“And?”
“And let’s just say the Mossad has pretty close ties to the Kurds. We don’t see eye to eye on everything—don’t get me wrong. But the enemy of my enemy is my friend, right? The Kurds are taking out ISIS forces. They’re taking out Assad’s forces. We try to help where we can. So Ari asked the security cabinet to authorize the Mossad to discreetly let the Kurdish rebel commanders know someone might have found Abu Khalif, and if that turns out to be true, would they be interested in taking him out. The cabinet agreed, and Ari set the plan into motion. Now everything’s set. The moment the women and children leave the compound, Ari will give the Kurds the precise coordinates for the missiles, and three minutes later, it will all be over.”
I was silent, processing this new information, as we kept our eyes on the monitors. All was quiet at the compound. Everyone except the guards on duty was sound asleep. Yael suggested that I try to get some sleep, after which she would do the same.
I tried, but I simply couldn’t fall asleep. Too much was happening—or more precisely, not happening. We’d done it. We’d hunted down Abu Khalif. We’d actually found him. We had him surrounded. Yet we couldn’t take him out.
Meanwhile, out there in the rest of the world, innocent people were dying. ISIS was butchering, enslaving, and raping men, women, and children. And why? To hasten the coming of their messiah, to fulfill their ancient prophecies, and maybe for sheer pleasure. Yet however ghastly their killing spree had been so far, they were just ramping up. They had already come after my country. They had already come after my family. Soon they would be coming after me. The stakes could not be higher.
Yet as I lay there, staring at the ceiling, thinking of my mother and my nephew now in heaven and Matt and his family now in hiding, I was growing desperate. Our window to move was rapidly closing. Dutch and his men couldn’t stay out there much longer. They were going to get noticed. They could very well get killed. We had to pinpoint Khalif’s precise location and then we had to strike fast.
But how?
97
For well over an hour, I war-gamed every possible scenario I could think of.
I prayed for wisdom—no, actually, I begged God to show me what to do. But no answer seemed to come.
Then it was my turn to relieve Yael and let her close her eyes and get some rest. Bleary-eyed, I splashed cold water on my face. Then I made myself a fresh pot of bad coffee, sat down at the desk in front of our laptops, and donned my headphones while she collapsed in the bed and immediately fell asleep.
Just before dawn, the Muslim call to prayer rang out from the minaret. It wasn’t a recording. Even through my headphones I could tell someone was actually in the tower, calling the faithful to their morning rituals. I remotely adjusted one of the cameras and zoomed in, hoping it might be the emir. But it was Al-Siddiq. Soon hundreds of foreign fighters came out of the dormitory and into the courtyard, each with a prayer rug. Then they all bowed down, facing Mecca, and began their prayers.
Before long, the sun began to rise, yet the compound—tucked into a small canyon and surrounded by mountain peaks—was still covered in long, dark shadows. The two dozen guards at the front gate were replaced by a new shift. Various other clumps of guards throughout the grounds were being relieved as well.
Eventually, as the first rays of sun splashed across the lawn in the courtyard, Al-Siddiq came out and went for a long, quiet, peaceful walk. No one was with him. Not his daughter. Not any of the fighters. He simply walked alone. And still, no sign of Khalif.
Why not? Where was he? Why wasn’t he showing his face? He couldn’t possibly sense we were watching him. If he had, his men would have attacked Dutch and Pritchard and their colleagues, and we’d be dealing with a bloodbath, not the prospect of another day of sitting around doing nothing.
At precisely eight o’clock, the courtyard was full of Arab fighters again. Now they were doing their morning exercises. By nine, I could see signs the wives and children were gathering in the various classrooms to begin their daily studies. All of this was pushing my frustration to the boiling point. I was watching a genocidal, apocalyptic terrorist community going about their day, business as usual, and I couldn’t take much more of it.
