The Third Target (3 page)

The crowd around me grew more frantic by the minute.

The time had come. The muezzin’s call was over. The faithful were supposed to be in the mosque by now, washed and purified and ready for their noon prayers. But still the soldiers held their ground.

I looked at these young men, barely out of high school, and wondered what they were made of. If they were rushed by this crowd, would they really fire? I wondered. If a disturbance erupted, how quickly would they respond? If someone threatened their ruler, would they really sacrifice their lives to protect him? How well trained, how disciplined were they? How deep did their loyalties to the throne truly run?

We were about to find out.

In mere moments, King Abdullah bin al-Hussein would be arriving just a few hundred steps from where I was standing. Could these young men really protect him? Or was the sixty-nine-year-old monarch truly in grave danger? Might extremists
 
—perhaps someone in this very crowd
 
—be plotting against him? Abdullah had only formally been on the throne for five years, since May 25, 1946, when the League of Nations granted Jordan its independence at the end of the British Mandate. Was it really possible that someone
 
—or some group
 
—was plotting to take him down and topple his entire kingdom?

I knew from my conversation with Reuven Shiloah that morning that the Israelis were worried for the king’s safety. Surely they were not the only ones. Reuven had said that His Majesty had been strongly urged by his own Jordanian intelligence service not to make this trip to Jerusalem. At the very least, they had urged him to reschedule it. But he was not listening. He was his own man. He had business in the Holy City, a city he considered himself personally responsible for, and he would not be deterred. He was, after all, a direct descendant of the prophet Muhammad. His forebearers had been responsible for governing Mecca and Medina for centuries. Now he was the guardian of some of Islam’s most revered landmarks. He simply would not cower or shrink away in the face of personal threats, however serious.

That was the king’s way. I wasn’t sure it was wise, but I had to admit, privately at least, that I wasn’t protesting. After all, His Majesty was also being urged by his closest counselors not to speak to the Western press at all
 
—and certainly not to agree to an interview with an American
 
—but he was ignoring this advice too. Clearly he had something to say to the world and had decided to use me to say it, and for this I felt enormously grateful.

I had worked for United Press International and the Associated Press for nearly ten years. I’d interviewed generals and commanders and local officials of all kinds. I had been posted in London, Paris, Bombay, and most recently Beirut. I’d met presidents and prime ministers and heads of state. But I had never even seen a king in the flesh, much less interviewed one, and I confess that the very notion of conversing with a monarch held for me a certain mystique that I cannot put into words.

So this was it. If I didn’t do something quickly to get through this crowd and past these guards, I knew I would regret it for the rest of my life.

I scanned the crowd, picked my target, and took my fate into my own hands. Wiping my palms on my trousers, I set my plan into
motion. I began pushing aside several old men, then shoved a few teenage boys out of my way, working along the stone wall to my right, toward the soldiers. Immediately, curses came flying back at me thick and fierce, but those I had moved past didn’t have a chance. I was over six feet tall and nearly two hundred pounds. So I kept moving toward my target, and with a few more steps I was there. Without warning, I drove my elbow hard into the ribs of the burly young man with crooked teeth who minutes before had called me an infidel. He was probably about twenty-four or twenty-five years old, and I suspected he had far more experience street fighting than I did. But for the moment, at least, I had the advantage. I had a plan, and he was being blindsided.

Infuriated, his eyes flashing with the same rage I had seen before, he took a swing at me with all his might. I knew it was coming, and I ducked in time, so his fist slammed into the stone wall behind me. At that moment, I embedded my right fist in his stomach. He doubled over, and I lunged at his waist, toppling him to the ground, whipping the bloodthirsty crowd around us into a frenzy. It didn’t take long for him to recover his wits and flip me over, but as he did, the whistles of the soldiers started blowing. I covered my face with my arms as he landed several blows. But before he could do any real damage, a half-dozen Jordanian guards descended upon us. They beat back the crowd with wooden clubs and soon were beating him, too, until they could pull him off me and clamp handcuffs on him. I received several kicks, one to my back and one to my stomach, and then I too was cuffed. But in the grand scheme, since I was on the bottom of the pile, I actually got the least of it, and when they realized I was not a Jordanian or a Moslem but a Westerner, the captain of the unit
 
—a Captain Rajoub, according to the name on his uniform
 
—looked horrified.

