The First Hostage: A J. B. Collins Novel (3 page)

2

Allen was right, of course.

The stakes couldn’t be higher. But still I hesitated. I couldn’t tell him
how
I knew. I could only tell him
what
I knew and that the story
 
—however horrible, whatever the repercussions
 
—was solid.

The monarch of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan
 
—King Abdullah II himself
 
—had just hung up from a secure call with the Pentagon. He’d spoken with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And he’d just relayed to me the essential details of the conversation. Did that count as one source or two?

I realized it could be argued that it was only one. After all, I hadn’t spoken with the chairman myself. But under the circumstances I was counting the intel as reliable. The king had told me nearly verbatim what the man had said. There was no reason for him to lie to me. I could see in his eyes he was telling me the truth, especially after all we had just been through. And what he told me rang true with everything that was playing out around me. I could see for myself that Air Force One was gone. I could see that the Chevy Suburban that had carried the president from the palace was not here on the airport grounds and was nowhere to be found. I had heard with my own ears when the king called his brother, Prince Feisal, the deputy supreme
commander of the Jordanian armed forces, and ordered a massive search of Route 35, the Queen Alia Highway, the very road we’d just taken to the airport and the last known location of the president.

I knew the facts. But I also knew I couldn’t directly betray the king’s confidence. I couldn’t run the risk that if I told Allen these details, some of them might wind up in the final story. I trusted Allen, but I wasn’t sure I trusted his bosses in New York. What’s more, I couldn’t chance any errors. Allen had mentioned the fog of war, and I’d experienced the phenomenon myself countless times before. I knew mistakes could happen. I’d made my share over the years. I didn’t intend to make one now.

I looked out on the burning wreckage of two jumbo jets as His Majesty strode across the tarmac. He was about to board a Black Hawk helicopter that had just landed and was kicking up a huge cloud of dust. Before stepping aboard, the king turned and frantically waved me over. He wasn’t going to wait for me. If I was going to stay with this story, I had to go and go now.

It was suddenly clear to me that I was about to make a career-altering decision. The king hadn’t specifically authorized me to tell the world what he’d just told me. But he hadn’t expressly forbidden it either. He knew full well I was a foreign correspondent for the
New York Times
. He had to know I was going to call the information back to Washington. He could hardly expect me to keep this a secret. Still, it was a judgment call. He might have just been telling me as a friend, as someone who had saved his life. Maybe at that moment he didn’t see me as a journalist but as an ally. Or maybe he wasn’t thinking clearly.

I didn’t want to burn a source. I certainly couldn’t burn a king. But in my mind there simply was no choice. Americans had to know their commander in chief was missing. After all, weren’t there serious national security implications at play here? Weren’t there grave constitutional implications as well? Was Harrison Taylor still technically the president? Or in his absence had power shifted to the vice
president, even temporarily? For that matter, where
was
the VP at the moment? Was he safe? Had he been briefed? Was he ready for what was coming? Was anyone in Washington ready for this? Then again, what was “this” exactly?

I had no idea. We were in uncharted waters. All I knew for certain at that moment was that the American people needed to know what I knew. They needed to know the facts. They needed to be asking the same questions I was asking. And people at the highest levels of the American government needed to be providing answers.

It was true, of course, that informing the American people that the leader of the free world was missing meant simultaneously informing the enemy. What would ISIS do with such information? Would it give them a tactical advantage in the current crisis? It would almost certainly give them a propaganda victory of enormous proportions unless the president resurfaced quickly, safely, and in full command. But none of that was my concern. My job was to report what I was seeing and hearing, regardless of the consequences to me or anyone else. I just had to make sure I didn’t expose my sources.

Running now for the waiting chopper and fearing His Majesty might lift off without me, I shouted into the phone.
“Allen, I’m sorry. I hear what you’re saying, but I can’t do it. Are you going to run the story or not?”

There was a long pause. For a moment I thought I’d lost the connection, but as I approached the Black Hawk, I could see that
 
—incredibly
 
—I still had four out of five bars of service and an open line to Washington.

“Are you going to run the story or not?”
I shouted again over the roar of the rotors.

Allen’s answer knocked the wind out of me.

“No, J. B., I’m not,”
he shouted back.
“Not until you give me your sources. I’m not a federal grand jury. I’m your editor, and I have a right to know.”

