The day after the game Pat wrote in his journal, "I f.u.c.king suck. I missed a tackle that resulted in a 78-yard touchdown. Boo. Not quite the jump out of the blocks I was shooting for. f.u.c.k it. I'll do better this week."

There are no further journal entries until September 9, the Sat.u.r.day before the Cardinals' next game, against the Dallas Cowboys. "What a f.u.c.king nightmare," the entry begins.

Since Sunday my athletic career has taken a serious turn for the terrible. I've been swimming in this missed tackle for days, which has made me a bit introverted and quiet. I'm not brooding as much as just focusing on getting better. Practices have been serious for me as I concentrate on no mistakes and making plays. However, because I've been quiet I've given the impression I'm down, and folks have asked if I'm OK. Well, Thursday at practice everything is going fine. I'm playing well, no mistakes, broke up a pa.s.s, and feeling good after 7-on-7 [a pa.s.s coverage drill] as we go into blitz period [a pa.s.s rushing drill]. I ran a great blitz on the first play and on the second I had a sack, but the running back hit me later than I thought he should. Not hard, just enough. I grabbed his facemask, really not wanting to fight, but he grabbed mine (obviously, to be expected) and I just said, "f.u.c.k it." I started kneeing him in the gut, then tossed his a.s.s to the ground before I was eventually pried off.After this fracas Pat wrote in his journal:Coach [Vince Tobin] kicked my a.s.s out of practice and added insult to injury by making me do the scout stuff. Later on I had to go in and speak to Mr. Tobin, where he said he was "incredibly disappointed" in my play Sunday; I'm "out of control"; and he doesn't think I'm a starter in this league. Pretty much everything I have been working to overcome. This episode really put the cherry atop a f.u.c.ked-up week.What is the most disappointing is how well my camp had gone, pre-season, even last week's practice, only to be p.i.s.sed on by a sub-par opening game. From here I've basically realized they will start Tommy [Bennett, the strong safety who was injured near the end of 1999] as soon as he's healthy. In order to prevent this I'm going to have to pull something crazy off this weekend against Dallas. Oh well, could be worse. All I can do is keep working.

One day after Pat wrote this grim wrap-up of his week, the Cardinals played what would turn out to be their best game of the year, against the Cowboys. Late in the fourth quarter Arizona was backed up to their own fifteen-yard line, trailing the Cowboys by five points, when quarterback Jake Plummer threw the ball to David Boston for a sixty-three-yard gain. Three plays later, with just under two minutes remaining in the game, Plummer pa.s.sed to Frank Sanders in the end zone for a touchdown. Although the Cowboys only needed a field goal to win the game, Pat and the defense dug in and stopped them cold. When time ran out, Arizona had upset Dallas, 3231. And Tillman had played brilliantly, including some critical tackles of the superstar running back Emmitt Smith.

"Sunday was a great day," Pat recorded in his journal.

Not only did we beat the Cowboys by one point, but I played, in my estimation, a h.e.l.l of a game: 7 tackles, 1 quarterback hit, and 3 pa.s.s breakups (one of which should have been a pick).... I am overly excited about the game. The whole week I was a f.u.c.king mess. Worrying about the future, my ability to play, stuff I never worry about. At least now if they decide to replace me I have a solid reason for saying they're wrong. Most importantly, though, I'm proud of how I came back and played well despite last week's s.h.i.tty game, the coach telling me I suck, and swimming in my frustration. As Nub so wisely wrote, I showed "the fort.i.tude and savvy of a champion." As for shamelessly throwing these compliments about myself in here, I stand by them. After last week's abortion I need all I can get. My modesty will return when I'm comfortably holding a starting position. This next week is a bye and I'm hoping to use the time off to relax. Perhaps take Marie to Sedona or something. Normally I'd go home but the week crept up quick and we forgot to buy plane tickets that I'd rather not drop $400 for now.

The Dallas game turned around Pat's season. Not only did he hold on to his starter's job, but he kept getting better and better with each successive week. During a tough 2027 loss to the San Francisco 49ers on October 1, Pat made eight tackles and knocked the ball loose for a fumble. After the game, he wrote, "Jerry Rice even came up to me and said I played well." A week later against the Cleveland Browns, he made thirteen tackles and broke up a pa.s.s on the last play of the game to give Arizona their second win of the year.

On the morning of October 12, 2000, four days after Tillman helped the Cardinals defeat the Browns, the USS Cole Cole-a billion-dollar, 505-foot-long guided-missile destroyer-arrived in the Yemeni port of Aden on the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula to top off its fuel tanks at an offsh.o.r.e buoy. Two years earlier, some of the cruise missiles launched against the Zawar Kili training camp in Khost, Afghanistan, during the unsuccessful attempt to kill Osama bin Laden had been fired from the Cole Cole. One of the most heavily armored and technologically sophisticated vessels in the U.S. Navy, its AEGIS radar system was capable of defending it against hundreds of enemy missiles or fighter jets simultaneously bearing down within a two-hundred-mile radius. The ship had been designed to be nearly invincible against the most advanced weapons systems the Pentagon had been able to imagine.

At 11:18 a.m., by which time the Cole Cole had finished taking on fuel and was getting ready to cast off, two men in a twenty-foot-long fishing boat powered by an outboard motor-an open fibergla.s.s skiff called an had finished taking on fuel and was getting ready to cast off, two men in a twenty-foot-long fishing boat powered by an outboard motor-an open fibergla.s.s skiff called an houri houri that was ubiquitous in Yemeni waters-pulled alongside the immense destroyer and came to a stop, in the manner of a minnow swimming up to a whale. The two Arabs on board the that was ubiquitous in Yemeni waters-pulled alongside the immense destroyer and came to a stop, in the manner of a minnow swimming up to a whale. The two Arabs on board the houri houri smiled and waved at American sailors standing above them at the rail of the smiled and waved at American sailors standing above them at the rail of the Cole Cole. The sailors a.s.sumed the little boat had been summoned by an officer on the bridge to haul away the destroyer's garbage. A moment later one of the smiling Arabs detonated a bomb made from hundreds of pounds of C-4 plastic explosive packed into a welded steel casing shaped to concentrate the force of the blast. The explosion, accompanied by a tremendous fireball, punched a jagged, thirty-five-foot-by-thirty-six-foot hole through the thick steel hull of the ship, killing seventeen sailors and injuring thirty-nine others, many of whom lost limbs and/or were horribly burned.

