Foreign Agent

CHAPTER 8

Plastic surgery had made Sacha Baseyev a man of nondescript features and indeterminate origin. All the better for him to move in and out of places he wasn’t supposed to be.

He stood five foot nine inches, but could look taller, or shorter, just by how he carried himself.

He was remarkable in that he was completely unremarkable. Even when he stood next to others, they usually failed to notice him. He was the quintessential “gray man” who faded into the background.

He was one of the best weapons the Russians had ever created against Islamic extremists. He had been trained to infiltrate their ranks and destroy them from within. He was exceptional at it.

But with Anbar, he had taken what he did to an entirely new level. The Russians had laid an elaborate trap for the United States. His job was to bait it. That’s why he was now in Turkey.

He was running a cell of ISIS fighters from an old warehouse. It was in a part of the city where few people spoke, and even fewer asked questions — a perfect location for a safe house.

Tonight, Baseyev’s oiled hair was black, his eyes brown. His knowledge of the Quran was as deep as the ocean. So deep was it that the brothers chose him to lead them in prayer. It was only natural. In their eyes, he was the most pious, the most devout among them. He was their leader.

Their faith in him was absolute and they had willingly ingested the pills he had given them. Though drugs were frowned upon in Islam, exceptions were made in preparation for battle.

Their bodies relaxed and their minds began to float free. It was a religious experience in itself, a hint of what awaited them in Paradise.

One of the men, his eyes dilated, smiled and said, “Insha’Allah, we will be victorious tomorrow, Brother Ibrahim.”

Ibrahim al-Masri was Baseyev’s nom de guerre. He had adopted it years earlier when he had joined a radical madrassa in the Caucasus. From there, he infiltrated his first Muslim extremist group in Chechnya. They had no idea of the deadly viper they had welcomed into their ranks.

Baseyev collected intelligence on the organization that resulted in several high-ranking members being taken out. He also did some of the killing himself — making it all look accidental.

When he used his jihadist connections to move on to ISIS, his reputation preceded him. Many fearsome acts had already become attached to the name Ibrahim al-Masri.

In Iraq and Syria, he slaughtered many enemies of ISIS. And as he did, his fame and prominence within the organization grew. They came to consider him a fierce lion. But it wasn’t always this way. At first, his superiors had been wary of him.

His travel patterns had troubled them. The young fighter came and went, never staying longer than a couple of months. It appeared he wasn’t fully committed to the struggle.

But when he started showing up with things they needed, their image of him began to change. He was proficient at finding hard-to-get items like medicines and blank passports, night-vision equipment and infrared laser devices.

He then began helping develop recruiting strategies and planning attacks. Eventually, Brother Ibrahim came to be seen as a valuable asset and a rising star within ISIS.

As the caliphate grew, he was offered a governorship, but he politely turned it down. Rationing fuel, settling petty squabbles, and overseeing councils were not for him. Allah, he explained, had blessed him with the skill and stamina to fight. His sword was meant to sing, not hang in a scabbard on a wall.

The powers that be understood. They were better off with him not sitting behind a desk. They allowed him broad autonomy and continued to be rewarded for it.

Everything had unfolded just the way the GRU had planned. He was on the inside. No one doubted Ibrahim al-Masri’s sincerity or devotion to the cause.

Unrolling his rug on the floor of the warehouse, he led the men in evening prayers.

He knew the words so well that he could say them in his sleep. He had been placed with an Arabic-speaking family and fully immersed in Islamic culture since his teens. Now in his late twenties, he could converse like a scholar on everything from the conquests of the Prophet Mohammed to the failures of Pan-Arab nationalism and the rise of the caliphate.

Many core ISIS members possessed advanced degrees, and intelligence, especially at the top levels of the organization, was very highly prized. Intelligent men went far and were handsomely rewarded. ISIS saw to it.

The men he had gathered here in this warehouse, however, would not go far. Any who survived the attack tomorrow he would kill himself. That was his will. Their pagan desert god had nothing to do with it. He would not stretch down a magical hand to protect them and smite their enemies. Allah was a phantom.

