The First Hostage: A J. B. Collins Novel (9 page)

13

“You’re right,” said the king.

“I beg your pardon?” I said, unprepared for his response. I’d just completed an extended and somewhat-heated treatise on the importance of being able to write and transmit back to the States a detailed article on the missing president and the failed rescue attempt, but apparently for no reason.

“Why do you think I sent you out there, Collins?” the monarch asked. “Why do you think Colonel Sharif pulled you into the middle of the action rather than staying up in the helicopter? Write the story quickly. As soon as the colonel clears it, you can e-mail it to your editors. I just have two requirements.”

“Requirements?” I asked, bracing myself.

“Yes.”

“And they are?”

“First, I’m asking you not to speculate,” he said.

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning just report the facts. Nothing more. Nothing less. We don’t know where the president is. That’s a fact. The rescue attempt failed. That’s a fact. A massive manhunt for the president remains under way. Also a fact. But you can’t say the president is in the hands
of ISIS. That’s speculation. I know you fear that. We all do. But that’s what I mean
 
—don’t guess, don’t surmise, don’t provide commentary or analysis. Not now. Not in the middle of a fast-moving crisis. Let the pundits back in the States or wherever do the speculation. And obviously you can’t mention any sensitive military or intelligence information, either, like where I am, what base we’re at, and so forth. The colonel will make sure there’s nothing classified or sensitive in your piece.”

I deeply rejected the very concept of a military censor. I’d fought it all over the world
 
—in Afghanistan, in Iraq, and wherever I went. But there was no time to fight it at the moment. And there was no point. The king understood what I was trying to do. He wasn’t asking for me to paint Jordan in a good light. He was just asking me to be a reporter, not a commentator, and under the circumstances that seemed fair enough.

I nodded, then asked, “What’s the second requirement?”

“Speed,” the king said. “Get some version of the story out fast. To write up the whole battle story will likely take you most of the night. But the American people can’t wait for the whole thing. Nor can anyone else. They need to know the most crucial facts right now. So don’t write it all up at once. Do a first draft. Get the basic details out there. We’ll let you transmit additional paragraphs with more details every thirty to forty-five minutes throughout the evening, if you’d like. It’s a world exclusive no matter what. No one else has the story. People will be hanging on every word. The
Times
web traffic will be off the charts. But at least everyone will know the lead right away. Agreed?”

“Photos too?” I asked.

“A few at a time, sure.”

“Then agreed,” I said.

“Good. Can you give the colonel a first draft in fifteen minutes?”

“I can do it in ten.”

“Even better.”

With that I was dismissed. Sharif led me out of the bunker, through a vestibule, down the hall, and into a complex of offices where staff members were hard at work coordinating sorties of fighter jets against various ISIS targets and managing the air portion of the enormous manhunt for the president. We came to a small, unoccupied office that apparently had been set aside for the colonel and me. Everything had been cleared from the shelves. The desktop was cleared off as well. But there was a new laptop waiting for me and a laser printer, along with a Keurig machine and a supply of coffees and teas. There was also a small refrigerator, like the kind I’d had in my college dorm room a million years ago, stocked with water and soft drinks.

I soon realized the phone on the desk was disconnected, and while there was Wi-Fi, the colonel said he wasn’t authorized to give me the password. Still, it was clean and quiet and far better than what Abu Khalif had provided me. So I sat down, took some more pain medication for my arm, and got to work.

Ten minutes later, as promised, I was done with the first draft.

*   *   *

Four hours later, I slid the laptop across the desk.

On the screen was the final draft. The colonel, as bleary-eyed as I was, carefully reviewed my copy, struck out only four sentences, and cleared it for publication. Then he plugged in a memory stick, downloaded the file, and took it to another room to e-mail it to Allen MacDonald.

While he was gone, I pulled out my grandfather’s pocket watch and wound it up. It was now just after midnight. Over the past several hours, I had spoken to Allen three times, under the colonel’s supervision, on a borrowed satphone. After assuring Allen that I was physically okay, I’d explained the unique circumstances under which
I was operating. I figured the king’s admonition against disclosing my location probably applied to phone calls as well as news stories, so I didn’t say exactly where I was. Allen didn’t exactly apologize for our dustup earlier in the day, but he was clearly glad I was alive and well and able to keep writing. With the pipeline cleared between us, he began posting my new material every hour or so. Thus far I’d written
 
—and Sharif had cleared
 
—three updates to my original ten-minute story on the ongoing hunt for the president, complete with additional details provided by the king and the prince themselves, including the fact that Egyptian and Israeli intelligence services were now working closely with the Americans and the Jordanians in the search. I’d also written a brief first-person account of being at the palace when the kamikaze attack took place. I’d wanted to write a story about helping to evacuate the king and his family, but the colonel had rejected this concept out of hand. Instead I wrote a detailed, blow-by-blow description of the battle at the SADAFCO warehouses north of the airport.

