The First Hostage: A J. B. Collins Novel

by Joel C. Rosenberg

  “I understand, Mr. Collins. But there’s been a development.”

  “And you can’t talk about it.”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “So where does that leave me?”

  “Taking a tour of the base.”

  “No,” I said again. “There’s no point and no time. If I can’t go back into the war room yet, then I need a phone and a computer and access to the Internet.”

  “What for?”

  I just looked at him for a moment, wondering if he could possibly be serious. “To do my job,” I said.

  “Let’s go upstairs,” Sharif replied. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  But I wasn’t about to take no for an answer.

  “Yusef—Colonel—listen to me. Please. You don’t seem to understand. I’ve been as patient as anyone could expect. I’ve been arrested, imprisoned, and put in solitary confinement. I’ve been used to do a sting operation against the director of the CIA. I’ve had my phone taken away. I’ve had my computer taken away. I’ve been made to sign nondisclosure papers preventing me from writing about the biggest story of my lifetime. I’ve been brought to a top secret military base to sit in on high-level meetings with the military leaders of five countries but prevented from talking to my editors or even to my family. I get the sensitivities of the moment. And I get that you have a job to do. But so do I—and I have to be in touch with my editors. I have to know what other people are reporting. And I have to file a story soon. Which means you have to help me—or let me go.”

  “I understand how you feel, Mr. Collins.”

  “But you’re not going to help me.”

  “I’m going to help you as best I can. But there will not be any communications off of this base until this operation to rescue the president is planned and executed. Period. Please understand—I’m not trying to be rude. But the fate of our kingdom is on the line here, and I have my orders. Now, if you’ll follow me upstairs, I’d be quite grateful.”

  The next thing I knew, we were riding the king’s private elevator back up to the ground floor. We rode in silence. I was livid but determined not to say anything stupid. There had to be something I could offer Sharif to get him to change his mind. But what? I had no ideas and no leverage.

  When the elevator doors opened, we were met by the two MPs who’d brought us here in the first place. They asked us to step inside an armored personnel carrier that was idling in the garage, and soon we were heading back out into the storm, which had not let up one bit. If anything, it had intensified. The clouds were thicker, the sky darker, and the booms of thunder far louder than when we’d first headed down to the bunker. The base was no longer being pelted by hail, but the winter rains were coming down in buckets. Even with our high beams on and the windshield wipers going at full speed, visibility was limited at best, and I couldn’t help but wonder how this was going to impact the operation the king and the generals were planning down below.

  “How long is it supposed to go on like this?” I asked our driver.

  “They’re saying most of the night, sir.”

  “Like this, or is it supposed to let up a bit?”

  “Actually, they’re saying it’s going to get a lot worse.”

  “How’s that possible?”

  “I have no idea, sir. But that’s what they’re saying.”

  “Is anyone still flying?”

  “Not many. Last sorties went out about thirty minutes ago. Should be back soon. But we hear everything else is being grounded.”

  This didn’t bode well for the president, I thought, but decided against stating the obvious. Instead, I changed the subject. “Any word on Agent Harris?” I asked.

  Just then the colonel’s phone rang.

  “Still in the infirmary, sir,” the MP in the front passenger seat said as Sharif took the call.

  “Is he okay?” I asked.

  “Sorry, sir. We haven’t heard.”

  “Could we take a few minutes and go see him?”

  The driver shrugged. “I guess, if you’d like.”

  “I would, very much,” I said.

  Admittedly, my motives were less than humanitarian. Aside from General Ramirez and myself, Agent Harris was the only other American on the base. If it came time to bail out of the Jordanian orbit—which I increasingly felt was the case—Harris would be the key. I was fairly certain that if I asked him, he’d be willing to let me accompany him back to Washington. The Jordanians certainly couldn’t force me to stay on the base, operating under their rules of military censorship. And as intrigued as I was with watching all this unfold from the inside, if I couldn’t report any of it in real time—and had to wait several years until I could even write a book about it all—then there was no point staying.

  But I wasn’t sure I wanted to head all the way back to D.C. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed to make sense to head to Tel Aviv instead. I very much wanted to see Yael for personal reasons, but I also thought I might have a better shot at being able to cover the unfolding saga in the region using my sources in Israeli intelligence and the IDF than I would by returning to the States. Of course, it now seemed unlikely that Harris and I could even get off the base before daybreak at the earliest. But hopefully we could be on the first flight out of Jordan once conditions permitted.

  What’s more, I thought, Harris had a phone and thus access to the outside world. Perhaps he’d let me use it to call Allen and touch base with my family and catch up on the headlines.

  Brilliant flashes of lightning repeatedly illuminated the desert skies. With each bolt, I saw more of the base and the tanks and APCs blocking every entrance and providing perimeter security. I felt bad for the soldiers standing guard in such terrible conditions but at the same time was grateful they were out there. This base was one of the largest in Jordan, but we weren’t that far now from the Syrian border and the genocidal conditions that had emerged within. Nor were we so far from the border with Iraq and the murderous rampage ISIS was perpetrating there as well.