When Yael eventually woke up, showered, and dressed, we spent several hours brainstorming ways to break the stalemate—but yet again we came up with nothing. At one point in the early afternoon, we got a call from Shalit. He wanted an update. We had little to tell him. He had little to tell us. The security cabinet was becoming divided. Several members were suggesting it might be time to pull us all out of Turkey. They understandably feared sparking a major confrontation with Ankara if Turkish authorities found us here. One member of the cabinet was urging Prime Minister Eitan to authorize the Kurds to simply decimate the entire compound immediately, even with Khalif’s wives and children there. He argued that in the end it would be the Kurds who would get credit for taking out the ISIS emir and several hundred ISIS fighters, and they would take any blame for collateral damage as well.
However, the prime minister had strenuously objected to the suggestion. “The government of Israel does not target innocent women and children—ever—period, end of discussion,” he’d said, and that was that.
For this I was immensely grateful and relieved. I hadn’t signed up to kill innocents. I’d signed up to bring Abu Khalif to justice. I would never be party to an operation that would countenance the targeting of the wives and children of terrorists, no matter what some politicians back home or anywhere else in the world might advocate. I hadn’t always lived by the morals and the ethics that my grandfather and my mom had modeled for me, but I had no doubt what they would say about purposefully killing innocents in pursuit of taking out a terrorist.
Some might argue that Khalif’s wives and children weren’t innocent. But I didn’t buy the argument. So far as I was concerned, they were effectively hostages of Khalif and the demonic system he had built around himself. Under the Islamic system, no woman could refuse a marriage proposal by him. And regardless of what the women thought about Khalif, they had absolutely no say in his day-to-day affairs. The children? What choice did they have in being born to a genocidal father and raised in this sinister family? None whatsoever. Might some of them one day join ISIS and devote themselves to a life of violent jihad? Yes, I knew they might. I wasn’t blind. I could see the path they were on. But did this condemn them to death by a Syrian missile before reaching their teenage years? Not in my mind. Besides, might they not choose other lives, especially if their father met his demise and they were free from his slavery? I couldn’t say for sure, but they might, and even that sliver of hope was enough for me.
“Have you gotten any rest?” Yael asked by midafternoon.
“No, but I’m fine,” I said.
“You don’t look fine. Your eyes are bloodshot. You’re getting dark rings under them. Why don’t you try to lie down for a while?”
“How can I?” I asked her. “How can I sleep while Khalif is up there in the mountains, free and clear, planning some new horrific attack? We can’t sit here anymore. We need to do something.”
“I agree,” she said. “But we’ve been over and over it, and we’ve come up with nothing.”
I was about to throw my hands up in despair when suddenly a thought occurred to me. “How precise are those Syrian missiles—the ones the Kurds captured?” I asked.
“Quite.”
“I mean, could they take out the mosque but leave the classrooms unaffected?” I asked.
Khalif’s wives and children were sleeping in the madrassa, while Al-Siddiq and all the male fighters were sleeping on the bunk beds in the dormitory.
“I don’t know about unaffected,” Yael replied. “Those missiles pack some pretty powerful explosives. But yeah, given the size of the compound, I doubt anyone in the classrooms or the dorms would be killed if the Kurds hit the mosque. Injured maybe, but not killed. But why do you ask? I mean, we don’t really know Khal
if is in the mosque.”
I ignored her question and asked another of my own. “What if Khalif was actually in the dormitory? Could one of the missiles take out the dormitory and not destroy the classrooms or kill those inside?”
“I think so.”
“Can you find out for sure?”
“I could,” she said, “but why? What good does it do if we don’t have precise intel on where Khalif is?”
“Just find out,” I whispered. “I have an idea.”
98
It was almost midnight when Yael finally gave me some answers.
Yes, according to Shalit, the Mossad analysts, and the chief of staff of the Israeli Defense Forces, the Russian-built missile was that precise. Given the size of the compound, if we could actually find Khalif, and if he was actually in a part of the compound that was far enough away from the women and children, then yes, the Kurds could hit that section, and the women and children should survive.