The suicide bombers turned out to be members of al-Qaeda. According to The 9/11 Commission Report The 9/11 Commission Report, the operation had been "supervised directly by bin Ladin. He chose the target and location of the attack, selected the suicide operatives, and provided the money needed to purchase explosives and equipment." a.n.a.lysis by the CIA determined that the blast had very nearly sunk the Cole Cole, and could easily have killed as many as three hundred sailors. Like the rented van packed with explosives that had been detonated beneath the World Trade Center in 1993, which had come very close to bringing down the Twin Towers, the attack on the Cole Cole had fallen just shy of destroying its target. But the had fallen just shy of destroying its target. But the jihadis jihadis who had directed both attacks were learning from their mistakes and continually refining their stratagems accordingly. who had directed both attacks were learning from their mistakes and continually refining their stratagems accordingly.

For his part, bin Laden had hoped the attack would provoke the United States into invading Afghanistan. Expecting to be targeted, he fled the compound where he had been staying near Kandahar and hid first at a compound outside of Kabul, then at a compound in Khost Province. The Americans considered a retaliatory missile attack against the al-Qaeda leader, similar to the strike on Zawar Kili in 1998, but eventually sc.r.a.pped the plan because they weren't sure where he was and they didn't want to be embarra.s.sed by another failure. Annoyed by the Americans' refusal to take the bait, bin Laden resolved to keep attacking prominent symbols of American hegemony until the United States would finally have no choice but to invade Afghanistan and become mired in an unwinnable war, just as the Soviets had. As cited in The 9/11 Commission Report The 9/11 Commission Report, a covert CIA source stated that bin Laden had "complained frequently that the United States had not yet attacked. According to the source, bin Ladin [sic] wanted the United States to attack, and if it did not he would launch something bigger."

Three days after the attack on the USS Cole Cole, Tillman made nineteen tackles in a 1433 loss to the Philadelphia Eagles. The following Sunday, October 22, the Cardinals were routed by Dallas. Two days after the game Pat wrote, "You thought we got beat last week.... You should have seen Sunday: 487. The worst part is the score was better than it actually was. [The Cowboys] absolutely ran through us. Our front line is unable to even slow the runners down, let alone tackle them." Pat took some small satisfaction from the fact that when these opposing runners got into the backfield, they usually couldn't get past him. He made sixteen tackles on that day, prompting him to note, "At the very least I can cling to that."

Two weeks later, Pat played his best game of his professional career, making an amazing twenty-one tackles against the Washington Redskins. At one point he sprinted from the far side of the field and threw himself into the legs of the Washington ballcarrier Stephen Davis, who had gained thirty-two yards on the play and would have continued running all the way into the end zone for a touchdown if Tillman hadn't torpedoed him. Pat's tackle preserved a rare Cardinals victory-their third, and last, of the season.

* Kevin was born in 1978, when Pat was fourteen months old. Because he couldn't p.r.o.nounce "Kevin" at the time, Pat called his little brother "Nubbin" or "Nub," and the moniker stuck. As did "Pooh," Pat and Kevin's nickname for their younger brother, Richard, born in 1981, who reminded the boys of the rotund protagonist of the Winnie-the-Pooh stories read to them by their mother. Kevin was born in 1978, when Pat was fourteen months old. Because he couldn't p.r.o.nounce "Kevin" at the time, Pat called his little brother "Nubbin" or "Nub," and the moniker stuck. As did "Pooh," Pat and Kevin's nickname for their younger brother, Richard, born in 1981, who reminded the boys of the rotund protagonist of the Winnie-the-Pooh stories read to them by their mother.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN.

On November 7, two days after the Cardinals' win over the Redskins, Americans went to the polls to elect a new president. Although Al Gore received 543,816 more votes than George W. Bush (51,003,926 to 50,460,110), the popular vote was immaterial. The office would go to the candidate who garnered a majority of the electoral votes, and the electoral vote count remained uncertain for more than a month after the election. By the morning of November 8, it was clear that Gore had won at least 255 electoral votes and Bush had won at least 246. But 270 such votes were required to win the presidency, and it was far from certain who rightfully deserved to receive Florida's twenty-five electoral votes because it was impossible to say who had won the popular vote in that state, owing to widespread voting irregularities.

When Florida's ballots were initially counted, Bush led Gore by 1,784 votes (out of some 6 million votes cast), prompting an automatic recount. On November 10, after that recount, the margin of victory was reduced to 327 votes, at which point Gore exercised his right under Florida law to demand that the ballots be carefully recounted again, this time by hand, in four counties that had a preponderance of Democratic voters. The upshot was a series of bitterly disputed recounts that dragged on for weeks, sparking a corresponding flurry of lawsuits and much gnashing of teeth.

More than a little of the postelection anguish (on the part of Democrats, at any rate) derived from the fact that 97,421 Floridians had voted for the third-party candidate Ralph Nader. Throughout his campaign, Nader had labeled Bush and Gore "Tweedledum and Tweedledee," insisting there was no real distinction between their positions. At a press conference in September 2000 Nader had proclaimed, "It doesn't matter who is in the White House, Gore or Bush." Now it appeared that enough voters had believed him to skew the outcome of the election. Exit polls indicated that had he not been in the race, 38 percent of his voters would have voted for Gore, 25 percent would have voted for Bush, and the remaining 37 percent wouldn't have bothered to vote at all. In other words, without Nader on the ballot, Gore would have beaten Bush by nearly thirteen thousand votes and become president of the United States by a comfortable margin.

But Nader of course was was on the ballot, and on November 8 the Florida vote was therefore too close to call. When November gave way to December, it remained that way, despite the ongoing recounts. The waters were muddied by several contradictory rulings from various Florida courts, some of which favored Gore, others of which favored Bush. Complicating matters even further, federal law stipulated that in order to preclude a possible congressional challenge to the legitimacy of the representatives Florida appointed to the electoral college, the state's vote count had to be completed and certified by midnight on December 12. Missing this deadline, as it turned out, would not have invalidated the Florida election results: more than a third of the fifty states failed to meet the December 12 target without incident. The crucial deadline for certifying Florida's vote count didn't actually fall until January 6, 2001. But if the December 12 deadline wasn't particularly important, it was widely perceived to be, and therefore infused the ongoing drama with an added measure of tension. on the ballot, and on November 8 the Florida vote was therefore too close to call. When November gave way to December, it remained that way, despite the ongoing recounts. The waters were muddied by several contradictory rulings from various Florida courts, some of which favored Gore, others of which favored Bush. Complicating matters even further, federal law stipulated that in order to preclude a possible congressional challenge to the legitimacy of the representatives Florida appointed to the electoral college, the state's vote count had to be completed and certified by midnight on December 12. Missing this deadline, as it turned out, would not have invalidated the Florida election results: more than a third of the fifty states failed to meet the December 12 target without incident. The crucial deadline for certifying Florida's vote count didn't actually fall until January 6, 2001. But if the December 12 deadline wasn't particularly important, it was widely perceived to be, and therefore infused the ongoing drama with an added measure of tension.