Every muscle in my body ached. The pills the doctor had given me earlier in the day were dulling the intensity of my gunshot wound, but the pain was still there, still throbbing. My head was killing me as well. I was feeling dehydrated and chugged down two bottles of water before deciding finally to retire for the night and get some desperately needed sleep.

Sharif requested pillows, an air mattress, and a few blankets for me, and they were all graciously delivered within the next ten minutes, along with basic toiletries, including a toothbrush, toothpaste, and some mouthwash. After Sharif said good-night, an armed MP led me to the restroom, where I washed up, then led me back to the cramped little office. As I lay down, the MP took up his position outside my door. I wasn’t going anywhere tonight. Nor was anyone coming in. For now, that was all I needed to know.

I turned out the lights and lay down on the thin mattress. I pulled
the blankets over me, trying to ignore the smell of the dirty carpet and trying equally not to think about the discomfort of not being able to fully stretch out my legs.

Instead, staring up at the ceiling, I thought about my mom back in Bar Harbor, Maine. I knew she was worried sick. But I also knew she was praying for me. I wished I could have called her, but there hadn’t been time, and I knew she was tracking the story on the
Times
website. She could see my dispatches. She knew I was alive and kicking. She knew I was doing my job, and I knew she was proud of me. Indeed, I was writing each of my stories with her as my audience
 
—not Vice President Holbrooke or the secretary of defense or King Abdullah or Abu Khalif or anyone else. I was trying to explain what I was seeing and hearing to my mom, in language clear and colorful enough to bring it all alive for her. Still, I wanted to talk to her, wanted to tell her personally that I was okay, wanted to hear her voice. Had she talked to Matt? I hoped he’d called her. I hoped he’d explained why he’d left Amman and reassured her that he and Annie and the kids were safe. Where exactly had they gone? I wondered. I had begged them to leave Jordan immediately. Abu Khalif had personally threatened them and our entire family. I was glad Matt had texted me to let me know they were now someplace safe. I could only hope that was really true.

I was not, by any means, a religious man. That was Matt’s thing, not mine. My older brother was the pastor and theologian in the family. I was, you might say, the family’s black sheep. But I loved my brother. I truly wanted him and his wife and kids to be safe. I couldn’t bear the thought of ISIS getting to any of them. So it occurred to me it might be a good idea to pray for them right then, before I fell asleep.

In the darkness, I closed my eyes and folded my hands like I’d done when I was a little kid, and rarely since.

“So, hey, God . . . how’s it going?” I began, then felt foolish for
sounding so ridiculous. “Look, I don’t really know if you’re there. But if you are, I’m asking you to please
 
—you know
 
—keep my mom safe. And Matt. And Annie. And the kids. I’m scared for them. They haven’t done anything wrong. But I feel like I’ve put their lives in danger. And I’m sorry about that. And I just ask that you, well, protect them, and make sure nothing happens to them. Okay? All right, well, thanks, and good night
 
—or amen
 
—or whatever. Anyway, that’s it. Okay. I’m done. Good-bye.”

I felt like an idiot. That had to be the worst prayer in the history of prayer. If there was a God in heaven, I was sure he was laughing at me. Well, not sure. The truth was I had no idea what God might be thinking. But as intensely uncomfortable and deeply self-conscious as I felt at that moment, there was also, I had to admit
 
—if only to myself
 
—something vaguely comforting in having tried to have a meaningful conversation with God for once in my adult life. I couldn’t explain it. I didn’t even really want to think about it, much less analyze it. But it was true. And that made me curious.

14

The next thing I knew, Colonel Sharif was trying to wake me up.

“J. B.? J. B., can you hear me?”

“What time is it?” I groaned, rubbing my eyes and trying to remember where exactly I was.

“It’s just after four.”

“A.m. or p.m.?”

“A.m.,” he said. “Very a.m.”

I groaned again, rolled over, and pulled the blanket over my eyes. In this windowless room, there was no evidence it was morning, but regardless, I still needed many more hours of sleep before I could function effectively again.

“Sorry, J. B.,” the colonel said, not really sounding that apologetic. “I let you sleep as long as I could. But we have breaking news. You need to come into the bunker.”

He handed me a cup of freshly brewed black coffee, a peace offering of sorts. It worked. The aroma alone helped get me to my feet. Given that I was bald, I didn’t need to worry about how my hair looked, though a shower and a good shave would have been nice before seeing the king and his brother again. But Sharif insisted there was no time. I needed to move quickly. So I threw on my shoes,
gulped down some Sumatran Reserve Extra Bold, and followed the colonel to the war room, a fresh MP at our side.

The bunker was a beehive of activity. The king didn’t look like he’d ever gone to bed, but he had changed out of the suit he’d been wearing at the summit into fatigues. He was in battle mode now, the warrior king, and he looked angry.