But that was a lot of ifs. The brutal fact remained—we had no idea precisely where Khalif was, and without that specificity, the prime minister and his security cabinet were not going to authorize a strike.
I pressed Yael on the specifics. I asked dozens of questions about the technical details of the missiles, their size, their range, their speed. I pressed her on the design of the guidance system and on why Shalit and the IDF were so confident. To her credit, she really had done her homework. She had answers to all the questions I was asking and then some. In the end, I was satisfied.
And then she asked a question of her own. “Why are you asking all this? What are you thinking?”
I had wondered how I’d feel when this moment came. I feared I might be jittery, tense, equivocating. But instead I found myself speaking in a calm, firm, but gentle voice. “Yael, I’m going to that compound,” I said. “Tonight.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Khalif wants to find me, wants to kill me—fine, he can have me. I’m going to surrender,” I told her.
“Are you crazy?”
“Not at all. Listen—the moment I arrive, Khalif will think he’s won. But I’ll be wearing a tracking beacon. I’ll be wearing the glasses you guys gave me. You’ll know exactly where I am and thus exactly where he is. The moment I’m in his presence, you can tell the Kurds to take the shot, and in three minutes, it’ll all be over.”
“But how will you get out?”
“I won’t.”
Yael’s eyes went wide. “J. B., that’s lunacy—no—absolutely not,” she shot back and launched into a desperate attempt to dissuade me.
But I cut her off. “Yael, stop,” I insisted. “My mind’s made up. This is the only way, and you know it. Dutch and Pritchard can’t stay up there indefinitely. They’re going to be caught. They’re going to be killed. And you said it yourself—Khalif isn’t leaving that compound, and why would he? He’s hiding behind the human shield of his wives and children. It’s time to take him out. Tonight.”
“J. B., come on. You’re exhausted. You’re not thinking rationally. There’s another way, and we’ll find it.”
“No, there isn’t. I wish there was—believe me—but there isn’t, and you know it. I’ve been thinking and praying about this nonstop. And this is it. We’re out of time. This is our only play.”
“What about Matt? What about Annie and Katie?” she asked, a look of near panic in her eyes as she observed the resolution in mine.
“Why do you think I’m doing this?” I asked her. “Khalif has triggered a worldwide hunt for my family and me. The only way Matt and Annie and Katie come out of this alive, safe, and free to live without fear is if we take out Khalif right here, right now.”
“So what are you going to do, walk up to the door and knock?”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s insane.”
“No, what would be insane is to keep sitting here doing nothing, to let him keep hunting my family, to let him continue his genocide without stopping him if I can.”
“But what if the moment you’re caught, he puts you in a cage in the middle of the courtyard and gathers his wives and children all around him?”
“That’s why I have to go now, in the middle of the night, while his wives and children are sleeping.”
“But what if he’s sleeping with them?”
“Then his men will wake him, and he’ll come to me.”
“How do you know?”
“Because he won’t be able to help himself,” I replied. “He’s a fanatical, apocalyptic Muslim. He believes he’s ushering in the End of Days. He believes he’s preparing for the coming of the Mahdi and the establishment of the global caliphate. He’ll want to gloat. He’ll lecture me. He’ll go off on a bloodthirsty, demon-possessed rant, and while he does, the Kurds will push the button, and boom. It’ll all be over before he knows it.”
“You’re really serious?” she said quietly. The look in her eyes was shifting. Gone was the shock. Gone, too, was the defiance. Now all I saw was sadness.
“I am,” I said.
“And you’re not scared to die.” Her eyes were filling with tears.
“I used to be, Yael, but I’m not anymore.”
“Why not?”
“Because I know where I’m going,” I said.
