The First Hostage: A J. B. Collins Novel

by Joel C. Rosenberg

  The room was silent, but Ari wasn’t finished.

  “Furthermore, General, with all due respect, you are distracting this group from the real objective, which is to analyze the evidence we have brought you,” he continued.

  The general tried to speak, but Ari would not let him.

  “No, I’m sorry; you can respond in a moment, but I haven’t yet completed my presentation,” he said as calmly as he could. “Look, all of us deeply regret not seeing these attacks against the summit coming. And we all regret not doing more to prevent them. Personally, if I could do it all over, would I have made different decisions? Of course. We’ve got three drones over Alqosh right now and, I might add, four over Dabiq. That’s what we can do—make adjustments, course corrections, based on what we’ve all learned. But we cannot look back. We can’t get bogged down in finger-pointing and recriminations. Not now. We do not have the luxury. As His Highness has reminded us several times, the clock is ticking. So this brings me to my last and final point. Aside from the vehicles that left the compound in Alqosh to take Mr. Collins to the Kurdish border, we had observed no other vehicles coming in or out of not just the compound but the entire village until around four o’clock this morning.”

  Yael took a deep breath and put a final video clip up on the main screen. It was more night-vision footage, this time of a convoy made up of three SUVs pulling off Highway 2, heading into Alqosh and right into the compound.

  “We believe you are watching the president of the United States arriving at Abu Khalif’s lair in the town of Alqosh on the Nineveh plains,” Ari said.

  The video now switched to thermal imaging of the three SUVs coming to a halt inside the walled compound under the tarps Yael had previously mentioned. So while we couldn’t see faces, I counted nine men carrying weapons exiting the first and third vehicle. Then I watched as four more armed men got out of the middle vehicle. I could see them opening the trunk and pulling out a body. At first I thought they were handling a corpse, and my heart almost stopped. But then I saw movement. The person’s hands and feet appeared to be bound. But whoever it was writhed and twitched and seemed determined not to go quietly. Was that really him? I wondered. Was that really President Taylor?

  “Now, what was particularly curious to us was that within minutes of this particular convoy arriving, communications of every kind in the village shut down completely,” Ari noted, and as he did, the video ended and the screen went black. “The lights in the village stayed on. They hadn’t lost power. But the nearby cell tower was abruptly switched off. We’re not sure how. All Wi-Fi services in the village went dead as well. Since 4:15 this morning, no calls, no e-mails, no text messages, nor any other form of communication has come in or out of the entire village. But we did intercept the last text message sent by a mobile phone inside the main residence in the compound just before everything went dark.”

  “What did it say?” asked the Saudi.

  “‘The package has arrived.’”

  49

  It was now 5:57 p.m.

  Just twelve hours until the deadline.

  The sun had been down all across the Middle East for more than an hour.

  And now the king asked Ari, Yael, the colonel, and me to step out of the room. They had heard the evidence. They had a decision to make and not much time to make it.

  I didn’t envy the position these men were in. I’d jotted down a list of questions on my notepad, each of which was as vexing as the next.

  Were the Israelis right—were the president and Khalif in Alqosh?

  Or was General Ramirez right about the evidence pointing to Dabiq?

  I found myself leaning heavily toward the case Ari and Yael were making. Perhaps I was biased, but I was trying to analyze the evidence as objectively as possible. And when it came to Alqosh, the pieces fit.

  Still, even if Ramirez and the others were persuaded by the Israelis’ case, could the U.S. afford not to send forces to Dabiq, given that the tracking signal from the president’s watch was unmistakably being picked up from there? What if Ramirez put all his chips on Alqosh and he was wrong—or vice versa?

  Then again, did the coalition have enough forces to embark simultaneously on two rescue missions?

  And if they did, with the raging storm bearing down on the region, could the coalition’s forces get safely to either site and back?

  As we stepped out of the war room and into the waiting area, I was eager to get the others’ take on all these questions, and there were so many more.

  If the storm was too intense to fly special forces teams to either or both sites, was there a realistic ground option that could be pulled off in the next twelve hours?

  And if they decided to fly, what would they do if one or more of the choppers went down due to weather or mechanical failure or enemy fire?

  What’s more, if they could even get to either or both of the sites, how would coalition forces protect themselves against the possible use of chemical weapons?

  Above all, what if they were all wrong? What if neither the president nor Abu Khalif was at either site? What if the president was already dead? What if another major attack was coming against Jordan, against Israel, or against the United States?

  When we got out into the hallway, the colonel pulled me away from the others and showed me his phone. He now had five text messages and two missed calls from my brother, begging me to call him immediately.

  In an instant, my entire perspective changed. “You need to let me call him,” I told Sharif.

  “I can’t,” he replied. “You know that.”

  “Then why show me all these messages?”

  “I’m just trying to keep you informed.”

  “And I’m grateful,” I said. “But you have to let me call him. Something’s wrong. He’s not like this. He never texts or calls this often.”

  “I wish I could, Mr. Collins. But I’m under strict orders not to let you—or anyone—communicate outside of this base. I’ve already bent those rules as far as I can. I can’t do more.”

