The Third Target: A J. B. Collins Novel

by Joel C. Rosenberg

  No sooner had I spoken the words than there was an ever-so-brief lull. This was it, I thought. We had to move now.

  “Go, go, go!” I shouted, springing to my feet and running again.

  I didn’t look back. I couldn’t. But sure enough, moments later, the machine-gun nest roared back into business. Bullets pulverized the walls all around me, but somehow I burst through the rear entrance of the building, out of the line of fire, unscathed.

  Now, however, I really was alone. I could hear mortars and artillery shells landing close by and moving closer. The explosions grew louder, and I both sensed and felt the already-pummeled and fragile building above me rocking and swaying with every concussion. I began to wonder how much more the structure could take. There was no reason I could think of for anyone to be firing directly at it. But what if a shell or two went astray? What if the building were hit? Might the whole thing come toppling down?

  It occurred to me that no one back home had any idea where I was. Allen MacDonald, my editor in Washington, thought I was merely heading up to the Lebanese–Syrian border to interview refugees about the latest battles in the village of Al-Qusayr, since that’s all I had told him after he shot down my Ramzy pitch. My mother thought I was going to Beirut to interview a Hezbollah commander. My brother? I hadn’t talked to him in years.

  Standing in a long, dark hallway, the floor rumbling beneath me, I had absolutely no idea what was in front of me. But I couldn’t turn back now. So I stumbled my way down the hallway, groping in the near pitch-dark with one hand, my other hand touching the wall, as shards of broken glass crunched beneath me.

  I felt something run across my feet and then something else. I immediately kicked the second one away, but a shudder ran down my spine. What were they? Rats? What exactly was I heading into? My imagination kicked into overdrive.

  Just then, in darkness so complete I could no longer see my hand in front of my face, I stumbled over something and crashed to the floor. I had no idea what it was, but it was large and yielding and my hands slid along the floor tiles into something wet and sticky and cold. Repulsed, I wiped my hands on my khakis and felt around for the iPhone in my jacket. I pulled it out, punched in the security code, and clicked on the flashlight app. Instantly, I realized I had landed in a pool of coagulating blood. The fact that it was not yet completely dry made me shudder all over again. I turned and pointed the camera behind me and froze as I stared down into the lifeless eyes of a young boy, no older than fourteen or fifteen, shot at least a dozen times, his white, stiff hands in a death grip around an AK-47.

  Click. Click. Click. My journalistic instincts kicked in and I snapped three pictures, then turned away in horror, wondering anew when the senseless killing in this godforsaken country would ever stop.

  I pointed the light of the phone toward the end of the hallway and made my way to the front door. But as I reached for the doorknob, I hesitated. I needed to find my colleagues, to be sure. I certainly didn’t want to be in this city alone. Nor, I had to imagine, did they. But then again, I had no idea what lay ahead. How in the world were we going to find Jamal Ramzy? For all we knew, he was leading this battle.

  Pulse pounding, I again wiped my hands on my pants, then slowly opened the door. What lay before me was a scene from the apocalypse. But Omar and Abdel were nowhere to be found.

  10

  The stench of death was thick, revolting, and inescapable.

  Everywhere I looked—up and down the street in both directions—I saw mountains of rubble and twisted rebar from half-collapsed buildings, the scorched remains of tanks and trucks and cars and motorcycles, and the ghastly sight of decomposing bodies that even the vultures had rejected. All of it was shrouded in an eerie fog of smoke and ash, bathed in the bluish-silver tint of the moon.

  I didn’t dare step out of the doorway. I wanted to call out to Omar and Abdel, but I kept my mouth shut. I pressed myself back into the shadows and all but closed the door to the apartment building, keeping it open barely a crack. Then I peered out into the night, scanning for any movement, any signs of friends or enemies. But nothing was moving save the smoke and ash in the winter winds that were now picking up and bringing a frightful chill. As slowly and quietly as I could, I zipped up my jacket and turned the collar up to protect my neck. Then the light began to dim as a curtain of clouds descended upon the moon.

