The First Hostage: A J. B. Collins Novel

by Joel C. Rosenberg

  “I’m sorry, J. B., but the floor is not really open,” Ramirez said. “You’re a friend. We’ve known each other a long time. But we were all told explicitly that you’re here as an observer, not a participant.”

  “I understand, General, and I promise I’ll be brief,” I said, plunging forward. “I’m just saying I’ve been to Homs. I’ve been to Jamal Ramzy’s base camp. I’ve seen it, and it’s an ideal safe house. It’s underground. It’s well protected. It’s the perfect place to hide the president and Khalif, and I think it’s a serious mistake to rule it out, especially if you have so many phone calls from Ramzy going to Homs.”

  “Wait a minute; I thought you saw Khalif in Mosul,” said the Saudi.

  “I did,” I replied. “But I first met Ramzy in Homs.”

  Colonel Sharif leaned over and whispered to me to knock it off, that I was overstepping my bounds.

  But El-Badawy wanted to hear more. “Could you find your way back to Ramzy’s lair?” he asked.

  “Of course not,” General Ramirez shot back before I could answer. “J. B. was blindfolded going in and coming out. I read your article.”

  “Is that true?” the Egyptian asked.

  “It is,” I said, “but General Ramirez is forgetting one important thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I might not have known how to get there, but I knew where I was.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “It means I was told by my contact to meet at the Khaled bin Walid Mosque,” I explained. “It was in a neighborhood of Homs called al-Khalidiyah. My colleagues—God rest their souls—snuck into Homs with me. We linked up with Ramzy’s men. They took us to that specific neighborhood and that specific mosque, and from there I was taken through underground tunnels to the meeting with Ramzy. So, no, I couldn’t find it wandering around that Dante’s inferno of a city. But how hard would it really be for you all to find that mosque with satellites and drones and figure out what kind of activity is under way there right now?”

  “And you think ISIS could be holding the president there?” El-Badawy pressed.

  “I can’t say that definitively, General,” I replied. “All I’m saying is that you should take a careful look. I’m not saying it would have been easy for Khalif to get there or for ISIS to have gotten the president there without being noticed. But remember, Jamal Ramzy got himself from Homs to Amman without being noticed. Obviously they’ve figured out a way to transit back and forth. So we know it can be done. I’m not saying the president is not in Dabiq. Maybe he is. I’m just saying, isn’t it a bit foolish to kidnap the leader of the free world and bring him to a town of four thousand people and then tell the world you have him there?”

  “Maybe,” Ramirez said, “unless you’re trying to trigger a battle you believe will bring about the end of the world.”

  36

  Prince Feisal suddenly leaned over and whispered something to the king.

  Then he turned to the group and apologized. He explained that the vice president of the United States was on the line and that His Majesty needed to take the call in his private chambers. As the king excused himself and took a guard with him through a door at the other end of the room, the prince asked General Ramirez to walk through his plan to invade Dabiq and explain what role he expected each coalition partner to play in the attack. I was yet to be convinced the president was actually there but was eager to hear Ramirez’s plan of attack.

  Over the years, I had become deeply impressed with the intellect and courage of this three-star general. Ramirez was the eldest son of Cuban refugees and grew up in south Florida in a family of nine kids. He graduated first in his class from West Point and was recruited by Delta Force early in his Army career. He was one of the first American special operators sent into Afghanistan to fight al Qaeda and the Taliban after 9/11. Later, he was an instrumental player in hunting down and killing Osama bin Laden in Pakistan. He was one of the chief architects of the surprisingly successful “surge” strategy in Iraq, before political leaders far above his pay grade unraveled America’s hard-fought gains by precipitously withdrawing all U.S. forces from Iraq in December 2011.

