The more important question, the one I should have been asking, was whether either team could get to its target in time. I pulled out my grandfather’s pocket watch and wiped away the condensation on its face. It was now 5:02 a.m. The deadline was less than an hour away. The fate of the president hung in the balance, and even if by some miracle he was still alive, I didn’t see how either team was ever going to reach him by six.
Nothing had been going according to the plan Generals Ramirez and El-Badawy had mapped out. Starting just after midnight, we’d sat at the end of runway 17R at the Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Azraq, cooped up in a freezing-cold C-130 Hercules with four more troop transport planes lined up behind us, all battered by gale-force winds and hail the size of golf balls, all waiting for hours for clearance from the tower that I soon feared would never come. Finally, around three thirty, our captain came over the intercom and told us we had a narrow window. The hail had stopped. The winds had dipped somewhat. The meteorologists and the guys in the tower couldn’t promise we’d make it to Alqosh. But they were unanimous: as bad as conditions were at that moment, they were as good as they were likely to get. If we didn’t take off right then, we never would. So the pilots revved the plane’s four turboprops to max power and we hurtled down the runway into the dark and cold of night.
Now we’d been in the air for just over ninety minutes, on a route typically flown by Royal Jordanian flight 822—usually an Airbus 320—from Amman to Erbil. By my calculations we were only a few minutes out, which meant the most terrifying moment of this operation—to me, at least—was coming up fast. We were about to do a HAHO jump into the storm.
HAHO was special ops talk for a high altitude, high opening parachute drop. In covering the American military over the years, I’d heard of them, of course. But I’d never expected to do one. I’d never jumped out of a plane at any altitude. Nor, frankly, had I ever even seriously considered it. When Yael got me into this operation and I’d signed six pages of legal waivers (three for the Americans and three for the Jordanians), no one had said anything about this. But Sharif had made my role clear.
“Mr. Collins, fate and Allah have brought us together for this moment, a moment much larger than any of us or our countries. We’ve said yes to you being an embedded reporter. You’ve done it lots of times before. You’ve got plenty of experience. But this isn’t going to be like any of those other times. The good news is that when it’s over, the king wants you to tell the world the truth. Exactly what happened. And exactly how. In the meantime, keep your head down and don’t do anything stupid, like get yourself killed.”
On the one hand, I was thrilled that the king had evidently changed his mind and was now going to let me do my job and not just observe but actually report on the things I was observing. On the other hand, I was starting to realize just how dangerous this mission really was.
Suddenly I felt the plane descending. I glanced at the altimeter strapped around my left wrist like a watch. It was dropping fast. A moment ago we’d been flying at 42,000 feet. Now we were at 34,000 and still descending.
Yael shouted something at me. But I could barely hear over the roar of the propellers and the intensity of the storm, which might have been another reason no one had answered my question a few minutes earlier. Maybe no one had even heard me.
We were all suited up for the jump, wearing insulated jumpsuits, gloves, and boots to protect us from the subzero temperatures at this altitude. We were also, of course, wearing special helmets, goggles, and oxygen tanks in addition to the rest of our gear—from bulletproof vests to ammo belts and grenades—since there wasn’t exactly a lot of air to breathe at such heights. The noise and the helmets and the cold and the constant shaking and rattling of the plane lumbering through the storm had made for a long and lonely journey. We’d said hardly a word to each other. We’d all been alone with our own thoughts and fears and questions, and now the moment of truth had finally arrived.
We were now at 31,000 feet.
30,000.
29.
28.
27.
Yael again shouted something at me, but I still couldn’t hear her. We were all wearing comms gear but maintaining strict radio silence. Finally she stood and motioned for me to do so as well. I saw Colonel Sharif and the others getting up as well, so I followed suit. Then Yael motioned for me to turn around; when I did, she turned on my oxygen supply.
