Dead or Alive: Bin Laden's Last Days

By Matthew Morgan

Written by the author of the critically acclaimed A Democracy Is Born (Praeger, 2007), The American Military after 9/11 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), and the six-volume series The Impact of 9/11: The Day that Changed Everything? (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), DEAD OR ALIVE: BIN LADEN’S LAST DAYS is a suspense-filled action thriller that takes the reader on an exciting fictional adventure in the days leading up to Osama Bin Laden’s death. We meet bin Laden, the world’s most wanted criminal and most hated and feared terrorist, in the remote village where he has secreted himself in Pakistan. The story unfolds with fast-paced developments in the war raging on Afghanistan and Pakistan’s remote border, following CIA interrogators, Delta Force operatives, U.S. political power players, Pashtun tribal fighters, and al Qaeda terrorists as events march towards Bin Laden’s death, but not in a way anyone would expect. The author is a veteran of the war in Afghanistan, where he was awarded the Bronze Star for his service in U.S. Army intelligence, and his insider’s perspective gives the story exceptional realism and cutting-edge authenticity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Matthew Morgan
• Release date: May 4, 2011
• ISBN: 9780983620617

Matthew Morgan

Matthew Morgan, David Sinden, and Guy Macdonald are best friends from childhood. Matthew and David are the authors of the hugely successful UK series YUCK. All three live in Kent, England.

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DEAD OR ALIVE

Bin Laden’s Last Days

A Novel

Matthew J. Morgan

Published by Parthenon Books at Smashwords

Copyright 2011 Matthew J. Morgan

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

Requests for permission to use or reproduce material from this book should be directed to [e-mail], or mailed to Permissions, Parthenon Books, 1239 Franklin Drive, Port Orange, Florida 32129.

The author is in no way affiliated with any agency of the U.S. government, and nothing in this book should be taken as a representation of any official government position. This book is entirely fiction, and none of the events actually took place.

978-0-9836206-0-0 (ISBN-13)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Morgan, Matthew J., 1977-

Dead or alive: Bin Laden’s last days / Matthew J. Morgan

978-0-9836206-0-0 (ebook)

For my girls,

Eve, Camila, and Paola

Acknowledgements.

I would like to acknowledge several friends and colleagues for their conscientious review of this manuscript in many stages of its development, including Paul J. Smith, Mike Myer, Matt Scherrer, Suzanne Matwyshen-Gillen, Anthony Nicolopoulos, Lonnie Moore, Jenna Walton, Richard Boswell, Jim Morgan, Janet Morgan, Edith Kutlus, Linda Nguyen, and Ileana Branisteanu. I would also like to thank graphic designer Erika Rojas for her help with the cover design.

This book is a novel in the genre of historical fiction. It is entirely fiction, inspired by true events in the Global War on Terrorism. While some of the events depicted here may resemble actual events, the events and characters are fictional, and their words and actions should not be confused with those of real persons. The characters Osama bin Laden, Jalaluddin Haqqani, and Sirajuddin Haqqani are composites based on the actual individuals from all available sources of information, including declassified government intelligence and journalistic accounts. All other characters are entirely fictional.

The Af-Pak Border Region

Prologue.

A towering figure, he would have loomed over the horizon to anyone looking at him from afar. Of course, around this isolated village in the Bajaur Agency of Pakistan, there were no observers to view the man’s prodigious six-and-a-half foot profile. He faced the setting sun, absently watching it begin its descent toward his former adopted homeland of Afghanistan. Osama bin Laden, hunted by millions of soldiers from countries all around the world. Osama bin Laden, with a $50 million price on his head. Osama bin Laden, the most prominent resident of the village of Nazir.

Nazir was a remote village, noted on no map and accessible by no modern means of transportation. The village was tucked into the rugged, mountainous terrain of Pakistan’s northwest frontier. Bin Laden had been here for such a long time, his presence a closely guarded secret that many had already taken to their graves. There is no better guardian than death to protect the most important of secrets.

With a humble community of a few extended families that lived on subsistence farming and followed the traditional ways of the Pashtuns, Nazir offered a protective resort for bin Laden. Nazir consisted of mud huts nestled in the cliffs of the mountains, with trees covering the terrain. A winding and exhausting road led to the high-altitude village. The terrain and the remoteness afforded protection from Osama’s major vulnerabilities. The cliffs and the thick trees prevented observation by American satellites or spy planes. No one in the village used a phone, so he was also safe from electronic eavesdropping.

