The First Hostage: A J. B. Collins Novel (32 page)

60

Yael put away her pistol.

Then she took off her night-vision goggles and used the scope of her MP5 to look down the well-lit portion of the tunnel. There wasn’t anyone immediately apparent, but here again the tracks curved to the right and we had no idea what was around the bend. As she radioed a status report back to Ramirez, Sharif, and the others, I put away my .45, put my night-vision goggles on, and aimed my MP5 into the darkness behind us.

“Carts,” I whispered when Yael had finished transmitting.

“What do you mean?” she said, her back still to me.

“Follow me,” I said.

I began walking forward, my weapon at the ready, and the deeper I went into the darkness, the more mining carts I saw. Five, six, seven, ten, fifteen, twenty, thirty
 
—in the end I counted fifty-one carts, leading all the way back to a cement wall, the end of the line. Moving cautiously toward the wall, fully expecting an ambush, I ducked behind the last cart and gave a quick glance inside. To my relief no one was there. Instead, I found at least a hundred artillery shells. I motioned for Yael to move up one side of the tracks. I took the other, each of us checking every other cart. When we came to the
front of the line again, we examined the cargo in the first cart. Like each of the others, it contained a pile of shells, but as I looked more closely, I found that they were all marked with skulls and crossbones and the word
warning
in Arabic.

“These are M687s,” Yael said.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“It’s a chemical weapon, a nerve agent,” she said. “The M687 is an American design
 
—a 155mm artillery shell with two canisters inside. The first contains one of the liquid precursors for sarin gas. The other canister holds the second. Between them is what’s called a rupture disk. When the shell is fired at the enemy, the disk is breached and the two chemicals are mixed in flight. Then when the shell lands:
boom
, death
 
—a very, very painful death for a whole lot of people.”

“Did the U.S. ever use them?” I asked.

“Tested them but never used them in combat,” she said. “They were eventually banned by the CWC
 
—the Chemical Weapons Convention
 
—and your government destroyed your stores. But the design has been knocked off by lots of different countries
 
—and now by ISIS.”

“They’ve got over five thousand of them here,” I said, trying to imagine how many people ISIS could kill if they had the chance to actually use these weapons.

“They’re stockpiling,” Yael said.

“Why?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe to use. Maybe to sell. But either way . . .”

Yael didn’t finish the sentence. She didn’t have to. I realized both of us had left our backpacks containing our chem-bio suits back in the villa, in the living room. Yael radioed Ramirez to let him know what we’d found. Then she turned and continued toward the light. I followed.

We moved forward, Yael still on one side of the tracks and me on
the other, and I suddenly noticed how eerily quiet it was. After the chaos on the surface, we were now at least twenty if not thirty feet belowground, and we could only barely hear the fight above us. Every now and then we’d get an update over our radios, but the bursts of information were few and far between and often in a military jargon that was lost on me. The only thing coming through loud and clear was that the team holding the villa was starting to worry about their supply of ammo, while the team assaulting the warehouse already had one KIA, three men injured, and no reinforcements on the way.

Just before we reached the bend in the track, Yael signaled for me to step behind her. As I did, we got the report that there’d been another KIA in the warehouse and two more injuries.

Yael pressed her back against the wall of the tunnel’s right side. I was less than a yard behind her. As she inched forward, so did I. She shot a quick peek around the corner and then pulled back. She said nothing, but all the color was gone from her face.

“What is it?” I asked. “What’s there?”

I waited a moment, but she couldn’t respond. I asked her again, but she just shook her head. Her hands were quivering. She was taking deep breaths. I’d never seen her react this way, even in circumstances far more dangerous than this.

Slowly, cautiously, I moved around her, took a deep breath, then pivoted around the corner, ready to shoot. But now it was I who could not speak. I felt the blood instantly drain from my face as well, and my hands too began to shake.

There were no ISIS members waiting for us. There was no ambush. We were in no immediate mortal danger. But never in my life had I seen anything like this.

