The Genesis Plague - Michael Byrnes [79]
Over the past months, the intelligence Jason’s unit had pieced together through monitoring chatter and milking informants had pointed to a band of heavily armed operatives moving furtively from south to north, bouncing from one safe house to the next. Certainly cause for concern. But none of the intel even remotely suggested that Fahim Al-Zahrani might be among the group.
That was how the dirty business of counter-terrorism functioned: for every truth there were provocative rumours. Like the claim made by an informant in Baghdad which suggested that these phantom operatives had acquired two Soviet suitcase-sized nuclear weapons (over sixty of which were still unaccounted for after the fall of the Motherland) and were planning to erase Jerusalem and Washington DC from the map.
Accepting ‘intelligence’ at face value was anything but smart. ‘Nothin’ but a bunch of drama queens,’ Meat had once said.
The tedious process of sifting good information from bad information had persistently put Jason’s unit one step behind their quarry. Only when Jason moved on to more aggressive tactics did a clearer picture begin to take shape. Case in point: the tips extracted from a former Ba’ath Party lieutenant who’d sung like a canary after only one night of sleep-deprivation in a brightly lit windowless room with Britney Spears’s ‘Oops! I Did It Again’ playing in a loop at blaring volume. Among other titbits, Britney got him to confess that he’d helped arrange transport for the quarry, from Mosul to Kirkuk, and that travelling with the group were senior Al-Qaeda members seeking safe passage to Iran. All true. Thanks, Britney.
From there, Hazo’s contacts in Kirkuk pointed them to a local imam who’d been rumoured to have briefly hosted a number of unsavoury guests. Enter bright lights, Britney Spears and one sleepless night and the imam had provided detailed descriptions for the four-wheel-drive vehicles he’d procured for the operatives. Shortly after Jason requested aerial surveillance support from one of the Predator drones flying reconnaissance rounds over the northern plain, the caravan had been spotted heading east towards the Zagros Mountains. An hour later Jason’s unit had staged a hasty ambush.
Now Jason was certain that the only contraband the Arabs aimed to smuggle over the mountains was far more ominous than plutonium: it had been Fahim Al-Zahrani himself. And Jason still feared that Al-Zahrani was plotting an escape. Crawford had better call for backup, he thought.
Finally, the passage widened and yielded to the cave.
At the opening, Jason paused and moved the light beam left to right. All along the walls the bone piles were stacked high - a circle of death.
What happened to these people? Jason wondered as he paced forward and shone the light on the skeletal remains. There had to be thousands of skeletons stashed unceremoniously in this cave. This was definitely not a modern mass grave, like Crawford wanted to believe. But it certainly was evidence of a large-scale burial. There was no telling if the bodies had been buried at the same time.
Working the cave counterclockwise, he walked the perimeter while using the light to scan the bones. Every few feet, something would catch his eye and he’d paused to examine the remains and hunt for clues. Even if these bones came from victims of an ancient war or genocide, there’d be signs of trauma - broken bones, cleaved limbs, gouges left behind by sharp blades. But there was nothing extraordinary about anything he was seeing.
Conversely, modern genocide wasn’t about torture: its focus was annihilation - speed and efficiency. It wasn’t uncommon for dozens or hundreds to be gunned down en masse by automatic weapons. Or if ammunition was slim, the modern executioner might opt to work his way along a line-up and deliver single-round headshots. Like Saddam’s henchmen had