Courtesy of Timothy Clemente

Omar Mohammed hunts terrorists in Baghdad. Hunts them and kills them. A few months ago, he killed two big guys in Al Qaeda — Abu Ayyub al-Masri and Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, the two most-wanted terrorists in all of Iraq. But when you hunt Al Qaeda, they also hunt you. The more you kill them, the more they want to kill you. They've shot Omar, blown him up, and killed dozens of his men.

Omar is a senior officer in the Iraqi Counterterrorism Unit. He was doing police work when the Americans invaded in 2003, and he volunteered his services to the occupiers as the insurgent war overwhelmed the American presence, enveloping them in a kind of warfare for which they were not prepared. To America's military and to many intelligence operatives in Washington and in Iraq, Omar is the best terrorist hunter alive. His photo has never been published. His face doesn't exist in any database linked to his real name. It's a broad, handsome face, and he's thick as a bull across the neck and shoulders.

At this precise moment he's not in Iraq, though; he's in a red canoe on a river in Virginia, heading fast toward a waterfall.

In the back of the canoe is Tim Clemente, a former FBI agent who until recently served on Washington's Joint Terrorism Task Force and is himself regarded as an excellent terrorist hunter. He trained Omar to hunt terrorists. Like a lot of FBI agents, you don't notice Clemente at first. Not too tall, not too short. Hair close-cropped but not military. Calm, kind hazel eyes. As can happen with those who bond in a common purpose under threat of death, Omar and Clemente are best friends, and they are here on the Rappahannock, as far from Baghdad as you can get, for a vacation with their families. In a month, the United States will pull all but fifty thousand troops out of Iraq, effectively ending all combat operations there, and the White House has announced that all American troops will be gone by the end of 2011, bringing an end to the eight-year U. S. military engagement altogether.

That's why Clemente has invited Omar* here.

Because of Omar's great success at killing terrorists on behalf of the United States, his chances of dying a natural death in his country are very slim, and so Clemente wants to show him all that America has to offer, thinking maybe he can persuade Omar to bring his family here and make a new life. He wants to take him to Washington, maybe show him California. He doesn't want him to be bombed, shot, or beheaded when the American troops leave for good.

Clemente steers the canoe over the waterfall, both of them whooping. Omar has been trying to take in this beautiful scenery. Having just arrived from Baghdad last night, he finds it's almost too much. The white water is tricky here, not deep but very fast. As they shoot the rapids, Clemente yells, "Go left!" He j-hooks hard, but the canoe spins sideways, taking water. Large rocks ahead. They both spill out into the chest-deep water, and the submerged canoe, caught in the fast current, swings around hard and catches Omar off guard, smashing him against a large rock. The canoe buckles around the rock, pinning Omar's leg, trapping him.

"My leg," Omar yells. "It's broken!" He's trying to laugh, but panic flashes across his face, too.

"Oh, stop crying like a baby!" Clemente yells.

"I'm not crying!"

The harder he works to get free, the more surely he is trapped. "I need to get to the hospital!" Omar says, and screams in pain, which alarms Clemente, who is trying to use his paddle as a lever to move the damn canoe off him but seems to be making things worse, and the churning water is just too strong.

Clemente falls down in the water, laughing. "I may have to cut off that leg," he says.

"It hurts worse than anything!" Omar shouts. He knows pain. A couple years ago, militia gunmen shot two bullets into his leg. Then they blew him up in his car. He doesn't remember that pain. He was in a coma for three weeks. Woke up with a beard. Now he's wide awake, and not completely sure he'll make it off this river.

"You're trying to kill me!" Omar hollers. "I see your plan now!"

"Come on, infidel, there are worse places to be!" Clemente yells. It's a joke from their days in Baghdad. Infidel. The truth is, to the jihadis, Omar is an infidel, marked for death because of his work with the Americans. Al Qaeda has been killing Iraqi cops with terrible frequency, and those are ordinary cops. Omar is no ordinary cop, and the terrorists he just killed were among Al Qaeda's top leadership in Iraq, responsible for murdering hundreds of Iraqi citizens and many American soldiers. If he goes back, Clemente is certain Omar will be killed in retaliation, in short order. Just today, Omar received word that Ali Lutfi al-Rawi, a sadistic killer whom Omar had put away for life, escaped from prison. And even if Omar lives, what kind of life is that?

"Why are you trying to kill me?" Omar howls.

"Better you die here than in Iraq!"

Baghdad, 2004

One morning in January 2004, a man drove a white pickup loaded with a thousand pounds of explosives toward the main entrance of the U. S. military headquarters in Baghdad. Clemente heard the blast from Camp Liberty, where the FBI is housed, grabbed his pistol and long gun, hauled himself into the back of an SUV with the FBI's hostage-rescue team, and raced toward the smoke and fire. He'd been in Iraq for three days.

American soldiers had already cordoned off the blast area when the SUV pulled up. Clemente marked the location of a severed hand far from the blast, then walked to the edge of the smoldering crater. He'd been early on the scene at the Pentagon on September 11 and was among the first generation of FBI to operate internationally to combat terrorism; he had also seen this before in Kenya, Tanzania, and Yemen. It was to be his job in Baghdad to prevent things like the Assassins' Gate bombing, as the blast would come to be known. But Clemente didn't know a thing about Iraq. He'd quickly need to find somebody who did.

