Page 26 of ELITE Protection
“Yes, because my father is a U.S. citizen. He was working in Iraq for the Center for Disease Control when he met my mother who was an ER physician.” Unsure if he knew the history of that area, she explained, “Back then, Iraq was actually a progressive country. My brother and sister were both born there too, but they’ve never claimed dual citizenship.”
Isaac got up and grabbed two bottles of water. “Go on.” He passed one over to her.
Hannah drank deeply before she set the bottle on the table. “When things got bad twenty-five years ago, my family fled Iraq in the middle of the night. It took them a few days, but they ended up in a refugee camp in Syria. That’s where I was born.”
“Got it.” Isaac’s fork scraped over his empty plate. “Back to my original question, why does ISIS want you so bad?”
“Fast forward to a couple years ago. I left college, flew to Syria, claimed my dual citizenship, and joined the YPG. As I started to tell you, they made me a captain shortly after I had finished my basic training in the Syrian army.” She looked down at her plate, still filled with food. This was the stupid part. She inhaled deeply and gathered her fortitude. She couldn’t look at the man who had given her such great pleasure the night before as she talked about her former lover. “There was this captain, Aziz al-Habib, who was with the male battalion that usually accompanied us. We…I…I thought we were in love.”
She looked up to see how he was going to take the news, but he was feverishly typing into his phone with his thumbs.
What the hell? He’s texting?
Here I am bleeding out my soul, and he’s fucking texting!
When his eyes finally met hers, he raised one brow. “Tell me more about al-Habib.”
“When we first met, he was wonderful. Although his English wasn’t great, it was more than passable.” She smiled. “He had kind of a British accent. He’d been educated at Oxford for a few years before returning to Syria. We had studied many of the same subjects so we had a lot in common.” She bit her bottom lip. “When we didn’t want anyone else to understand our conversation, we’d speak in English.”
“You really liked this guy, didn’t you?” Isaac seemed to understand.
“No. I thought I loved him.” She grimaced, then admitted, “He was just using me to get the locations of our next raids. The women’s battalion concentrated on finding and freeing children who had been kidnapped by ISIS.”
She shook her head and looked out the kitchen window. “I was such an idiot. I don’t know why I never saw it. So many times our teams would arrive hours too late. The girls had already been moved.” Withholding the anger and controlling her voice, she told Isaac, “All those times, if I had kept my mouth shut, we could have saved those girls.”
She grabbed the bottle of water and tried to wash away the lump stuck in her throat. “He betrayed me.” She could hear the vehemence in those three simple words but tamped down the hatred in order to explain. “I trusted him with the lives of those girls and the women I fought next to. There were several occasions when one of my soldiers was wounded or killed in a raid. When I discovered what he’d done…I couldn’t let him do it again.”
With no inflection in his voice, Isaac asked, “So you killed him?”
“No, damn it.” Then she reconsidered. He was dead due to her actions. “I didn’t pull the trigger, but once I found out who he really was, I turned him in.”
“So, he’s still alive?”
“No. He died while trying to escape.” She would never forget the pain in her heart when the colonel had told her about his death. Part of her had been elated that she didn’t have to worry about him finding out that she’d been the one to turn him in. She had seen Aziz’s temper on more than one occasion, although he’d never focused that anger on her. She’d never imagined that his brother would order his followers to come after her, especially in the USA.
“How did you find out he wasn’t who he said he was?”
“My visa was about to expire, and I really missed my parents. I wanted to go home and see them.” Hannah swallowed hard. “I wanted to surprise Aziz and get him a visa to come to the United States with me. I thought, like the young fool I was, that our relationship was moving on to the next step. We had even talked about children, although he had never asked me to marry him. I wanted my mom and dad to meet him.”
Isaac simply nodded. “Go on.”
“I was at the U.S. Embassy and had just gotten my visa renewed so I could come back to Syria after going home. I gave the clerk Aziz’s name. A few minutes later, she spun the screen around so I could see his picture and confirm it was him. Not only was he on the no-fly list, but it also said he was the only brother of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.”
“The head of ISIS?” Isaac confirmed.
All Hannah could do was nod her head.
“You were sleeping with the Caliphate’s brother,” he accused.
“I didn’t know that at the time,” she threw back at him. “Look, I was young and stupid. I had dated in college, but all of a sudden I’m halfway around the world in the middle of a war zone and this handsome, intelligent, older man who speaks my native language starts paying attention to me.” She threw her hands up and let them fall back into her lap. “No one knew who he was, least of all me.”
“And because you turned in his brother who got killed during his arrest, al-Baghdadi wants you dead.” Isaac had summed it up quickly.
“Yes.” Tears streamed down her face. “I really fucked things up. I went to Syria to help the kidnapped girls. Sure, we were able to save a few hundred, but my naïveté and big mouth kept hundreds more in slavery. And the things those men do to those little girls makes me sick.”
She was crying so hard she could hardly catch her breath. “I don’t give a shit about their civil war. The Sunnis and Kurds have been fighting for hundreds of years. I wish they would kill each other off completely. I just don’t want them harming young girls ever again.”
Isaac came around the table. He picked her up out of the chair and carried her to the living room where he sat in one of the rocker recliners, placing her across his lap. “It’ll be okay, sweetheart. You’re safe here with me.”