Ramirez moved to the back of the plane and held up two fingers. Two minutes to go. I was terrified. I hadn’t admitted as much to anyone, of course, not even Yael when she’d finally told me how we’d be getting to our target. To begin with, I didn’t think she’d believe me. I was sure she’d tell me the gun battle at the palace and the harrowing race to the airport had been much more dangerous. She’d also tell me I was far more likely to die in the imminent battle for Alqosh than by parachute failure. And I was sure she’d be right. But aside from claustrophobia, there was one primal terror I’d long and carefully avoided at all costs: heights.
The rear ramp of the plane began to open, and every muscle in my body tensed. One by one, the Delta operators gave a final check to their weapons and stepped into formation. Yael helped me put on my pack filled with almost fifty pounds of camera equipment, a chem-bio suit and related gear, bottles of water and PowerBars, and plenty more ammo to go with the MP5 strapped to my chest. I’d insisted I wasn’t going to fight, of course. But Ramirez, who’d made it clear he didn’t want me coming at all, had insisted that if I was going in with Delta, I had to be armed. In addition to the MP5, Ramirez had given me a .45-caliber Colt M1911A1 with a few extra seven-round magazines. When I protested that I was a journalist, not a combatant, the general had taken his case directly to the king, who in the end had sided with Ramirez, reminding me that I’d been armed at the palace, and that was likely the only reason—aside from the mercy of Allah—that I was still alive.
Sharif turned and attached his harness to mine. This was going to be a tandem jump. There’d been no time to train me. So we’d be strapped together on the way down. I’d be depending on his chute the whole way, though I had a reserve chute of my own—“just in case,” as he put it. Not exactly the words I’d wanted to hear.
Ramirez held up one finger.
We were one minute out and stabilizing at 25,000 feet as the entire fuselage shuddered in the storm. The ramp in the back of the plane finished opening. I held the strap above me in a death grip and stared out into the utter darkness. I wondered what my mom was doing right then. Was she praying for me? Were Matt and Annie praying as well? I hoped so. I didn’t know how to pray for myself. Part of me wanted to. After all, there was a very real chance I wasn’t going to make it out of this thing alive. I knew that, and I was racked with fear over what would happen to me after I died. But I felt like a hypocrite. I hadn’t “gotten right” with God. Matt had begged me to, but I couldn’t. I just wasn’t there. I didn’t believe. Not like he did. Not yet. Maybe not ever. I still had too many questions, too many doubts. Yet as I stared into the void, five miles over northern Iraq, the last words Matt had said to me before I went into Iraq the last time rang in my ears.
“Are you ready, J. B.? Are you ready to die?”
The answer was still the same—no, I was not.
55
Ramirez jumped first.
Then one by one, his ODA—Operational Detachment Alpha—followed him off the ramp. That meant two teams of twelve men each, for a total of twenty-four Delta operators, plus three command-and-control men, a commander, a radio operator, and an Air Force CCT or combat controller. Yael followed them. And then it was just the colonel and me and the jumpmaster manning the controls by the ramp.
My heart was racing. My legs felt numb. My feet wouldn’t move, so Sharif nudged me forward, closer and closer to the edge. There was no longer anything to hold on to. The wind was whipping around me. The rain had already soaked my jumpsuit, and though the plane was flying through thick, dark clouds, I could actually
see flashes of light below me. At first, I wondered if the Air Force was dropping bombs. Then I realized it was lightning. The lightning was below us—and we were about to jump into it.
I held up my hand. I needed a moment to gather my wits and reconcile myself with what was coming. This was now officially the craziest thing I’d ever considered doing, I decided, far worse than sneaking into Syria to find Jamal Ramzy. Sure, Yael had already jumped. But she’d been trained for it. For all I knew she loved jumping out of planes. Maybe she and her first love had done this on dates. But it was different for me. No matter what the stakes were. No matter what the story was. I was just a civilian. It wasn’t the same for me. I just had to—
I never finished the thought. Before I realized what was happening, Sharif had kicked me in the back of the knees and launched us out of the plane. And then we were free-falling. Sharif was behind me, so I couldn’t see the plane above us. I looked down but couldn’t spot the Delta operators below us either. I couldn’t see anything except the flashes of lightning. But I could feel the bone-chilling cold. I could hear the wind howling past my mask and helmet. I could feel my stomach in my throat and my heart pounding so hard in my chest I feared it was going to explode. It never occurred to me to check my altimeter and track my descent. It never occurred to me to check my watch and figure out when Sharif was going to pull the rip cord. My mind went totally blank. What few instructions Sharif and Yael had given me were completely gone.