Two days earlier, Clemente had made his way to the former jail that housed the Major Crimes Unit of the Iraqi police. He saw AK-47's and grenade launchers strewn all over the floor, and more leaning against the barred windows. The Iraqi cops were deferential to Clemente but they were wary, too. No one spoke.

Finally a young cop stepped forward and offered his hand. Clemente shook it and looked into Omar's face. "What's with all the weapons?" he asked.

"We got in a shoot-out here last week," Omar answered in unbroken English. "Insurgents blasted us from the minaret across the street."

"You kill them?"

Omar nodded.

"How many guys are you?" Clemente asked.

"Just us." Omar pointed to a small clutch of cops. They seemed to have no interest in Clemente and turned back to their work, whatever work a cop can do without computers, maps, or even pencils.

"What's wrong with them?" Clemente asked.

"No, they're great," Omar said. "They just don't speak English. Watch this." He yelled at the cops, "Hey, you piece of shits!" He turned to Clemente. "Do I say it right?" Omar yelled at them again. "I'm going to kill all of you!" Nobody even looked up. Omar grinned.

"Where'd you learn English?" Clemente asked.

"A beautiful woman," Omar said. "I followed her into a night class. She dropped out, but I stayed." Omar ushered Clemente to a jail cell, his makeshift office.

Eight months earlier, Paul Bremer, the American administrator in Iraq, had fired the entire army and police force. Unemployed and angry, some of those armed men would join the insurgency, planting some of the deadliest improvised bombs ever seen in warfare.

But not Omar. When the national police force was dissolved, Omar drove a cab, keeping an AK-47 under the seat to protect himself, waiting for the chance to be a cop again. His father, a highly decorated army general during the war against Iran, had been murdered by Saddam Hussein when he voiced opposition to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990. "We only find one of his boots, half burned. We put it in the casket. To this day, my mother thinks he was buried."

Omar had gone to the prison to press charges against Saddam's armed forces chief of staff, who he believed ordered the hit, only to find that thousands who'd also lost fathers and brothers were there ahead of him. Even when Saddam was in the hole, Omar was still terrified of him. Saddam believed he was coming back, and until he was arrested, Omar had the same feeling, that Saddam would come back and kill all of those who had betrayed him.

Clemente had been in Iraq long enough to learn that Iraqis couldn't be trusted. At least that's the warning he'd received from some of his FBI colleagues: All Iraqi cops are dirty and in bed with Saddam and the terrorists. But Clemente, himself a former St. Louis cop, had no choice but to trust someone.

"I don't want to spend weeks reading files," he told Omar. "I need a partner here who can help me identify terrorists."

"I can do that," Omar said.

Clemente looked around at the AK-47's and rocket launchers stacked in Omar's office. "You killed those guys and recovered these yourself?" he asked.

Omar smiled and nodded.

The next day, the two started working together. Omar would drive, as he knew the neighborhoods, the culture, and could immediately distinguish Shiite from Sunni. Clemente grew a beard to blend in a little and took to wearing a kaffiyeh. Together they built an informant network from nothing, and before long they had people in bakeries, driving taxis, sweeping floors inside mosques. Omar's men started bringing in low-level terrorists, locals who were being paid by the insurgency to set bombs and provide intelligence on the Americans to Al Qaeda.

By American standards, Omar didn't have much formal police training, but he was eager and seemed fearless. Under Saddam, police loyalty to the regime was valued much more than detective work. At the police academy, Omar's class was ordered to skin and eat a live dog. After that, his instructors believed, no order would be too repulsive to carry out.

Hunting terrorists, Clemente told Omar, is just good police work. But doing police work in a war zone complicates things somewhat. Leads disappear or get shot, so it pays to act fast. Some days, Omar and Clemente would interview a source in the morning, identify a suspect, tap the phone a few minutes later, have a unit doing surveillance in the afternoon, make an arrest, and be interrogating by evening.

Slowly, they began to trust each other. One day, when Omar had been on the job for just a couple of weeks, his car got hit by fifty-five AK-47 rounds on his way to meet Clemente at the American base. He wasn't hurt, but it told him that militants had discovered that he was working with the Americans. The next time Omar drove to the base, he saw Clemente ambling down Route Irish, the deadliest stretch of road in Iraq, wearing shorts and a baseball cap, with a gun tucked into the back of his waistband. He was waiting for Omar, to ride with him for the most dangerous stretch. From then on, most days Clemente would walk out to ride in with him. During a dust storm, Omar called to warn Clemente that insurgents might use the weather as cover to fire mortars into the FBI operations center at Camp Liberty.

And they began to catch bombers. Two months on the job, one of Omar's sources, a baker, called in to report a suspicious man carrying a duffel. The baker's street was one that U. S. convoys used every day. The man was now digging a hole, the baker said. Just minutes away, Omar raced over with one of his cops, parked, and approached on foot, trying to look casual, and then wheeled around and jammed his pistol into the guy's stomach while his partner gingerly grabbed the bag containing the bomb.

Clemente arrived to interrogate the suspect, a handcuffed middle-aged man named Zaid, and underneath a napkin on the table, he found a small device, the size of a brick, with a hand crank and wires with alligator clips at the ends. Clemente shut down the interrogation, took Omar for a walk.

"Is that how you do police work?"

"Of course. We torture them."