“Who are you?” he demanded while his colleagues aimed their rifles at me.

“I am a reporter,” I said in English, scooping my hat off the ground,
dusting it off, and replacing it on my perspiration-soaked head as two soldiers rifled through my leather satchel.

“From where?”

“America,” I replied.

There was no point in saying I was actually based in Beirut. It would just confuse the matter. And although I was fluent in Arabic, I spoke only in English since the whole point was to distinguish myself from the locals, to be as foreign as possible.
America
was a word I was sure these men knew. They didn’t love us. But they had the decency to fear us.

“Papers!”
the young captain insisted, bristling.

I slowly reached into my suit pocket, careful not to make the boys with the rifles any more nervous than they already were. I pulled out my American passport and my AP credentials and handed them to him. The man opened the passport first, looked at the photo, then looked back at me.

“Andrew?” he asked, his accent thick but his English passable, to my surprise. “Is that your name?”

I nodded.

“Andrew Bradley Collins?”

I nodded again.

“Born September 9, 1920?”

“Yes.”

“In Bar . . . Bar . . .”

“Bar Harbor,” I said.

“What’s that?”

It seemed ridiculous to be discussing my hometown. “It’s a little town in Maine.”

The man just looked at me. Indeed, the whole crowd was staring at me, and many seemed ready to tear me limb from limb.

“Why are you here?” Captain Rajoub asked.

“I have a telegram,” I said, slowly reaching back into my breast
pocket and pulling out the crumpled yellow sheet from Western Union. I handed it to the captain and watched as he read it.

Then I saw his eyes widen.

“You are supposed to meet His Majesty?” he asked, incredulous. “You’re meeting him here?”

“I’m supposed to
 
—I was trying to get this message to you, sir, but that lunatic there tried to kill me,” I said, pointing at the burly man being forcibly restrained by several soldiers from trying to attack me again.

“You’re supposed to meet him now?”

“Yes
 
—if you and your boys will let me through.”

Genuine fear flashed in the captain’s eyes. He and his men had arrested and very nearly shot a man who was supposed to be meeting with the king. For a moment, he was speechless. But only for a moment.

“Right this way, sir,” he said at last. “Please, my friend, come
 
—I will take you to His Majesty.”

He turned to his dumbfounded men and barked a command in Arabic. Stunned by all that had just occurred, the soldiers immediately cleared a path. Then the captain beckoned me to follow him. I grabbed my satchel from the soldier holding it, straightened my tie, brushed myself off as best I could, and followed the captain onto the Temple Mount.

My desperate plan had worked, and I could hardly believe my eyes.

I was late, but I was in.

I desperately scanned the plaza but did not see him.

Had I missed my chance?

Captain Rajoub told me to follow him closely and not to say a word, and then he set across the plaza at a rather brisk pace. I did what he said, amazed that I was really on the Temple Mount for the first time in my life.

Rising before me was the stunningly beautiful Dome of the Rock. Built in the seventh century and completed around AD 691, it was larger than I’d expected, rising several stories from its stone base. The octagonal structure of the building, covered in exquisite blue-and-green tile work with Islamic decor, was spectacular. And of course the expansive wooden dome, gilded in pure gold, was even more spectacular
 
—and very nearly blinding as well
 
—gleaming majestically in the noonday sun.

Captain Rajoub and I turned the corner and headed for the front door of the mosque, on the south side of the complex, but there was still no sign of the king. I saw several soldiers patrolling the grounds, but not the royal entourage. I was tempted to despair, I’ll admit, but I wouldn’t allow it
 
—not yet, anyway. Rather, I started asking questions.

“Excuse me,” I said in Arabic to a pair of soldiers walking nearby.
“I was told to wait here to conduct an interview with His Majesty. Have I missed him?”

Both men looked at me suspiciously, but the captain assured them my story was true and showed them the telegram. What’s more, the captain promised them he would stay at my side and make certain I caused no trouble. They glanced at the pistol strapped to the captain’s belt and then looked back at me, apparently satisfied.