Then my harness suddenly tightened around my armpits and crotch. My head snapped back. It felt like we were being jerked back into the sky above us. I craned my neck and caught a glimpse of the canopy above us. Sure enough, the chute had deployed. I’d never seen a more beautiful sight. We weren’t free-falling anymore. We were still descending, of course, but not nearly so fast. Sharif was manipulating the cords to navigate our route and regulate our descent. As he did, my breathing began to slow a bit. So did my heart rate. I could think again.
I remembered what Sharif had told me—that we’d only be free-falling for ten to fifteen seconds. I remembered, too, what Ramirez had said about the whole point of the HAHO being to enter the airspace over Alqosh quickly, quietly, and covertly. With the odds stacked against us, our only chance of success—thirty-three men and one woman versus more than five hundred ISIS fighters—was to seize and maintain the element of surprise. We certainly couldn’t afford to let the grumble of the C-130 tip off the jihadists who controlled the village. So we’d jumped almost forty miles out. By now, our plane had already turned back. There were choppers en route, about an hour behind us. They were coming for our exfiltration. There were fighter jets coming too, sooner than the choppers. But for the moment it wasn’t safe for them to be anywhere near us. In that sense, the storm was actually helping us—at least we hoped it was—providing low cloud cover to obscure our arrival and plenty of thunder and rain to muffle what little sound we would inevitably make.
Our route hadn’t taken us all the way to the Kurdish capital of Erbil, of course. Instead, we’d flown about twenty kilometers north of Dohuk, then essentially done a hook so we’d be headed southwest along a range of mountains that led straight to Alqosh when we jumped. The big problem at the moment was the crosswind, which was whipping us around like rag dolls and had the very real potential, I feared, of blowing us far off course.
Sharif, like the others, had a GPS device strapped to his right arm. He was constantly making course corrections, and I knew I could trust his years of experience in Jordanian special forces. But our drop zone was narrow—precisely 36.735 degrees latitude and 43.096 degrees longitude—and there was no margin for error. To veer even slightly off course could put us dozens of kilometers from our ideal landing site, all of which would have to be made up by walking—more likely running—or could drop us right in the middle of Alqosh and the ISIS forces that controlled it. I knew all too well the stories my grandfather had written when he’d covered D-day for the Associated Press, stories of drops gone badly and untold numbers of American and Allied paratroopers spread out far from each other, behind enemy lines, with little chance of survival much less the chance to link back up with their own. I desperately didn’t want to become one of those stories.
For more than twenty-five minutes, Sharif battled the winds, the rain, the lightning, and the cold, zigzagging north, then south, then back north again, trying to keep us on track for our landing site. At precisely 5:36 local time, we slipped under the clouds for the first time. My altimeter showed us at 1,700 feet and coming in red-hot. There were only twenty-four minutes to the deadline.
Just then Sharif tapped me on the back and pointed to the left. In the distance, at about ten o’clock, I could see the lights of a village. There weren’t many, and they were faint, but was that it? Was that Alqosh? I didn’t have a GPS, so I couldn’t be sure. But a minute later—we were now at only 900 feet—Sharif gave me a thumbs-up. Before I knew it, he was kicking my boots. I was confused. That was the sign he’d prepped me for that it was time to land. But at still so high, I thought maybe I’d misunderstood. Then he kicked me again, more urgently this time, and suddenly we were smashing into the side of a mountain.