"Don't you try to figure out what they are doing first, and who they work for?" Clemente asked.

Omar said, "No, why should I? This guy is a terrorist — he was going to blow up people."

"We can flip him," Clemente said. "Let me talk to him."

Back in the room, he uncuffed the man. "Zaid, did Al Qaeda pay you to bury the bomb?"

"Yes."

"How much?"

"$150."

"Do you have a job?"

"No."

Clemente pulled out a photo of his children. "I have eight children," he said, "and if my kids were starving, I would do anything to put food on the table." Clemente put a hand on Zaid's shoulder.

"What if I could pay you more money to not make bombs?" Clemente had convinced the FBI to give him plenty of cash to pay informants to make his plan work. Zaid took a breath. Omar gazed at him intently.

"I'll pay you to tell us whenever you see bad men planning or doing bad things."

Finally, Zaid said, "How much can you pay?"

Clemente looked at Omar. Bingo.

And it was this moment — the moment that he learned to be clever rather than brutal — that was the most important moment in Omar's life. With this new skill, he felt that maybe his job wasn't so futile after all. He felt as if, just maybe, he could help save his country.

Along the way, Omar and Clemente became inseparable and began to build a deep friendship. Clemente heard that Omar liked fishing and brought him to Camp Slayer, an American base on the grounds of one of Saddam's former palaces, where the dictator had dug lavishly stocked lakes. No rod and reel for Omar; he just wrapped the line, which he called the "lion," around the thick of his hand. And once he hooked a fish, he didn't let go. One day he caught a sixty-pound carp by hand, waded into the water, and gaffed it. Clemente snapped pictures. And they would talk movies for hours. Omar loves anything with Robert De Niro, but his favorite movie is Die Hard, because a cop is the hero, and it has a happy ending. He doesn't care for Serpico, which is one of Clemente's favorites. Too dark.

One day they took the baker fishing at Camp Slayer, and he told them that jihadis in his neighborhood were recruiting blue- and green-eyed Iraqis to walk into police stations and army bases wearing suicide vests. Two weeks later, Zaid called to tell them that someone named Ahmed was in town. "He's a guy whose father was part of the former regime."

Turns out that was an understatement. The father was Muhammad Younis al-Ahmed, known to investigators as M.Y.A., a member of Saddam's inner circle and a leader of the Ba'ath Party military wing. No insurgent action in Iraq, from suicide bombings to kidnappings, happened without M.Y.A.'s green light. He controlled billions of dollars stolen from the Iraqi treasury to fund the insurgency. So wily that he never showed up on Washington's original deck of cards. Eight weeks before, when they'd captured Saddam in his hole, he was holding letters to M.Y.A. They included how to run the insurgency, how to reach out to Al Qaeda, what kinds of attacks to execute, where to concentrate. These were Saddam's orders to his commander as to how to conduct the war. Through their new network, Omar and Clemente had stumbled upon the guy at the top.

In short order, Clemente got a call from a Delta Force leader. He wanted to see Cle-mente immediately.

The Delta commander wanted to know about Omar. He said they were impressed by the intelligence he'd been able to gather. "We've been chasing M.Y.A. for months but have nothing." He wanted to know how much Clemente trusted Omar.

"With my life," Clemente answered.

"Bring him in. We want to meet him."

"When?"

"Now."

This is how Omar found himself walking into Delta's top-secret compound, which he would come to call Disneyland — the first Iraqi cop ever to set foot inside.

*Omar's name has been changed to protect his identity.

Alan Silfen

Virginia, 2010

Having survived their canoe adventure with just scrapes and bruises, Omar and Clemente go driving through the Virginia backcountry. Clemente's behind the wheel for a change, and as he rounds a bend, he sees a for-sale sign and slows down — What about that one? It needs a little work, but nobody will be trying to blow you up. Not long ago, a truck bomb blew up across the street from Omar's apartment in Baghdad, killing ninety-five people and injuring six hundred, and parts of the engine landed in his apartment. "That sort of thing doesn't happen around here," Clemente says as he pulls up to his property. They get out and walk under the old beech trees. Tim's not rich. He bought the land in 1998 for $89,000, making the down payment with overtime he'd earned working the embassy bombings in Africa. Since his retirement in 2007, he has found work in the movies, doing some screenwriting and consulting on a few films and TV shows, "so that they get the law-enforcement stuff right." But just look at this spread. The house is on twenty-eight acres that was a Union encampment in advance of the bloody Battle of Fredericksburg. Homemade swings now hang from the high branches. Omar's three-year-old daughter runs toward them through the trees and hangs on Omar's legs as they walk. Clemente built his own house here, and he wants to build one for Omar, too. The bad guys will not find you here, he tells him. A homemade version of witness protection. We can do this. You, your family, you'll be safe. We'll find you work. Clemente's own grandfather, a stonemason, came over from Italy with nothing.

In the meantime, Clemente has plenty of room for them to stay. There are some visa problems, a bit mysterious given Omar's service to America, but Clemente's hired a lawyer and has a stack of letters to support Omar's petition, including from top American generals. Omar wants the visas for his wife and daughter, wants them to stay here where life is good. He's less certain about himself, as he has unfinished work in Baghdad, where the situation is still so dire.