On December 8, Gore appeared to have prevailed in the legal arena when he won a key ruling by the Florida Supreme Court, which ordered yet another manual recount of some forty-five thousand disputed ballots throughout the state. As this recount got under way, Bush's lead rapidly diminished. On December 9, however, before the tally could be completed, the U.S. Supreme Court voted 54 to issue an injunction that halted the recount in response to an emergency plea filed by Bush's attorneys. At the time this stay was granted, Bush's lead had dwindled to 154 votes and appeared to be fast on its way to vanishing altogether.

The December 9 injunction provoked furious protests from Democrats and was derided by legal scholars as a transparently partisan attempt by the Rehnquist Court to hand the election to Bush. Unmoved by the firestorm of criticism, the Supreme Court justices issued their momentous decision in Bush v. Gore Bush v. Gore three days later, at 10:00 p.m. on December 12. Again by a vote of 54, the Court ruled that the December 12 deadline for certifying the vote count would in fact be binding, and because completing a const.i.tutionally valid recount would be impossible within the two hours that remained before the clock struck midnight, there would be no further reckoning of Florida's disputed votes. three days later, at 10:00 p.m. on December 12. Again by a vote of 54, the Court ruled that the December 12 deadline for certifying the vote count would in fact be binding, and because completing a const.i.tutionally valid recount would be impossible within the two hours that remained before the clock struck midnight, there would be no further reckoning of Florida's disputed votes.

Incensed Gore supporters quickly pointed out that just six paragraphs earlier in the text of the same ruling the Court had declared, "The press of time does not diminish the const.i.tutional concern. A desire for speed is not a general excuse for ignoring equal protection guarantees." Furthermore, the Gore camp argued, the only reason a recount couldn't be completed by the court-mandated deadline was that the same five-justice majority had stopped the recount three days previously with their December 9 injunction, predetermining the outcome of their December 12 ruling.

Critics found numerous other reasons to cry foul over the Court's hastily rendered decision. Among the most compelling were allegations that two of the five justices who voted with the majority in favor of Bush-Antonin Scalia and Sandra Day O'Connor-unequivocally violated the federal judicial conflict-of-interest statute by partic.i.p.ating in Bush v. Gore Bush v. Gore. In the instance of Scalia, two of his sons were affiliated with law firms that happened to be representing Bush at the time. Regarding O'Connor, who was seventy years old and in poor health, she had stated on several occasions that she was very eager to retire from the Court and did not want a Democrat to nominate her successor. Had Scalia and O'Connor recused themselves, as the statute clearly required, the vote would have been 43 in favor of Gore.

It wasn't simply Gore supporters who were outraged by the Court's decision. In a dissenting opinion that was uncharacteristically harsh in tone, Justice John Paul Stevens (a Republican appointed by President Gerald Ford) lamented that the outcome of Bush v. Gore Bush v. Gore "can only lend credence to the most cynical appraisal of the work of judges throughout the land.... Although we may never know with complete certainty the ident.i.ty of the winner of this year's presidential election, the ident.i.ty of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the Nation's confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law." "can only lend credence to the most cynical appraisal of the work of judges throughout the land.... Although we may never know with complete certainty the ident.i.ty of the winner of this year's presidential election, the ident.i.ty of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the Nation's confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law."

Be that as it may, the highest court in the land handed down its decision, which allowed Florida's secretary of state, Katherine Harris, to certify the vote with Bush's minuscule lead still intact, which in turn gave Florida's twenty-five electoral votes to the Republican candidate. Twenty-four hours after the Supreme Court issued its decisive ruling, Gore addressed the nation, declaring, "Let there be no doubt: While I strongly disagree with the Court's decision, I accept it. I accept the finality of this outcome which will be ratified next Monday in the Electoral College.... While we yet hold and do not yield our opposing beliefs, there is a higher duty than the one we owe to political party. This is America and we put country before party. We will stand together behind our new president." And thus did Bush become the forty-third president of the United States, a turn of events that would have no small impact on the life of Pat Tillman.

On April 27, 2008, four years after Tillman's death, Justice Scalia was interviewed by CBS correspondent Lesley Stahl on the television show 60 Minutes 60 Minutes. "It has been reported that he [Scalia] played a pivotal role in urging the other justices to end the Florida recount, thereby handing the 2000 election to George Bush," Stahl observed, and then confronted Scalia face-to-face: "People say that that decision was not based on judicial philosophy but on politics."

"I say nonsense," he replied, deflecting the accusation with an imperious smirk. When Stahl wouldn't drop the issue, he snapped, "Get over it. It's so old by now."

Twelve days after the Supreme Court ruling that would put Bush in the White House, Tillman and the Cardinals were back in the nation's capital to play their final game of the year, which they lost to the Redskins in a blowout. Tillman performed well, nevertheless, capping a season of stellar play. Pat was credited with 224 tackles, setting a new Cardinals record. Had he made that many tackles on a better team, he almost certainly would have won enough votes to play in the Pro Bowl, the NFL all-star game, but because Arizona went 313 for the season he was ignored in the balloting process.

However, Tillman wasn't overlooked by Paul Zimmerman, the esteemed football writer known to his readers as "Dr. Z," who publishes a list of the NFL's best players in Sports Ill.u.s.trated Sports Ill.u.s.trated at the conclusion of each season. After meticulously a.n.a.lyzing every play Tillman made all year, Zimmerman declared Pat to be the most accomplished strong safety in the league in 2000. Players who made his list at other positions included such luminaries as Donovan McNabb, Marshall Faulk, Randy Moss, Ray Lewis, and Warren Sapp. In a column t.i.tled "My All-Pro Team," Zimmerman acknowledged that his elevation of Tillman to this elite circle would surprise many readers. Football aficionados, he wrote, were likely to "glance at my all-pro list and sneer, 'Pat Tillman! Who the h.e.l.l is that? Dr. Z's going loony on us.'" at the conclusion of each season. After meticulously a.n.a.lyzing every play Tillman made all year, Zimmerman declared Pat to be the most accomplished strong safety in the league in 2000. Players who made his list at other positions included such luminaries as Donovan McNabb, Marshall Faulk, Randy Moss, Ray Lewis, and Warren Sapp. In a column t.i.tled "My All-Pro Team," Zimmerman acknowledged that his elevation of Tillman to this elite circle would surprise many readers. Football aficionados, he wrote, were likely to "glance at my all-pro list and sneer, 'Pat Tillman! Who the h.e.l.l is that? Dr. Z's going loony on us.'"