I was caught unprepared; my feet weren’t up when we hit, and I stumbled forward and hit the rocks face-first, pulling the colonel down on top of me. Fortunately, my helmet, goggles, and shin guards took the worst of the impact, but the real problem was that we weren’t stopping. The winds were so fierce that we were being dragged along the ridge with no way to self-arrest. The rains were so intense that the granite was too slippery to gain a foothold, and what little topsoil there was so close to the summit had turned to mud. For several hundred yards, we bounced and crashed and scraped across the ridgeline, ripping gashes in my hands and face, tearing my jumpsuit, and slicing up my knees. Rain and blood were streaming down my face, and in the fog I could see almost nothing. I was in unbearable pain now and experiencing near vertigo as we blew and toppled forward like tumbleweeds. I had no idea what to do or how to stop. And then I saw the edge of a cliff surging toward us.
I remember this question flashing across my mind at that moment: Can I grab something and hold on before we go plunging over the edge, or are we better off going over the edge anyway, since at least we have a parachute? But no sooner had I thought it than we came skidding to an excruciating and abrupt stop, not thirty yards from the edge.
I lay there facedown in the mud and gravel, in searing pain but suddenly motionless and on solid ground after hours in the air. It took me a moment to catch my breath and look up. But when I finally did, I saw Sharif maybe five yards from the cliff edge, beginning to crawl back toward me. In his right hand he held a bowie knife that glinted in the intermittent flashes of lightning, and it dawned on me what had happened. He’d cut me loose from him, then cut himself loose from the parachute, and in so doing he had almost certainly saved both our lives.
“You okay?” he asked, putting the knife away and scrambling over to me.
“I think so,” I lied.
“Nothing’s broken?”
I moved my arms and legs, then my fingers and toes. Then I rolled over, sat up, and wiped the blood and mud from my goggles. To my surprise, despite the pain, I hadn’t broken anything.
When I shook my head, Sharif grabbed my hand and pulled me to my feet. “That was a close one,” he said with a smile, wiping blood and mud from his face and goggles as well.
“Certainly was.”
“But you’re sure you’re okay.”
“My arm’s killing me.”
“Which one?”
“Left.”
“The gunshot?”
“Yeah.”
“Here, I’ll give you something for it.” He pulled off his backpack and fished around a bit until he found a first aid kit. Then he gave me some painkillers and a bottle of water to wash them down. “What else?” he asked.
“My knees,” I said.
We looked down and found my knee pads were gone.
There were enormous tears in my fatigues on both my left and right knees, revealing bloody gashes smeared with pebbles and dirt. Sharif found some rubbing alcohol and tweezers in the first aid kit and did his best in the fog and rain to clean my wounds, apply some antibiotic cream to them, and then bind them up with gauze pads and duct tape. A moment later, he found another pair of knee pads in his pack and helped me put them on.
It was clear I needed stitches and just as clear it wasn’t going to happen anytime soon.
56
“Gentlemen, we need to move.”
I turned as General Ramirez and the rest of his men came up behind us, weapons at the ready. They didn’t stop to chat. They were double-timing it to the peak of this ridge, about fifty or sixty yards away. Yael brought up the rear.
“You guys okay?” she asked.
“I’ll be fine,” Sharif said. “This guy got pretty banged up, but I think he’ll pull through.”
“You’re a mess,” she said to me.
I agreed but waved it off and asked if she was okay. She said she was fine, just a bit winded, and I was relieved to see she didn’t look any worse for wear. As we scrambled together to the top, she explained that most of the group had landed quite a ways down the slope and had to hustle to regroup.
It was now 5:47. We had only thirteen minutes.
I was moving the slowest, but Yael and the colonel helped me to the top of the ridge, where we found the Delta team on their stomachs, peering down into the village below. Sharif turned on his night-vision goggles and pulled a pair of high-powered binoculars from his pack. A moment later, he handed them to Yael, who looked briefly and handed them to me.
Looking through the binoculars, I could see the compound on the north side of the village. It was no more than five hundred yards down the other side of this ridge. I could see the warehouse where the terrorists were storing the chemical weapons. And about 150 yards to the west, I could see the crumbling mausoleum built around Nahum’s tomb. It all seemed so quiet and surreal, hardly noticeable and certainly not an obvious threat to the uninitiated like myself.
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