3

Hanging up, I jumped into the waiting chopper.

A soldier slammed the door behind me, and seconds later we were off the ground. To my astonishment, King Abdullah was at the controls. He still had his chem-bio suit on, as did we all, but he had taken full command of the situation. We shot hard and fast over the desert floor, then gained some altitude and banked east.

“Where are we going?” I asked the Royal Jordanian Air Force captain who had clearly been asked to relinquish the controls and was now sitting beside me, along with a half-dozen heavily armed special forces operators scanning both the skies and the ground for trouble.

“I can’t say,” the captain replied.

“Classified?” I asked.

“No,” he said into my ear. “I just have no idea.”

The king
 
—a highly experienced helicopter pilot, not to mention the supreme commander of Jordan’s military
 
—was keeping his cards close to his vest, and given the circumstances, he was probably right to do so. He was in the midst of a coup d’état. Much of his government had just been killed by forces loyal to the Islamic State. His palace, his friends, and the region’s hopes for peace had been destroyed by a traitorous member of his own air force. He clearly wasn’t taking
any chances with who was going to fly his chopper, and he was certainly not going to confide his immediate plans to anyone he didn’t implicitly trust, which at the moment had to be almost no one.

Wincing in pain and feeling blood trickling down my left arm, I buckled up and looked out at the billows of smoke rising over Amman. Wherever we were going, I could only hope I could get some medical care when we arrived. I hadn’t had time to examine the wound, and Yael hadn’t had time to clean it, much less dress it. She’d simply taken the queen’s scarf and tied it tightly around the wound before helping the queen and the crown prince into their chopper, bound for some secure, undisclosed location.

I closed my eyes for a moment and tried not to think of the excruciating burning sensation shooting up and down my arm. Instead I tried to turn my thoughts to Yael. Was she okay? She’d been twice punched hard in the face during a struggle with one of the hooded jihadists that had stormed the palace grounds
 
—a struggle that had nearly taken both our lives. She’d also sustained a terrible gash to her forehead while we were escaping from the compound in the king’s Suburban. But she’d never complained for a moment. She’d done everything she could to save the lives of her own prime minister and of the Palestinian president, even while protecting the royal family and me. Was she safe now? Were she and her team already on the ground in Jerusalem? Was Prime Minster Lavi going to make it? Was President Mansour?

Opening my eyes, I turned to the window and winced at my reflection. Aside from the cuts and scrapes and bruises on my cheeks and forehead
 
—not to mention across my entire body
 
—the face of an increasingly weathered and tired old man was staring back at me. I was barely into my forties, but a line from a Harrison Ford film echoed in my brain.
“It’s not the years, honey; it’s the mileage.”
That was exactly how I felt. I was a foreign correspondent, a war correspondent, part of “the tribe” of reporters who cheated death and
covered the news from the front lines of the most terrifying events on the planet. But death was catching up fast. I was an adrenaline junkie who had always loved jetting around the globe, living out of a suitcase, pushing the envelope in every area of life. But now I was also divorced, a recovering alcoholic, exhausted, and alone. My friends were dead or dying. My family was half a world away, and I barely saw them. I hadn’t had a date in years. And no matter how hip and expensive my black, semi-rimless designer glasses were, they couldn’t hide my bloodshot eyes. No matter how many years ago I’d shaved my increasingly gray head bald, I was still sporting a salt-and-pepper mustache and goatee. They no longer looked cool, I decided. They just made me look like a guy trying too hard to hold on to his youth.

Unable to take any more of myself, I shifted focus and tried to make sense of the surreal scene out my window. From our vantage point, south-southeast of the capital, I could see squadrons of F-15s and F-16s streaking across the skies of Amman, dropping their ordnance on the ISIS forces below. I watched the spectacular explosions that ensued and could even feel the impact ripple through my body. I quickly snapped some photos on my iPhone and then took a shot of the king flying the Black Hawk before anyone could tell me not to.

My thoughts shifted back to the president. Where was he? Were he and his security detail under fire? Were they in immediate and overwhelming danger? Or was the Secret Service just lying low, keeping their charge out of sight and off the air until they had more confidence they could truly get him to safety?