But Zimmerman explained why he held Tillman in such high regard. He began his evaluation of Pat with a three-day review of his play throughout the 2000 season, during which, Zimmerman wrote, he had a "dim awareness" that Tillman had a number of good games and should be a.n.a.lyzed further. "And then," he continued, stringing together all his numbers, I discover, h.e.l.lo, that he has defeated the compet.i.tion.... I couldn't believe the margin by which he outscored everybody on my board, so I started making calls to personnel people whose opinions I respect.... You want to laugh at me, go ahead. But I'll show you, for instance, my chart of Tillman's performance against New Orleans, when he was knocking down anything with a heartbeat and the Cardinals had the NFC West champs on the ropes for a while, or my doc.u.mentation of his work in the September victory over the Cowboys, when I got him for six great pa.s.s defense plays and 10 stops near the line of scrimmage, both high numbers for a strong safety this season.

After his piece was published, Zimmerman later acknowledged, some sports announcers from the major television networks ridiculed his selection of Tillman as an All-Pro player, pointing out that he was "not the greatest in coverage, etc. But what I had seen was a wild and punishing tackling machine, a guy who lifted the performance of everyone around him. You could see the fire in the whole defensive unit when he led the charge to the ball." In the final a.n.a.lysis, one came away believing that Dr. Z was absolutely right: at the end of the 2000 season, Tillman deserved to be considered one of the best players in professional football.

Zimmerman's article was posted on the Internet on January 3, 2001. In the nation's capital that day, Richard Clarke-the Clinton administration's national coordinator for security, infrastructure protection, and counterterrorism-briefed the incoming Bush administration's new national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, on the dire threat the United States faced from Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda. Clarke writes in his book Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror, "My message was stark: al-Qaeda is at war with us, it is a highly capable organization, probably with sleeper cells in the U.S., and it is clearly planning a major series of attacks against us; we must act decisively and quickly, deciding on the issues prepared after the attack on the Cole Cole, going on the offensive."

On January 25, Clarke alerted Rice that six recent intelligence reports uncovered statements from al-Qaeda operatives boasting of an upcoming attack. Over the following weeks, he repeatedly implored her to persuade President Bush to give much higher priority to terrorism in general and bin Laden in particular, but his e-mails and memos were met with apathy and annoyance.

The Cardinals had paid Tillman a salary of $361,500 for his services in 2000, and had given him a contract that lasted only a single year. Based on his performance in the just-completed season, the St. Louis Rams-a terrific team that had won the Super Bowl a year earlier-believed Tillman was worth considerably more than that. On April 13, 2001, the Rams' management offered him a five-year deal for $9.6 million, $2.6 million of which would be paid up front, upon signing. Frank Bauer, Tillman's agent, immediately called him with the good news. "I get Patty on the phone," Bauer remembers, "and tell him, 'Listen to me. The Rams really want you, and I don't see Arizona matching their offer. I'm going to fax the Rams' offer sheet to you. You have to sign it.'"

Bauer a.s.sumed Pat would leap at the deal, as almost any player would. Instead, Tillman told him, "I need to think about this."

"Patty!" Bauer replied. "What are you doing to me here! You're killing me!" Tillman said he'd let Bauer know his decision in a day or two. "So Pat calls back," according to Bauer, "and he tells me, 'Look, Frank, the Cardinals drafted me in the seventh round. They believed in me. I love the coaches here. I can't bring myself to take the offer from the Rams.' I said, 'Patty, are you nuts? Are you f.u.c.kin' crazy? The Rams want to pay you $9.6 million! If you stay with the Cardinals, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that you're gonna be playing for $512,000.' Pat says, 'I've made my decision, Frank. I'm going to stay with the Cardinals.'

"In twenty-seven years," Bauer continues, "I've never had a player turn down that big of a package in the National Football League. I've had players take twenty grand less per year to stay at clubs they really wanted to play for, but turning down nine and a half million? That's unheard of. You just don't see loyalty like that in sports today. Pat Tillman was special. He was a man of principle. He was a once-in-a-lifetime kid."

After he declined the Rams' offer, the Cardinals offered Tillman another one-year deal for the 2001 season that would pay him the league minimum for a fourth-year player, $512,000, just as Bauer predicted. Pat signed the contract, provoking expressions of astonishment from players, coaches, and fans around the league. For his part, however, Tillman had no regrets.

He was one of those rare individuals who simply can't be bought at any price. Although he had no qualms about making a boatload of money if it happened to mesh with his master plan, Pat was impervious to greed. His belief that other things in life took priority over ama.s.sing wealth never faltered. But if Tillman was uncommonly resistant to the temptations of the baser human appet.i.tes, and was thereby well defended against attempts by others to manipulate him into doing their bidding with such enticements, he found it nearly impossible to resist appeals to his sense of decency and justice. Paradoxically, this latter trait would ultimately prove to be his downfall.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN.

Although Pat spoke self-deprecatingly about his intelligence, and claimed that his academic success in college came from hard work rather than brainpower, his intellectual curiosity was boundless, and he was a compulsive reader who never went anywhere without a book. Pat Murphy, the celebrated Arizona State University baseball coach, remembers seeing Pat in the bleachers during most of the Sun Devils' baseball games when Kevin was on the team. "He always had a book with him," says Murphy. "Between innings, or anytime there was a lull, he'd have it open and he'd be reading something."

Because he loved engaging in informed debate, Pat made an effort to study history, economic theory, and world events from a variety of perspectives. Toward that end he read the Bible, the Book of Mormon, the Quran, and the works of writers ranging from Adolf Hitler to Henry David Th.o.r.eau. Although Tillman held strong opinions on many subjects, he was bracingly open-minded and quick to admit he was wrong when confronted with facts and a persuasive argument.

With his shoulder-length hair and outspoken views, Tillman had been considered a maverick ever since his arrival in Tempe to attend ASU, and he'd done many things in the ensuing years that confirmed his unconventional reputation in the minds of Arizonans. He was an ardent advocate for the rights of h.o.m.os.e.xuals, for instance, and once demanded of Lyle Setencich, an ASU football coach for whom he had great respect, "Could you coach gays?" When Setencich answered not only yes he could, but that he already had, Tillman's esteem for the coach grew even higher.

Curiously, however, nothing seemed to enhance his nonconformist reputation more than his decision to enter a triathlon in the summer of 2001. Two months after turning down the Rams' offer and re-signing with the Cardinals, Pat flew to Cambridge, Maryland, to compete against sixteen hundred people in the Blackwater EagleMan Triathlon. When a reporter for ESPN asked Tillman what had motivated him to enter his first triathlon (after suggesting he must be a "pathological, clinically calibrated m.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.t"), Pat replied, "We've got a long-a.s.s off-season. Doing stuff like this gives me something to focus on. I feel like a b.u.m not doing anything in the off-season. It forces you to stay on a schedule, keeps you from going out and drinking each night, doing something stupid."

