The First Hostage: A J. B. Collins Novel (7 page)

9

I opened my notebook and furiously scribbled down every word.

“The fate of us all is in your hands.”

It was a sobering line, one I wanted to ask the king about when I saw him again. It suggested the monarch saw not only the president’s personal fate hanging in the balance but his own, his kingdom’s, his people’s. In many ways, he had prepared his entire life for a moment like this. Yet he was not in the field. He was back in the bunker. He had to trust the men under his command, and if they got it wrong . . .

The general ordered the choppers to bank back toward the target and hit the deck. We were going to come in low and fast. Then he ordered his commanders on the ground to mass tanks and armored personnel carriers at two points, one kilometer east of the compound and one kilometer west, both significantly off the main road and out of sight of all civilians.

“Do you want us to cut off traffic?” one of the battalion commanders asked. “There are a lot of trucks and other vehicles passing through that area.”

To my surprise, the general said no.

“We don’t want to do anything to tip them off that we’re coming,” he explained. “Let everything proceed as normal.”

But that wasn’t all. Jum’a then instructed his special forces teams on the ground to commandeer buses, minivans, and SUVs and be prepared to drive up to the compound at normal speeds, like all other traffic, upon his command.

Next the general asked the prince if there were any calls being made to or from mobile phones or landlines at the target site.

Feisal said both Jordanian and U.S. intel assets were monitoring the site but that they weren’t picking up anything. “It’s all quiet
 
—oddly quiet,” the prince said. “We’re trying to monitor Internet traffic at the site too. But so far, nothing. They seem to have shut down the Wi-Fi system.”

The general thanked the prince, then gave his men their orders.

“Two minutes out,” he said when he was done. “Radio silence from this point forward.”

And all was quiet, save the roar of the rotors above us.

Colonel Sharif reached behind him, grabbed an MP5 machine gun, and inserted a fresh magazine. Then he reached for two flak jackets, put one on, and gave the other to me. It suddenly dawned on me that we might not be staying on the chopper. We might be getting off. I pulled out the gold pocket watch I always carried with me, the one my grandfather gave to me before his death. We had less than a minute. I could feel my heart pounding in my chest and a surge of adrenaline coursed through my system.

Suddenly the pilot pulled back sharply on the yoke. Rather than flying barely fifty feet off the ground, we climbed rapidly to two hundred feet, then three hundred, and kept climbing until we leveled out at five hundred feet.

We were less than thirty seconds out. I was pretty sure I could see the compound, but now we banked sharply to our right and began a circling pattern around the target. The Black Hawks didn’t follow. Nor had they climbed as high as we had. They were still racing for the compound at an altitude I figured to be no more than a hundred feet.

Just then our helicopter was rocked by a massive explosion. One of the warehouses, in the far left corner of the compound, erupted in an enormous ball of fire. But how? Had someone inside detonated a bomb? Or had someone just fired a missile? I looked to my left and saw nothing. But when I turned and looked out the window to my right, I saw an Apache attack helicopter
 
—and it was firing again.

Two more Hellfire missiles streaked across the afternoon sky. I followed the contrails and watched spellbound as one destroyed the main office building. An instant later, the second missile took out the 18-wheeler that had been blocking the entrance. Then a Cobra gunship swooped in below us and to our left. Its pilot opened fire on the armed rebels patrolling the grounds, then trained his fire on the rebels stationed in the doorways of the remaining five warehouses. One by one I watched men in black hoods shredded into oblivion.

The Apache opened fire again. More Hellfire missiles rocketed down into the compound. They weren’t targeted at the buildings, however. Rather, they exploded in the open spaces, vaporizing the remaining visible terrorists but more importantly creating deafening booms and raging fires I had to assume were intended to stun and disorient the enemy combatants inside the main building.

Now the Black Hawks moved into position. Two hovered over the warehouse where the president’s Suburban was located. A moment later I could see the king’s most elite forces fast-roping to the warehouse roof. Two other Black Hawks broke left. The remaining two broke right. The commandos in all four choppers were soon fast-roping to the ground, then scrambling to secure the perimeter. And that’s when the shooting started.

The initial explosions had done their job. They had caught the terrorists completely unaware. They had temporarily thrown the enemy into confusion. But some of the ISIS soldiers were firing back. Within seconds, the fighting had reached a fever pitch. From our vantage point, watching the drone and satellite feeds and looking out
the window to our left, we could see the Jordanian commandos in the heart of the compound. They were using Semtex to blow the doors off the warehouse on the north and east sides. Then we watched mesmerized as they tossed flash grenades into the main warehouse.