  Rumor had it that he and his men were actually responsible for the capture of Abu Khalif several years earlier, though he had adamantly and repeatedly denied that U.S. forces had been involved in that operation at all. It made perfect sense to me that Ramirez and his Delta Force operators were being tasked with the rescue of the president and the recapture (or killing) of Khalif. Few knew the region better—indeed, few knew al Qaeda and ISIS better—than this six-foot-five, 230-pound former defensive tackle whom his colleagues had nicknamed “the Cuban missile.” The stakes, of course, could not have been higher. As far as I was aware, this would be the first time in history that U.S. forces would fight on Syrian soil. The very president they were hoping to rescue had repeatedly vowed never to put American “boots on the ground” in Syria. Yet if there was anyone who could pull it off, I had to believe it was Marco Ramirez.

  However, just as the general began handing out briefing books and explaining his approach, the colonel nudged me and insisted I follow him out of the war room and back into the waiting area. I assumed this had something to do with my speaking up in the meeting, which to be honest kind of ticked me off. Still, I had no choice. If I was going to get back in that room, it wasn’t going to be by making a scene. So I stepped out with Sharif, pulse racing, and prepared to defend myself.

  Before I could say a word, however, the colonel led me through a door I’d previously not noticed, down a narrow hallway, and past several more soldiers, where he knocked twice on a closed door, then entered a nine-digit code into a keypad and waved me through.

  We were now in the king’s spacious private office in what appeared to be the deepest recesses of the bunker complex. His Majesty was sitting behind his desk under a large portrait of his father, a Jordanian flag on a stand by his side. He was already on the phone but nodded to the colonel and me and motioned us to take a seat on the couch. Sharif whispered to me that I should pick up the phone on the end table to my right. Then he reached for a similar handset on the end table to our left and instructed me to select line two and hit the Mute button. I did and watched him do the same.

  “Your Majesty, thank you for waiting,” an older woman’s voice said on the other end of the line. “Vice President Holbrooke will be right with you.”

  I pulled out my notebook and a pen and tried to calm down and shift gears. I’d been bracing for a fight, sure I was being thrown out of the Ramirez briefing for speaking out of turn. But I’d been dead wrong. I hadn’t been thrown out at all. Instead, I’d been invited into the inner sanctum.

  My mind raced with questions I wanted to ask Martin Holbrooke. The gray, grizzled, and somewhat-cantankerous seventy-seven-year-old VP was now in an extremely precarious position, and the nation—along with the entire world—was watching his every move.

  I’d known Holbrooke for years, but he was a shrewd political operator and Washington insider long before I came on the scene. He’d first been elected to Congress from a district in northeastern Ohio back in the late 1960s. Later he’d won a Senate seat, played his cards carefully, and risen to become chairman of the powerful Armed Services Committee. By the time I met him, he’d become a heavyweight in the Democratic Party, raising enormous sums for his political action committee, investing in up-and-coming progressive candidates, making allies, earning chits, and laying the groundwork for a run for the Democratic nomination for president.

  Holbrooke was also an early backer of Harrison Taylor and helped get the software CEO elected first to the Senate, and then, after only one term, elected governor of North Carolina. Along the way, Holbrooke had seen Taylor’s popularity rising slowly but surely, both in the local grass roots of the party and nationally. And when the day came for Holbrooke to announce his candidacy for the presidency, he instead stunned everyone by using his announcement speech to become th
e first U.S. senator to endorse Taylor for president.

  The effect was transformative. Taylor, a noteworthy voice on the center-left of the party, suddenly had the full backing of one of the country’s most hard-core liberals for one reason and one reason only: Holbrooke was convinced Taylor was the only Democrat who could actually win, and he’d been right. Taylor went on to clinch the nomination and asked Holbrooke to be his running mate. The two won a brutally close race that fall, 50.3 percent to 49.7 percent.

  I’d covered Holbrooke when I was a young correspondent for the New York Daily News and had interviewed him from time to time throughout my career. He’d always been generous with his time—and his liquor—and could be counted on for newsworthy quotes (as well as spicy off-the-record gossip about his colleagues on the Hill). I’d always found him a compelling, complicated, and often-conniving member of the U.S. Senate; he could write legislation and craft amendments and build unlikely coalitions—and simultaneously yet subtly sabotage his personal and political enemies better than anyone I’d ever seen. But I’d never really been convinced by him as vice president of the United States. The role was, in far too many ways, a complete mismatch of his skill sets. He was a particularly gifted and clever orator, yet his job now was basically to travel the country and B-level world capitals and give banal speeches that purposefully made no news. He was a master in the art of the deal, yet he was no longer tasked with any deals to cut.