But there was more to his decision than he shared with ESPN. Pat was agnostic, perhaps even an atheist, but the Tillman family creed nevertheless imparted to him an overarching sense of values that included a belief in the transcendent importance of continually striving to better oneself-intellectually, morally, and physically. Endurance events like marathons and triathlons, which favor bony ectomorphs, were not Tillman's strong suit-hence their appeal to him: they were especially challenging to a guy with the hulking physique of a professional football player.

Pat didn't expect to beat many expert triathletes, but he wanted to demonstrate to himself that he could finish the event's 1.2-mile swim, 56-mile bike ride, and 13.1-mile run. Being compet.i.tive by nature, he also looked forward to competing against himself-he was eager to see just how good a triathlete he could become in the limited time he had to prepare for the race. He took pleasure, during his twice-daily runs, rides, and swimming sessions, in forcing himself to ignore the lactic acid burning in his arms and legs, push through the pain, and cover whatever distance he'd set for himself that day a few seconds faster than he had the week before. It made him physically stronger, needless to say, but more important, he believed, it developed something that might be termed character.

On June 3, after undergoing three months of rigorous training, Pat completed the seventy-mile EagleMan event in six hours, ten minutes, and eight seconds. This was almost two hours slower than the winner, and placed him 956th among the 1,278 finishers, but the race-and the training that preceded it-were immensely satisfying to him. In many ways Tillman had approached this triathlon the same way he approached football-he just happened to have genes that made him really, really good at the latter and not the former.

On June 30, 2001, the CIA issued a top-secret report known as the Senior Executive Intelligence Brief that included an article t.i.tled "Bin Laden Threats Are Real." By late July "the system was blinking red," according to the CIA director, George Tenet, and could not "get any worse." Yet the highest-ranking members of the Bush administration-including National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Vice President d.i.c.k Cheney, and President Bush himself-continued to express doubts about the seriousness of the threat posed by bin Laden. Two senior officials in the CIA's Counterterrorist Center were so dismayed by the failure of the White House to heed their impa.s.sioned warnings that they considered resigning and taking their concerns to the media.

On July 27, the day Tillman and his teammates arrived in Flagstaff for the start of the Cardinals' 2001 preseason training camp, the counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke informed Rice that the danger of an imminent attack from al-Qaeda had most likely pa.s.sed. He warned, however, that new intelligence indicated the attack had merely been postponed for a few months and "will still happen."

Ten days later, on Monday, August 6, George W. Bush received a confidential doc.u.ment known as the President's Daily Brief while vacationing at his ranch in Crawford, Texas. The memo, a summary of important intelligence a.s.sembled by the CIA, included a two-page a.s.sessment of the current threat posed by terrorists. At the top of this report was a headline in boldfaced type that read, "Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US." In its concluding paragraphs, the report warned that information gathered by the FBI indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York.The FBI is conducting approximately 70 full field investigations throughout the US that it considers Bin-Ladin-related. CIA and the FBI are investigating a call to our emba.s.sy in the [United Arab Emirates] in May saying that a group of Bin Ladin supporters was in the US planning attacks with explosives.

This memo was the thirty-sixth occasion during the preceding eight months that the CIA had alerted the White House to the threat posed by al-Qaeda or bin Laden. After a CIA officer finished briefing President Bush on the memo, according to Ron Suskind's book The One Percent Doctrine The One Percent Doctrine, the commander in chief was openly disdainful of the warning it contained. "All right," Bush told the officer in a sarcastic tone of voice, "you've covered your a.s.s," and then dismissed him. (Three years later, after the confidential memo was decla.s.sified and released to the public, the president's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, would insist that the confidential memo contained nothing more than "historical information based on old reporting. There was no new threat information.") Growing increasingly desperate to convince Rice, Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Bush of the need to take decisive action to prevent the major attack that he believed bin Laden was about to launch within the borders of the United States, Richard Clarke sent Rice a scathing e-mail that challenged her to imagine how she and her White House colleagues would feel "when in the very near future al-Qaeda had killed hundreds of Americans: 'What will you wish then that you had already done?'" Clarke issued this urgent call to action at the beginning of September 2001, exactly one week before the attacks of 9/11.

By the conclusion of the Cardinals' training camp at the end of August, Pat was feeling secure about his job as a starter, and was looking forward to the team's first game of the season. Most teams in the NFL played their initial game on September 9, but due to the vagaries of the league schedule Arizona wasn't slated to play until the following Sunday, September 16.

On the Tuesday before that first game for the Cardinals, the players were given the day off, as they usually were on Tuesdays. Pat was intending to sleep late that morning, but shortly after 7:00 a.m. mountain standard time he was jarred awake by a ringing phone. It was his brother Kevin, sounding frantic, yelling at him, "Get your a.s.s up and turn the TV on!"

When Pat raced into his living room and switched on his television, the first thing he saw was a film clip of a Boeing 767 crashing into the World Trade Center at 590 miles per hour, sending a fluorescent blossom of fire bursting through the upper floors of the south tower. A newscaster was explaining that the footage showed United Airlines Flight 175 striking the tower an hour earlier, at 9:03 a.m. eastern daylight time, and that the entire building had just collapsed with thousands of people still inside. Another Boeing 767, American Airlines Flight 11, according to the reporter, had flown into the north tower at 8:46 EDT, and that building was now burning out of control. Twenty minutes later Pat was still staring at the screen, transfixed, when the north tower plummeted to the ground before his eyes. "I left to go in to work," says Marie, "but he sat there watching all morning, and it had a big impact on him."

Shortly after the first tower had been struck from the north, eyewitnesses reported that the jet had been attempting to swerve away from the building before crashing into it, prompting many people to a.s.sume the collision was a terrible accident. But when the second jet flew into the south tower from the opposite direction, there was no mistaking that a sophisticated attack on New York was under way. Like most Americans, Pat found it very difficult to get his mind around this. It seemed beyond belief.

With Marie at work, eventually he left the house and went to the Cardinals' training facility, where he resumed his vigil in front of a television among his teammates. Footage of tiny figures leaping from the upper floors of the burning towers and tumbling through s.p.a.ce left an indelible impression on him. Pat was especially affected by images of people jumping from the buildings holding hands.

Several days later, at the request of the Cardinals' public relations department, Pat submitted to an interview that was videotaped for distribution to the news media. When asked to speak about how the national tragedy had affected him, Pat reflected, "You don't realize how great a life we have over here.... Times like this you stop and think about just how-not only how good we have it, but what kind of a system we live under. What freedoms we're allowed. And that wasn't built overnight. And the flag's a symbol of all that. A symbol of-My great-grandfather was at Pearl Harbor. And a lot of my family has...gone and fought in wars. And I really haven't done a d.a.m.n thing as far as laying myself on the line like that. So I have a great deal of respect for those who have. And what the flag stands for."

