The Tightening Dark Read online

  The views expressed in this publication are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy and position of the Department of Defense or the U.S. government. The public release clearance of this publication by the Department of Defense does not imply Department of Defense endorsement or factual accuracy of the material.

  Copyright © 2021 by Sam Farran and Benjamin Buchholz

  Cover design by Terri Sirma

  Cover photograph © D-Keine / Getty Images

  Cover copyright © 2021 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  Translation of Quran 2:286 verse from The Quran: Translated to English by Talal Itani. ClearQuran, Beirut. 2012.

  Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

  Hachette Books

  Hachette Book Group

  1290 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10104

  HachetteBooks.com

  Twitter.com/HachetteBooks

  Instagram.com/HachetteBooks

  First Edition: July 2021

  Published by Hachette Books, an imprint of Perseus Books, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The Hachette Books name and logo is a trademark of the Hachette Book Group.

  The Hachette Speakers Bureau provides a wide range of authors for speaking events. To find out more, go to www.hachettespeakersbureau.com or call (866) 376-6591.

  The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2021938259

  ISBNs: 978-0-306-92271-8 (hardcover); 978-0-306-92272-5 (ebook)

  E3-20210611-JV-NF-ORI

  CONTENTS

  COVER

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  DEDICATION

  MAPS: YEMEN AND THE HOUTHI ADVANCE SANA’A CITY

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER 1 IDYLLS OF A LEBANESE CHILDHOOD LEBANON

  CHAPTER 2 A NEW AMERICAN

  CHAPTER 3 MARINE DUTY

  CHAPTER 4 INTERROGATOR AND ATTACHÉ

  CHAPTER 5 YEMEN, DEFENSE INTELLIGENCE AGENCY

  CHAPTER 6 CONTRACTOR

  CHAPTER 7 ARAB SPRING

  CHAPTER 8 NATIONAL DIALOGUE

  CHAPTER 9 THE HOUTHIS COMETH

  CHAPTER 10 BAGGED

  CHAPTER 11 CELL ONE

  CHAPTER 12 CELL MATES

  CHAPTER 13 INTO A TERRIBLE RHYTHM

  CHAPTER 14 RESCUE EFFORTS

  CHAPTER 15 CAPTIVITY’S FINALE

  CHAPTER 16 HOMECOMING

  EPILOGUE

  PHOTOS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  DISCOVER MORE

  For those who have served

  Explore book giveaways, sneak peeks, deals, and more.

  Tap here to learn more.

  Yemen and the Houthi Advance

  Sana’a City

  PROLOGUE

  I HAD PASSED THROUGH Sana’a International Airport so many times that part of me, a big part, tried not to pay attention to the changes, tried not to be worried about the things I saw that were so markedly different from all the other times I had entered through the airport’s gates. This part of me kept me calm. This part of me knew the smells of Sana’a: the thin, cool air infused with dust wafting up 7,000 feet into the mountains from the emptiness of the Rub al-Khali desert below. This part of me didn’t worry about mongrel dogs scurrying around. It didn’t worry about sirens or the occasional celebratory gunfire from a wedding down the street. It didn’t care about squalor. It noticed human suffering, people in the shadows, in every shadow, watching, hungry, threadbare, but it did so not in a state of panic or despair but more as a matter of contrast between rich, clean Dubai—where I now lived—and the Middle East’s poorest country. My bravado and my experience of Yemen allowed me to step forward, one foot in front of the other, despite all these things. It allowed me to smile at the baggage handlers, the workers in the ratty airport café, the passport inspectors, and even the multitude of guards and armed military personnel who hadn’t always been so prevalent—lounging about on the fringes of the runway, laughing in the baggage hall, leering at us passengers in the passport lane, watching us from the taxi stand outside on the curb in front of the airport.

  Sure, I could be cool. I could come and go and pretend like everything was okay.

  But another part of me itched.

  This part knew something had changed. It knew something was different and wrong.