  What now? We were not yet at our rendezvous point, though as best I could tell we were getting close. To get to Ramzy, we were supposed to meet up with Tariq Baqouba, one of Ramzy’s top lieutenants. Born in the Decapolis region of northern Jordan, Baqouba was, by all accounts, a young but battle-hardened fighter who had distinguished himself killing American Marines and Army Rangers in Iraq before turning his “talents” to the killing fields of Syria. It was his younger brother, Faisal, a former technician for Al Jazeera television, who was my e-mail contact.

  Faisal’s instructions had been simple: My team and I were to meet him in the remains of the Khaled bin Walid Mosque in a neighborhood several blocks away called al-Khalidiyah. Faisal would then take us to his brother Tariq, who would take us to Jamal Ramzy. I checked my pocket watch. The rendezvous time was just twenty-three minutes away. Yet how could I continue on without Omar and Abdel?

  My fears were getting the best of me. Had the fighters manning the machine-gun nests cut my friends down before they had reached safety? Had the jihadists come after them? Had they reached a “safe” building, only to stumble upon armed men inside? Mortar rounds kept exploding. The building kept shaking. I knew it wasn’t safe to stay. But I had no idea where to go, unless I headed to the mosque alone. The longer I stayed put, the more questions raced through my thoughts. What if they were injured? What if they were bleeding, dying? Should I go back for them? Of course, I had no idea which buildings they had gone to. Had they split up as I’d told them, or had they stayed together after all?

  Feeling dehydrated, I grabbed the water bottle out of the side of my backpack and took a swig. Then, oddly enough, the explosions outside stopped. I had no idea why. Perhaps it was just a lull, but for a few unexpected minutes, there was near silence, broken only by the sporadic crackle of machine-gun fire in the distance . . . and by the ringing in my ears. I began to breathe normally again, but just then I heard a noise behind me. I turned quickly and saw a flash of moonlight pour through the doorway at the other end of a long hallway, though only for a moment. Someone had opened and closed the door. Someone had entered the building. The hair on the back of my neck stood erect. My heart started racing again. Who was it? Was it one of my men? Or someone about to kill me?

  I closed the door behind me all the way, careful not to make a sound. I didn’t want even the slightest ray of light to fall upon me or make me a target.

  Now, however, the hallway was completely black. I was stuck. There was no way forward, and I didn’t dare go back.

  And now shards of glass were crackling under someone else’s feet. Whoever it was, he was moving toward me. Slowly. Step by step. Inching his way forward.

  Trying not to panic, I slowly lowered myself to my knees. Whoever was coming, if they were armed and started firing, I was determined to present as small a target as possible. Then I remembered the AK-47. It was just a few yards away, in the hands of the young boy who likely had been killed merely a few hours earlier at most. I had noticed that the magazine was still in the weapon. I had no idea if there was any ammunition left, but what choice did I have? I did not want to die. Not here. Not yet. On my hands and knees now, I felt around in the dark until I found the cold, stiff corpse. I kept feeling around until my hands came upon the gun.

  The crunching of boots on broken glass was getting louder. Whoever was out there, they were getting closer. I was running out of time. Desperate, I pried the boy’s stiff fingers from the weapon and pulled it to my side.

  Feeling every part of the machine gun in the dark, I tried to make sense of it. I’d never held a Kalashnikov. It wasn’t like the shotguns or r
ifles my grandfather had taught me to use back in Maine. Then again, how different could it really be? The key, I decided, was the safety. It was clear the weapon had one. I could feel the switch. I toggled it up and down. But in the dark I couldn’t be sure whether the safety was engaged when the lever was up, or whether it had to be down. There was only one way to find out, of course—aim, squeeze the trigger, and see what happened.

  But I hesitated. I’m a reporter, not a combatant, I told myself. I’m not here to kill, but to cover. This had been my mantra in every conflict I’d ever reported on. Now, however, everything seemed different. Suddenly I wasn’t so sure of my ethics. But this was it. I had only a moment. If I didn’t shoot now, I might never have the chance. The closer he got, the more likely he was to shoot if I didn’t. I crouched down and aimed. I knew if I pulled the trigger and the gun didn’t fire, I’d still have time to flick the safety the other direction and pull the trigger again. With the element of surprise, I had the chance to live. But should I take it? What if I was wrong? What if he wasn’t alone? What if other armed men were prepared to rush into this hallway and gun me down the moment I fired? If I set down the gun, yes, I might be caught. But in that case, as a journalist, I still might be able to talk my way out. I might be able to persuade this person I was there to help them, to give them a voice to the outside world, and wasn’t that my job? If I was caught with a smoking gun in my hand, there would be no mercy. I was sure to be butchered like an animal, whether the footage wound up on YouTube or not.