Partially decomposed bodies were hanging from the ceiling on each side of the tracks, their necks wrapped tightly in chains. I counted nineteen men and nineteen women, all of whom I guessed were in their forties and fifties, and twenty-seven children, both boys
and girls, ranging in ages from maybe eleven or twelve up to perhaps eighteen or nineteen. But that wasn’t the worst of it. Parked on the tracks were a dozen mine carts, and all of them were filled to overflowing with human heads.

For a moment I just stood there and stared, too stunned to think, too paralyzed to move. Then suddenly I turned and vomited all over the tracks near me, again and again until there was nothing left in my system. When my dry heaves finally ended and I had steadied myself against one of the walls, Yael handed me a bottle of water. I took some, swished it around in my mouth, and spit it back out. Then I took some more and swallowed and felt it burn the whole way down my throat. Only then did I notice that Yael had just finished vomiting too.

Wiping my mouth, I gripped my weapon and forced myself to keep moving. Yael started moving as well. Once again, she stayed on the right side of the tracks with me on the left. She picked up the pace, eager to get out of this house of horrors as quickly as possible, but I lagged behind. I tried not to look at the dangling corpses above us or the bulging eyes and gaping mouths of the heads stacked in the carts. As I kept my head down and eyes averted, I couldn’t help but notice piles of debris running along each wall. Curious, I finally stopped and took a more careful look, and then I realized these weren’t heaps of garbage. These were crosses and icons and Communion cups and Bibles and other holy books. And then I knew who these people were and why they had died such grisly and horrible deaths.

Shaken like I’d never been in my life, I, too, picked up the pace and caught up to Yael just as she was pivoting around another bend in the tracks. There were no bodies this time, nor even any carts. Nor were there any signs of ISIS fighters. But here the tracks and the tunnel began to tilt upward, and we started climbing back toward the surface.

Eventually we came to another bend in the tunnel, and again
no one was immediately visible. But there was something I hadn’t expected: a large retractable steel door
 
—almost like a garage door or a blast door
 
—coming down from the ceiling and completely blocking our path. At the base of the door were two rectangular notches about three and a half feet apart that accommodated the rails. As we got closer, I noticed that there was also a smaller door built into the larger one that would permit a person to pass through while the larger door still blocked passage of the mine carts in either direction. Yael motioned for me to move to the right side of the smaller door. She moved to the left. Then she silently counted down from three with her fingers, turned the handle, and cautiously stepped through, her MP5 leading the way. I followed immediately and shut the door behind us.

We were now standing in the pitch dark. I quickly switched back to night-vision goggles, and when I did, I was aghast at what I saw. For here, against each wall
 
—both on the left and right sides of the tracks
 
—were metal cages. Inside each cage was either a young boy or young girl, ranging in age from maybe eight to no more than ten or eleven years old. They were naked, gaunt, and shivering. And now that they knew someone had just entered their hell, they were awake, wide-eyed, backing away, and cowering in fear.

They couldn’t see us or each other in the blackness, of course, but they must have been awakened by hearing us open the door, and they had surely seen the light spilling in from the other side as we had entered. Perhaps they had seen our silhouettes as well. None of them dared to say anything. No one called out and asked who we were. But neither did we call out. I didn’t dare. I knew they were hostages. They were captives. They were slaves. But they weren’t here to work
 
—they were far too young. Which meant they were being held here for only one purpose: to be sex slaves to
 
—and likely to be brutally raped by
 
—their ISIS masters.

An involuntary shudder rippled through my body. I’d rarely
experienced the presence
 
—the physical presence
 
—of evil before. But I did now. I’d heard rumors of ISIS members engaging in sexual slavery. I’d seen some unsourced reporting. But I’d never taken it very seriously. I’d certainly never believed any of it. All the allegations and insinuations seemed so outlandish, so far beyond the pale, as to be unworthy of serious attention. This was the twenty-first century, I’d told myself. No one was savage enough to be engaged in such barbaric behavior, I’d convinced myself.

But what else were these children doing here, naked and alone, at such tender young ages?

61

The stench in the place was overwhelming.