  In one corner of my mind, I heard the voices of my friends, Yemenis and others who had fled and had been telling me not to come back. I also heard the voices of my friends inside the country, calls I had made to them before getting on the plane this time. These people who had stayed—highly placed in Yemeni military or intelligence posts or just businessmen who knew what was what—warned me it wasn’t wise to come back to Yemen, not right now, not even for the savviest American, not even for an American who had grown up like me: Lebanese, fluent in the culture, fluent in the Arabic language, of course, and an ex-Marine too.

  CHAPTER 1

  IDYLLS OF A LEBANESE CHILDHOOD

  LEBANON

  I was born in a small village called Tebnine in the far south of Lebanon, just on the other side of the border from what is now Israel. My village is an ancient and beautiful one, situated in the mountains on the road between Tyre and Damascus. The Crusaders built a fort here. Saladin, first sultan of Egypt and Syria and founder of the Ayyubid dynasty, took it over. The Ottomans ruled us. The French too. And a lot of the worst fighting in the Lebanese Civil War throughout the 1970s and 1980s happened right around us, there in the south near and in my village. But I left before those latest calamities and remember only good things from Tebnine. The first seven years of my life come back to me wrapped in this sense of goodness, as if enveloped in a golden mist.

  As a youngster back in the 1960s, I had the run of the whole place, from one grandfather’s house in the Hayy Harra, the Hill Neighborhood, down to my other grandfather’s house in the valley, or Hayy Tahta, the Low Neighborhood, as we called it. I roamed the Christian area freely too, perched on its hill with its church bells. We hardly knew there was any difference back then, Christian or Muslim, as every day we heard both the muezzin crier in the minaret of our mosque and those deep bronze bells in the church tower. They filled the air in a way I always thought of as beautiful, haunting almost in its contrast and cacophony, though most people would find it odd, I think now, those two sounds together at intervals or overlapping.

  The gang I ran with were all kids related to me. In fact, most of the townspeople were relatives of some sort since, as I said, Tebnine was and is just a village—1,500 or 2,000 people back then, probably no more than 3,000 now—and almost everyone belonged to one of two families, the Fawaz or the Berri. My mother was a Fawaz, the dominant family. The Berris were the rich ones, though everyone got along just fine, and even the Berris were friendly people. Nabih Berri, the current head of that clan, is now the most powerful man in Lebanon as the Speaker of Parliament. His sister Nabiha married my mother’s brother in a match that has probably been repeated a thousand times over the centuries, someone from Fawaz marrying into Berri and vice versa. We’re all family in Tebnine.

  I knew of these things as a kid, history and marriages and war, but they weren’t my world. They were only
peripheral subjects that grownups talked about and that seemed somewhat unreal to me. My world involved running through the streets with my friends, cousin Hussein and cousin Ahmed, both of whom were just a little bit younger than me, with a parcel of even younger siblings—Hisham and Ibtissam—trying to keep up with us whenever they could.

  Lebanon

  We played a lot of war games, did a lot of hunting. We were experts with slingshots like Tom Sawyer, searching out the perfect Y-shaped branches in our grandmother’s fig or olive trees, cutting them (which got us scolded or smacked), and then stretching lengths of bicycle tire so that we could heave fist-sized cobblestones with enough accuracy and power to kill birds. We’d bring the birds home to my mom for dinner, especially the tasty little asafeer, which were like sparrows. Or sometimes we’d bring them to grandmother to repay her for the branches we’d swiped. We’d often also shoot each other with pebbles, starting little wars between ourselves or bullying the little ones so that always, it seemed, one or another of us would need to run away, down the hillside, through the narrow stone streets, to take refuge at the house or in the neighborhood of some cousin or aunt from the other side of the family.

  This was typical life in Lebanon for a kid. Free rein. Sunshine. The best mountains and climate on earth. Everything grew like weeds, including us.

  There was work too, but that I remember most fondly of all.