Omar picks up a call as he makes his way to the porch. Clemente watches his friend's face turn grim. More news on the escape of al-Rawi, who has been an obsession of Omar's since he kidnapped and killed Margaret Hassan, an Irish aid worker, in autumn 2004. The video al-Rawi made of her death shows him shoving a green apple onto the muzzle of his pistol as a silencer before shooting her at point-blank range. Omar had watched the video over and over again and had come to care about Hassan, who had spent thirty years in Iraq, working among the poorest. Omar hunted al-Rawi for three years, and put him in prison for life. He turns to Clemente: "If I'd been in Baghdad, he wouldn't have escaped."

"Who are you, Superman?" Clemente says. "There's nothing you could have done, Omar."

But then the bustle of Clemente's household envelops Omar and his wife, Amira, and their daughter. Clemente and his wife, Karen, have eight kids, ranging from six years old to twenty-three, and the kids are lounging around the kitchen on stools pulled up to wooden counters and spilling over into easy chairs and couches in the adjoining family room. They have all been homeschooled and there's no TV, but there are always a half dozen laptops going.

In Iraq, Clemente always carried a "family" cell phone, and Omar recalls that unless he was on a mission, when that phone rang, Tim always picked up.

Clemente's middle daughter, Grace, is eighteen and has a diamond nose stud and wants to be an FBI profiler like Tim's older brother, Jim, who retired in 2009 after twenty-two years with the Bureau. As she dries the dishes, she asks Amira how she and Omar met.

"He saved my life," Amira says quietly. "It was very romantic."

Omar leans against the counter. "I got shot twice in the leg."

Amira, an electrical engineer, had done some work for the Americans in the Green Zone when she started getting threats. She was living with her parents, and her family took the threats seriously because her sister, who was also working with the Americans, had already been shot in the chest three times by militants at a roadblock. Army doctors worked fifteen hours and saved her life.

"Friends in the FBI asked me to check up on Amira," Omar says. "So I went to see her..."

He gave Amira his cell number — and told her to call anytime, day or night.

"I'm on night shift when she calls," Omar says. "She's terrified, whispering that men with guns are in her house looking for her."

Amira had locked herself in the bathroom. The gunmen were ransacking the house and yelling, Which one works for the Americans?

Omar grabbed a vest and an AK-47 and raced to the house in his SUV, lights flashing. There were two cars parked at her front gate, and an armed lookout. Omar crashed straight into the first car.

"My SUV landed right on top of it, killing the getaway driver inside. And then I shot the lookout."

Clemente's youngest son asks, "You killed him?"

Omar looks to Tim, who nods, It's okay.

"Yes, I killed him," Omar says softly. "The gang was shooting at me from inside the house. I kept firing, killing two of them, and I saw a third go down. I ran inside the gate, trying to get to the house. That's when I felt the first bullets hit me."

As Omar was falling, he returned fire, killing the last gunman. By that point his backup had arrived.

"So you know what he does?" Amira says. "He tells his guys to carry him inside. So they do, and he knocks on the bathroom door."

"I wanted her to hear my voice," Omar says. "So she'll know she's safe."

"I opened the door," Amira says, "and saw him, leg bleeding and shattered, being held up by his men."

"She squeezed my breath out," Omar laughs, "and we fell to the ground."

"I waited at the hospital all night outside his room."

"In the morning she kissed me. And three months later we got married! That's Baghdad romance."

By now it's late, and Omar's feeling a little sore from the river, leaving aside the jet lag from having just flown in from Iraq.

"You should just stay here," Clemente says. "We've got seven bedrooms."

"No, thank you, we're good at the hotel," Omar says. "There's a swimming pool."

Omar carries his sleeping daughter out into the darkness.

Later that night, after his wife and daughter are asleep, Omar walks across the freeway to the Burger King for a snack. He is the only customer, and he sits on the curb with his burger. In Baghdad, he ate at least one meal a day at a Burger King at Camp Liberty, sitting on picnic tables under camo netting, surrounded by concrete blast walls and sandbags; sometimes he and Clemente brought informants, some who were low-level terrorists they had flipped, and they'd eat Whoppers as they plotted how to stop the bombings.

But now Omar worries that nothing's going to stop the bombings, not when the Iraqi army's chief of staff today announced that the Iraqi military won't be ready until 2020 to stop foreign insurgents. Maybe Tim's right, maybe it's crazy to go back.

Omar looks at the nice new Burger King. In another life, he'd like to be the burger king of a tranquil Iraq, own franchises all over the country — he'd make millions. But that Iraq doesn't exist, and may never again. And what would he do in America? Are there terrorists to hunt? It's beautiful here, very peaceful, the abundance is dazzling, and Tim and his family are so good to them. But there's the unfinished work of his own country that just won't leave Omar alone. His teeming mind will scarcely let him sleep.

Omar walks back across the freeway to his hotel room, and he will stay up and lurk for hours more on a jihadi Web site. When he finally falls asleep, it's the deepest sleep he's had in months.

The next afternoon, Omar's talking to Clemente when his phone rings again. He excuses himself and comes back a few minutes later. "I need to be in Washington tomorrow. Our friends there would like to see me."

