The First Hostage: A J. B. Collins Novel

by Joel C. Rosenberg

  “What they discovered was that Homs wasn’t a base of operations for ISIS,” Ari noted. “It turned out the number in Homs was nothing more than a switching station, and all of the calls were being switched to a series of numbers in Mosul.”

  “A series of numbers?” the UAE general asked.

  “Yes,” Ari said. “To keep things simple, I didn’t put all the data on the slide. But once the calls were routed from Homs to Mosul, they were rerouted again five, six, sometimes seven times before finally connecting. I’m afraid we weren’t able to determine where the two inbound calls were coming from before they were routed to Ramzy’s phone. But we were able to figure out where each of the outgoing calls was routed to, and the last call becomes the most important.”

  The next slide showed a blizzard of detailed technical data: certain phone numbers that were used to specific cell towers in Jordan, Syria, Iraq, Syria again, and Iraq again, and so forth. Given the constraints of time, Ari told us he would skip a thorough explanation and just cut to the chase.

  “This last call was bounced around the most, a total of nineteen times through three different countries,” he said. “In the end they weren’t able to throw us off the scent. In fact, by taking such precautions, they revealed that of all twelve calls to and from Ramzy’s phone, this was by far the most important. It wasn’t as long as the call to the Western Union office in Virginia, but at six minutes and thirteen seconds it was the longest call in the region. It was clearly the call the ISIS team worked hardest to camouflage. Any guess where it went?”

  “Alqosh,” Al-Mufti said.

  “Exactly,” Ari confirmed. “Now, I wish I could tell you that we were able to intercept and record the actual call. I wish I could tell you we had Jamal Ramzy and Abu Khalif on tape plotting the assassination of our leaders and their plan to bring the president back to Alqosh. But I can’t. Maybe NSA has it. But to be honest, given the high-level penetration of NSA this week, we didn’t think discussing it with our friends in Fort Meade was the best move right now. But this is where my colleague Dr. Katzir enters the picture. With your permission, I’m going to hand things over to her now.”

  The king and prince both nodded, and Yael stood. She straightened her jacket and smoothed back her damp hair. She was moving slowly and seemed stiff.

  “Thank you, Your Majesty and Your Highness, for allowing us to come over on such short notice,” she began. “Dr. Shalit brought me here today because my specialty—first in the IDF and for the last several years with the Mossad—is weapons of mass destruction and particularly chemical weapons. I have a master’s from UC Berkeley and a doctorate from MIT in chemical engineering. My father was a chemist for Pfizer and now teaches chemistry at Tel Aviv University, which is how I developed my love for the subject. Anyway, a number of weeks ago, as you know from Mr. Collins’s reporting, ISIS forces led by Jamal Ramzy’s top deputy—a guy named Tariq Baqouba—attacked a Syrian military base near Aleppo. We don’t think Baqouba knew at the time that it was a storage facility for chemical weapons. The U.N. had, after all, supposedly moved all of Syria’s WMD out of the country. But the Assad regime was still secretly hoarding a great deal of chemical weapons. So when the fight was over and Baqouba and his men gained control of the base, they found—most likely to their surprise—stockpiles of sarin nerve gas and the bombs and artillery shells to deliver them.”

  I was disappointed that she’d called me “Mr. Collins” rather than “J. B.” or “James.” But other than that I was enjoying just being in the same room with her, having the chance to look at her for long stretches of time without it seeming odd, and getting to hear her speak with just a mesmerizing hint of an accent.

  Ari now put up a series of photos of the Syrian base in question, taken from Israeli drones, but I never took my eyes off Yael.

  “As you might imagine, we’d been using drones to monitor each of the sites where we believed the Assad regime had been making or keeping chemical weapons,” she continued. “We’d also been monitoring all radio, phone, and e-mail traffic in the area around these bases. Bottom line, we watched Baqouba and his men cart away the sarin precursors, load them onto trucks, and drive away.”

  Ari now played a video clip showing drone footage of the ISIS convoy of five white box trucks driving away from the base.

  “For the next five days, we tracked these five trucks as they drove through Syria, across the border into Iraq, and on to Mosul,” Yael explained. “Unfortunately, our drone fleet was stretched thin at that time, and when the convoy got to Mosul, the drivers split off in five different directions. As a result, we lost four of them, but we did follow one, and it led us here.”

  For the first time, I forced myself to look away from Yael and toward the main monitor on the wall. A new video clip showed one of the trucks exiting a highway, driving down a long country road, entering a small village, and pulling into a heavily guarded compound on the edge of the village, just along a mountain ridge.

  “Let me guess,” General El-Badawy said. “That’s Alqosh.”

  “It is,” Yael confirmed. “Now, when we watched this whole thing begin to unfold, I had never heard of Alqosh. Nor had Dr. Shalit. But he tasked me with learning everything I possibly could about the town: who was there, why ISIS would park a truck filled with sarin gas there, and so forth. So I set up the same type of monitoring operation as I had at the Aleppo base. We started tracking phone calls, e-mails, text messages, anything we possibly could, and of course we kept a steady eye on the drone images. But we had gaps. I wanted a second drone so we’d have nonstop coverage of the compound. Unfortunately, there weren’t any others available. So we had to keep bringing the drone we were using back to Israel for refueling and maintenance. My team and I feared the weapons would be moved out of Alqosh and we’d miss it. Instead, we actually captured on video two more of the white box trucks arriving at the compound a few days after the first, amid numerous cars coming in and out at all hours of the day and night, and we began to consider the possibility that ISIS was actually storing the bulk of the chemical weapons they’d captured at this particular compound in Alqosh.”