He was a myth, a figment from the mind of a disturbed psychopath named Mohammed. The violence and hatred he preached had created over a thousand years of anguish.

Sacha Baseyev looked at the men on their mats. How these bloodthirsty animals envisioned any god that would condone their acts of barbarism was beyond him.

He would always remember that September day in Beslan. It felt more like spring than the end of summer vacation. His father, the school’s director, had awakened him and his younger sister before dawn. His mother, an art teacher, was already cooking breakfast.

His father liked to joke that the two best days of the year were the first day of school and the last. Sacha liked to respond that his father was only fifty percent correct.

Who in their right mind wanted summer vacation to end? Even their mother, a schoolteacher, sighed as she moved about the kitchen, pausing as she changed the water in a small vase of flowers they had picked on a recent hike together.

The summer had been full of all sorts of adventures. His six-year-old sister, Dasha, had ridden her first horse. He and Grigori, his best friend, had found a cave with an abandoned jeep inside. They spent weeks pretending to repair it, discussing all the places it would take them.

When Sacha’s birthday arrived, his father gave him a beautiful pocketknife. Catia, the neighbor’s freckled niece visiting from Stavropol, let him hold her hand.

Who would trade any of this for school?

The sun was only just beginning to rise when they arrived at their father’s office. He poured small coffees for them and allowed them to have extra sugar. It was a reward for getting up so early.

Sacha drank his as he watched the officers changing shift at the district police station next door. Many of them had children in the school. Grigori’s father was a police officer. He had taken them into the woods over the summer to shoot his pistol. It was very loud. Not as loud, though, as what was to come.

The traditional start of the Russian school year was known as First Bell, or Knowledge Day. Children dressed in their best clothes and brought their parents and relatives with them. They presented flowers to the teachers and participated in school-sponsored festivities.

Sacha was outside with his parents and sister at eleven minutes past nine that morning. They were welcoming everyone when a police van and a military truck pulled up and his life was shattered forever.

Several dozen heavily armed Islamic terrorists leapt out and began shooting. They were dressed in camouflage military fatigues and black masks. Many wore suicide belts.

Over a thousand people were herded and packed into the school’s gymnasium. There, the terrorists separated off the biggest, strongest men and executed them. One of them was Sacha’s father.

During the next three days, temperatures in the gymnasium soared. The children stripped down to their underwear. Sacha and his friends drank their own urine from shoes to stay hydrated. His mother was taken away and raped. He never saw her again.

The terrorists had rigged the gymnasium with explosive devices in case they were overrun. On the third day, at three minutes past one in the afternoon, something exploded. Two minutes later, there was another explosion. The roof of the gymnasium was on fire. The terrorists refused to let anyone leave.

Minutes later flaming rafters and large sections of roofing began to fall in. Sacha’s sister, Dasha, was trapped. He and Grigori tried to get to her, but they couldn’t. She burned to death.

A third explosion followed, knocking out a huge section of wall. Panicked hostages stampeded to get out. Grigori and Sacha fought their way through the smoke and fire to join them. Then, more shooting started.

The terrorists were firing into the crowd, attempting to stop anyone from fleeing alive. Parents, teachers, children… bodies fell all around them, but Sacha and Grigori kept running. They had to get out. They had to get free.

There was a pop, and then time collapsed. Sacha looked to his left as half of Grigori’s face disappeared. One of the terrorist’s bullets had tumbled through the back of his head and out the front of his face. He seemed to stare at Sacha as his lifeless body collapsed to the ground.

Someone, he would never know who, grabbed Sacha and propelled him forward.

People told him he was lucky to be alive. That he must live his life not only for himself, but also for his dead mother, father, and sister. Those people were wrong.

There was nothing lucky about his being alive. There was nothing lucky about having lived through what he had. It had broken him — like a watch that had been struck so hard, it had stopped at the moment of a terrible accident. He wasn’t alive. He was a walking version of death. He was cold through to his very core. Actual, physical death, if it ever came, would be a relief.

The CIA team and their women in Anbar was just the beginning. An appetizer. The next attack was going to be even more dramatic.