Inside the Hunt For Saddam

As

the five-ton truck rattles to a stop on a dirt road just before dawn, Lieut. Jason Lojka snaps his squad to attention. "Dirty!" he barks to the men loaded in the back of the vehicle. "Boots!" they reply. Again. "Dirty!" "Boots!" The infantrymen barrel out of the truck toward a two-story home perched on the edge of a sandy bluff overlooking the Tigris, some 10 miles north of the city of Tikrit. They reach the compound's metal gate, M-16s locked and loaded. A translator bangs on the door. When an old woman opens up, the troops sweep through the garden and into the house. An intelligence report had said Taha Yasin Ramadan, Saddam Hussein's Vice President, might be in the area.

They didn't find him. But the raid did turn up some serious firepower: 50 lbs. of C4 plastic explosives, a cache of rifles hidden in the garden and seven AK-47 magazines wrapped in plastic and sunk into a pile of rotting chicken parts. The soldiers also found a Republican Guard uniform and posters of Saddam, and from a field beyond the house they unearthed a telltale box of star-cluster signal flares. "They initiate ambushes with these," says Lieut. Colonel Steve Russell. The flares are further evidence that the Tikrit area, home base for Iraq's fallen leader and his most fervent supporters, is a center of resistance to the U.S. forces.

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Raids like this, designed to flush out Saddam and his top aides, happen every few days. On one level, they have been successful. In their recent operations around Tikrit, U.S. soldiers with the 4th Infantry Division's 1st Brigade — known as the Raiders — have enjoyed several big scores: they helped special forces nab Saddam's trusted aide Abid Hamid Mahmud, seized more than a ton of plastic explosives and hundreds of weapons and uncovered at a farm more than $9 million in cash plus a buried chest of jewels worth more than $1 million that belonged to Saddam's first wife Sajida. But the U.S. forces have been unable to capture Saddam, even as the former Iraqi leader somehow circulates recorded messages calling on Iraqis to fight against the U.S. occupation.

The U.S. is desperate to find him. At home, Americans are concerned about the constant flow of U.S. casualties resulting from what new Central Command General John Abizaid described last week as a "classical guerrilla-type campaign." While there is no evidence that Saddam is directing the attacks, U.S. war planners believe that as long as he is at large, he will continue to galvanize his followers. "Until the myth dies," says Lieut. Colonel Russell, who oversees the town of Tikrit, "people are going to show unnatural fear of his return." Capturing Saddam would also give a lift to the Bush Administration, roiled by allegations that it misled the public about Saddam's weapons. "Time to find Saddam," said a top Republican operative last week. "Time to change the subject."

Russell is doing his best to oblige. "We get nothing if we do nothing," he says, and so he sends his 22nd Infantry Regiment out on almost daily raids and ambushes. The strategy is clear. As long as the coalition forces keep up the pressure, says a Pentagon official, Saddam will eventually make a mistake and be caught. "It's just a matter of waiting for Murphy's Law to kick in," says this official. At the same time, the steady stream of arrests of Saddam loyalists, the Americans hope, will eat away at his support structure. "He needs money and trusted friends to move around," says the official, "and we're scooping up both."

The more former regime members U.S. forces nab, the more they are learning about Saddam's underground network. Brigade commander Colonel James Hickey says a core group of bodyguards around Saddam apparently is moving his money around the area, from Baiji, 20 miles north of Tikrit, to Balad, 50 miles to the south. At the end of June, the brigade intercepted a nephew of Saddam's who was carrying $800,000 in a Samsonite briefcase, presumably moving it from a hidden stash to a delivery point. The farm where the brigade found millions of dollars and Sajida's jewels is believed to have been a way station for those aiding Saddam.

He will not be an easy catch. Although he was Iraq's President, Saddam has been living like a man on the run for more than a decade. A butler who worked for him from 2000 until the day Baghdad fell tells TIME that the former dictator rarely spent more than 10 straight hours in a location. After waking up, Saddam would move on to another place before the call to morning prayer. Though he had his pick of huge palaces, says the butler, Saddam preferred to stay in small houses inside the palace compounds.

Almost certainly, Saddam is traveling with only a few companions. A former private secretary to the dictator tells TIME that a small number of Saddam's bodyguards and close associates disappeared when he vanished after the fall of Baghdad. Everyone else from the former regime, the secretary says, is accounted for. These missing few, he says, are known around Tikrit as shabbah, or ghosts. "No one has seen them," he says, "but we know they are out there, helping him."