The league canceled all the games that had been scheduled for the Sunday and Monday following September 11, but had announced the season would resume on the twenty-third, when the Cardinals would play the Denver Broncos. With the tape rolling, the interviewer tried to elicit a statement from Pat to the effect that he and the other players were eager to resume playing football, in spite of the attacks that had killed nearly three thousand people. Tillman did his best to stick to this upbeat script. "I want to play now," he started to mumble, looking uncomfortable, "if for no other reason-just because this thing has already done enough damage. Let's move on. Let's move on, let's go out there, sit out there for the national anthem." It was becoming painfully obvious, however, that these words weren't coming from his heart. "I don't know," he stammered, attempting to continue. Then he sighed, collected his thoughts, and declared, "It's hard because...I play a G.o.dd.a.m.n-We play football, you know? It just seems so G.o.dd.a.m.n...It is so unimportant compared to everything that's taken place."

At the time, n.o.body who saw this interview a.s.signed great portent to this statement, or to the depth of emotion with which it was delivered. Looking back at it again in light of subsequent events, however, it seems obvious that Tillman had already begun to think seriously about making changes in his life-changes that, in the context of the al-Qaeda strikes on New York and Washington, would entail doing something he considered to be of greater consequence than playing football.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN.

Because the league suspended play following the attacks on September 11, when the Denver Broncos came to Tempe on the twenty-third, the Cardinals hadn't played a game since their final exhibition game on August 30, more than three weeks earlier. Pat and his teammates were understandably rusty, although it wasn't apparent initially. Jake Plummer completed his first five pa.s.ses for 109 yards, and Arizona scored a field goal and a touchdown early in the game to take a 100 lead. But then the Cardinals squandered their momentum by making three turnovers, and the Broncos' offense, reenergized, steamrolled the Cardinals' defense. Denver won, 3817.

Pat played poorly. His lowest moment occurred with 6:05 remaining in the third quarter. The Broncos had the ball on the Cardinals' thirty-six-yard line when Denver quarterback Brian Griese threw a pa.s.s toward the receiver Eddie Kennison, who was being covered by Tillman. Kennison had gotten away from Pat, however, and was open in the end zone, so Pat grabbed him illegally to prevent him from catching the football. Although the pa.s.s was incomplete, a referee saw the infraction and charged Pat with a pa.s.s interference penalty, which gave Denver a first down on the Cardinals' one-yard line. On the next play, Griese threw the ball to the fullback Patrick Hape for an easy touchdown, putting the Broncos ahead, 3110.

Pat was furious at himself for the rest of the day, but by the time he went to bed that night he had already regained his perspective, and was looking forward to using the episode as a learning experience to improve his performance in the future. "For the most part," Marie explains, "Pat put football in its proper place. If he had a bad game, he would take it hard. It was his job, and he took it seriously. But there were only a handful of instances that I can remember when he was really, really upset about it."

The following Sunday, September 30, the Cardinals lost at home again, this time to the Atlanta Falcons, 3414. Only 23,790 spectators had shown up to witness the defeat, Arizona's smallest home crowd in many years. The Sunday after that, the Cardinals flew to Philadelphia to play Donovan McNabb and the red-hot Eagles in Veterans Stadium. Sixty-six thousand three hundred and sixty fans were there, a sellout, to cheer their beloved Eagles. The start of the game was delayed nine minutes, however, so that a speech from the president of the United States could be broadcast live to the crowd. At 1:00 p.m., as the players from both teams stood on the field before the opening kickoff, a surreal image of George W. Bush materialized above them on the stadium's JumboTron.

Dressed in a dark suit with a red tie, sitting in the White House Treaty Room with an American flag behind his right shoulder, the president p.r.o.nounced, "Good afternoon."

On my orders, the United States military has begun strikes against al-Qaeda terrorist training camps and military installations of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. These carefully targeted actions are designed to disrupt the use of Afghanistan as a terrorist base of operations, and to attack the military capability of the Taliban regime....More than two weeks ago, I gave Taliban leaders a series of clear and specific demands: Close terrorist training camps; hand over leaders of the al-Qaeda network; and return all foreign nationals, including American citizens, unjustly detained in your country. None of these demands were met. And now the Taliban will pay a price. By destroying camps and disrupting communications, we will make it more difficult for the terror network to train new recruits and coordinate their evil plans.Initially, the terrorists may burrow deeper into caves and other entrenched hiding places. Our military action is also designed to clear the way for sustained, comprehensive and relentless operations to drive them out and bring them to justice....We did not ask for this mission, but we will fulfill it. The name of today's military operation is Enduring Freedom. We defend not only our precious freedoms, but also the freedom of people everywhere to live and raise their children free from fear....In the months ahead, our patience will be one of our strengths-patience with the long waits that will result from tighter security; patience and understanding that it will take time to achieve our goals; patience in all the sacrifices that may come.Today, those sacrifices are being made by members of our Armed Forces who now defend us so far from home, and by their proud and worried families. A Commander-in-Chief sends America's sons and daughters into a battle in a foreign land only after the greatest care and a lot of prayer. We ask a lot of those who wear our uniform. We ask them to leave their loved ones, to travel great distances, to risk injury, even to be prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice of their lives. They are dedicated, they are honorable; they represent the best of our country. And we are grateful.To all the men and women in our military-every sailor, every soldier, every airman, every coastguardsman, every Marine-I say this: Your mission is defined; your objectives are clear; your goal is just. You have my full confidence, and you will have every tool you need to carry out your duty.I recently received a touching letter that says a lot about the state of America in these difficult times-a letter from a 4th-grade girl, with a father in the military: "As much as I don't want my Dad to fight," she wrote, "I'm willing to give him to you."This is a precious gift, the greatest she could give. This young girl knows what America is all about. Since September 11, an entire generation of young Americans has gained new understanding of the value of freedom, and its cost in duty and in sacrifice.The battle is now joined on many fronts. We will not waver; we will not tire; we will not falter; and we will not fail. Peace and freedom will prevail.Thank you. May G.o.d continue to bless America.

Tillman stared up at the towering video screen alongside his teammates and pondered the president's words. The strikes against bin Laden, al-Qaeda, and the Taliban of which Bush had spoken had commenced exactly two hours earlier when four American ships, an American submarine, and a British submarine launched a synchronized barrage of cruise missiles toward Afghanistan. The first of these fifty missiles had exploded into their targets just thirty-three minutes before Bush had begun his address to the nation. When images of the military action were shown on the JumboTron, the crowd filling the stadium let out a thunderous, cathartic roar. The attacks of 9/11 were being avenged. The United States was now at war.

