According to the intel from Tara Walsh’s group back home, al-’Aqran was the founder and leader of the Cause. Tara had given Mustang team some good information about this man, and Riley had used the daily hour-long drive to Barletta from the team’s base of operations in Bari to review the file. By now he nearly had it memorized. Al-’Aqran, or “the Scorpion,” had been born Abdul Rahman Bey in the Iraqi village of Ar Radwaniyah, just outside of Abu Ghraib. In 1968, at the age of sixteen, Bey had joined the military just months before the bloodless coup that had put Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr and the Ba’athists into power. Saddam Hussein had immediately been made deputy president and had soon become the country’s strongman. As with many in the Iraqi military, Bey’s loyalty was primarily to Hussein. In 1979, Hussein took power by making accusations of disloyalty in the Ba’ath Party and arresting sixty-eight of its members while they were gathered for a meeting.