"Take me with you, Omar," Clemente implores. "You need someone to negotiate for you." As hard as he's been trying to persuade Omar to make Virginia his home, there are others in the U. S. government who are convinced that counterterrorism in Iraq simply won't function if Omar decides to accept his friend's offer of a comfortable retirement in the country. For several years, Omar has been working closely with the CIA and Special Forces and the "Delta boys" in Baghdad — on most significant operations outside the Green Zone — and it has come to the attention of some very senior agency officials that he is vigorously pursuing a visa for U. S. residency. This has them concerned that he isn't going back to the fight. And so the urgent meeting.

In spite of Clemente's pleading, the next morning, Omar goes on his own. And that night, Omar returns after dark and announces he wants to get drunk. Clemente takes him to a hotel bar in Fredericksburg. Omar wants to try a margarita, maybe two. Clemente's never seen Omar drink liquor before.

Finally, Omar turns to Clemente and says, "I'm going back, Tim."

"Fuck you," Clemente says. "No, you're not."

They promised Omar that American special ops would stay in Baghdad for as long as he needed them. He wouldn't just be abandoned.

"Bullshit! It's a lie! I know the agency and I respect them. But you're just an asset to them, now, Omar. And you'll just as easily be a casualty. Their obligations are to the institution, and never to the individual. That's why I want you out of there." Clemente is livid. "Did they offer you a visa for your family?"

Omar shakes his head. "I didn't go there to negotiate," he says.

"They should have. Getting you a visa just takes a phone call. This is a dirty CIA trick, Omar." He's pleading now, eyes brimming with tears. "Don't you see? They need you back in Baghdad to help prove the withdrawal plan can work — even if it kills you."

The evening dissolves into a drunken emotional blur.

The next morning Clemente picks Omar up at the hotel. He's just stirring. "How you feeling?" Clemente asks.

"Ahh. Dizzy."

"Headache?"

"Big headache."

"I have the best cure for a hangover." They grab some egg sandwiches from the Wawa and drive over to the Bass Pro Shops for fishing gear. Omar comes to life, selects his tackle. I'll take the ninety-pound test.

Clemente has chartered a deep-sea fishing boat. "You've fished enough carp in Saddam's moats, buddy," he says. "Let's find you a tidewater Virginia house, Omar. Or something down the road from us. Hell, you can have a piece of my land! It's yours. I'll give it to you. We'll build the prettiest house for your girls. But please, just don't go back."

Even out on the Chesapeake, Omar wraps the line around his hand, and when he feels a bite, he lets the hook set with a tug. His pain threshold is extraordinary. With an upward stroke of his hand, a rockfish arcs through the air and crashes on the deck.

"They promised if I stay three years, I can get a job at Langley as an analyst," he tells Clemente.

"Bullshit, Omar. They won't even get you a visa!" Clemente yells. "You go back and you and your family will be killed. And they'll do nothing to protect you. I can get you a job tomorrow, teaching at Quantico. Who knows more about Al Qaeda? You should be advising the president!" Clemente is searching, desperate. And then, a ridiculous plan occurs to him. "Let's go to Hollywood!" he says. "Let me take you there. I'll introduce you to movie people. I'll introduce you to Robert De Niro! You can meet them all. Just don't go back to Iraq. Please. Let's get you a job in the movies."

Baghdad, 2004

On the way into Disneyland, Omar had to pass three checkpoints. He walked into the Delta command room, where flat screens showed real-time footage from all across Iraq.

On the wall was a large photo of M.Y.A. Underneath, a notice that the reward for his capture was $1 million. Omar, stunned, took a closer look. "One million for him?"

"That's the official number." Unofficially, he was told, America would pay $5 million in cash. Omar looked at Clemente. Twenty soldiers sat down on folding chairs and the meeting began.

Clemente explained that M.Y.A. had a real estate problem. He had properties all over Baghdad that he needed to sell before the Iraqi government seized them; the funny part was that he needed a lawyer to negotiate the sales for him and backdate contracts. He had sent his son, Ahmed, to take care of things for him. Tracking Ahmed offered an excellent opportunity to kill or capture M.Y.A.

The Delta team agreed to help on the operation, and they offered beacon trackers, drones, and a couple of assault teams.

A week later, when Ahmed pulled up to the lawyer's house in his white BMW, geo-positioning satellites locked in on the car. The whole house was wired for sound, and an assault force waited, hidden nearby. A Delta operator put a tracker on the BMW. Clemente and Omar waited back at Disneyland, listening.

"Do you have the money?" the lawyer asked.

"It's here," Ahmed said.

"Your father needs to sign these documents."

"I'll take them to him."

"I have to see him sign them. How do I know this is being done with your father's approval?"

"Do you know who my father is?"

Ahmed sounded agitated, upset. He told the lawyer he'd get back to him and walked out of the house. Afraid that he'd vanish, Omar and Clemente gave the signal to snatch him. As Ahmed walked toward his car, an assault team of Delta operators on the ground and in the sky descended on him. He was brought to Camp Cropper, the military detention center by Baghdad Airport.

At Ahmed's interrogation, Clemente, another FBI agent named Sutton, and two Delta boys were in the room, with Omar watching from the back. Ahmed was a big guy, twenty-six years old, spoke good English, and was very arrogant. Designer jeans and lots of cologne. Omar became offended at his behavior. After an hour, he asked permission to speak to the prisoner. He walked up to the handcuffed young man and said in Arabic, "My friends were killed in your father's operations. Now you're going to pay for the blood you spilled. I'm going to make you pay."