  I heard a rattling behind me, and the door to the street swung open. Instantly the hallway was flooded with moonlight. I pivoted hard, gun in hand, and found myself staring at two silhouettes. I was about to pull the trigger but could barely see. My eyes were desperately trying to adjust, and as they did, I found myself wondering if this was Omar and Abdel. Were they alive? Had they found me? My whole perspective started shifting. But before I could react, a burst of gunfire erupted from over my left shoulder. Stunned, I yelled out but it was too late. The two men standing in the doorway had been hit. They fell to the ground outside, screaming in agony. Horrified, and without thinking, I dropped the gun, jumped to my feet, and ran through the open door to their side. But they were not Omar or Abdel. They weren’t anyone I knew. To the contrary, both were in uniform. They were soldiers in the Syrian army. Both held machine guns in their hands. The safeties were off. They had been about to kill me.

  One of the men was writhing on the pavement, choking on his own blood. Seconds later, he went limp. The rifle dropped away. He was gone.

  The other man had been shot in the face and chest. He was dying a slow, cruel death, and worst of all, he knew it. I stared down at him in the moonlight, sickened but unable to look away. He stared back at me, his eyes wide and filled with terror.

  “Help me,” he groaned in Arabic.

  I stood there for a moment, not knowing what to say.

  “Please,” he said, his voice barely a whisper.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said finally.

  “I don’t want to die. Please, do something.”

  But I just stood there, frozen. I wanted to help. I really did. But how? I had no medical supplies with me. I wasn’t a doctor. I had no training. There was literally nothing I could do, and as soon as he understood, his fear grew all the more.

  In all my years covering wars, I had seen my share of battlefield deaths. I’d seen men die in drone strikes and by Hellfire missiles. I’d seen suicide bombers and carpet bombings and sniper shootings. I had seen men die instantly and unaware. One moment they were full of bravado and testosterone, and the next they were gone.

  I’d also seen men die in the hands of professionals. I’d seen medics and fellow soldiers fight valiantly to save their friends, racing against time, doing everything humanly possible to save their lives.

  But I’d never seen anything like this. This man was about to leave this world and enter the next. He was begging me for help, desperately clinging to life, even as it slipped away. Then his eyes unlocked from mine. He was staring up at the sky now. He had forgotten about me. He seemed to be able to see something I couldn’t. He was riveted on it, and it filled him with panic.

  “No!” he shrieked. “No—!”

  Another deafening gunshot pierced the night sky. Then all was quiet. I turned and saw a young boy standing next to me. At least, I assumed he was a boy because of the way he was dressed. But I couldn’t actually see his face. He was wearing a black hood, and he was aiming a pistol at the soldier’s head. Smoke curled out of the barrel.

  And then he turned the pistol on me.

  11

  “Who are you?” he demanded in Arabic, his voice cold and detached.

  For a second I was too startled to answer. His head and face were covered by a black hood, but I could see his eyes, and that’s what chilled me. They were dark and soulless. There was not a spark of life or hope in them. He had gunned these men down without giving it a thought. He had clearly killed others. Probably many others. And I knew at that moment he would not hesitate to kill me.

  “I’m a reporter,” I replied in Arabic, my mouth bone-dry.

  He said nothing.

  “I’m supposed to interview someone.”

  Still nothing.

  “Soon,” I added.

  The boy just stared through me, this haunted, hunted look in his eyes.

  “At the Khaled bin Walid Mosque,” I mumbled, not sure why I was still talking.

  He obviously couldn’t have cared less, and I wondered if he was going to shoot me now.