  When the colonel finished his call, our driver glanced in his rearview mirror and asked if it was okay to head to the infirmary. But to everyone’s surprise, Sharif said no.

  40

  “Take us to ISR,” the colonel ordered our driver.

  I had no idea what that meant, but suddenly we were doing a U-turn, then turning onto a service road not far from a row of barracks and pulling up to a long, squat, unmarked, and otherwise-nondescript administrative building. The front door opened and two MPs carrying large umbrellas dashed out to our vehicle, opened the rear passenger door, and rushed us inside. Once we cleared security, Sharif introduced me to the two-star general who ran the facility. The general put us on an elevator, punched a security code, and took us down several floors to meet the rest of his team.

  He explained that I was now in the nerve center of the Jordanian air force’s ISR command. ISR stood for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, and it was here, the general told me, that all of Jordan’s air operations were planned. At the moment, several dozen staff on the floor just below the main level were planning and analyzing all the air strikes against ISIS targets in the capital, particularly at or near the Al-Hummar Palace. One floor below them, other staff were designing sorties against ISIS targets in other cities and towns throughout Jordan, particularly in Irbid in the north, which I now learned for the first time had come under heavy assault by forces of the Islamic State.

  However, we didn’t stop on either floor. When the elevator finally did stop, I could no longer hear the thunder or the rain or wind or any other element of the storm outside. Indeed, one of the first things that struck me as we exited the elevator was the unusual quiet. The overhead lighting was dim, and the staff—all of them young and sharp and serious—worked in small offices and tiny cubicles in front of banks of flat-screen computer monitors and wore big headphones and spoke in hushed voices.

  “This is where the general and his team are doing the legwork
for tonight’s raid on Dabiq,” Colonel Sharif explained. “And that’s why the king called me and wanted us to come over here. He’s got a new crisis he’s dealing with at the moment, but he wanted you to see this.”

  “Why?” I asked, fearing this was part of a tour I had no interest in being on. I didn’t care about all this high-tech wizardry. I didn’t have time to hang out with a bunch of young air force officers in their twenties and thirties, no matter how important their work might be. It was clear I wasn’t going to be allowed to write about any of this anyway, which was why all I wanted at that moment was to reconnect with Agent Harris and nail down a plan to get off this base as quickly as humanly possible.

  “The king wants you to start looking at Homs,” the colonel replied.

  “Homs?” I asked, not sure I’d heard him correctly.

  “Yes.”

  “What for?”

  “To see if he’s missing something,” said Sharif. “Everything seems to be pointing toward Dabiq. But if the president is being held in Homs, the king needs to know, and he needs to know fast.”

  The colonel then explained the situation to the two-star. We needed an intel suite, his most proficient analyst, real-time feeds of all the satellite and drone coverage he had of Homs, a fresh pot of coffee, and anything else we asked for. The general readily agreed and led us to his cramped office, where he picked up a phone and asked one of his aides to join us immediately. A moment later the aide ushered Colonel Sharif and me into an adjoining room that was about the size of the bedroom I’d had growing up in Maine but looked like a broadcast news control room. The far wall was covered with seven flat-screen monitors, a large center screen with three others above it and three below it. In front of that was a long console that at first looked like an audio mixing board but upon closer examination turned out to be an integrated series of laptop computers, radar displays, and a bank of phones.

  There was a quick knock at the door, and the aide introduced us to Zoona, a young lieutenant—couldn’t have been older than thirty—wearing glasses and a light-blue headscarf.

  The colonel quickly explained the situation. Zoona, in turn, explained that she had been working for the past several hours on analyzing the intel on Dabiq.

  “Are you convinced the president is there?” Sharif asked.

  “I wouldn’t say convinced,” she replied. “But it’s compelling.”

  “Maybe you could take a moment and show us why,” I said. “Then we can compare it with whatever we see in Homs.”

  She agreed, and her fingers went to work. She pulled up a range of images and maps and status reports on the six smaller screens, then put a live satellite feed of Dabiq on the main monitor, zooming down from space as if we were using a commercial application of Google Earth.

  “Okay, this is the elementary school where we’re picking up the tracking signal,” Zoona said. “As you can see, it’s a fairly simple three-level structure built in a horseshoe configuration. There’s the playground on the north side of the compound, and you can see the parking area there on the south side.”

  “What are those?” I asked, pointing to several large, blocklike images in the parking lot.

  “Those are our problem—they’re SAMs,” she explained, zooming in farther and changing the angle somewhat so I could see the surface-to-air missile batteries more clearly. “Those five are SA-6 units, a mobile model, each with support vehicles and cranes to load more missiles as needed. And that’s not all. There are four more batteries in other parts of the compound—three sixes and an eleven—there, there, there, and . . . there.”

  “That’s a lot of firepower for a school.”

