“You see the movie Black Hawk Down? Read the book? Mogadishu?”
Miller nodded.
Both were right on the money. Do I tell Britton that the Black Hawk belonged to the 160th Special Forces Aviation Regiment and
that First Lieutenant Richard H. Miller, Jr., was flying Black Hawks in Somalia for the 160th at the time?
“A guy on The Philadelphia Inquirer wrote the book,” Britton said.
“So I understand. He did a good job.”
“When that happened, when they dragged the bodies of the American soldiers through the streets, the reaction of some of the lunatics here was that it was the will of Allah, about time, right on, brother. That shock you?”
Miller shook his head.
“And, right away, some of the local lunatic mullahs— who have no more idea where they come from in Africa than you or I do—started claiming they were from Somalia. Pure bullshit, of course, to impress the brothers. And then, because that seemed to work, they embellished the story. They had contacts with Somalia, they said, and we—meaning, the mullahs—have to go over there.
“We had a series of fund-raisers, some of them your standard church chicken supper, all proceeds to the cause, and some your standard knock over the local grocery store, your friendly neighborhood drug dealer and hooker, etcetera. And they came up with the money for the plane tickets, got passports, and went.”
“You tell anybody about this?”
“I turned in a report. A couple of weeks later, the FBI wanted to talk to me. So I got myself arrested—did this routine —and two guys from the FBI talked to me—in this interview room, come to think of it—and I told them what was going down, and they laughed, and said, one, the AALs couldn’t get into Somalia and, two, even if they could the Somalians would not only not talk to the wannabes but would probably cut their throats and steal whatever they were carrying.”
“So what happened?”
“Off the AALs went, they said to Somalia.”
“You sound as if you don’t believe they actually went.”
“What the FBI said made sense to me. None of these wannabes speak Arabic, much less Somali. I figured they wouldn’t get any further than Kenya, or Ethiopia, where they would find out what Somalia was really like and decide it was the Will of Allah to whoop it up with the local hookers instead of actually going there. Who would know they hadn’t gone? Or they would actually try to go there and get knocked over by some really professional bad guys.”
“So what actually happened?”
“I don’t know,” Britton said. “Right about that time, my wife was about to have our first son, so I did almost a year in the Pennsylvania Correctional Facility in Camp Hill.”
“Excuse me?”
“I was picked up on an armed robbery charge, plea-bargained it down to four years, and was sent to the state slam at Camp Hill, near Harrisburg. When I was a bad boy, which was often, they put me in solitary, from which I was surreptitiously removed and sneaked out of the joint in the warden’s trunk. That way, I got two weeks with my wife—a couple of times, three—we had a nice apartment in Harrisburg —before they sneaked me back in. The department shrink said I had suffered severe mental stress on the job, so technically I was on medical leave.”
“Jesus Christ!” Miller said.
“Anyway, like I said, it was about a year before I got back to the mosque.”
“I don’t understand,” Miller confessed.
“The mosque hired a pretty good lawyer to appeal my conviction. The sonofabitch used to come to Camp Hill— which meant I had to sneak back into the prison to meet with him and then sneak back out—every other month to tell me how he was doing. After about a year, like I said, the Supreme Court ordered a retrial, the district attorney declined to prosecute, and I was sprung.”
“You volunteered to go back?” Miller asked, incredulously.
Britton met his eyes for a moment before replying.
“I’m in pretty deep with the mullahs,” he said. “It would have been hard to get anybody else into the mosque who would have learned much.”
“You couldn’t pay me enough to do what you’re doing,” Miller said.
“Yeah, but, like I was saying, when I got back to the mosque the mullahs were, quote, back from Somalia, end quote, they were watching me pretty closely . . .”
“They were suspicious?”