  And if that weren’t bad enough, he absolutely hated to fly. For decades he had insisted on driving himself from his home near Cleveland to Washington and back, had run his Senate campaigns from an RV traveling back and forth across the Ohio Turnpike, and had complained endlessly when having to travel abroad (which might be why he drank so much with the press when he’d reach his foreign destinations). Yet now he was in sole possession of Air Force Two and had racked up more frequent flyer miles than any other VP in the history of the country.

  What concerned me most right now, however, was that he’d undergone triple bypass surgery less than six months earlier. He’d been on bed rest for several months and had only recently gotten back on the road. What’s more, his wife, Frieda—his third in as many decades and almost thirty years his junior—had just been diagnosed with breast cancer and was now at the Mayo Clinic going through chemotherapy. Was Holbrooke up for this crisis? Physically? Emotionally? Mentally? He’d never served in the military. He’d never served in an executive capacity. Was he ready to be commander in chief?

  37

  Despite all my questions, I knew the best thing was to simply listen.

  I was treading on thin ice as it was, or so I believed, and if this were true, then there was no point risking my position with the king any further. And truth be told, I suspected the VP might be less than candid with His Majesty if he knew I was listening in on their conversation. So I readied my pen and waited quietly until the VP came on the line.

  “Abdullah, it’s Martin; has General Ramirez briefed you?” Holbrooke asked straightaway, skipping any pleasantries and getting down to business.

  “He has,” the king replied. “You all believe the president is in Dabiq.”

  “We do, and the general seems to have developed a pretty solid plan for getting him back.”

  “He’s just about to go through that with us,” the king said, glancing at me. “But I have to say, Martin, my team and I are not completely convinced the president is actually in Dabiq.”

  “And why is that?” the VP asked, sounding as exhausted as I’d ever heard him. “Our satellites have picked up his signal. We’ve got the calls from Ramzy’s phone to Dabiq. We’ve got the testimony of the Secret Service agent. We have Khalif’s own words in the video. It all points to Dabiq, Abdullah.”

  “You’re not concerned your systems have been, perhaps, affected?” the king asked, raising as delicately as possible the emerging scandal at the highest levels of the U.S. intelligence community.

  “Affected?” the VP asked.

  “Compromised?”

  “You mean this nonsense with Jack?”

  “It sounds quite serious.”

  “It’s a distraction. Our intel is solid. Believe me.”

  “But surely there’s a risk that—”

  “No,” the VP interjected, cutting him off. “I’m telling you, this whole thing with Jack is an isolated incident. It’s a nuisance, to be sure, but I have no doubt it will sort itself out in due time. But we can’t let that sidetrack us from what we know—that all indicators are pointing to Dabiq.”

  “Martin, look, you may be right. But your own government has just arrested the director of the CIA. You’ve arrested a senior analyst at the NSA. Your intelligence systems have been penetrated by ISIS. And who knows who else is involved and where else this leads? These perpetrators have already used American intelligence to launch assassination attempts against President Taylor, Prime Minister Lavi, President Mansour, and myself. They’re in the process of trying to overthrow my government and destabilize yours. Don’t we have to consider the possibility that whoever is plotting against us is manipulating the very intelligence you’re looking at to make critical decisions?”

  “What are you saying, Abdullah?” the VP asked, sounding agitated and defensive. “That I can’t trust the intel on my desk? Those phone intercepts that are pointing us to Dabiq came from a phone you gave us. The president’s tracking signal is coming from Dabiq. Khalif said, ‘We are waiting for you in Dabiq.’ Those aren’t my words—or Jack’s—but his. I’m not saying this mess at Langley isn’t a problem. Of course it is. But we’ve got to be able to sift this all through and take an objective read on the data we’re seeing. And I’m telling you my guys say all the data is pointing to Dabiq. What more do you want?”