The thermal images on the second monitor revealed the chaos inside the facility. The king’s commandos were now storming in from all directions. They were firing at anything that moved. I could see bodies dropping, including some of the king’s men. But they didn’t stop. They kept firing, kept pushing forward, kept advancing toward the back office, though they were encountering fierce resistance.

I was feverishly snapping photos through the windows of the Little Bird as well as at the images from the two video monitors. I was also trying to keep track of the radio chatter. But it was in Arabic and it was coming fast and furious. My Arabic wasn’t horrible, but I certainly wasn’t getting it all. Too much was happening to take it all in. And then, without warning, the Little Bird plummeted. I realized too late it was a planned descent as we hit the ground hard in the driveway just yards from the remains of the tractor-trailer out front, now engulfed in flames.

The moment we slammed to the deck, Colonel Sharif threw open the side door and jumped out. When he shouted at me to follow, for a moment I didn’t move. Was he crazy? The situation was hardly secure. There was an intense gun battle under way. In the chopper, we’d had the perfect vantage point. Why in the world would we get out now?

I’m not saying I was scared. Okay, I was scared. He had an MP5. I had a Nikon. He was a trained soldier. I was just a journalist. Besides, I’d had enough excitement for one day. I’d already been shot at
 
—and hit. I didn’t want to go back into the fray. I wanted to stay with General Jum’a, high above the action. It wasn’t just safer; it was an ideal way to track all the elements of the battle. But now the general was shouting at me to get out. The colonel was unfastening my seat
belt and yelling at me to move faster. He wasn’t kidding. This was really happening.

I ripped off my headset, grabbed the camera bag, and scrambled out of the chopper after him. And no sooner had my feet touched solid ground than I felt the Little Bird lift off behind me and race out of the hot zone.

“Come on, Collins, let’s go,”
Sharif yelled over the nearly deafening roar of the helicopter blades and the multiple explosions.
“Follow me.”

10

I did as I was told, though I hadn’t much choice.

To my shock, Sharif didn’t head for the cover of the perimeter. I guess I’d expected him to put me
close
to the action, at the side of some of the Jordanian forces, to see and hear and smell the battle for myself. Instead, the colonel took me into the heart of darkness.

Suddenly we were racing into the compound, even as the ear-shattering explosions and blistering staccato of machine-gun fire echoed through the courtyard. Sharif didn’t take us around the raging flames of the 18-wheeler. He literally jumped right through them, and I had no choice but to follow suit. He was, after all, the only one with a weapon, and I didn’t dare get separated.

Inside the courtyard, Sharif was running flat out, and I struggled to keep up. He was in far better shape. I was gasping for air. Just then fresh machine-gun fire opened up from a window above us. Fortunately it wasn’t aimed at us but at an armored personnel carrier that was coming in behind us. The ground reinforcements were beginning to arrive, and they were drawing intense resistance.

The colonel broke right, then dove through a gaping hole in the wall of that warehouse. Terrified, I dove too. By a minor miracle, the camera wasn’t damaged, though I did drop the bag with all the
attachments. I should have worn it like a backpack, but I wasn’t thinking clearly. I turned and saw the bag through the smoke, about twenty yards away. I started to go back for it, but out in the courtyard bullets were now whizzing in all directions. A moment before we’d been able to race through unharmed. Now it was a kill box out there, and there was no way I could retrieve it.

Then again, how could we go forward? Gunfire suddenly erupted on the other side of the warehouse floor. I had no idea if it was from the terrorists or friendly fire from the Jordanians. There was no way either side could see us clearly. To them we were only shadows moving through the smoke. That’s certainly how they all looked to us.

Scrambling to my feet, I ducked into a row of pallets piled high with canned goods and other foodstuffs. Sharif aimed his MP5 and returned fire. Then he ducked in beside me and took cover behind the pallets.

Why we were in this particular building I had no idea. If we were going to take such risks, then I wanted to be in the main event, in the next warehouse over. That’s where the president’s Suburban was. That’s presumably where the president himself was. That’s certainly where the biggest gun battle was taking place. We needed to be there too. Instead, we were hunkered down in a warehouse that, as far as I could tell, had no strategic significance. We couldn’t go back. We couldn’t press forward. And the raging fires of the main office building were rapidly spreading. The flames had reached this building and were leaping up the walls. The entire warehouse was going to be consumed in the next few minutes. We had to get out.