Ahmed smirked. "Fuck you. You can't touch me, the Americans have me." Omar rocked back slightly on his heels, and before Clemente could react, he windmilled his right hand and slapped Ahmed so hard that he lifted him off the floor. Just as quickly Omar hit him hard with his open left hand. Clemente grabbed Omar in a bear hug and pushed him back. But Omar strained forward into Ahmed's face and said in Arabic, "No! You are my prisoner."

With that, Ahmed wasn't so composed anymore. "You can't let him take me," he begged Clemente. "He'll torture me, he'll kill me."

"Well, I can help," Clemente said. "There's another way this can go. Just tell us how you contact your father."

Ahmed slipped off an Italian loafer. Stashed under the insole were three SIM cards. He asked for his three phones back, put the SIM cards into each of the phones, and showed Clemente what he thought was an untraceable method for contacting M.Y.A. It involved initiating contact with one phone, talking on a second phone, and listening on a third. Ahmed dialed the first phone. He let it ring once, and hung up. This signaled his father that it was him calling. He dialed the second phone and said hello. A few seconds later, his third phone rang. His father's voice was on the other end of the line. "Where are you?" he asked Ahmed.

"I'm in Baghdad. I'm getting ready to do that thing."

Hearing something in Ahmed's voice, he said, "Tell me what's wrong. Are you with the Americans? Do the Americans have you?"

"They do, father, and they want you to give yourself up."

"Die like a man" was all his father said, and hung up the phone. Both lines went dead, and Ahmed broke into sobs.

Delta had traced the calls to a village just across the border in Syria.

"Let's go!" Omar shouted. He was ready. M.Y.A. was within reach. "That won't be possible," said the Delta commander. Delta didn't have authorization to cross into Syria, by order of the president of the United States.

In private, Omar implored Clemente. "Let's go anyway," he said. "If your government won't do it officially, we can go ourselves."

"I'm an FBI agent, I can't go," Clemente reminded him. "I can't invade a foreign country." Omar looked him in the eye. "Then quit. That's what I'm doing."

"You're quitting the police force?" Clemente was incredulous. Omar nodded.

"What are you going to live on?"

"A $5 million reward."

"I can't, Omar. I have a job to do here. And there are rules. You know that."

Omar was so angry that he didn't talk to Clemente for two days. But he'd learned from Clemente, and he set about finding out all he could about where M.Y.A. was and how he spent his time. By the time he saw Clemente again, he'd found a villager who knew the farm where M.Y.A. was hidden and had learned a back way onto the property. "We can drive an old livestock truck with goats and sheep across the border. We'll dress like shepherds. We can hide all of the weapons in the back. We'll take the smuggler's route. When we get there, we can take him dead or alive."

Clemente made a decision. "I'll go with you. Even if it means I have to quit the FBI to do it." Clemente went to his barracks and yelled for Sutton to come down. Sutton came out in his underwear. "I'm quitting the FBI. I'm going with Omar to Syria tonight. I have to. This man could be the most important target of the war."

"You're fucking crazy," Sutton told him. "What about your family?"

Clemente looked at him and said nothing.

"Do what you have to do," Sutton told him.

And that was as far as Omar's plan went. Moments later, Delta was informed that the two were planning to freelance a cross-border mission.

"If you were to do this," a senior Delta operator told them, "it would look like we approved your mission. Our explicit orders are that we cannot cross into Syria. It will make things worse. That'll be on your head." It was clear that if Omar and Clemente were to cross the border, they put Delta operations at risk throughout Iraq.

To Omar, this was incomprehensible. It's a one-night job, a piece of cake, he told Tim, weeping. For several days he didn't answer Clemente's calls. He finally came back around, but he made it clear that M.Y.A. was unfinished business.

After that, Omar changed. A grimace settled in. Tim had trained him in counterterrorism, but Tim's deployment would eventually end. Over a period of months, even as Omar continued his work as a Baghdad cop, Delta welcomed him into its fold, and as he became a full-fledged Delta asset, his work marked him. Omar started traveling with bodyguards. Dogs searched his car before he went anywhere. He switched cars several times a week and moved apartments every few months. One of his closest cop buddies killed himself, and Omar, in shock, crashed into three cars on his way home. When another antiterrorism cop had two of his children kidnapped by insurgents, as a unit they voted not to negotiate or pay ransom. Otherwise, every cop and his family would be vulnerable. After the kids were murdered, Omar stopped going home, sleeping mostly at the office.

An insurgent whom Omar sent to jail for life sent him a message: "I have four sons and three brothers. My family will hunt you down for the rest of their lives." Omar had seen the beheading videos; he knew what vengeance looked like. But when Clemente began to express his worry, Omar would laugh. "There's an Iraqi saying," he would tell him. "If you are already wet, there's no reason you're afraid of rain."

On the wall of his office Omar kept two large boards. On one, a whiteboard, was an official list of his targets, the most-wanted terrorists in Iraq. On the other, a red board, was the list of those who had tried to kill Omar or his men. Every day that list was growing longer.