The children were living in their own filth. But it was the horror in the eyes of these kids
 
—staring out through the darkness, trembling in terror, unable to see us but knowing we were there
 
—that haunted me most.

The monstrosity of it struck me hard. I grabbed Yael’s arm and tried to pantomime what I was thinking, that we should let them out and lead them back through the tunnels. But Yael shook her head, put her finger over her lips, and then pointed forward. We had a mission. We had to stay with it. And of course she was right. These children weren’t going to be any safer in the tunnels behind us or up in the villa than they were right now. Their only hope was for us to clear these tunnels of the enemy, link back up with the Delta Force teams, and hold our own until the choppers came to rescue us. Then, just maybe, hopefully, we could get these children not just out of the cages but out of Iraq to somewhere clean, somewhere safe. Until then, they had to remain where they were. And quiet.

So we kept moving. Carefully. Stealthily. My heart was alternating between compassion and rage. But in the end I chose rage. It seemed the only possible choice.

Turning forward, we could see that there was another large steel door, similar to the one we had just passed through, about thirty meters ahead. It too had a smaller door built into it. As we approached, we could hear the sounds of a gun battle growing louder and louder. The good news was that the racket masked what little noise we were making. The bad news was that I suddenly realized we were coming up on the back side of the battle the Delta Force team had been engaged in for the last forty minutes. On the other side of this steel divide was the third and lowest level of the warehouse. This was where several dozen ISIS fighters were holding their own against America’s finest. What chance did we have? Going through that door might very well be suicide.

Yael was going anyway, I had no doubt. I saw her back stiffen and her stride quicken as she headed for the small door. I raced to catch up with her and grabbed her by the arm again just before she turned the handle. I shook my head. I couldn’t let her go through that door. There had to be another way. We could radio back to Ramirez. We could explain the situation to him. He could send some of his men through the tunnels to link up with us. They could help do the job their colleagues couldn’t get done on their own. And we could stay to protect the children.

The only problem was that I couldn’t say any of this. I didn’t dare do anything that might alert the jihadists to our presence. We had one ace up our sleeve, and only one, and that was the element of surprise.

But just as I was about to let go of Yael’s arm, I looked over her shoulder at the cage not five feet behind her. I had thought it was empty, which seemed odd since it was the only one of sixteen cages that wasn’t filled. But at that moment I thought I saw movement. I pivoted her around and aimed my weapon into the cage. Then I saw it again. Something or someone was in there, hiding under a blanket. Yael saw it too, and it momentarily stopped her from going
through the doorway. Whatever it was, it seemed too large to be another child. Perhaps it was an animal, maybe a dog of some kind. But then it moved again and I saw a foot slide out from under the blanket
 
—only for a second, and then it disappeared again. But it was definitely a foot. A human foot. A man’s foot. A bloody foot.

I moved toward the cage, aiming my MP5 at the center of the mass. Yael didn’t stop me. I didn’t want to take any unnecessary chances. I handed her my machine gun. Then I handed her my .45. I was going into this cage one way or the other, but I didn’t dare run the risk that an ISIS fighter trying to take a nap
 
—or God forbid, having his way with one of these children
 
—might grab one of my weapons and kill me and Yael with it.

Wiping my sweaty hands on my rain-drenched fatigues, more out of instinct than because it dried them off, I reached for the door of the cage. It was cold to the touch. Only then did I notice the padlock. There was no way I was getting this door open without the key. So I started looking around. Maybe it was hanging on a hook somewhere. Yael searched as well. But we found nothing. And when our search was over, we found ourselves standing in front of the cage again. I wasn’t going in. That much was clear. Not without killing whoever had the key. So Yael handed my weapons back to me, and I began to back away toward the door, toward the inevitable. We were going through it, come hell or high water. We were going to take ISIS on from behind.

And then, just as I was about to turn toward the doorway, the figure under the blanket rolled over in his sleep. For a moment, the blanket slipped away from his face. Only for an instant, for he shifted again and pulled the blanket back over his face. But that instant was all we needed. It was unmistakable. It was Harrison Taylor.