The rarity of anyone traveling to or from the village prevented inadvertent revelations. Many of the Pashtun tribes were nomadic, but generations ago, these families had settled in this inaccessible village and lived isolated from its surroundings. Now, on those infrequent occasions when the men left to trade for those few commodities that they acquired from the neighboring tribes (tools, clothes, or prospective brides), one or two of bin Laden’s remaining men accompanied them, always remaining silent and watchful. Their faces were constantly hidden beneath the folds of the shoufa to prevent anyone from remarking the odd presence of Arabs among these rustic Pashtuns. By now fluent in the local Pashtun tongues, these trusted holy warriors ensured that no one learned of the great sheikh’s presence. Or that, if anyone learned, he died shortly afterwards.

So it was not the cave that the Westerners imagined him to have fled to, but it might as well have been. Osama reflected on his situation as he stared at the western horizon on this hazy late afternoon. As a holy teacher and conqueror in the tradition of historical leaders such as Saladin and the Prophet himself, people expected Osama to enjoy a better lifestyle. But he had always eschewed material comforts as causes of weakness of the spirit.

In Saudi Arabia, he had been like a prince, the scion of a wealthy family. He was used to living far below his means, however, attracting attention and surprise for his austerity and winning praise for his generosity. While he could have lived in a palace, his family had resided in a simple apartment with sparse furnishings, no different from a member of Saudi Arabia’s burgeoning middle class. This simple living in his home country was nonetheless more comfortable than his lifestyle after his departure, when the Saudi government had become too intolerable to bear.

In the years of exile afterwards in Sudan and then Afghanistan, despite the impoverished economies of those countries, Osama had been offered to live in comfortable conditions. During the rule of the Taliban, the ten thousand Arab warriors he had brought to that land had enjoyed the best pick of everything Afghanistan had to offer. Osama self-consciously chose the harder life, however. When the Taliban’s supreme leader Mullah Mohammed Omar had asked bin Laden’s group to move to the Taliban capital of Kandahar, there were two options of where to locate the camp. They could move to an area outside the city’s power plant or to the site of the Kandahar International Airport. The latter option had no electricity or plumbing. Bin Laden did not have to think long to move the mujahideen warriors there.

He mulled over his past accomplishments. Today, by any standard, he was an Islamic leader of historic proportions. He had brought the great enemies of Islam, the Jews and crusaders of America and Europe, to their knees. He was beloved by peoples around the world. He was an inspiration to a movement that had revolutionized his holy religion and the entire world.

He did love some comforts that were now denied. In Afghanistan, Osama had made hundreds of phone calls to followers and associates around the world. He had enjoyed satellite television and internet access.

Now he was the most honored guest of a couple hundred illiterate Pashtuns. He lacked electricity (except for his rarely used gas-powered generator), plumbing, the ability to travel, easy access to modern news media. The villagers had never experienced or even heard of any of these things. Not one of them had ever used a toilet or taken a bath.

And, after all, the villagers lived a holy and pious existence. Bin Laden both resented the Western oppression of this hardy and honest people and felt pride that these true Muslims remained uncorrupted by the comforts of a world that had become increasingly materialistic and antagonistic to traditional values. He spat on the ground.

Sheikh? A soft whisper, offering an Arab honorific in high-pitched Pashto, interrupted his musings and prompted him to look over his right shoulder. It was a slender boy, fourteen or fifteen years of age, native to the village. How long had he been standing there, waiting patiently for Osama to rouse himself from his reverie? Bin Laden slowly turned to face the dirty boy. The old man’s thick lips curved slightly into the beginnings of a smile.

Allah’s peace be upon you. What is it, child? he responded, with a soft, whispering voice. Bin Laden recognized the young man, who often ran errands for the village’s elders. Gafaar was his name, bin Laden recalled.

The boy, his gaze looking down vaguely somewhere between his feet and the great teacher’s, looked up hesitantly. He was caught by the electricity of bin Laden’s eyes, dark, filled with power. Bin Laden had deep dark circles under those eyes and a beard that had become considerably greyer in the years since he had first arrived in Nazir. The beard emphasized his long face, which seemed even longer and thinner than in the days when he had first arrived. The boy, intimidated by the great master, quickly averted his gaze and looked down again.

Hmmmm, Osama murmured, reminding the young boy that the great teacher still waited for him to deliver his message.

Peace be upon you, Sheikh. The elders wait for you to join them for tea, Gafaar murmured.

Thank you, child. Allah’s peace to you. I will be there shortly, Osama answered in his soft spoken voice and turned back to his thoughts.