  “Wake up, sleepy head,” I remember my uncle Ali saying many mornings before first light. He’d steal into the room where I slept with my brothers and sisters around me and shake me, only me, by one shoulder until my eyes opened. I didn’t need to be told what was going to happen.

  Uncle Ali owned one of the few cars in town. He’d take me and Hussein, the two of us being the oldest and strongest of our generation, and pack us into the backseat of that car to bring us down to his tobacco fields. Still rubbing our eyes, Hussein and I would grasp at old oil lanterns Ali handed us, and we’d stumble out into the darkness. There, once the headlights of the car had been doused and our eyes had adjusted to the dimmer but warmer glow of the lamp light, we’d see other figures in the fields adjacent to us, in our own field too, some of them moving, their lamps swaying slowly, some walking through puddled light from lanterns placed on the ground so that their shadows loomed and receded, blending with the shadows of the waist-high plants. Each field held a constellation of such lanterns. The shadowed figures moved around them, bending, picking, stuffing big canvas sacks with tobacco leaves, maybe fifty people in each field all busy at once. Hushed voices. Quiet and simple hearts. Tebnine was famous for tobacco. Best in the world. Our families, our own hands, picked it on those cold, quiet mornings, all of us like ghosts as the sun shivered up from beneath the mountain ridges.

  We’d make a few cents from this enterprise, so we loved it. We loved the money, a big privilege to have some for ourselves, but we also loved the camaraderie. We loved being singled out by Ali as his helpers. I remember that Hussein and I were paid most often to string the tobacco, taking a nine-inch needle and a long thread and sewing the leaves onto a line that we stretched between makeshift sawhorses that had been brought out to the field. The leaves were left like this to dry. And we’d get five cents a string, usually completing two or three strings in a morning.

  This money we would save up for the Friday market (Souk Al Jumma), which was a fixture of our childhood: that time after prayers at the mosque when all the vendors set up their little tented shops and we could buy sweets, popguns, knickknacks, all the things kids crave. On outings to the market, and elsewhere too, Hussein and I led our little gang, which also included my younger sister Ibtissam and Hussein’s sister Fatimah, as well as my baby brother Hisham.

  ▪ ▪ ▪

  ONE THURSDAY NIGHT, after we had been tucked into our beds, sleep came with difficulty, as I didn’t know whether Hussein and I had earned enough in the tobacco fields to supply everyone with goodies for the market that coming morning. As our mother blew out the candle in our room, Ibtissam asked me for the tenth time what flavors of ice cream I thought the Friday market might have that week. I didn’t know. But I had a lot of fun making up strange concoctions and imagining her face in the darkness as it registered disbelief and worry: pumpkin, mulberry, goat cheese, grass, all kinds of strange things.

  Truthfully, I felt a little sick to my stomach about sharing the money I’d earned. I really didn’t want to spend those coins. I’d worked hard for them. But we always treated things more communally. Ibtissam, in my mind and heart, had earned a share of my tobacco proceeds just by being my sister. It really wasn’t a choice; it was more a lifestyle, or a culture, but even then I already knew it was a good one, though it required me to put aside some of my personal desire for riches (and sweets) in order to share with my “tribe.”

  Morning came at last, and with it the Friday market.

  It turned out to be everything we expected. The Friday market was, and still is, an institution in Tebnine, as in many other villages throughout Lebanon. Vendors come from all over. Awnings are set up. Wares are spread gleaming in the sun. Musicians and singers find shady places in the town square or walk from place to place strumming their ouds or trilling their mijwiz flutes.

  We kids knew the market. We frequented it every Friday. We hung around the edges, listened to the music, ogled the shops. But never before did we have anything nearly as much as two whole lira to spend.

  We got our ice cream, a couple popguns, a few other doodads, a ribbon Fatimah twisted into her hair. We were as happy as we’d ever been, close-knit, picking our way among the crowds of adults who filled their bags with fresh produce or sat in one of the cafés on the square, smoking shisha, that mainstay of Arab and Turkish cafés, also sometimes called a hookah, while also drinking little cups of Turkish coffee.

