold faucet—and ran at him with all my strength. His trousers made him tumble; I jammed the fitting-end of the faucet into his eye until blood gushed. He screamed and grabbed me with both arms as if to crush the life out of me, but we were both dripping wet and the tile floor was slippery. I got him facedown and dug my fingernails into the long hair around his ears; I beat his head into the floor until I felt his skull crack. The others heard the screams and came back. They beat me with clubs and kicked my ribs in with their boots. I was saved only by the chance of the morning detail being marched past. A sergeant who knew me made the beating stop.

  “I was in the prison hospital for nine weeks. Colonel Salem kept the guards from murdering me. He got me out of there. Razz was released the same day as me. This was no accident. The police wanted me as a link to him. A black Mercury Navigator picked him up. He told me to come with him. We were given body armor and helmets. Two other vehicles in a convoy escorted us to a house on Gezira Island. I have tried to find that place again, more than once, and have never come close. It was a safe house operated by some arm of American intelligence. Waiting there was Razz’s father. The old man wept as if his eyes were rivers. ‘This is the one,’ Razz said, meaning me. ‘Not a hair on your head will be harmed,’ the old warlord vowed to me, ‘so long as I live.’

  “A man, an American, handed me $3,000 in cash. I was given new clothes and papers and flown to the U.S. Naval Base at Bahrain; they kept me there for eighteen months, in language school and UW training—Unconventional Warfare. I was supposed to get a new American passport and be repatriated, with my family, to the States. Who was I kidding? I’m a Muslim carrying a gun. No way U.S. Homeland Security is gonna gimme an EZ-Pass to New Jersey. I wound up back in Damietta, a civilian again, with a new name and a crap job in the furniture business.”

  El-Masri grins at me.

  “This was me at twenty-one, Gent. A long way from North Bergen.”

  My assignment is to get el-Masri on the plane that night if possible. But he and the house are on Arab time; by two in the morning, my prize is passed out on the carpet and I’m not far behind. Harry the brother wakes everyone for prayers at dawn. The festival lasts two days. No one is going home. When the day’s heat has passed, the rite begins again. This time el-Masri’s brothers and uncles tell their life stories. It goes on for hours. No one interrupts. The tales are of ghastly suffering endured with patience and a depth of faith that we in the West cannot conceive of.

  Sometime around midnight, it’s el-Masri’s turn again. I’m texting Conrad, who’s waiting with the plane at Cairo West. Chris Candelaria, Chutes, Junk, Q, the whole team is in place at our next destination. A message from Salter’s number one, Pete Petrocelli, appears in my text window:

  Got him?

  I answer not yet.

  Get him.

  El-Masri washes; he daubs rosewater. He returns to the caucus as fresh as Minnesota Fats. The prior speaker, his uncle (it seems they’re all his uncles), has finished with his own tale of striking back at the United States. This brings up 11/11—the seaborne dirty bomb attack in 2019 on the port of Long Beach.

  “Razz was behind this.”

  El-Masri seats himself cross-legged at my side.

  “Behind it himself, or in possession of knowledge of who was. This brings us to our guest, Colonel Gent—and to General Salter, in whose name our friend has come now to visit us.”

  The brotherhood leans in, listening intently.

  El-Masri picks up the timeline. Seven years have passed since he and Razz were released from prison. It’s 2019. The youth Razaq is no longer the prince-in-waiting of an Afghan Tajik power family; he has become a force in his own right. With his father he controls half the transshipment routes for opium moving out of Afghanistan via Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan to Russia and Western Europe. He is worth tens of millions. His militia numbers twenty thousand. And he remains a rabid, U.S.-hating Takfiri.

  6

  CRAWLING MAN

  “IN NORTHERN YEMEN, THEY have mountains,” continues el-Masri. “That’s what the Yemenis call them. They are more like tits. You could build mountains as big by hand. But they are steep and barren and without water; you have never seen no place like this. God himself will not go there. In Yemen when a man defeats an enemy, he cuts off his testicles and wears them on a cord around his neck. I have seen bandits do this more than once. Better, they believe, if the victim is still alive. You want him to see your knife and feel the weight of his balls coming off into your cupped palm.” El-Masri glances to me. “Not like you Christians, who want only a man’s money.”

  El-Masri retells the tale of 11/11, the 2019 dirty bomb attack on Long Beach and the frantic search in the aftermath for who was behind it. “Brothers, I will tell you something about the American people. You can fuck with them only so long and only so much. You remember Cairo then. The city emptied so fast you would think no one had never lived there. Everybody was waiting for the nukes to rain down. Tehran, too, and Islamabad and every town and village for a thousand miles except Mecca and Medina. I was here, at Damietta. We stayed, my brothers and me, to protect the furniture factory. I was working then too for the UIV, the Upholders of Islamic Virtue, which was the Brotherhood’s most secret arm of internal security. The phones were ringing like crazy from the Americans. Every secret police officer, old or new, was called in for his contacts. My name came up, linked to Razz. The Americans had reports that he was the money behind the bomb, or if he wasn’t, he knew who was. A car came for me. Three hours later I’m getting off a plane at El Rehaba airport in Sana’a, being picked up by three U.S. Marines in a ragged-ass, twenty-year-old Humvee with a .50 caliber up top and three racks of jerry fuel cans. The team leader is Gent. I had never met him before. He did not
look happy to see me.” El-Masri turns to me now grinning. “What did they tell you about me, Gent?”

  Only, I say, that my team had forty-eight hours to track down Razz before the entire Middle East was nuked into molten glass—and that el-Masri was the only man in the world that Razz would talk to.

  “And I was!” The Egyptian laughs, remembering. “Who was on that team? The tall one with the parachute pants … ‘Chutes!’ Yes! And Junk and Q and that Hindu from Sri Lanka …”

  “Tony.”

  “Yes. And Salter. He was our boss.”

  El-Masri sketches a quick map on the tabletop—of the tribal Houthi north of Yemen. There is a town called Abada, the last outpost before you enter the Vale of Sinn; my team and two others were flown in aboard a KC-130. The teams were part of TacOps, short for Tactical Operations. This was an experimental program, later discontinued, which operated under MARSOCOM, Marine Special Operations Command, which itself was an experiment under SOCOM, Special Operations Command. The teams were hybrids, meaning they included CIA field operators, Yemeni Special Forces, and private contractors.

  I was still a Marine then; this was the first time I had worked with soldiers for hire. They were impressive. Former Special Forces, Navy SEALS, NSA—we had four on our team; the youngest was forty-two; the oldest was sixty. They were tribal warfare experts and intelligence specialists. They had lived with the tribes; they spoke the languages. This was their life. They got home once every eighteen months and turned around and came right back. The mercs’ overall contract was with Lockheed, but their direct employers were private intel agencies—Strategic Modalities Corporation, American Intelligence Security, Actionable Analysis International. I had never heard of any of these. The contractors wouldn’t tell us how much they were being paid, but it was clear that the decimal point in their checks was a lot farther east than in ours.