I told her what I’d done. I told her how Matt had been trying to convince me about Jesus Christ for years. I told her how I’d been angry, how I’d completely rejected my brother, how I hadn’t even talked to him for nearly a decade. But then I told her what had happened on the plane on the way to Dubai, how I’d finally received Christ as my Savior. “Everything’s changed, Yael. I’m changed. I’ve made enough bad choices in my life. It’s time to make a good one.”
“But how could this possibly be good?” she asked, tears running down her cheeks.
“Because it’s one of the first things I’ve ever done that isn’t about me,” I replied. “It’s for Matt and Annie. It’s for Katie. And for everyone else facing death at the hands of Abu Khalif.”
Until that moment, I’d basically lived my entire life in utter self-centeredness. I’d ruined a marriage, become an alcoholic, and put countless friends and colleagues in harm’s way. And for what? To get a good story? To win a Pulitzer or some other award? Was that really worth it? I’d concluded it wasn’t. Not for me. Not anymore. It was time to do something for others. It was time to follow the example of my Savior.
“I told you about the letter Khachigian left me. Did I ever read it to you?”
“No, you just summarized it—that he was urging you to go after Khalif with everything you had. I don’t think this is what he meant.”
“Maybe not, but he did urge me to listen to Matt and give my life to Christ, like he finally did.”
“Okay, fine, and you did that. But—”
“I know this doesn’t make sense to you, Yael. And I’m sorry. But just listen to me for a moment. Khachigian closed the letter with a verse of Scripture, something Jesus said to his disciples. ‘Greater love has no one than this, that one lay down his life for his friends.’ Honestly, I’d never even heard of that verse until a few weeks ago. Then the pastor quoted it during the memorial service. I’ve been chewing on it ever since, but until this afternoon I never really understood it.”
“And you think you do now?” she asked.
“Yeah, I do. Sometimes you don’t get to win like they do in the movies. Sometimes, if you really love someone, you just have to lay down your own life so they can live. I know you think that’s crazy. And for most of my life I would have agreed with you. But now I finally know where I’m going when I die. The moment I draw my last breath here, I’ll draw my first breath in heaven with Christ. I’ll get to see my mom and Josh again and be with them forever. Death isn’t the end for me. It’s just the beginning. I’m ready. I wasn’t before, but now I am. And at least my death will mean something.”
I reached for my carry-on bag and pulled out a few folded pieces of paper and h
anded them to her.
“What’s that, your suicide note?” she asked.
“I’m not committing suicide, Yael.”
“Of course you are.”
“No, it’s not suicide; it’s called sacrifice.”
“Same thing.”
“Look, I don’t want to die. I don’t. But I’m willing to—for the right reason, at the right moment, and this is it.”
“Okay,” she said, wiping the tears from her eyes, though they just kept coming. “So what’s that?”
“It’s for Matt,” I said. “Would you make sure he gets it?”
“What is it?”
“It’s a letter explaining everything I just told you, with more details on how I finally came to trust in Jesus and how I came to conclude that this is the only way to keep him and his family safe. Don’t worry—I left out anything that might be classified. I didn’t mention you or Ari or any of the others. You can read it if you want. But will you take it to him personally? Will you promise me that?”
She nodded, and then she put her arms around me and began to sob.
99
The night was cold and quiet as I drove eastward along Highway O-52 toward the mountains.
I could still feel the sting from the tiny tracking beacon Yael had injected under my right armpit. In a final conference call with Yael and Shalit, Dutch had explained that this device, though minuscule, was designed to emit as strong a GPS signal as possible, even if I was taken underground.
I was touched by the last words Shalit and Dutch had said to me. They’d both told me I didn’t have to do this. But when I’d insisted one last time, they’d said how grateful they were for my sacrifice, especially knowing that the entire plan rested on the Kurds taking all the credit. My name, I knew, would never be associated with this operation at all. I thanked them and said the last thing in the world I wanted was credit. The only way Matt and his family would ever be safe was if no one ever knew of my association with the plan to take down Abu Khalif once and for all.