Los Angeles, August 2010

Straight from LAX, Clemente does his best to roll out the lures of dreamland. A hot young director screens an early cut of his action film for him and Omar. There are steak dinners on Sunset, and after-hours casinos, and heady talk of the Rock playing Omar in the movie version of a story that has yet to end — no matter, we'll make up a good ending! — but they may have to set it somewhere else, because, really, does anybody care about Iraq anymore? In Santa Monica one perfect evening, as the sun slips into the ocean, Omar sips Coronas on the green of a grass badminton court, and shows incredible prowess at the game, which he calls "featherminton." It seems the war couldn't be further away. But there's a look in Omar's eyes that tells Clemente he's already gone. There are not enough miles in the world to separate him from the marauders who are loose in his country. And whether the entropy was set in motion by the American invasion, or now by the American withdrawal, or by something essential to the Iraqi character, or all or none of these things — matters not at all to Omar. "Imagine if it were your home," he tells Tim. "Nothing would be able to keep you away." And then the sunset and the featherminton are interrupted by a call from Iraq: Two convicted Al Qaeda terrorists, just freed from prison, have publicly vowed to kill Omar.

There is so much unfinished business, and Hollywood has nothing to offer that could possibly change his mind. The face that Omar sees at night — the woman who broke his heart — is Margaret Hassan. He keeps photos and videos of her on his laptop and looks at them every day. It's an Irish face, fifty-nine years old, looking into a camera that is held by those who will kill her. This is the movie Hollywood will never make. Her kidnappers taunt her, forcing her to beg. Eyes lined with fatigue and fear, she pleads for her life. She'd been on her way to work in her Toyota when two cars of gunmen blocked her. She had a driver and a bodyguard, but that didn't matter. Not when eight gunmen, including one dressed as a police captain, raced toward her car, weapons drawn. They savagely beat her bodyguard and driver, leaving them for dead. Hassan was thrown into the back of a white Land Rover. The vehicle had two doors, her bodyguard told Omar. Which became his first clue — most Land Rovers have four doors.

Omar watches a video of Hassan pleading for her life — she faints, a bucket of water is poured on her. She is wet, helpless, lying on the floor, struggling to get up. It didn't matter that for twelve years she'd been the head of CARE, and devoted to the people of Iraq, or that she'd married an Iraqi and converted to Islam. She was still an infidel. Knowing that he was racing the clock, Omar hunted for the two-door Land Rover. There were maybe fifty white Land Rovers in Baghdad. He and his men knocked on doors, worked his informants. They followed white Land Rovers every night. He kept charts on the wall, thousands of surveillance photos. He slept at the office.

The kidnappers asked for ten million in cash, and then weeks after she was kidnapped, they sent the video of her execution. Al Jazeera refused to broadcast the video, but Omar studied it, looking for clues.

In the video, the leader of the gang, later identified as al-Rawi, keeps his face covered. He pushes a green apple onto the muzzle of the gun, an improvised silencer. He then puts the gun to the back of Margaret's head and pulls the trigger. The apple doesn't silence the gun completely, but it's the clue that changes the focus of Omar's investigation. Who needs a silencer in the country? Her executioners were here, in Baghdad.

Six months later, Omar's investigators followed a white Land Rover as it drove up to a small house in a quiet neighborhood, and the surveillance photos showed a man at the door. The man's face matched that of the kidnapper in the police uniform. In the raid on the house, Omar killed one of the suspected kidnappers in a shoot-out, and two others were arrested.

Al-Rawi, the man behind the kidnapping, wasn't there. It would take Omar three more years to hunt al-Rawi down. Maybe he thought everyone had forgotten. But Omar hadn't.

At the Santa Monica Pier, the next morning, Omar plays arcade games and redeems yellow tickets for a key chain. He gives his extra tickets to a young girl. Later, as they amble down the beach, he tells Clemente, "You're walking with a dead man." For all his bravado, Cle-mente feels a desperate sadness, mixed with other emotions, too. It was he who got Omar started in the counterterrorism business. And it is he who has now abandoned Omar to a country in chaos. He feels he has betrayed Omar and left him surrounded by the enemy to be killed. Iraq was once the front in America's "war on terror," but no longer. It was once Clemente's war, but no longer.

Clemente spends the night on Omar's hotel couch; he just wants to be in the same room. He pleads again for Omar to seek asylum. "For God's sake, man, you have a wife and a kid."

Omar shakes his head no and tells Clemente a story about the night he watched Uday Hussein and his thugs kidnap a woman, and he didn't stop them. The woman was standing in front of one of Baghdad's best hotels with her husband. Uday was known to take women off the street and rape them. Her husband tried to resist, but Uday's men beat him with the butts of their guns. Uday's red Ferrari idled nearby. The woman screamed and clawed as her attackers shoved her into a waiting SUV. Omar, just out of the police academy, saw this from down the street and grabbed for his gun. But two older cops held him back. "Don't get involved," they warned. "You'll get yourself killed. Think of your family."

The shame he felt that night has never left Omar. And he has never walked away again.

Baghdad, Fall 2010/Winter 2011

On Halloween, as Clemente is at a party in Los Angeles dressed as Maverick from Top Gun, Omar is outside Our Lady of Salvation Church in Baghdad. Inside, five suicide bombers have taken a hundred Christians hostage. They are demanding the release of all Al Qaeda prisoners in Iraq and have already killed a priest and several children who cried. Omar hears machine-gun fire and grenades exploding inside and gives the order to go in. The suicide bombers detonate, and in the end, scores of worshippers and six of Omar's men are dead, along with the insurgents, four of whom were foreign jihadis.

Omar calls Clemente from the hospital.

There's a lot of static on the line.

