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Guantanamo since Left-wing forces in the United States were on the march on behalf of people like himself.
    This struck a chord with Ben, because he knew the oil corporation, and he knew bin Laden was related to its president. This latest news suggested to him that The Sheikh was on his case, and he could hardly wait to tell his new buddies Yousaf and Ibrahim.
    There was only one other prisoner with whom he might wish to share this information, and that was Abu Hassan Akbar, another former Hamas killer who had trained in the Hindu Kush specifically to become second-in-command to Ben al-Turabi the next time Osama sent in his men to wreak havoc on either the West or Israel.
    Abu Hassan was an honest-to-goodness psychopath from downtown Gaza where he had been born twenty-five years previously. Shot and wounded in the backstreets of north Baghdad, he had been hauled into custody by the throat, manacled, and grilled over the deaths of fifteen U.S. Army personnel, who had been killed the previous week by a mighty booby-trap bomb that detonated on the roadside as the troops raced past. He also carried no identity, but Israeli agents, called in to help, ascertained he was Palestinian, almost certainly a Hamas field operative, and one of the principal experts on explosives still at large in that benighted part of the world.

    Abu Hassan had been wanted by both the Mossad and the U.S. military for several months, but kept vanishing over the Iraqi border into Iran. When, finally, the SEALs picked him up, it was still impossible to pin an accurate identity on him, but the Mossad swore he was the mastermind behind the Be’er Shiva bombing of a barmitzvah in 2004, which had left six dead and thirty-five maimed, most of them kids.
    Like Ben al-Turabi, Abu Hassan was nailed by poor-quality photographic evidence and the occasional cell-phone location. The Israelis knew him on sight and were happy to take the sonofabitch off the hands of the Americans and out into the desert to shoot him.
    What saved Abu’s life, perversely, was his cold-blooded murder of the U.S. Army personnel, because that changed the game. That made him a criminal in the eyes of Uncle Sam, which is not great, but better than being grabbed by the Mossad and the instant death that almost certainly signified.
    The Americans spent several weeks trying to pin multiple murder charges on Abu Hassan, but without an accurate name and some form of identity and background it proved impossible. Bin Laden and Yasser Arafat sent in a team of lawyers prepared to lie, beg, or threaten legal mayhem if the Americans harmed one tight, black, curly hair of Abu’s head. One U.S. general swore by all that was holy that he would personally wring the neck of one particularly persistent New York-based lawyer, who had stopped about a centimeter short of calling him a liar.
    U.S. military INTEL had a thick file on Abu Hassan, with enough circumstantial evidence to hang him from a tall palm tree a hundred times. By one estimate, he was implicated in more than a dozen bombings in Israel alone. He was suspected of launching rockets from Gaza City over the new barrier wall and of blowing up two supermarkets. In the U.S. garrison in Bagram, in the foothills of the Hindu Kush, he was named as the most likely culprit for no fewer than twelve attacks on U.S. personnel involving roadside bombs.
    When the SEALs finally grabbed “Abu the Bombmaker” in Baghdad, he was extraordinarily lucky they did not just shoot him right there—but then, so was Saddam Hussein. Abu was, in a sense, in exalted, if notorious, company. Of the four unbroken terrorists grinding out their daily existence in Guantanamo, he was the most likely looking killer, with his unshaven lopsided face, permanent scowl, and jagged scar running down the left side of his jawbone.
    An angular character of medium height, with an athletic way of walking, Abu, since a young age had enjoyed killing. Out there in the hot,
sandy ghettos of Gaza City