  “This is all well and good, Dr. Katzir, but it doesn’t put the president there,” Prince Feisal protested.

  “I realize that, Your Highness,” she said calmly and without seeming to take offense. “I’m getting to that.”

  “With all due respect, you need to get there faster. The clock is ticking.”

  47

  “Of course, Your Highness,” Yael replied.

  She leaned forward to pour herself a glass of water. I noticed she winced as she did so and held the glass with two hands. She was in more pain than she was letting on.

  “Gentlemen, it’s at this point that we intercepted a series of e-mails sent from inside the compound. Both were going to an e-mail address in Washington, D.C., an address belonging to one Allen MacDonald.”

  Stunned, I looked around the room and then back at Yael. No one else knew whom she was talking about, but I did, and I could hardly believe she was serious.

  “Who’s Allen MacDonald?” al-Mufti asked.

  “He’s Mr. Collins’s editor at the New York Times,” Yael explained. “We suddenly realized that Mr. Collins was at that location, writing two articles and sending them back to the foreign desk. When we read the articles, we realized what was happening. ISIS forces had just attacked the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad. In the process, they had liberated their spiritual leader, Abu Khalif. They had also captured Mr. Collins, who was writing about these events in great detail. What’s more, he was writing about his exclusive interview with Khalif and the demonstration he witnessed of ISIS operatives testing sarin gas on several Iraqi prisoners.”

  Ari now stood. “I give tremendous credit to Dr. Katzir and her team,” he said. “They not only tracked the movement of some of the most deadly weapons in the Syrian arsenal, but they also identified the location of one of the highest value targets on the Mossad’s most-wanted li
st, not to mention each of your own. Because my own boss is so ill and I’m serving as acting director at the moment, I took this to the prime minister at once with a request that we take immediate action.”

  “What kind of action?” I asked, my heart racing.

  “We wanted to neutralize the target,” Ari replied.

  “Neutralize?”

  “Yes.”

  “You mean destroy?”

  “Of course.”

  “With me inside the same compound?”

  “Well, that did complicate the situation enormously.”

  “I guess so.”

  “So what did Danny do?” the king asked.

  “He put two F-16s on strip alert, ready to hit the compound on his orders, but he also went straight to the security cabinet,” Ari said. “They debated it for hours.”

  “Hours? What for?” El-Badawy pressed. “You had the head of ISIS, likely his top deputies, and a cache of chemical weapons all within a couple hundred meters of each other. Why in the world didn’t you take the shot?”

  “General, this was exactly my position,” Ari said. “The national security of the State of Israel was in grave peril. We didn’t know, of course, what was about to happen in Amman. But we knew enough that in my judgment we had to act. And to be completely candid—and completely off the record—the majority of the security cabinet recommended the strike as well.”

  “But in the end, Danny called it off,” said the king.

  “Yes.”

  “And not taking out Abu Khalif when he had the chance cost him his life.”

  “I’m afraid so, Your Majesty.”

  I looked at Ari, then at Yael, then down at my notes. But there was one person I couldn’t look at just then—the king. He and the Israeli prime minister—“Danny”—had been friends for years. They had also worked together for months on the peace treaty with the Palestinians they had all come so close to signing. And now Daniel Lavi was gone—because of me.

  There could be no other reason Lavi had hesitated to attack Alqosh than to protect my life. Ari hadn’t said it in so many words, but everyone in the room knew what he was saying. And now hundreds were dead. Many more were wounded. The Hashemite Kingdom was on the brink, and the president of the United States had been captured.

  And yet again I had nearly died. When I’d been taken captive by Khalif and his jihadists, I was convinced I was going to be beheaded on YouTube for all the world to see. I never imagined two Israeli fighter jets were on standby, waiting for a single order to drop two five-thousand-pound bombs and kill me and everyone around me before any of us even realized what was happening.

  I shuddered at the thought. How many times in recent weeks had I been so close to death, so close to slipping out of this world and into the next? More than I dared count, especially since I knew I wasn’t ready to die. My brother was pleading with me to give my life to Christ. He kept telling me that receiving Christ was the only way to heaven. He kept telling me I was going to spend eternity in hell with no way of escape if I didn’t. I used to be furious with him for saying things like that. But I no longer believed he was trying to be cruel. I was convinced now that Matt absolutely believed this in the core of his being. I knew he genuinely feared that I would be separated from God and from him and from the rest of our family forever. He loved me. He wanted the best for me. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it.

  I wasn’t even sure that he was wrong. I was actually beginning to wonder if he might be right. But something in me couldn’t say yes to Christ. I couldn’t have explained why. I’m not even sure I knew. I just couldn’t, and yet a fear was engulfing me like I’d never experienced before. My hands started trembling again. I set down my pad and pen on the conference table and put my hands in my lap. I was perspiring and my mouth was dry, but I didn’t dare reach for the glass of water on the table before me. I was too afraid of spilling it.