You heard about the attack on the church?

Yes. Clemente had just heard on his radio — the deadliest attack on a Christian target since the war began.

That was us, Omar says. My team.

You were at the church?

Yes. Silence.

Where are you now?

I'm at the hospital.

Are you all right?

I'm all right.

You're sure?

Six of my men are dead. I'm here with the wounded. The suicide bombers blew themselves up. Fifty or sixty of the Christian people inside the church died.

You made the call?

Yes.

You made the right call, Omar. The bombers were going to blow themselves up no matter what. You saved some lives.

A long pause. Omar, who did this?

The Dentist. You know who the Dentist is?

Clemente knows. The Dentist is the Baghdad leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq. Omar captured the last Al Qaeda leader in Baghdad months ago, and the Dentist, so called because he fixed teeth before the war, is his replacement.

Omar, you gotta get out of there.

Not until I hunt down the men who did this.

Omar, there are too many of them, and only one you. At least your family — they can come to my house.

Your country won't give us visas.

The next day Omar and his police unit walk in a procession from the bombed church through the neighborhood as a show of force and respect. At the cemetery, he gathers his men and vows to hunt down those responsible for the attack.

Three weeks later, Clemente is at home in Virginia. It's Thanksgiving, and his phone rings. It's Omar, elation in his voice.

It's done. We caught the Dentist.

How'd you catch him?

Police work.

They both laugh. It's what Tim always said, hunting terrorists is just good police work.

There was a white car at the church bombing, Omar says. We track the registration. We did stakeouts all over Baghdad. We waited. They had five dens, they moved between them. We got the Dentist and eleven others. They had tons of explosives and cars rigged with bombs, ready to go. We found intel on foreign insurgents planning big bomb attacks — they were waiting up by the Syria border, in the Badlands. We gave them a big surprise.

You went to the Badlands?

I flew in your helicopters.

With our friends from Disneyland?

It was like the old days. We fight side by side. We were hunting every night. For two weeks. Camping in the desert. Big fights, but we catch thirty-nine insurgents, all foreigners. We catch them and load them onto the helicopters back to Baghdad to be interrogated.

Were they the ones who bombed the church?

They helped, and they were going to do many more bombings. Same one paid them all.

Who paid them?

You know. There is only one name Omar will not say out loud, not over the phone. I have another mission. I'm going back after him. Clemente knows he is speaking of M.Y.A. Have they approved the mission? he asks. Soon, Omar says. M.Y.A. is still operating his terror network out of Syria, but with Al Qaeda contacts around the world, he is more powerful than ever. He's back at the top of the most-wanted list. No terrorist operation in Iraq, including the church bombing, occurs without his approval and funding.

Clemente fears that hunting M.Y.A. will bring brutal retaliation, and that Omar and his men alone will never be enough to stop the madmen. The Americans are leaving within months. Omar will soon be alone.

Watch the news, Omar had told him. You will see.

Sure enough, a few days later Clemente opens up his laptop and sees a picture of Iraq's interior minister parading thirty-nine terrorist suspects wearing orange prison uniforms in front of the news cameras. Al Qaeda's third-highest-ranking leader in Iraq, Hazim al-Zawi, is brought in wearing a black hood. In a rare appearance, Omar's counterterrorism boss is there. The minister says that while the capture of the insurgents is a serious blow to Al Qaeda, many of the men have been arrested in the past by U. S. forces and released as a result of political deals and have gone back to the insurgency. By design, neither Omar nor the Americans are credited with the arrests. It's important that Omar stay invisible.

The new year begins, and still no visas for Omar and his family. Moktada al-Sadr returns to Iraq from his three years of self-imposed exile in Iran to exercise a greater degree of control over affairs in the country. Things are now so dangerous that Omar's wife for the first time begs him to get them to America, for their daughter's sake. A famous counterterrorist cop in Mosul, a lieutenant colonel, is killed when three suicide bombers dressed as police come into his station and blow themselves up. The colonel, who was Omar's friend, had been sleeping at the station to protect his family, as Omar often does. Omar goes to the American embassy in the Green Zone to strike a bargain: If they give his wife and daughter visas, he'll stay in Baghdad to fight. He is told to come back later. The embassy official is not hopeful.

To Tim Clemente, this is no mere bureaucratic intransigence. As a special agent in the FBI, he had an easier time obtaining visas and other special favors for the rankest criminals, once gaining safe passage to America for a drug-cartel money launderer and his stripper girlfriend. Omar is nothing of the sort. He may be unknown to Americans, but his anonymity makes him no less an American hero. That he cannot get the proper documents to protect his wife and daughter is a scandal and a disgrace to Clemente, who is not giving up on his campaign to persuade Omar to come to America.

And so it is that on January 3, Omar is behind the wheel on a highway far outside Baghdad with two prisoners and four Delta boys in his Humvee when his phone rings and he hears a familiar voice. He pulls over, too excited to drive. "Hi, Omar, this is Bob De Niro. I just want to make sure you're okay over there, that you're staying safe."

"Robert De Niro!" Omar blurts out. "I love your movies!"

"Thank you," De Niro says. "Tim's told me all about you."

They talk for a couple of minutes, none of which Omar will be able to recall later. The actor invites Omar to come see him in New York.

"Inshallah," Omar says. God willing.

"Inshallah," says Robert De Niro.

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