The First Hostage: A J. B. Collins Novel (8 page)

11

Amid the blazing wreckage, we plummeted toward the first floor.

But we didn’t fall the entire way. We dropped, instead, onto a row of pallets, then rolled off and landed with a thud on the concrete floor. My left arm was in excruciating pain. My knees had smashed on the pavement and were killing me. But as I looked up and wiped sweat and soot from my eyes, I could see the agent’s suit was on fire. I summoned what little strength I had left, tossed the Kalashnikov to the side, and threw myself on him, extinguishing the flames with my own body. It had all happened so quickly I didn’t think the agent had actually suffered any serious burns. But I feared the fall might have finished him off. Again I checked his pulse. It was weak, but it was there. He was still alive, though barely.

I turned to look for the colonel, to call for help, but instead found myself face to face with one of the terrorists. Shrouded in a black hood and covered in blood, he was pointing an AK-47 and screaming at me in Arabic.

“Get up
 
—get up and prepare to die!”

Slowly, and with some difficulty, I rose to my feet, my hands in the air, not wanting to make any sudden movements. His eyes were locked on mine, and they were wild with a toxic mixture of rage
and self-righteousness. I’d never seen anything quite like it, and I instantly lost all hope that this could turn out well.

And then something changed. I couldn’t see his full expression, of course, just his eyes, but behind the rage something was different. Whatever was fueling his emotions at that split second didn’t soften, nor did it weaken, but it did alter somewhat.

“You,” he said, shaking the barrel of the machine gun at me. “I’ve seen you.”

I said nothing.

“You’re . . . you’re the infidel . . . the one who interviewed the emir,” he said, practically spewing the words out of his mouth as if they were laced with poison. “You filthy
kafir
 
—you will pay for what you have done!”

I was frozen
 
—couldn’t move, couldn’t think, couldn’t speak. I saw the man’s finger preparing to pull the trigger, and I wish I could tell you that I reacted in some way
 
—that I lunged at him or dove for cover or at least closed my eyes and prayed. But I just stood there. Eyes wide open. Waiting for death. And then a machine gun erupted to my right and the terrorist’s head exploded.

Before I fully realized what was happening, Colonel Sharif was rushing to my side to see if I was all right. I wasn’t, though I told him I was fine. Smoke was curling out of the barrel of his MP5 as a squad of Jordanian commandos came rushing by.

“Clear,” I heard one of them say.

“You sure you’re okay?” the colonel asked.

I couldn’t answer. Instead I drew Sharif’s attention to the agent.

“Who is he?” Sharif asked, dropping to the man’s side and checking his vitals.

“I have no idea,” I replied.

“Where did you find him?”

“Upstairs, near the window.”

“What was he doing up there?”

I just shook my head.

Sharif pulled out a radio and called for a medic. Moments later a team of four men rushed in. They immediately put the agent on a stretcher and raced him out to a chopper that was landing in the courtyard. At the same time, Sharif grabbed my arm and led me out of the inferno
 
—and just in time, for we had no sooner begun to cross the courtyard than the entire building collapsed in a huge ball of sparks and smoke.

I turned and looked at the burning wreckage. I just stood there for a few moments, watching it. Then I heard Sharif telling me to follow him again. I wasn’t sure that was a good idea, but it was dawning on me that the entire site was now secure. All of the terrorists must now be dead or in custody.

Soon I found myself stepping inside the next warehouse over. It was cavernous, much larger than the others, and it was swarming with Jordanian commandos. Some were tending to their wounded. Others were collecting clues or taking photos as if it were a crime scene. One soldier was videotaping the scene, presumably for the king and the prince, perhaps even to uplink to the White House Situation Room, the war room in the Pentagon, and CENTCOM. The floor was littered with shell casings, shrapnel, and shards of safety glass from the blown-out windows of one vehicle after another. The metallic, acrid smell of gunpowder hung in the air, mixed with the stench of the fires all around us.

Instinctively, I grabbed the Nikon around my neck and began snapping photos as well.

But Sharif pulled me aside. “Stop,” he said.

“Why?”

“It can wait,” he said quietly.

“For what?” I pressed. “This is why I’m here.”

“Trust me,” he replied. “It can wait.”

Sharif asked me to come with him. I didn’t want to miss anything.
I had an unprecedented world exclusive, if only the king
 
—and my editors back home
 
—would let me run with the story. (That, of course, assumed I hadn’t been fired yet, though I knew I’d cross that bridge later.) Reluctantly, I did let go of my camera and let it dangle around my neck as the colonel brought me to the very back of the warehouse.

There it was
 
—the president’s bullet-ridden Chevy Suburban.

I stiffened. The scene was eerie
 
—haunting, really. The two front doors were open. So were the back doors. The bodies of three Secret Service agents lay before me. I peered into the backseat of the SUV. It was covered with blood. And on the concrete floor was a trail of blood leading away from the Suburban and out a side door.

“Tell me you found the president,” I said, suddenly sure they hadn’t.

“We haven’t,” Sharif said, confirming my suspicion.

“Please tell me he’s safe.”

“I can’t.”

“Tell me you know where he is,” I pressed.

“I’m sorry, Collins; we have no idea.”

12

AMMAN, JORDAN

We landed back at the air base in Marka just after 8 p.m. local time.

It was now one o’clock in the afternoon in New York and Washington, and I knew Allen and his bosses had to be furious at me for not answering my phone.

As we headed into the bunker, I asked Colonel Sharif to brief me on what was happening in the outside world. He might not be authorized to give me back my iPhone, I argued, but I couldn’t do my job if I had no idea what everyone else was reporting. He agreed and summarized several of the stories he was reading on his Android.