  There was a long stretch of silence. Well, silence in the sense that neither of us was talking. The winds were howling through the concrete canyons and across the barren wasteland of the streets of Homs. A fresh round of gunfire could be heard several streets to the east, the rat-a-tat-tat staccato of automatic weapons being fired in short bursts. I heard a stray mortar round or two, but the pitched battle of the last hour appeared to be dying down. Then again, maybe that was wishful thinking.

  “The bag—what’s in it?” the boy asked at long last, pointing the pistol at my backpack.

  Startled, scared, not sure how much to say, I stammered, “Oh, uh, you know, just some stuff. Notebooks, pens, whatever.”

  “Food?” he asked in a barely audible voice.

  “I’m sorry?” I replied, not sure I’d heard him right.

  “Do you have any food?” he repeated, only marginally louder now.

  “Oh yeah, well, a little—not much—just some apples, some PowerBars, that kind of thing.”

  “Give it to me,” he said.

  “Which?”

  “All of it—whatever you have.”

  Was he serious? Didn’t he want my wallet, my cash, my credit cards? Then it dawned on me these would do this boy no good. There was no place for him to buy food no matter how much money he had. I took the pack off, set it on the ground, and unzipped the top.

  “I haven’t eaten anything but a few olives in the past three days,” he said as if reading my thoughts.

  I stopped what I was doing and looked up. What he said stunned me—not his words but the way he said them. There was no emotion in his voice. None. He wasn’t complaining. He wasn’t a little kid whining or moaning or asking for sympathy. He was just stating a fact, and come to think of it, I don’t think he was even saying it to me. It was almost as if he were saying it to himself. I just happened to be standing there.

  As I looked more closely, I saw how his loose his trousers were, how they barely hung on his emaciated frame. His gloveless hands, gaunt and bony, looked cold and raw.

  Who was this boy? I wondered. What was his name? Where did he live? How did he spend his days? Who looked after him? Did anyone, or was he just roaming the streets at night, gunning down strangers in hopes of finding a little food? I wanted to ask him so many questions. I wanted to write a story about him, put him on the front page of the Times.

  But he waved the gun at me, hurryin
g me along. He was growing impatient, and I could sense how dangerous it would be to try to engage in conversation. Whoever he was, he had long since lost his innocence. He had seen too much, done too much, and he didn’t want the world to know. His world had contracted. His only aspiration was to survive the night, not tell his story, yet in that cold, dark street I wondered if even his will to live would last much longer.

  “Never mind,” he said with a sudden urgency. “Just give me the bag.”

  Again I looked up at him. I could see in his eyes that he meant it. There would be no arguing. No negotiating. And he wasn’t going to ask twice. I zipped up the backpack. It wasn’t simply filled with notebooks and pens and a bit of food. It also held a brand-new digital camera and telephoto lens and a digital audio recorder, all property of the Times. I cautiously took a few steps forward and held it out to the boy. For a moment I wondered if he would look inside and then shoot me for not telling him the full contents. But then I saw he was getting edgy, anxious to get moving, off this street, back into the shadows. I set down the pack and carefully backed up to where I had stood before.

  Glancing around in every direction to see if the coast was clear, he reached down, stripped the dead soldiers of their ammo, stuffed the magazines into one of the side pockets of the backpack, slung it over his shoulder, and ran back into the long, dark hallway.

  Before I knew it, I was standing all alone in the middle of the rubble-strewn street, just me and two new corpses. I knew I should run. To stand there was to be a target. But I just stared at the two soldiers and the sheer terror in their eyes.

  My brother liked to talk about heaven and hell. That’s what he’d been trained for. That’s what interested him. Until now, I’d honestly never thought much about one or the other. But at that moment, I realized I could not say these men were in a better place. As cruel as their last moments were, was it possible they still existed but now in someplace worse? I didn’t want to think this way, and I never had before. I’d never thought much about the afterlife, but to the extent I’d pondered it at all, I had just assumed that when we died, we were all simply snuffed out like a candle. That was it. That’s all there was. But now I was haunted by this Syrian’s last words. As he was slipping away from this world, he had clearly seen another, and it had terrified him. I’d seen it in his eyes. I’d heard it in his voice. And all of it rattled me.