  Under the big tree in the square center, a storyteller had gathered a small crowd around him, all of them sitting cross-legged on the ground. We were pulled toward him, as if by magic, or by an attractor beam, but just as we came near enough to hear his words, I saw my grandfather, the one from the High Neighborhood. He wasn’t Hussein or Ahmed’s grandfather, but they knew him—101 years old, wizened, ancient, and nearly blind too. They saw him approaching the storyteller, striding forward in his insistent but shriveled way, and they pulled us forward even though Ibtissam and I tried to turn away.

  “C’mon,” said Hussein. “This’ll be classic.”

  I couldn’t say anything. I feared it would be a train wreck. My grandfather could be a very agreeable person, tender and full of attention to us kids. But he could also be argumentative. And this looked like an argumentative moment.

  The storyteller stopped speaking as my grandfather stepped right into the middle of his cross-legged crowd.

  “You want a story?” grandfather said. “I’ll give you a story…”

  Everyone had heard my grandfather’s stories a hundred million times. He was, justifiably, famous for them. But he couldn’t stand someone else stealing center stage. The situation felt combustible. I didn’t know what might happen, with my grandfather such an institution in town and this storyteller, obviously, foreign—swarthier than anyone in town but also strangely fluent in not only our language but also our accent, our voice, our way of saying things in Tebnine. Lebanon was like this back then, still is to some extent. Just by how we speak you can tell who is a big-city person, who is a village person, who is from the north or the south or the Beqaa Valley. You can tell who is from your village or from the village next door through small little signs, some of them secret, some not, like passwords in pronunciation. This storyteller must have been an adept at voice, I thought, because he nailed it. He sounded just like one of us despite being, quite obviously, from somewhere else.

  “Story!” my grandfather said again. “A young man like you, what can you know about stories!”

  The storyteller simply stood and held his ground against my grandfather’s approach.

  More quietly bu
t still quite clearly, the man said, “And what would you give us to keep these people entertained, hajji? Will it be a story of how you escaped from the Turkish army? How you had been kidnapped and then ‘recruited,’ brought north to the war to fight the British at Gallipoli or the peasants in Armenia or wherever, and how you escaped not once, not twice, not three times, but four—ditching your uniform and walking back in a potato sack or dressed like a Sufi, wandering months and months across all of Turkey’s wilderness until you came home, only to get ‘recruited’ again the next time the Basha’s troops came to town?”

  This was no storyteller. This was a mind reader, a magus, a wizard. He’d called my grandfather’s bluff. He’d spoken just as if he had pulled the words from my grandfather’s mouth, a sweet and perfect summary of exactly what grandfather’s stories always focused on: his long-ago exploits evading service with the Ottoman army.

  My grandfather’s mouth fell open for a moment. He took a half step backward. But then a twinkle filled his rheumy eyes. He squinted. And then he held his arms out wide.

  “Son,” he said.

  I looked from my grandfather to the storyteller and back again. I couldn’t figure out what was going on.

  “Son…”

  The two men clasped each other, not in a handshake or in the semiformal embrace of long-lost friends, but in a hug much more tender and endearing. My grandfather’s body shook a little. It crossed my mind that he might be crying.

  Ibtissam grabbed my hand. “What’s happening with grandpa?”

  “I don’t—” No. No. I knew. I knew what was happening.

  “Dad? Pappa?” I said, and I pulled Ibtissam with me toward the two men.

  People started to stand from their cross-legged places of comfort. They started to clap, to whistle. A woman ululated, that trilling noise Arab women make with their lips and forefingers when they’re overcome by emotion. Ibtissam and I pushed our way through and joined in the hug. Hussein and Ahmed and Fatimah hugged too, though they seemed a bit more confused. We were all hugging.