Allen’s refusal to run my story stunned me. The more I thought about it, the angrier I became. After all these years, after who knew how many stories
 
—many of them exclusives
 
—how could he not trust me now? Did he really think I would run with such a provocative story as the president of the United States being missing in the middle of a coup attempt unless I was absolutely certain? I didn’t mind if he added caveats to the story, hedged the language a bit to
make it clear this was a fast-developing story and the situation could change at any moment. To the contrary, that was undoubtedly the right thing to do. But he knew I was in the eye of the storm. He knew I was with the highest-ranking leaders in Jordan who were still breathing and fully conscious. Where did he think I was getting this information?

The whole thing enraged me. I felt powerless and cut off. Until I looked down at the iPhone in my hands. I realized we were flying low enough that I still had cell coverage. And just then it occurred to me that I didn’t need to wait for Allen MacDonald or the brass at the Gray Lady to get this story out. I could do it myself.

A soldier offered me a bottle of water, but I waved it off. Instead, opening my Twitter app, I began typing and sending dispatches, 140 characters at a time.

Over the next few minutes, I sent nineteen tweets. In many ways, I realized, the story read more dramatically over Twitter than it might on the
Times
’ home page. This was the epitome of a breaking news story. Raw. Dramatic. Unfiltered. Fast-moving. And in this case, exclusive. If Allen and the brass in Manhattan wanted to skip the biggest story of our time, they could be my guest. But I had news, and I was going to share it with the world.

After getting out the core of the story, I then sent three more tweets using some cautionary language. I made it clear this was a fluid situation. I stressed my hope that additional reporting from
other journalists
 
—and disclosures from U.S. government officials themselves
 
—would shed light on the situation. But in less than five minutes, the story was out there. Now all I could do was wait.

I’d never broken a story via Twitter before. It wasn’t my style. In my heart, I guess I was old-school. I believed in filing dispatches and having editors clean them up and make their own decisions about what and when to publish. It wasn’t just safer for readers
 
—and for me. It wasn’t just the way things had been done forever in the world of responsible journalism. I genuinely believed it was the right approach. It’s certainly the way my grandfather operated, and I held him in the highest esteem.

Back in the day, back when Andrew Bradley “A. B.” Collins was writing for the Associated Press in the forties, fifties, and sixties, he worked his craft by the book. He wrote up his stories on old-fashioned typewriters (hunting and pecking with just his pointer fingers as, remarkably, he never formally learned how to type). His dispatches were hand-edited by grizzled old men wearing bifocals and smoking pipes or fat Cuban cigars. His stories were rigorously fact-checked and sometimes heavily revised, sometimes even rewritten, before they were finally transmitted over the wires and printed out in the clackity-clack of cacophonous newsrooms the world over. He didn’t like being questioned by his editors over his facts or sources. He didn’t like being rewritten. No reporter worth his salt did. But he wasn’t a rebel. He took his risks in the field, not in the newsroom.

Sure, occasionally when a story was breaking big and fast, he had no time to type it up and cable it to his editors. Sometimes he had to phone in his stories from exotic locales to the news desk in London or New York. But my grandfather would never have even imagined doing an end run around his editors. They were the gatekeepers. Everything went through them. That’s just the way it was done. That was the system. And my grandfather respected the system.

I did too. Or I had until now. It had never occurred to me to
“publish” my interview with Jamal Ramzy, the ISIS commander in Syria, via Twitter or Facebook or some other social media just moments after I’d finished talking to him. Nor had it occurred to me to tweet out the story of the prison break at Abu Ghraib or the grisly sarin gas tests conducted by Abu Khalif and Jamal Ramzy in Mosul. To the contrary, I knew such stories needed Allen’s critical eye and the go-ahead from those above him. If I could convince them of the story’s merit, and if they were satisfied with the care I’d taken to write it, then they’d publish it
 
—and not a moment earlier.

But this was different. This story was too big to hold, too important to sit on. I couldn’t reach millions of people directly, the way the front page of the
New York Times
or the home page of the official website could. But I had 183,000 followers on Twitter. People all over the country and all over the world were tracking my stories. More importantly, most of my fellow war correspondents and most of the reporters, editors, and producers in Washington and numerous foreign capitals followed me, as did political, military, and intelligence officials throughout the U.S. government, NATO, the Middle East, the Kremlin, and the Far East. I could guarantee they were all tracking their Twitter accounts right now. They were all desperate for any scrap of information from inside the battle zone.

By “publishing” this story directly, at least I could reach people who could reach others
 
—many others
 
—and fast.