But the pilot, noting the black line of a power cable suspended over the lot, and guessing there might be others he couldn’t see, said: “I don’t think—”

“Take me down!”

So the helicopter began to descend, and Idris took off his headset and unbuckled his seat harness. As he got up to go back into the cargo compartment, there was a loud crack! and a hole appeared in the right side of the cockpit windshield.

Idris and the pilot both turned their heads in time to see the second muzzle flash. The shooter was in the tower of a nearby mosque. A Guardian Angel on night watch perhaps, or the muezzin himself, up in his roost after hours and doing what any good Sadrist would do upon spying a black helicopter hovering over the ’hood.

“Son of a bitch!” the pilot cried, blood running down his cheek where he’d been cut by flying glass. His trigger finger twitched on the control stick, but it was an empty gesture. The helicopter was unarmed.

And unarmored. The next muzzle flash had a different shape, the shooter switching his aim towards the tail of the aircraft. A red lamp lit on the control panel, and a recorded male voice began warning of damage to the hydraulic system.

“Take me down!” Idris repeated.

But the pilot, in sudden panic at the thought of crash landing amidst a million Shia, shook his head. “No,” he said. “We must abort!” As Idris continued to yell at him, he increased throttle and yanked the control stick hard to the left. The chopper flew away into the night, trailing smoke. The last image on the camera feed before line-of-sight was lost was of the taxi speeding away as well, Iyad laying rubber to escape before the Mahdis could close down the streets.

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Scheherazade

Scheherazade is the master storyteller in the classic Arabian folk tale collection One Thousand and One Nights.

In One Thousand and One Nights’ framing story, King Shahryar of Persia is driven mad with rage when he discovers that his wife has betrayed him. Not only does he execute her, he vows to take a new wife every night and have her strangled the following morning. These executions are carried out, reluctantly, by the king’s grand vizier, until the vizier’s eldest daughter, Scheherazade, comes up with a plan to put an end to the cruelty.

Scheherazade marries the king. On her wedding night, she asks permission to say farewell to her sister Dunyazad. Dunyazad is brought to the king’s chambers, where, in accordance with Scheherazade’s plan, she asks Scheherazade to tell her a story. Scheherazade begins the tale but is forced to break off at the coming of dawn. The king, entranced, grants her a one-day stay of execution so that he can hear the end of the story. The following night Scheherazade finishes the first tale and begins a second, earning another stay of execution. This continues for a thousand and one nights until at last King Shahryar, transformed by love, lifts Scheherazade’s death sentence and makes her his queen . . .

In the small hours of the morning, Saddam Hussein descended to the deepest cellar of his Adhamiyah estate.

West of the main house, in back of the outbuilding that abutted the lion enclosure, was a plain-looking steel door secured by an electronic keypad. Past the door, a circular stairway descended to a guard room staffed by a half dozen of Saddam’s most trusted men. Two of the men wore the standard Republican Guard uniform and were armed with riot guns. The other four were dressed as if for a heavy contact sport: chest, shoulder, and thigh pads; knee, shin, and elbow guards; groin cups and throat protectors; reinforced gloves and boots; and helmets with face shields that they lowered into place as Saddam entered the room.

The four-man extraction team preceded Saddam and the two gunmen through a long cellblock. The cells were empty and had been for some time, but bloodstains were still visible on some of the walls and a search of the floor would have turned up the occasional tooth or fingernail among the rat droppings.

At the end of the cellblock was another flight of stairs and another security door, beyond which was a brightly lit antechamber containing two chairs. One was a throne-sized easy chair with a matching ottoman; the other was a steel-backed restraint chair that had been bolted to the floor.

The antechamber also contained a liquor cabinet, and Saddam helped himself to whiskey while the gunmen positioned themselves to either side of him and the extraction team continued on through a final security door. From beyond the door came sounds of a man being tackled and pummeled into submission.

The extraction team returned with the prisoner. He was a blond American in his early thirties, tall and muscular. He wore camouflage fatigue pants and a gray ARMY T-shirt; a skull in a green beret was tattooed on his upper right arm.

The prisoner was limp and unresisting as the guards carried him out, but as they approached the restraint chair he abruptly came alive and began to fight again. This was an old trick and the extraction team were ready for it. They kept hold of him, and with some joint-twisting, a bit of head trauma, and a few hard taps to the solar plexus they got him into the chair and strapped down. Saddam picked up a small remote from atop the liquor cabinet. There were electrical contacts inside the chair’s wrist and ankle straps, and by pressing a button on the remote he could deliver painful shocks.

The extraction team had stepped away from the chair and were looking at Saddam expectantly. A flexible black cable tipped with a large alligator clip dangled from the seat of the chair between the prisoner’s legs. This was an optional attachment that could be used to deliver current directly to the prisoner’s genitals, but to put it on him, they’d have to remove his pants or at least cut a hole in the crotch—a delicate procedure.

“No,” Saddam said, to the unspoken question. “We won’t need that tonight, I think. Leave us.”

His men went back up the stairs. Saddam rested a forearm on the back of the easy chair and sipped his whiskey. The prisoner watched him, grinning despite a bloody nose and a black eye; probably he was thinking about what he would do if his restraints were removed.

“You know, these displays of defiance are unnecessary,” Saddam said. “No one here questions your manhood. But you are alone and powerless. You can’t escape. You can’t kill me. There’s no shame in accepting these facts.”

“Thank you for the advice,” the prisoner said. “I appreciate you acknowledging my manhood. But you know I don’t have that much else to occupy me, so I might as well try to kill you.”

Saddam smiled. “Your Arabic is improving. You must be studying very hard.”

“Like I say, I don’t have much else to do. I couldn’t even follow the TV, without it.”

“So you’re happy with the television? The screen is big enough?”

“Yes.”

“And that Xbox thing I got for you—you like that?”

“I do,” the prisoner said, truthfully. “I could use some more games for it.”

“I’ll see what I can do. I want you to be happy. Anything else you’d like, just ask . . . Are you sure you don’t want a woman?”

“No, and we’ve been over that. I’m not interested in Helen Keller, and if she can see me or hear me she can tell people about me, and that means you’ll kill her, after. I don’t want that on my conscience.”