  “Tell me about it,” she said. “Each missile fired by an SA-6 can reach a top speed of Mach 2.8 and can hit almost any aircraft up to forty-five thousand feet at a range of up to fifteen miles.”

  “What about the SA-11?”

  “Bigger, farther, faster—let’s just say a single missile has a 90 to 95 percent probability of destroying its intended target.”

  As if this weren’t bad enough, she then explained that there were numerous triple-A or antiaircraft artillery batteries in and around the school and the entire village.

  “But at least you know where they are, right?” I said. “I mean, you could take all these out with air strikes before they even knew what was coming, couldn’t you?”

  “Not exactly.” Zoona zoomed out a bit and pointed to nine more SAM batteries in a several-block radius around the school, all positioned close to houses, shops, and even a nearby hospital. Her meaning was clear. Any effort to take out the SAMs by air strike would likely cause enormous collateral damage.

  “Are people living and working in each of those buildings?” I asked.

  “Quite a few.”

  “Tell me they’re all terrorists working on those batteries and guarding that school.”

  “Some, sure, but we’ve got video images of women and children living there too.”

  “How many?”

  “Several hundred at least.”

  “The kids are using the playground?”

  “Every day,” she said. “From noon to one and then again from three in the afternoon until sundown.”

  “How come there aren’t any there now?”

  “For the same reason you’re not outside right now,” she said. “This storm is hitting the whole region pretty hard right now, Dabiq included. Everyone’s inside.”

  “Can you go back in on the school?”

  “Of course.”

  Using what looked like a video-game controller, Zoona zoomed in again on the three-level structure and then on a particular window in the northwestern corner. I could see the faint outline of a person inside, apparently looking out the window.

  “Can you enhance that?” I asked.

  Zoona nodded and soon the image came into focus. To my astonishment, looking at a real-time feed from a billion-dollar American KH-12 Key Hole spy satellite operating two hundred miles above the planet, I was staring at the face of a little Syrian boy, no more than five or six years old. He was holding his mother’s hand and staring out at the storm that was making it impossible for him to play on the swing sets and jungle gym just a few meters away.

  “The tracking signal is coming from the basement of the school,” Zoona explained. “And for the last several nights, the kids have been sleeping in the school.”

  “That’s not normal?”

  “No.”

  “What about their parents?”

  “Several women are staying at the school each night with them. We assume they are mothers and grandmothers. There are a lot of men in the building as well. Some are probably fathers. But we’ve also counted at least sixty armed terrorists there.”

  “Phone calls?”

  “We’re monitoring everything, but no—no calls in or out over the past few days.”

  “But the cell towers are working?”

  “They are.”

  “What about e-mail traffic?”

  “Minimal and nothing of particular value.”

  “But you think they’re hiding something there,” I said.

  “Or someone,” Zoona concurred. “And they expect we’re coming.”

  41

  “What about chemical weapons?” I asked.

  “They’ve got artillery batteries and mortar cannons strategically positioned all over the village,” Zoona answered. “So far we can’t say whether the shells are filled with sarin gas. But the command has come down from the top that we should assume that’s what they’ve got.”

  “And prisoners?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Are they holding prisoners in the basement of the school or anywhere else?”

  “Besides the president?” she asked.

  “If he’s even there,” I said. “But all this is circumstantial evidence at the moment. The tracking signal is the most compelling piece, I grant you, but the watch could have been removed from the president whe
n he was captured or anytime afterward.”

  “Then, no—there’s no sign of other prisoners being held at the school, unless you count the children and their parents.”

  “And it’s not an ISIS command-and-control center?”

  “If it is, they’re not talking to anyone. No cell calls. Minimal radio chatter. Minimal Internet traffic. Everything’s hot; everything’s working; there’s just no evidence they’re talking to each other via electronic means—not much, anyway.”

  “And the calls to and from Jamal Ramzy’s phone?”

  “Actually, we just heard from the NSA on that last night. Two of the calls did go to a cell phone at the school. Several others were relayed there from other switching stations. But beyond that, as I said, there’s been very little phone traffic not just to the school but to any of the homes within a five-block radius.”

  “Doesn’t that seem odd?”

  “It does.”

  “What do you make of it?”

  “I don’t know. There’s not enough data to support a conclusion.”

  “Are there any other buildings with this kind of profile in Dabiq?” I asked.

  “You mean surrounded by SAMs and triple-A batteries?”

  “Right.”

  “None,” Zoona said. “The school has become the security vortex of the entire town. Everything ISIS has done appears designed to protect the school and those inside it from a foreign attack.”

  “Ground or air?” I pressed.

  “Both,” she said. “The main roads into the town are blocked by cars, buses, nails, booby traps, IEDs, you name it. And it’s not just the main roads. Every street that could possibly be used by ground forces to get to the school is blocked and booby-trapped.” She redirected the satellite to show me several examples.

  I looked at Colonel Sharif and asked what he thought.

  “I’d say she’s right,” he replied. “It’s pretty compelling.”

  “Okay, can we look at Homs now?” I asked.