  “More,” the king said. “I don’t have to tell you that if we all move on Dabiq and we’re wrong, Khalif is going to behead the president on worldwide television, and all hell will break loose in this region. We will have just handed ISIS the most powerful propaganda tool we could possibly imagine. People will flock to join the caliphate. ISIS will have more money than they’ll know what to do with. They could become unstoppable, Martin. The region will become completely destabilized.”

  “No one understands the stakes better than me, Abdullah. But we’re running out of time. If we’re going to move, we need to move soon. My guys are worried it may already be too late, that the president may already be dead. I can’t operate that way. I’m going to trust that he’s still alive until the deadline. But we’re running out of daylight.”

  “I agree,” the king said. “But first we’ve got to be certain we’re not being set up.”

  “The evidence for Dabiq is overwhelming.”

  “It looks that way. But it all seems a bit too easy to me.”

  “You think ISIS is baiting us?”

  “That’s exactly what I’m afraid of. Look, we know Khalif wants to wage the final battle in Dabiq. He and his men have been planning it. They’ve been prepping for it. They’ve got an arsenal of chemical weapons that could turn the whole thing into a bloodbath. We have to seriously consider the possibility that this is a trap.”

  “I grant you Khalif had some chemical weapons. But he’s used them already—at your airport. There’s no evidence to suggest he has more. We can’t let ourselves be paralyzed by Khalif’s genocidal rhetoric, not when the president’s life is on the line.”

  The king looked at me. I shook my head, though almost imperceptibly. We absolutely had evidence that ISIS had enormous stockpiles of sarin gas—far more than could have been used at the airport. I’d personally seen a warehouse full of warheads that Abu Khalif and Jamal Ramzy had told me were filled with sarin gas, and I’d seen it tested on Iraqi prisoners. I’d reported as much in my story in the Times. The king had read it. Certainly the VP had too. So why was Holbrooke downplaying the threat now?

  “Martin, as you know, the New York Times reported that Khalif captured a warehouse full of sarin gas,�
� the king said respectfully but without hesitation. “Based on what I saw at the airport in Amman, I think we have to believe not only that Khalif has much more, but that he’s ready to use it—and where better than in Dabiq, where ISIS intends to make their final stand?”

  There was a pause. “You could be right,” the VP said finally. “But my guys say they’re ready for anything. We can deal with poison gas. What we can’t deal with is sitting on our hands doing nothing while time runs out. I don’t have to tell you I’m under tremendous pressure here. This isn’t just the president; this is my friend we’re talking about.”

  “He’s my friend too,” the king said.

  “I know, but for me he’s not just a friend,” Holbrooke added. “He’s the constitutional leader of my country. And if you’re watching the American press at all, you can see there’s already a steady and almost-deafening drumbeat for the attorney general to declare that Harrison is no longer president and to have me sworn in immediately to replace him. That puts me in a very dicey place. I don’t want to even consider stepping into the presidency unless I’ve done absolutely everything I possibly could to get Harrison back safely to his family and to the country.”

  As the two men kept talking, I could see the strain in the king’s face and shoulders. This wasn’t some run-of-the-mill Middle Eastern hostage situation. It was, back in the U.S. at least, fast becoming a constitutional crisis.

  The VP’s comments underscored how cut off I was from all news coming out of the States. I needed access to the Internet. I needed to get up to speed on the political and geopolitical nuances of this fast-moving story. I knew, at least in general terms, that Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution stated that “in case of the removal of the president from office, or of his death, resignation, or inability to discharge the powers and duties of the said office, the same shall devolve on the vice president.” I also knew that the Twenty-Fifth Amendment to the Constitution stated plainly that “in case of the removal of the president from office or of his death or resignation, the vice president shall become president.” The question was whether the capture of the president by foreign military forces fit the definition of the president’s inability to discharge his powers and duties. Did the current crisis warrant removal of the president from office?