Of all the senior leaders who had been forced to flee Afghanistan during the American invasion, none were as isolated as bin Laden. He thought of his closest Pashtun friend, Jalaluddin Haqqani. Haqqani, who had not been an original member of the Taliban, had become the Minister of Borders and Tribal Affairs and a provincial governor of the Taliban regime. Haqqani now lived far to the south, in the heart of Waziristan, where he was coordinating a resurgent Taliban emirate. He had become the leader of the new Taliban and thus was nowhere near as isolated as Osama himself. Of the other al Qaeda key leaders, his deputy, the scholarly Ayman al-Zawahiri, lived in greater isolation than most, moving every few months among small villages in the northern agencies of the Federally Administered Tribal Area. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the operational leader of the organization, was a study in what happened when an al Qaeda leader became a victim of his own success. Once one becomes so visible, one’s capacity to run things in security diminishes. Unfortunately, that truth had not stopped Sheikh Mohammed from his work. Not long after the American invasion of Afghanistan and the group’s flight to Pakistan, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed had been absconded in the relatively metropolitan Peshawar. After bouncing back and forth between various secret American bases in the Near East and then Eastern Europe, Sheikh Mohammed most likely now resided in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, with so many other of al Qaeda’s best men. Osama had foreseen this and remained hidden.

He took a deep breath and marshaled himself to join Nazir’s elders for afternoon tea. Before turning to walk to the mud hut, he took one more look at the Afghan landscape. Too far away to see, the land was now filled with holy warriors—mujahideen—battling a powerful enemy invader. It brought to mind the Quranic story of David and Jalut (or Goliath, as Christians and Jews called him). With some degree of satisfaction, bin Laden reflected that he had been largely responsible for the defeat of the last Goliath in Afghanistan, the Soviets in the 1980s. Now, the Americans were fighting there. Bin Laden knew he was responsible for bringing those infidels to Afghanistan and thus would be ultimately responsible for the defeat of the Americans as well. Unfortunately, with all the forces of the West fanatically dedicated to finding him, Osama could no longer fight alongside his mujahideen brothers.

Osama bin Laden had a surprisingly accurate view of what was going on in Afghanistan, given his detachment from the outside world. After decades of fighting an Islamic insurgency, Osama understood the battlefield and could envision what was happening there. In spite of his perceptive insight, however, he could not realize everything going on in Afghanistan as he turned away from the horizon. Given Osama’s careful and strict precautions, he would never have expected that the war would be coming again to his doorstep.

1.

On a breezy afternoon hundreds of miles south of Nazir, another village was about to become part of the raging war between the jihadist fighters and Western invaders. Village might not have been the right word, because it was merely a cluster of twenty or so mud huts. There were similarities to Nazir, although it was less remote and in a valley rather than a mountain range. Like Nazir, the village of Zala Khel was inhabited by Pashtuns and its residents lived off the same subsistence farming and raising of livestock that sustained their Naziri brethren. Zala Khel was on the Afghan side of the winding border with Pakistan, but that boundary line meant little to the Pashtun tribesmen.

Six tan armored humvees raced in a column towards Zala Khel, the wheels spinning up clouds of dust in the column’s wake. The vehicles quickly surrounded the huts, as the villagers dropped what they were doing, staring in shock at the approaching American soldiers.

Once the humvees had encircled the village, completing the cordon portion of the cordon and search operation, light-skinned soldiers in desert pattern camouflage dismounted and moved in a disciplined formation toward the villagers. Some villagers began to move towards their homes, but many froze, paralyzed in fear of the soldiers with their intimidating body armor and tan Kevlar helmets.

The soldiers started making menacing gestures with their rifles and screaming incomprehensibly. Through these gestures and the efforts of a lone interpreter who accompanied the Americans, the villagers understood that the men were to be separated from the women and children. Most of the tribesmen slowly began to comply with these instructions, although the shocking situation, the shouting Americans, and the language barrier made it difficult to achieve order.

The Afghan interpreter appeared to be a local man, dressed as he was in a shalwar kamees—a long sleeved, knee-length shirt with baggy pants. The interpreter was not dealing well with the pressure of simultaneously interpreting for the shouting American soldiers and wailing native villagers. In the confusion, a group of men broke off from the group and began running towards the perimeter. Some soldiers were still sitting in the armored humvees encircling the village.

"Wodaraygah! commanded one of the Americans mounted on the armored humvee. His Pashto was imperfect but understandable, yet none of the fleeing men heeded the order to Stop!"