The game between the Cardinals and the Eagles began immediately after the president's speech. Arizona won it, 2120, when Jake Plummer threw a thirty-five-yard touchdown pa.s.s to MarTay Jenkins on fourth down with only nine seconds left on the clock. Tillman had to leave the game in the first quarter, however, with a severe sprain to his right ankle after he received an illegal cut block from the Eagles' Jon Runyan, a six-foot seven-inch, 330-pound offensive tackle. Although Pat hopped off the field on one leg without a.s.sistance, the injury turned out to be serious. Other than the broken tibia he suffered when he was twelve years old, it was the only debilitating injury Pat ever received on a football field, despite the fact that he was one of the hardest-hitting and most aggressive players in the league.

Immediately after returning to Arizona, ignoring the pain, Pat began working out so he wouldn't lose too much strength or speed as the ankle slowly healed. While his teammates practiced, Pat ran endless laps around the field with an inflatable cast on his foot. And as he continued to rehabilitate the injury over the weeks that followed, he closely followed the war in Afghanistan.

On October 19, the first American ground troops-a small contingent of Army Rangers-landed eighty miles south of Kandahar. For the first months of the war, though, the Bush administration was extremely reluctant to involve more than a handful of Special Operations Forces in the conflict, relying instead on air strikes and ex-mujahideen militias whose services were purchased with duffel bags full of hundred-dollar bills. Most of these mercenary fighters (who received some $70 million all told) were Tajiks, Uzbeks, Turkmen, and Hazaras affiliated with the so-called Northern Alliance, which had been battling the Taliban for control of Afghanistan for the better part of a decade.

Despite the severity of Pat's injury, he missed only four games before returning to the lineup against the Giants on November 11, a game the Cardinals lost, 1710. Two days later, Northern Alliance fighters, supported by American bombers, took control of Kabul, forcing the Taliban to scatter into the surrounding mountains. The Taliban had been vanquished from the Afghan capital with surprising ease, and without the death of even a single American soldier. The Bush administration, ecstatic over the painless victory that seemed at hand in Afghanistan, accelerated a secret plan it had been formulating to invade Iraq, although it would be many months before the president's intent to launch a second war would be revealed to the American public.

On November 25, a CIA officer named Johnny Michael Spann was gunned down by the Taliban during a prison uprising that occurred outside the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif while Spann was interrogating prisoners of war-the first American to die in combat during Operation Enduring Freedom. Ten days after that, three U.S. Green Berets were killed and five others were gravely wounded on the outskirts of Kandahar when a U.S. Air Force B-52 bomber struck them with a two-thousand-pound, satellite-guided "smart" bomb that had been calibrated "for maximum blast effect."

The latter accident occurred during a desperate firefight between the Taliban and American Special Forces. An inexperienced Air Force tactical air controller had just calculated the coordinates of an enemy fighting position and was about to call in an air strike when the batteries died in his precision GPS device, causing its display screen to go dark. Frantically, the air controller put new batteries into the GPS, the numbers flashed back on the screen a moment later, and he directed the B-52 flying overhead to drop its lethal payload on these coordinates. The air controller was unaware, however, that after a battery replacement his GPS automatically defaulted to display the coordinates of its own position. He mistakenly called in these coordinates instead of the Taliban's position, and the upshot was the first three members of the American military to die in the Afghanistan war were victims of fratricide.* Impressed by the stability the Taliban brought to Afghanistan when they appeared on the scene in 1994, Karzai initially endorsed their rise to power with great enthusiasm. His support of Mullah Omar continued until 1999, when Taliban fanatics murdered his father, at which time Karzai joined forces with the Northern Alliance against the Taliban and vowed to avenge this murder, in keeping with the tenets of Impressed by the stability the Taliban brought to Afghanistan when they appeared on the scene in 1994, Karzai initially endorsed their rise to power with great enthusiasm. His support of Mullah Omar continued until 1999, when Taliban fanatics murdered his father, at which time Karzai joined forces with the Northern Alliance against the Taliban and vowed to avenge this murder, in keeping with the tenets of Pashtunwali Pashtunwali.

At the time he was wounded by the misdirected U.S. bomb on December 5, 2001, Karzai was leading eight hundred Pashtun militiamen in a battle against the Taliban outside of Kandahar. Fighting alongside twenty-four American Green Berets, Karzai and his forces had been skirmishing with the Taliban for two days when several hundred of Omar's fighters mounted a surprise a.s.sault, prompting the Green Berets to call in the air strike that killed the three Americans and almost killed the newly installed Afghan leader.

As this incident was unfolding, bin Laden was three hundred miles away, hiding with a large number of defiant al-Qaeda fighters in a network of covered trenches, caves, and underground bunkers, most of which had been constructed by bin Laden during the Soviet war with a.s.sistance from the CIA. This complex of caves occupied just a few square miles Sergeant Brian Prosser. Although Johnny Michael Spann was killed ten days earlier, he was employed by the CIA, not the Armed Forces. of rugged, spa.r.s.ely forested terrain on the slopes of a fourteen-thousand-foot ma.s.sif called Tora Bora. Believing that bin Laden was within their grasp, six CIA operatives directed an intensive air attack on Tora Bora's frigid heights, carpet bombing al-Qaeda positions with wave after wave of fifteen-thousand-pound "daisy cutters," five-thousand-pound thermobaric "bunker busters," and other instruments of overwhelming devastation. The air a.s.sault was bolstered by operations on the ground conducted by approximately seventy American Special Operations troops (some fifty of whom were Delta Force operators, the nonpareil of the U.S. military), a dozen British commandos, a handful of German commandos, and two thousand Afghan mercenaries commanded by a hodgepodge of local warlords who, in return for multimillion-dollar payments from the CIA, had momentarily put aside their hostilities to form an ad hoc coalition dubbed the Eastern Alliance.

Before the heaviest bombing began, according to a tape-recorded message from bin Laden broadcast on Al Jazeera two years later, he had directed his fighters to dig "one hundred trenches, spread across an area no more than one square mile-one trench for every three brothers-so as to avoid heavy human casualties from the bombing.... The bombing continued around the clock-not a second went by without warplanes flying over our heads, day and night. The American defense ministry command room, with all its allies, put everything they had into blowing up and destroying this small area. They tried to eradicate it altogether."

It appeared as though the onslaught from the sky had succeeded when, during the evening of December 11, the al-Qaeda fighters contacted one of the Eastern Alliance commanders and begged for a truce in order, they said, to negotiate the terms of their surrender. Despite vehement objections by the Americans, the Afghans agreed to the truce on the morning of the twelfth. Believing that bin Laden had no intention of capitulating, and that the cease-fire was merely a gambit to allow al-Qaeda forces to regroup, early that morning twenty-five American Delta operators and British Special Boat Service commandos attempted to climb toward bin Laden's redoubt in order to continue their attack, when eighty Eastern Alliance fighters on the American payroll leveled their weapons at the Western commandos and forced them to turn back.