“No, you have not missed him,” the older one replied in reasonably good English. “His Majesty is on his way. Wait over there.”

“Shukran,”
I replied, thanking the men, amazed at my good fortune.

I did my best to look calm, but my heart was racing.
The angels must be looking out for me,
I thought. Somebody up there was.

Perhaps there really was something mystical, even magical, about this spot, I mused while I waited. It was here, the Jews said, that the biblical Abraham nearly sacrificed his son Isaac, until God intervened and saved the day. It was here
 
—on this very spot
 
—that not one but two Jewish Temples had once stood, and where the Jews believed a third Temple would one day be built. That certainly seemed implausible, given that the Jews hadn’t controlled the Old City, let alone the Temple Mount, for more than two thousand years.

Besides, the Moslems would never allow the Jews to build here. After all, they too considered the site sacred. They believed that Muhammad, their Prophet, had arrived here after taking his famed night flight from Mecca on a winged, white horselike creature. Furthermore, they claimed that from this very spot he had been taken up to heaven.

The Christians, meanwhile, believed that not far from here Jesus of Nazareth had been crucified, buried, and resurrected
 
—and that he would return to this very spot at the End of Days to judge his enemies and set up his eternal Kingdom.

I had no idea who was right. I’d never been religious growing up
 
—never cared much about it, I must say. But if there was a God, he had certainly shown me kindness this day.

While I waited, and the soldiers eyed me warily, I tried to get my thoughts in order. What was I supposed to do first when I met the king? Did one shake his hand? Bow down? Kiss his feet? I suddenly realized that I had no idea what the protocol was. No one had told me, and foolishly I had not asked.

I brushed such thoughts aside. There was no reason to be anxious. This man had agreed to meet with me because I had something he wanted: a worldwide audience. He and his advisors had obviously vetted me. They surely had read my dispatches from the region. They must have concluded I was a fair-minded reporter who strove for balance and accuracy. More important, His Majesty clearly had something he wanted to say through me to my readers, to the nations, and to the men who ruled them. But what?

There was something about this particular monarch that intrigued me a great deal. On the face of it, one could argue that King Abdullah didn’t matter much to my American readers or even to most Europeans. His kingdom possessed no oil, no gold, no silver, no diamonds or precious minerals. It had no real natural resources to speak of at all, in fact. It had no heavy industry, nothing of substance to export. It had far too little water and precious little arable land. The king ran a tiny, tribal nation of bedouin Arabs who had not exactly distinguished themselves by splitting the atom or curing polio or inventing the wireless or creating the world’s tastiest breakfast cereal. This wasn’t a nation abounding in Pulitzers or Nobel Prizes. If Jordan was known for anything, it was instability and shifting sands. The nation had gained its independence amid the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. It was first governed by a man who wasn’t even born there but rather in Mecca. Then it was overrun in 1948 by hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees, most of whom had fled
the war with the new state of Israel, though some had been driven out of their homes by the Jews. The Palestinians called the war
“al-Nakbah”
 
—the “catastrophe,” the “disaster”
 
—and they were deeply embittered. How loyal were they to the current king? I couldn’t say. But my sources told me officials in London worried about the stability of the throne in Amman. So did officials in Washington.

So beyond a few government officials, who in the U.S. or Great Britain really cared about the fate of Jordan? The AP didn’t even have a bureau in Amman. Neither did UPI or the
New York Times
or Reuters. Cairo? Yes. Jerusalem? Of course. Damascus and Beirut? Without question. But not Amman. Didn’t that say something? Nevertheless, there was a story here
 
—I was sure of it
 
—and Abdullah was the key.

Suddenly I saw him.

He was approaching from the east, through a grove of trees and an ancient stone archway, flanked by a handful of bodyguards in plainclothes
 
—I counted six
 
—several aides, and a dozen uniformed soldiers, each carrying a submachine gun. The king was dressed entirely in white cotton robes that shimmered in the sunshine, and he wore a white turban. He appeared to be bald, but he sported a well-groomed mustache that connected with a full goatee. As he drew closer, he struck me as more diminutive in stature than I had expected, no more than four or five inches over five feet, if that. But he strode purposefully across the warm stones with a regal bearing, commanding and self-assured. His skin was the color of hot tea with a splash of milk. His eyes were bright and intense, though they never looked at me.