Agence France-Presse was reporting casualty figures of more than five hundred dead in the attack on the peace summit, though Sharif and I knew the real figure was, tragically, double that number.

Reuters was reporting that Palestinian president Salim Mansour was now in guarded condition at a hospital in Ramallah but was increasingly expected to make a full recovery.

Al Jazeera and the Associated Press were reporting rumors of a major military operation not far from the Amman airport. Interviews with unnamed local residents suggested a heavy concentration of Jordanian ground and air forces and large explosions in an industrial
park just off the intersection of Routes 15 and 35. So far, however, Sharif noted, neither story even hinted that this operation might have anything to do with the hunt for President Taylor.

The big story, far and away, was the rumor
 
—driven by the Drudge Report and my tweets
 
—that the president of the United States was missing.

Sharif checked the
New York Times
home page.

“Your story is the lead,” he said. “It was posted twenty-two minutes ago.”

“So they went with it after all,” I said, not sure if I was more surprised or angry.

“How could they not?” Sharif said. “Once Drudge moved it, every news organization in the world picked it up.”

“You don’t know Allen and the brass.”

“What were they going to do?” Sharif asked as we showed our IDs to the MPs guarding the general headquarters building and ran our backpacks, camera gear, and other supplies through the X-ray machine, stepped through metal detectors, and were patted down for good measure. “Their top correspondent in the region broke the story. Sure, you did it on social media, but no one knows the difference anymore. Or cares. And once it was out there, of course the
Times
was going to ‘own’ it. You’re their man, and this is a sensational story. Terrible
 
—don’t get me wrong. But from a journalist’s perspective, this is the mother of all news stories. I guarantee your editors are kicking themselves for letting Drudge get the jump on them. And look, no one but you and I and a handful of others even knew they weren’t going to run it in the first place.”

“I guess,” I said. “What about the White House? Are they confirming the president is missing?”

“Not quite,” said Sharif, quickly scanning the full story. “But they don’t actually deny it either.”

“What are they saying exactly?”

“The story says, ‘A senior administration official, who asked that his name be withheld as he was not authorized to speak on so sensitive a matter, insisted that Air Force One has landed safely at Israel’s Ben Gurion International Airport without damage and without casualties. The official went on to say that the White House is grieving the loss of several senior officials and numerous support staff but is withholding the names of those killed and wounded until their families can be properly notified.’”

“That’s it?” I asked. “That’s all the White House says about the whereabouts of the president?”

“That’s it,” Sharif said, gathering his things from the X-ray machine.

“Talk about a nondenial denial,” I said. “They can’t shoot my story down because they know it’s true. But by not providing any other details, they’re creating a global firestorm of interest. Why don’t they just tell everyone the truth?”

“Who’s going to say it?” asked Sharif. “The White House press secretary is dead. So is the chief of staff. So are the secretary of state and at least a dozen senior White House officials.”

“Secretary Murray is dead?”

“Sorry
 
—I thought you’d heard.”

“I hadn’t.”

“He and his team got to the ceremony late,” Sharif explained. “Their plane landed about twenty minutes after the president’s, just in from Beijing.”

“I didn’t even see him.”

“He was meeting with a half-dozen other foreign ministers in the east wing of the palace. They were going to join up with the principals immediately after the ceremony.”

A wave of nausea hit me with the news of the secretary of state’s death. Though I’d never interviewed him or developed him as a source, I had met him twice
 
—once when he’d made a surprise visit to Baghdad to hold a press conference with a new Iraqi prime minister,
and once with his lovely wife, Bernadette, and their three teenage girls at a Christmas party at the American embassy in Paris. I couldn’t imagine what this family was going through, and so many other families like theirs.

There was no time to grieve, however. We headed down several flights of stairs, with soldiers flanking us both ahead and behind. I appreciated the colonel’s help. It occurred to me that beyond his name and rank, I really had no idea who he was. We’d had no time to get acquainted. What was his background? Where was he from? And why was he so trusted by the king? I was about to ask him to tell me a bit about himself, but he started talking first.

“You know, your name isn’t the only one on the byline. There are three others.”

“Really? Who?”

“Conyers from the White House, Baker at State, and Neeling at the Pentagon.”

“They’re all backups, second-stringers,” I said. “What about Fisher, Thompson, and O’Malley?”

“Says here they were all at the summit,” Sharif said. “They all died in the attacks.”

“What about Alex?” I asked, referring to Alex Brunnell, the
Times
’ Jerusalem bureau chief.

“I’m afraid he was killed too.”

We were approaching the vault door into the bunker. But I had to stop. I needed a moment. There was too much happening, too much death. I was sure some kind of emotional circuit breakers were going to blow at any second, and I didn’t want to see the king until I had gathered myself together. I stood there, just outside the bunker, eyes closed, inhaling and exhaling very deliberately.
Just breathe,
I told myself.
Just breathe, in and out, in and out, in and out.

What made it all worse was my complete inability to do my job properly. With no phone, I had no way to check my messages, no
way to respond to e-mails, no way to track information or stay in touch with my family or my team in the States. And now I had a huge story that would rock the world. The Chevy Suburban carrying the president had been found bullet-ridden and abandoned in a facility swarming with terrorists. The president’s entire Secret Service detail was dead or gravely wounded. The backseat of the Suburban was covered with blood. There was a trail of blood leading to a side door. But the president was nowhere to be found. The Jordanians didn’t know where he was. Neither did the entirety of the American government.

The door of the bunker opened. Sharif told me it was time to go see the king. I braced myself for the fight that was coming. I understood full well that there were national security implications here. But the American people needed to know. The world needed to know. These were no longer rumors. The president was gone, and the only logical conclusion that could be drawn from the facts at hand was that he was now in the custody of the Islamic State.