The soldier pointed his weapon in the air and released a warning shot. After hearing the pop of the rifle, the women being corralled in the village covered their ears. The children, many with tears already streaming down their faces, screeched in terror. Most of the fleeing men instinctively dove to the ground upon hearing the rifle discharge. Many covered their heads with their arms, and a few cowered in the fetal position.

Three men, however, continued their race away from the center of the village. The American soldiers leveled their rifles, and one fired a shot at the fleeing villagers. Hit, the leading runner fell to the ground. Seeing this, the two men running behind him dropped to their knees, shielding their heads with their arms.

***

A few hours later, the Americans were readying to leave in the direction from which they had come. Eleven male villagers, including the man who had been shot, were leaving with them. The other Afghans remained behind, bewildered. The men were their fathers, brothers, husbands, and uncles. The war had not reached Zala Khel until today. It had come with a vengeance, however, as the villagers had seen several of their own hooded and bound. The men were shoved into the military vehicles, and the entire convoy sped off with the rapidity with which it had arrived. The tribesmen watched the convoy head west, most likely returning to the foreigners’ military compound at Khost, the provincial capital.

2.

The Afghan city of Khost was close to the Afghan border with the wild regions of Pakistan. Task Force Red, primarily focused on the hunt for bin Laden and other senior terrorist leaders, was headquartered on an American military installation outside the city. A mere fifteen miles from the border, the base, Forward Operating Base (or FOB) Salerno, was home to Task Force Red. Few of the two thousand soldiers on the installation had anything to do with the task force or even knew of its existence beyond the vaguest ideas.

Task Force Red was located in an isolated compound within FOB Salerno. The compound was mostly manned by Army Rangers from the 75th Ranger Regiment, who provided much of the leg work for Task Force Red’s operations. Along with their Delta Force and Navy Seal colleagues, the Rangers were the primary terrorist hunters in Afghanistan, directed by their civilian intelligence counterparts in Task Force Red.

Tony Roubanis, a CIA case officer who himself had been a Ranger-qualified paratrooper, was reviewing the daily intelligence reports, which had frustratingly little useful information in them. There were just too many outlandish claims to take anything seriously. Whenever he read these reports, Tony remembered one of his favorite Afghan authors, Khaled Hosseini, who described in The Kite Runner, "laaf, the Afghan tendency to exaggerate—sadly, almost a national affliction; if someone bragged that his son was a doctor, chances were the kid had once passed a biology test in high school."

Tony was a Greek American, the son of a diplomat who enjoyed dual citizenship in Greece and the United States. Tony had been raised with Greek spoken at home, English at school, and a smattering of European languages as the Roubanis family jaunted across the continent in Tony’s youth. His language ability had been one of the things that had attracted him to government intelligence after serving several years as an officer in the Army.

Tony had dark brown eyes emphasized by long black eyelashes. He was no longer as fit as he used to be, his waistline having grown softer in the years since he had left the military. His physique was not helped by his habit of munching on Snickers bars, a habit that Tony presently indulged while perusing the day’s intelligence data.

He had twenty different intelligence reports on the locations of Osama bin Laden and other senior terrorist leaders, but they defied common sense. And where the reports seemed slightly plausible, they contradicted themselves. He looked over at Jim Foster, a master sergeant in the Army and a member of the elite and secretive Delta Force unit.

Jim, I don’t know how we’re going to get anywhere with this pile of shit, Tony complained, holding up a few of the offending intel reports.

Well, our sources are a bunch of self-serving fucks, Jim responded, wrinkling his craggy features with distaste. Jim’s piercing, pale blue eyes looked at Tony. They will do anything to get a government contract or a bottle of booze, depending on their mood.

Jim was referring to economic ties with local warlords, which were secured through cooperation with American intelligence, and a separate popular CIA program on the frontier to give liquor to informants. In a country strictly adhering to Islamic law, alcoholic beverages were impossible to come by and had proven a compelling incentive for assertiveness among the intelligence sources. One of their sources was partial to an odd combination produced by mixing Jack Daniels with Mountain Dew. Unfortunately, there were too few incentives for reliability. It seemed as often as not, the informants were passing along rumors which could have been invented by anyone with enough creativity, including the informants themselves.

We sure have hit a dry spell, Tony said glumly. A while back, 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed had been captured with the help of Pakistani Intelligence Services. Since then, the predator drone bombing campaign had done much damage to many of the Taliban’s senior operation leaders. But