If that wasn’t enough, we knew for sure there were terrorists above us
 
—the ones that had been shooting from the window on the second floor seconds earlier.

Through the flames, I noticed a stairway to my right. When I pointed it out to Sharif, he quickly motioned for me to get down and stay behind him. The reason was fast becoming obvious. The
terrorists were either going to be consumed by the fire racing to the second floor or get suffocated by the thick black billows of smoke that were surging into the rafters
 
—or they were coming down those stairs any moment.

The heat was infernal. Sweat was pouring down my face and back. My shirt was already soaked. I mopped my brow, steadied my camera, and started shooting just as Sharif did. Sure enough, three masked terrorists came barreling down the staircase. They weren’t expecting us. Sharif unloaded an entire clip. The men were dead before they hit the ground. I’d captured it all, but Sharif wasn’t finished. He raced over to the men, checked their pulses to make sure they were really gone, then pulled off their hoods as I kept snapping pictures. Then I rifled through their pockets and came out with cell phones, maps, and other articles. I shot all of it, item by item.

As he began loading the items into his own backpack, I got curious. Looking up the stairwell into the hazy darkness, I hung the camera around my neck, pried an AK-47 from one of the terrorists’ death grips, and began moving slowly up the stairs.

When the colonel realized what I was doing, he must have thought I was crazy. He yelled at me to come back. No one in his right mind would be going up those stairs at that moment. The entire building was now on fire. We had maybe a matter of minutes before the whole structure collapsed. But I kept moving, and I’m not sure I can tell you why. If I’d taken some time to think about it, I would never have done it. But I wasn’t operating on rational thought at that moment. I was going by instinct, and my instincts were calling me upward.

Every step seemed an act of delayed suicide, yet I couldn’t stop. More gunfire erupted behind me, but I kept moving, step by step, into the unknown. I’d thought the heat was unbearable when we’d first entered the building. But it was getting worse and worse by the second. When I reached the top of the stairs, I could barely see. The smoke was nearly impenetrable. It and the flames were sucking out
what little oxygen was left in the air. I dropped to my knees, then quickly glanced back. Sharif was no longer with me. From the sound of the gunfire below, he was in full contact with the enemy. I was alone.

Crawling forward, I could barely see the window from which the terrorists had been firing, but I decided this was my destination. I scrambled ahead, stopping every few moments to check my six, terrified someone in a black hood was going to come up and shoot me in the back. Yet the farther I pressed forward, the less I could see behind me. My eyes were watering. I was choking on the smoke and fumes. The gunshot wound to my left arm was throbbing.

I was now crawling on my belly. The only air that was left was down here. The Nikon was on my back. I still held the Kalashnikov, sweeping it forward from side to side as I crawled, just in case.

Why was I doing this? It made no sense. I was moving farther away from the center of the story and putting myself in grave danger in the process. Parts of the roof were collapsing all around me. The holes created new sources of oxygen, giving new fuel to the flames now shooting twenty or thirty feet into the air. I was completely drenched with sweat. I could barely breathe or see. But as I reached the window, I found the bodies of two terrorists. I checked their pulses. They were both dead. I went through their pockets for phones or IDs or anything else useful but found nothing. Was that it? Was this why I’d come? I’d risked my life for what? For nothing?

Cursing myself, I ripped off their hoods and took a few pictures, then turned to leave. But then I began to panic. What if I couldn’t make it back? What if I died here, foolishly, without cause and without any idea where I was going next? I thought about my mom. I thought about my brother, Matt, and his wife, Annie. I thought about their kids. I thought, too, about Yael. I desperately wanted to see them. I wasn’t ready to die. Not yet. Not here.

As I scrambled back toward the stairs, I stumbled upon something
I hadn’t seen coming the other direction. It was a leg. A body. But whoever it was wasn’t dead. He was groaning. He was bleeding heavily, but he was alive. And this wasn’t a terrorist. He was dressed in a suit. I rolled him over and to my astonishment found it was an American. This was an agent of the United States Secret Service. He had a sharpshooter rifle at his side and a gaping wound in his chest. His breathing was shallow. His pulse was erratic.

I threw the strap of the Kalashnikov around my neck so the weapon itself was now slung over my back, side by side with the camera. Then I scrambled around the agent and began dragging him toward the stairs. There was no way I could stand up. The flames along what was left of the roof were coming down closer and closer to the floor. We had only seconds left, so I used every ounce of energy I had to drag the agent across the floor, inch by inch, begging God to allow us to make it to the stairs before it was too late.

But just then the roof above us collapsed, and part of the floor below us gave way.