  “Colonel—Yusef—you have to.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “But you don’t understand,” I pleaded. “Abu Khalif personally threatened my family. What if something’s happened to them? Please, ask the king to make an exception.”

  “Absolutely not. You heard His Majesty. He and his war council are making their final plans. They cannot be distracted by civilian affairs.”

  “There’s got to be something you can do.”

  “There isn’t.”

  “Think, Colonel—I’m not a prisoner anymore. I’m not a hostage. You can’t deny me access to my own family in an emergency.”

  “The needs of the kingdom rank higher than our own personal needs, Mr. Collins.”

  “For you, yes, but you’re a subject of the kingdom—I’m not,” I argued. “I’m an American citizen who has done everything I can to protect the king and his family, not out of obligation but because of the respect I have for them. Surely you can help me protect my family in a time like this.”

  “The king’s command is sacrosanct, Mr. Collins. You may not speak to anyone off this base.”

  “That doesn’t apply to you, though, does it?”

  “Of course not.”

  “You’ve been in touch with foreign media and foreign officials in the last few days, right?”

  “Yes, of course, but what’s your point?”

  “Call him for me.”

  “Your brother?”

  “Yes, you can call him. Find out what’s wrong. Maybe I can listen in but not say anything, or just hand you a note if there’s something I need to tell him, and you can decide whether you can pass the message along or not.”

  Sharif didn’t immediately say no. I had five more arguments to make, but I held my fire. I didn’t want to push him. And in the end, I didn’t have to.

  “Okay.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’ll call him?�
��

  “Yes. Come with me.”

  Sharif excused himself from the Israelis, encouraged them to have a seat, and said we’d be right back. They were a bit surprised, to say the least, but the colonel didn’t wait or discuss it with them. Instead, he led me down the hall to the security command post and into a break room typically filled with off-duty guards. Except that it was empty now. No one was off duty. Sharif pulled the door closed behind us, and we sat down on opposite sides of a small table covered in used coffee cups and napkins.

  “Get out your notepad,” he said as he found Matt’s number and started the call.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “If there’s something you want me to say, write it down and slide it over to me. Otherwise, you keep your mouth shut or I hang up immediately. Got it?”

  “Yes.”

  “No exceptions.”

  “I understand.”

  With that, he hit the Speaker button and suddenly Annie’s voice filled the room. “Hello?”

  “Yes, hello, I’m looking for Dr. Matthew Collins. Do I have the right number?”

  “Yes, this is his wife. May I ask who’s calling?”

  “Of course—I’m Colonel Yusef Sharif. I work for His Majesty King Abdullah. I’m returning a call from your husband. Is he there?”

  “Yes, yes, he is,” Annie replied. “Just a moment and I’ll fetch him.”

  It was a joy to hear her voice. Her kids were fighting in the background over some toy, and one of them started to cry. Typically things like that annoyed me, but not anymore, or at least not today. Those were the sounds of home, and for perhaps the first time in my life I wanted to be with them instead of on the front lines of a major story.

  Then, before I knew it, Matt came on the line. “Hello? This is Matt Collins. Who’s this again?”

  The colonel greeted him and explained who he was. “Your brother is okay, Dr. Collins,” he told Matt. “He’s safe and covering this unfolding drama over here and doing an excellent job, I might add. But I’m afraid with all that’s going on, there are restrictions on foreign nationals making calls outside the country, at least those foreign nationals who know where His Majesty is. I hope you’ll understand.”

  “Well, I guess so,” Matt said. “But it is really urgent that I talk with him.”

  “I realize that, and that’s why I’m calling you back. Again, it’s not that J. B. doesn’t want to speak to you. To the contrary, he’s dying to talk to you and to his mother, your mother. But for security reasons, no one but government officials are allowed to call out of the location we’re currently in. But I can certainly pass along a message.”

  There was a pause. I could tell Matt was weighing his options. Whatever he had to tell me, it was clearly sensitive. I scribbled down a note and passed it to the colonel. He read it, then looked at me, then closed his eyes.

  “Listen, I understand this isn’t an ideal way for you two to communicate,” Sharif told Matt. “But I’m afraid right now it’s this or nothing. I’m not sure I’m allowed to tell you this, but I’m going to because your brother has been a true friend to the kingdom. You should know that your brother is sitting right here with me. He’s listening to our conversation. He seems glad to hear your voice and your kids in the background. He’s not allowed to speak to you, but I want to assure you that he’s not going to miss anything you’re saying.”

  “Really? J. B., can you hear me?”

  Instinctively, I was about to respond, but Sharif held up his finger and cut me off. “Dr. Collins, like I said, he’s right here, but he’s not allowed to say anything. But you can speak to him if you’d like.”

  “How do I know he’s really there?” asked Matt.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, how do I know you are who you say you are and that he’s really at your side?”

  “I guess you’ll just have to trust me.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t do that, Mister—Colonel—whoever you are. For all I know, you work for ISIS.”

  50

  “I don’t work for ISIS,” Sharif insisted. “I work for the king of Jordan.”

  “So you say.”

