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documents. Like them, he had refused to speak. Like them he had faced only the briefest military tribunal, and not one member of the U.S. military could prove who he was, one way or another.
    So far as the Mossad was concerned, Ben had constructed the bomb that detonated in Netanya, on Israel’s coast, north of Tel Aviv, on March 27, 2002—the one that had nearly blown the Park Hotel in half, killed twenty-seven and injured one hundred and forty, many of them women and children, right in the middle of Passover.
    The Mossad, for once, with Middle Eastern peace talks pending, was not anxious just to hunt al-Turabi down and murder him within Israel’s borders. And when their INTEL located him in the Hindu Kush, Afghanistan, they tipped off the CIA in Langley and suggested they take over. It took SEAL Team 5 four days to run Ben to ground, and about two hours to manacle him and ship him direct to Guantanamo.
    Ben was very nearly as tall as bin Laden himself, and just as malevolent in his loathing of the West. He was not a bad goalkeeper either. He was quick and sure-footed, with the eye of a desert hawk and enormous, powerful hands. His methods of self-survival in the prison were the complete opposite of those employed by Ibrahim and Yousaf. Ben presented a cheerful, sunny-side-up appearance and seemed to be happy to cooperate with both the guards and the interrogators, laughing and shaking his head at the apparent absurd suggestion that he was, himself, a Hamas commander in the cauldron of the West Bank.

    Ben’s good nature and friendliness toward his captors was, after more than five years, a feature of Camp Five. He had a huge smile, a deep spontaneous laugh, and an almost comic expression of incredulousness whenever it was suggested that he, Ben, had actually blown up the Park Hotel. All these years he had sworn to God he was a back-packer from the University of Tel Aviv, wandering the mountains, and that these weirdos with Kalashnikovs slung over their shoulders had taken him in for a gourmet feast of flatbread, dust, sand, and sour goat’s milk.
    “Next thing I knew,” he would assert, “these huge American guys with beards had sprung from nowhere, shot the guards at the entrance to the caves, and frightened the life out of everyone, including me.”
    Thus ran the party-line of Ben al-Turabi. Although he was never able to explain quite why, at the moment of his capture, he was carrying a fully loaded machine gun, with ammunition belts slung diagonally across his chest, and four bomb-detonators in the pockets of his baggy Afghan pants. Neither was he clear with his explanation of the gunpowder under his fingernails that the American forensic guys instantly detected. Ben was also somewhat vague as to why the University of Tel Aviv had never heard of him.
    The Mossad, Israel’s renowned Secret Service, was absolutely certain he was a grade-one terrorist. They had photographed him at the scene in Netanya, and while it was a picture of appalling quality, it was better than three others they had snapped from various other terrorist crime scenes.
    According to the hard-eyed sages of King Saul Boulevard, Ben had started off as a young hitman for Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian terror group, Hamas, but had been called up to The Base, bin Laden’s world jihadist headquarters in the Afghan mountains. He had left the rubble-strewn streets of Gaza on the understanding that he might return for “specialist missions.” The Mossad considered he was on one of these when the Park Hotel blew.
    The problem for the Mossad was two-fold. One, they did not know Ben’s name, or any way to identify him. Two, they had no experience of operating in the northeastern mountains of Afghanistan. Whereas they were more than happy to work in tandem with America’s CIA or FBI antiterrorist squads, they had no fighting force comparable to the U.S. Navy SEALs when it came to mountain combat on murderous escarpments that, down the centuries, had