Don Pendleton: Appointment In Baghdad

As Syria, like Saddam’s Iraq, was a Baathist state, IMJ’s internal operations had often involved operations against elements of Islamist opposition domestically. Externally, international operations had focused on the exportation and sponsorship of terrorist acts and causes the regime was sympathetic to, such as interference in the internal politics of Lebanon. Its agents operated from Syrian embassies and in the branch offices of Syria’s national airline. Dozens of terrorist actions had been attributed to them, including the attempted bombing of an Israeli airliner at London’s Heathrow Airport in April of 1986.

The IMJ’s position as favored attack dog had not changed with the death of Hafez al-Assad and the ascendancy of his son, Bashar.

Most importantly for Stony Man, the IMJ had been at the spearhead of the pipeline operation moving foreign fighters and equipment into western Iraq. Even if the Toronto cell was a passive operation, its communications, records and computer files could prove to be vital. Two days earlier a known courier, monitored by the CIA as an informational node between disparate jihadist cells, had disappeared after disembarking a plane in Toronto’s Pearson International Airport.

The runner’s face had shown up in a routine situation report filed by an Army counterintelligence unit working out of the Pentagon and in close liaison with the Defense Intelligence Agency. The report had put him outside an extremist mosque mostly unpopular with the larger Toronto Muslim community. Stony Man had been put on alert.

Mack Bolan had once again been placed at the sharp end.

The MP-5 SD-3 was up and at the ready in his grip as he ghosted down the staircase toward the third-floor landing. Intelligence targets were worth more alive than dead. However, as had been the case with al-Qaeda-in-Iraq’s leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, it was often more expedient to simply take them out when other means could not be readily facilitated. In this case a snatch operation under the eyes of CSIS had been deemed imprudent and traditional American assets too much of a potential political liability.

Bolan stepped softly off the staircase and stopped by the interior door on the narrow landing. From his check of the blueprints Bolan knew the third floor housed offices, a small kitchen and bedroom apartments while the second floor, directly above the grocery store, was a wide-open place of worship housing prayer mats, a lectern and screens to separate male and female faithful.

Bolan tried the knob to the fire door. It turned easily under his hand and he pulled it open, keeping the MP-5 submachine-gun up and at the ready. The door swung open smoothly, revealing a dark stretch of empty hall. Bolan stepped into the hallway and let the fire door swing shut behind him. He caught it with the heel of his boot just before it made contact with the jamb and gently eased it back into place.

Down the hallway, in the last room, a bar of light shone from underneath a closed door. Bolan heard indistinct voices coming from behind it, too muffled to make out clearly. Occasionally a bark of laughter punctuated the murmurs. The soldier stalked down the hall. Prudence dictated clearing each room he passed before he put those doorways at his back, but it was an unrealistic expectation for a lone operator in Bolan’s circumstance.

He eased into position beside the closed door and went down on one knee. Keeping his finger on the trigger of the MP-5, Bolan pulled a preassembled fiber-optic camera tactical display from his inside jacket pocket. He placed the coiled borescope cable on the ground and unwound it from the CDV display.

It was awkward working with only his left hand, but the voices on the other side of the door were clearly audible and speaking in what he thought was Arabic, though Bolan’s own skill in that language was low enough that it might have been Farsi. He turned on the display with an impatient tap of his thumb and then slid the cable slowly through the slight gap under the door.

The display reflected the shifting view as Bolan pushed the fiber-optic camera into position. A brilliant light filled the screen, and the display self-adjusted to compensate for the brightness. A motionless ceiling fan came into focus and Bolan twisted the cable so that the camera no longer pointed directly up at the ceiling.

A modest kitchen set twisted around on the slightly oval-shaped picture, and Bolan could clearly distinguish four men sitting around the table. All wore neutral colored clothes and sported beards, except for a younger man seated to the left, whose facial hair was dark but sparse and whispery.

Bolan was able to identify all of the men by the photographs that had been included in his mission workups. One man was Hiba Bakr, the imam of the Toronto mosque, a radical Whabbist cleric with ties to the Egyptian-based Muslim Brotherhood. Sixty-three years old, veteran of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan where he had served as spiritual adviser to the mujahideen, Bakr was a man intimately plugged into the international jihadist network, and had been for decades. His fiery rhetoric and extreme interpretation of the Koran had earned him followers among the disaffected Muslim youth of the area and the interest, albeit passively, of the RCMP.

The next man at the table was the youth with the wispy beard. Bolan identified him as Aram Mohammed Hadayet. It was his cell-phone calls that had been intercepted. An automatic pistol sat on the kitchen table in front of the youth. He listened as the cleric spoke, but his eyes kept shifting to the pistol on the table.

Next to Hadayet sat the man who had so excited the DIA—Walid Sourouri. A known graduate of al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan under the Taliban, Sourouri had impressed his trainers with his nondescript demeanor and language capabilities. No glorious death by suicide for this warrior. Instead he was employed to help the networks circumvent the technical superiority of Western intelligence agencies by keeping things primitively simple. Sitting at the imam’s kitchen table was the foot messenger of al Qaeda.

The third man was Raneen Ogedi, a blunt-featured man with a large reputation within the intelligence community. It was a gruesome reputation that had somehow failed to capture the attention of the news media for one reason or another. Despite this, Bolan realized he had stumbled upon a killer from the Iraqi A-list of wanted men.

Ogedi was a former cell commander of Saddam’s fedayeen, and an operator who had exploited his Syrian intelligence contacts to funnel in foreign fighters during the earlier stages of the American occupation and to later on target Iraqi consensus government Shiite officials in hopes of exacerbating a civil war. He had been a virulent Baathist until the fall of Saddam, after which he had suddenly found his Muslim faith again, most specifically its very radical and extreme fringe elements.

The man was almost never accompanied by less than a squad of Syrian-trained bodyguards, but Bolan saw no evidence of them in the kitchen. Like the youth Hadayet, Ogedi had a weapon positioned in front on him on the kitchen table. The wire-stock of the Skorpion machine pistol had been collapsed, and the automatic weapon was barely larger than a regular handgun.

The resolution on the borescope was state-of-the-art, and Bolan was able to make out several books on the table as well as the weapons. One was a copy of the Koran, another a modern arms book and the third a U.S. Army munitions manual.

Bakr was speaking directly to Hadayet, his words impassioned. The youth nodded in agreement and muttered something in a low voice. The cleric’s blunt finger tapped the worn copy of the Koran for emphasis, and Sourouri nodded in enthusiastic agreement. His bulky parka fell open when he did, and Bolan got a flash of the nylon strap supporting the man’s shoulder holster.