  “Dr. Collins, I realize you’re under a lot of stress right now. But I’m in the middle of a war. I really don’t have the time or interest to argue with you. Would you like to pass a message on to your brother or not? I’ll remind you that you called me. I’m simply returning your call.”

  “Not exactly,” my brother shot back. “You texted me first. You said my brother was passing along his greetings. But you offered no proof, and you still haven’t.”

  That’s my brother, I thought. For all his faults, the man was no fool.

  Sharif checked his watch and took a deep breath. “Fair enough, Dr. Collins. Ask your brother a question to which only he would know the answer.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay,” Matt said. “What was it that we talked about in the hallway just before we went in to see Annie and the kids?”

  Sharif pushed my notebook back across the table. I wrote as quickly as I could and then slid the notebook back to him. He read the note and looked quizzically at me for a moment, but to his credit he read it to Matt anyway.

  “You were explaining a bunch of prophecies from the Old Testament, from the book of Jeremiah.”

  “Go on,” Matt said.

  I grabbed the notebook and wrote more.

  “They were prophecies about the End Times,” Sharif told Matt. “You said that in the last days terrible judgments were coming on Jordan. You said you hoped what ISIS was doing wasn’t the beginning of the fulfillment of those prophecies. You said you liked the king, that he seemed to be wise and wanted to keep the peace, that he’s one of the good guys.”

  “Okay, fine, but that wasn’t actually the last thing we spoke of,” Matt replied. “There was something else.”

  Sharif slid the notebook back to me. This time, I wrote a note on a single sheet of paper and slid that across to him, rather than the whole notebook.

  “He says he warned you to leave Amman immediately, that your life was in danger.”

  “Everybody knows I’m not in Amman any longer, Colonel. You’ll have to do better. There was one more topic. The last thing we discussed before we entered the front door of my apartment.”

  I couldn’t think. My mind went blank. Sharif again glanced at his watch. We were running out of time, and we hadn’t even gotten to what Matt wanted to tell me yet. I closed my eyes and leaned back in my chair. What was he getting at?

  Our conversation had been almost entirely theological, which was probably why I remembered as much as I did. It was so unlike any other conversation I’d ever had. I’d interviewed all kinds of people in my career—presidents and prime ministers, generals and jihadists, soldiers and spies—but I’d never known, much less interviewed, anyone like my brother. I never talked with people about the Bible. No one I knew talked about it. We certainly didn’t talk about Bible prophecy or the End of Days. But Matt loved this stuff. He was, after all, a seminary professor, an Old Testament scholar, and the author of a textbook for Bible colleges and seminaries on how to study and teach biblical eschatology. I’d never read it. It had never seemed interesting in the slightest to me. In fact, if I was honest with him—which generally I had not been over the course of our strained and at times contentious relationship—I’d always found the whole subject a bit loony. I mean, really, how in the world could a dusty old book thousands of years old tell us what was going to happen in our times? The very notion seemed insane—except he explained it.

  After all these years, Matt was starting to get my attention. I remembered being intrigued when he explained that thousands of years ago the biblical prophets foretold the rebirth of the State of Israel, predicted that Jews would return in droves to the Holy Land after centuries of exile, and posited that with God’s help the Jews would rebuild the ancient ruins and create an “exceedingly great army.” Mo
st people considered the idea lunacy for almost two thousand years, including many of the church fathers who thought such prophecies couldn’t possibly be true—not literally, anyway. But Matt argued that May 14, 1948, changed everything. Suddenly the State of Israel was back in existence. Jews were returning. They were making the deserts bloom and constructing great cities and building a mighty army.

  What could explain such dramatic, unexpected developments? I didn’t have an answer. True, there were certain historical and sociological and geopolitical realities that made the rebirth of Israel as a modern nation more likely in the mid-twentieth century than ever before. The collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the Holocaust, the implosion of the British Empire, the rise of political Zionism, and the support of Christians for a Jewish state were all contributing factors. But it was still one of the most unlikely events to ever happen in the history of mankind. What other people group exiled from their homeland for two millennia had ever come back home and reclaimed not just their sovereignty but their nearly dead language? Maybe God did have something to do with it. Maybe there was something to all those old prophecies.

  It was intriguing, I’d conceded. But it didn’t prove Jesus was the Messiah. It certainly didn’t prove that he was coming back to reign over the earth for a thousand years, let alone coming back soon, even in our lifetime. These were bridges I couldn’t cross. But Matt really believed such things, and despite the fact that I’d mocked him for years, he wasn’t an idiot. Though I was loath to admit it—to him or to others—he was a lot smarter than me. I’d been a decent student back in the day, earning my BA in political science from American University and an MA in journalism from Columbia, my grandfather’s alma mater, though I’d partied far too much and almost certainly spent more on beer than books. Matt, by contrast, had five degrees. He’d earned a BA from Harvard, three master’s degrees—one in theology, another in Hebrew, and a third in ancient Greek, each from Princeton’s school of divinity—and had a PhD in theology from Gordon-Conwell, with an emphasis in Old Testament studies. What’s more, he’d graduated at or near the top of his class each time. It made it hard to dismiss my older brother as completely as I’d wanted to for the last few decades.