Several minutes behind schedule now, the king headed straight for the ancient mosque. The captain beside me stood ramrod straight and saluted, as did the soldiers nearby. Then I noticed a young boy, no more than fifteen or sixteen years old, dressed in full ceremonial military garb, walking a stride or two behind the king.

“Who is that?” I whispered to the captain.

“That is Prince Hussein, of course,” the captain whispered back.

“The king’s grandson?” I asked, startled because no one had told me he was coming.

“Who else?”

As the entourage rushed past me, I feared the deal was off and the interview had been forgotten or ignored. But then one of the king’s aides caught my eye and motioned me to follow. I quickly complied. As we headed down a flight of steps toward a small crowd of worshipers and well-wishers, the aide moved to my side.

“Mr. Collins, I am Mansour, His Majesty’s spokesman,” he said in a hushed tone as we walked. “Please forgive us for being late.”

“Don’t mention it,” I said, breathing a sigh of relief. “Is everything okay?”

“Yes, yes
 
—well, it is now,” he said. “I confess we had a bit of a scare as the motorcade came over the Mount of Olives. There was a demonstration of some kind
 
—a roadblock, quite unexpected. And as you can imagine, our security detail is on heightened alert.”

“Yes, of course,” I said, trying to keep pace with him and the others.

“At any rate, our security men were worried for a few minutes, but it all worked out. Everything is all right. I think we should have a good day, and then we will find a time for you and His Majesty to sit down and speak together. He is looking forward to meeting you, and he has confided in me his desire to give you quite a . . . scoop, I believe you call it.”

I was elated. This was really happening. Here I was, being escorted into the Al-Aksa Mosque, the third-holiest site in the Islamic religion, right behind one of the descendants of the prophet Muhammad, and I was soon going to speak with him as well.

Ever since my days as a young boy at Phillips Academy in Andover, I’d wanted to be a news correspondent in foreign lands. I
cannot explain the obsession. There was no obvious rationale. My classmates certainly did not aspire to be journalists. They wanted to be baseball players and bankers, congressmen and corporate titans. There were no journalists in my family. My father was a tax attorney. My mother was a piano teacher. My father was a good man, kind and generous, but he never traveled outside the United States. He didn’t even own a passport. Yet since childhood I harbored an insatiable desire to explore deep jungles and vast deserts and exotic locales of all kinds. My father couldn’t stand meeting new people; I lived for it. At Princeton, my father immersed himself in numbers. At Columbia, I immersed myself in history. My father read the King James Bible and the
Wall Street Journal
. I’d had my own subscriptions to
Life
magazine and
National Geographic
since I was eight years old and used to sneak a small transistor radio into my bed at night to listen to the reports of Edward R. Murrow. And here I was, in Jerusalem
 
—at the Dome of the Rock itself
 
—in the presence of royalty.

A thousand questions flooded my head. Where would I possibly begin? Here was a man who was already eighteen years old when the twentieth century began. Here was a member of the Great Hashemite Dynasty, the son of Sharif Hussein bin Ali, onetime ruler of Mecca of the Hejaz. This king had been schooled in Istanbul at the peak of Turkish power. Later, he had gone back to Arabia and emerged as the esteemed commander of the Great Arab Revolt against the Ottomans. He had been personal friends with T. E. Lawrence, the legendary British colonel who became known as Lawrence of Arabia. Together they had taken the region by storm, organizing the Arab tribes to fight against the Ottomans. And when it was all over and the dust had settled, the Turkish empire had collapsed, and the Hashemite family had been amply rewarded. The Brits carved up the remains of the Turkish fiefdom and gave the Hashemites three territorial gifts: the desert region known as the Arabian Peninsula,
the fertile Mesopotamian region that became known as Iraq, and the land on the eastern side of the Jordan River that became known as Transjordan. It was over this last swath of territory that Abdullah now ruled, and as the door to the mosque was opened for us, it finally dawned on me which question I had to ask him first.