At 5:00 that evening, by which time no enemy had come forward to surrender, the Americans declared the truce to be invalid, ignored the protests of the Eastern Alliance, and resumed their a.s.sault on bin Laden's caves with even greater fury than before.

Giant orange fireb.a.l.l.s again flared across the slopes of Tora Bora as B-52s, F-18s, and B-1 stealth bombers released their payloads over al-Qaeda positions. As the exploding ordnance shook the earth around him, bin Laden concluded that his forces were about to be eradicated and his own death was imminent. Wounded in the left shoulder, disillusioned and resentful, he put pen to paper and composed his last will and testament from a cramped subterranean bunker eighty-two hundred feet above sea level. "If every Muslim asks himself why has our nation reached this state of humiliation and defeat," he wrote, "then his obvious answer is because it rushed madly for the comforts of life and discarded the Book of Allah behind its back.... The Jews and Christians have tempted us with the comforts of life and its cheap pleasures and invaded us with their materialistic values before invading us with their armies, while we stood like women doing nothing because the love of death in the cause of Allah has deserted the hearts."

Confirmation that the al-Qaeda leader had given up and was preparing to die seemed to come on December 14, when the CIA intercepted a radio transmission from bin Laden in which he thanked his "most loyal fighters" for their sacrifices, asked their forgiveness for losing the battle of Tora Bora, and then promised that the battle against the infidels and crusaders would continue on other fronts. After the radio transmission, bin Laden's forces continued to fight for three more days until the battle came to a gruesome end. Although scores of enemy surrendered, the last al-Qaeda fighters holding out on the mountain killed themselves with hand grenades rather than capitulate. On December 17, when the bombs stopped falling, the shooting ceased, and smoke from the battle finally drifted from the flanks of Tora Bora, American and British commandos immediately entered the warren of tunnels and bunkers, within which they were sure they would find the remains of bin Laden. A thorough search, however, turned up no trace of him.

The truce on December 1112, it became apparent, had been a ruse to allow the al-Qaeda leader to make a deal with an Eastern Alliance commander who subsequently helped bin Laden escape for a purported payment of $6 million. The CIA had a.s.sumed the sheik's radio message on the fourteenth was a final farewell to his followers issued shortly before dying in one of the caves. Belatedly, the Americans came to understand that it was merely a send-off to his rear guard before he lit out for Pakistan.

This revelation infuriated the CIA and Delta Force operators who partic.i.p.ated in the battle. Eliminating Osama bin Laden was the primary objective of the entire post-9/11 campaign. In late November, when they realized that they had bin Laden cornered, the man who ran the CIA's operations in Afghanistan, Hank Crumpton, went to the Oval Office to warn President Bush and Vice President Cheney that they didn't have nearly enough American troops on the ground to seal off Tora Bora. According to Ron Suskind's book The One Percent Doctrine The One Percent Doctrine, Crumpton told Bush and Cheney, "We're going to lose our prey if we're not careful."

A week earlier, twelve hundred Marines had arrived in Kandahar. Crumpton implored General Tommy Franks to immediately transfer most of these Marines north to where bin Laden was dug in, but Crumpton's request was ignored. As an alternative, the CIA leader on the ground at Tora Bora requested that a more modest contingent of Rangers be dispatched to block escape routes into Pakistan, but this plan was rejected by Major General Dell Dailey, the head of the Joint Special Operations Command. The American presence at Tora Bora would thus remain limited to the eighty or so Special Ops Forces and CIA personnel who were already in place there. A request by the Delta Force squadron commander to at least seed bin Laden's potential routes of egress with hundreds of CBU-89 antipersonnel mines, dropped from the air, was also denied.

Responsibility for blocking the avenues of escape from Tora Bora thus fell almost entirely to Afghan militia fighters from the Eastern Alliance-a motley a.s.sortment of mutually hostile former mujahideen commanders and subcommanders who were deeply suspicious of American ambitions in Afghanistan, but whose loyalty had nevertheless been expensively rented by the CIA. In retrospect, the decision to rely on these untrustworthy warlords for such an utterly crucial task probably doomed the mission from the outset.

Bin Laden had close personal ties going back more than fifteen years to several of the commanders who had been paid to block his retreat. Instead of killing "the world's most wanted man," one or more of the warlords who'd taken the CIA's cash opened their arms to bin Laden and ushered him safely through the cordon-probably first to Jalalabad, then north on horseback into the snow-choked canyons of Konar Province, and from there across the mountains into Pakistan. According to the journalist Peter Bergen, Jalaluddin Haqqani played a key role in bin Laden's escape. "Lutfullah Mashal, of the Afghan Interior Ministry, told me that it was Haqqani who saved bin Laden after the fall of the Taliban," Bergen wrote in the October 2004 issue of the Atlantic Atlantic, "affording him refuge in Khost not long after the terrorist leader had slipped out of Tora Bora."

Bin Laden later gloated about eluding the CIA's clutches: Despite the unprecedented scale of [the Tora Bora] bombardment and the terrible propaganda all focusing on one small, besieged spot, as well as the hypocrites' forces, which they got to fight against us for over two weeks, non-stop, and whose daily attacks we resisted by the will of G.o.d Almighty, we pushed them back in defeat.... Despite all this, the American forces dared not storm our positions. What clearer evidence could there be of their cowardice, of their fear and lies, of the myths about their alleged power? The battle culminated with the resounding, devastating failure of the global alliance of evil, with all its supposed power, to overcome a small group of mujahideen mujahideen, numbering no more than three hundred, in their trenches within one square mile, at temperatures as low as ten degrees below zero Celsius. We suffered only six per cent casualties in the battle, and we ask G.o.d to accept them as martyrs. As for those in the trenches, we lost only about two per cent, thank G.o.d. If all the forces of global evil could not even achieve their objective over one square mile against a small number of mujahideen mujahideen with such modest capabilities, how could they expect to triumph over the entire Islamic world? with such modest capabilities, how could they expect to triumph over the entire Islamic world?

By the first days of 2002, American forces and their allies had killed hundreds of Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters throughout Afghanistan, and most of the rest had dispersed into the countryside or fled over the border into the tribal regions of Pakistan. The insurgents were far from defeated, however, and the three enemy leaders who had been marked for elimination at the top of a hit list a.s.sembled by the American military bra.s.s-Osama bin Laden, Mullah Mohammed Omar, and Jalaluddin Haqqani (whom Omar had recently