“Collins, take a seat,” he said as he caught my eye and the vault door shut behind me. “Abu Khalif has just sent a new video to Al Jazeera. The network has been told to broadcast it precisely at 6 a.m. local time. But one of their producers contacted the colonel here and suggested we should watch it first.”

“Have you seen it?” I asked.

“No, not yet,” the monarch said. “None of us. Whatever it is, I thought you’d want to break the story.”

“Isn’t the whole world going to see it at once?” I asked.

“The video, yes,” he replied. “But I want you to report my reaction and the next steps we take against ISIS.”

I took a deep breath and tried in vain to steel myself for what was coming. The king ordered Sharif to play the video, and I turned so I could see the monitor. It took a moment before Sharif could get the images from the e-mail on his laptop to the main screen, but a few seconds later, the image appeared. When the video began to play, I felt I could hardly breathe.

The first shot was that of a man who had become all too familiar to me in recent days: Abu Khalif, the emir of ISIS and self-proclaimed caliph, wearing a kaffiyeh and flowing white robes. While I had met him and spoken to him and even interviewed him in person, face to face, this image startled me because it was the first video ISIS had ever released with its leader in the starring role. Until a few days earlier, Khalif had been locked away in a maximum-security prison in Abu Ghraib, Iraq, not far from Baghdad. But now, as the world knew because of my reporting, the forces of ISIS had attacked the
prison, killed most of its leaders and guards, and freed the spiritual and political leader of the Islamic State. The photos I had taken that had accompanied my front-page story in the
Times
just a few days ago were some of the first the world had ever seen of this barbaric tyrant. Now they were going to see him on television and hear his voice, and I didn’t dare imagine what he was about to say.

What struck me in particular was not the dark eyes or carefully trimmed beard of the emir but the setting he’d chosen in which to shoot this video. He was standing in the courtyard of what appeared to be an ancient, crumbling, perhaps even abandoned mosque. There were several decaying arches behind him, though one of the archways had collapsed entirely and was just a heap of stones. It wasn’t obvious whether this was from recent bomb damage or from an earthquake centuries before, but it was clear that the video had been shot at night. The partially collapsed structure revealed the night sky, and stars were clearly visible, as was part of the moon. The rest of the courtyard was awash in klieg lights that created harsh and oddly formed shadows in the background.

“I am Abu Khalif, the head of the Islamic State,” he began, speaking in flawless, classical Arabic and looking straight into the camera. “I greet you in the name of Allah, the most beneficent, the most merciful. All praise and thanks be to Allah, the Lord of the
’Alamin
, the only owner, the only ruling judge on the Day of Recompense, the Day of Judgment, the day of the glorious resurrection. The Day of Reckoning is coming, the Day of Decision you used to deny.”

He was citing various passages from the Qur’an, pretending to be the spiritual and political leader of a billion and a half Muslims worldwide rather than the savage, soulless terrorist he was in reality.

“Truly, all praise belongs to Allah. We praise him and seek his help and his forgiveness. We seek refuge with Allah from the evils of our souls and from the consequences of our deeds. Whoever Allah guides can never be led astray, and whoever Allah leads astray can never be
guided. I testify that there is no god except Allah, alone without any partners, and I testify that Muhammad
 
—peace and blessings be upon him
 
—is his slave and messenger. It was this messenger who instructed us in the holy Qur’an that ‘he who deceives shall be faced with his deceit on the Day of Resurrection, when every human being shall be repaid in full for whatever he has done, and none shall be wronged.’ Tonight judgment has begun for some of the worst deceivers on our planet. As many of you know by now, forces of the Islamic State have launched an operation inside the heart of Jordan, territory that once was held by the dark forces of the Hashemite infidels but has been liberated by our brave forces and is now part of the ever-expanding caliphate.”

The image quickly changed to shots of distinctive black ISIS flags flying over various landmarks in Amman as well as over villages that could conceivably be Jordanian but weren’t immediately distinguishable from villages throughout Syria or Iraq. I glanced at the king, but he was inscrutable. He was serious and intently focused on both the images and what Khalif was saying, but his expression hadn’t changed at all. Colonel Sharif, on the other hand, looked like he was about to become violently ill.

“Presently the warriors of the Islamic State are embarked on a brave and glorious mission to overthrow the wicked regime in Amman, to rid the holy lands of corruption and betrayal of the Qur’an and the Prophet. Our forces are determined to restore this land and its people to the rightful rule of the caliphate and Sharia law. As I speak to you, this operation is already bearing great fruit. For tonight, by the power and greatness of Allah, I announce to you that our forces have captured the leader of the arrogant powers, the dog of Rome, the president of the United States.”

An audible gasp went through the command center as the image panned from the emir to a shot of President Harrison Taylor wearing an orange jumpsuit, his hands and feet in shackles, standing in the middle of a grotesque iron cage.