  A new video started playing on the main monitor. It was a night-vision shot showing a car and an SUV driving away from the compound.

  “That night, we observed two vehicles leaving Alqosh in the middle of the night,” Yael said, breaking the awkward silence. “Because we had only one drone operating over the site, we couldn’t follow the car. We believed at the time that Abu Khalif was leaving. The problem was that the mandate of my unit was to track chemical weapons, not ISIS leaders per se. It was a brutal call to make. I was cursing my superiors for not giving me a second drone. But I had my orders. I couldn’t disobey them. I had to stay with the compound.”

  “So you didn’t know it was Mr. Collins who was being taken away from the town instead of Khalif?” Prince Feisal asked.

  “No, Your Highness, I did not.”

  “Why not?”

  “There were tarps over the driveway and carport in the compound, preventing us from seeing faces of people entering or exiting the vehicles inside. And the windows of the vehicle were tinted. Plus it was night. So it wasn’t possible to make proper IDs, I’m afraid.”

  “But if you had known?” the Saudi asked.

  “If I’d known what, General?”

  “If you’d known Collins had left instead of Khalif, would you have hit the compound?”

  “Well, of course, it wasn’t my decision to make,” Yael replied. “But yes, I would certainly have recommended an immediate strike. I know for a fact my superiors would have agreed and taken my recommendation directly to the PM. And I have no doubt that the PM and the security cabinet would have ordered a strike. As it was, we didn’t know who had left the compound, so the PM ordered the F-16s to stand down.”

  “But even without Khalif there, you could have hit the compound anyway,” the Saudi pressed. “I still don’t understand why you didn’t take the opportunity to destroy all those chemical weapons when you had the chance.”

  Yael said nothing but looked to Ari.

  “I wanted to do just that,” he replied. “But Dr. Katzir pleaded with me not to.”

  “Why not? It was a perfect opportunity.”

  “In some ways, yes,” Ari agreed. “But Dr. Katzir argued it would have exposed our knowledge of the site. It would have destroyed all the highly valuable intelligence that was surely at the site. She strongly recommended, instead, that we find a way to send several operatives—”

  “Spies?” the Saudi asked.

  “Okay, yes, spies, to infiltrate the compound and find out who exactly was there and what their intentions were,” Ari added.

  “You couldn’t have believed that would have really worked.”

  “It was a compelling case,” Ari said.

  “This wasn’t about intelligence,” El-Badawy interjected. “She was trying to protect Collins.”

  “We did have an innocent American citizen—a highly respected and accomplished journalist—in the compound, yes,” Ari concurred. “It’s not our practice to kill innocent civilians, whatever the media in the region say about us.”

  “But there was a higher mission,” El-Badawy insisted. “Wasn’t it worth killing one man to save the lives of so many others?”

  48

  “In the end, I took Dr. Katzir’s recommendation,” Ari said.

  “Just to save a reporter?” the Saudi asked, indignant.

  “She was the lead analyst on this,” Ari responded. “She had an impeccable service record. I’ve always trusted her judgment. I didn’t necessarily agree with her. But I respect her, and at the time I couldn’t say definitively that she was wrong.”

  “But she was.”

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. My blood was boiling. The colonel could see it. He reached over and put his hand on my arm, a subtle reminder—perhaps a plea—not to say anything, to let this thing play out without jumping in. I looked at Yael. She was surprisingly calm. I didn’t know how she did it. But I could see this was getting to Ari. His jaw was clenched as he carefully chose his next words.

  “Dr. Katzir could not have possibly known what was coming, General,” he finall
y replied. “Nor could I. Nor could our prime minister. Nor could any of you. Not that night. Not based on what we knew at that precise moment. We had a judgment call to make. Hindsight is twenty-twenty. But I believe we made the best decision we could, given the imperfect information we had at the time.”

  I was grateful for the answer. The Saudi general, however, wouldn’t let it go.

  “But in the end you cannot escape the brutal fact that you chose to risk the lives of thousands—thousands of Arabs, I might add; thousands of Muslims—to save the life of a single man, a single reporter.”

  “An American citizen,” Ari added, “and a friend.”

  “Ah, and now we get to it,” the general said, his face red as he leaned forward in his chair. “This was not just an American and not just a reporter; this was someone Miss Katzir knew personally.”

  “Dr. Katzir.”

  “Someone that Dr. Katzir knew personally.”

  “Yes.”

  “Someone she is friends with?”

  “You could say that.”

  “Close friends?”

  “Perhaps—they’ve certainly been through a great deal together.”

  “And perhaps more than friends?”

  “What are you implying?”

  “I’m not implying,” the general said. “I’m merely asking.”

  “You’re asking if there is some kind of inappropriate relationship going on here?” Ari asked, incredulous.

  I glanced at Yael. She was mortified. Her face said it all. And she was growing angry. Her back stiffened. She leaned forward in her seat. For a second, I thought she might unleash on the general. But she was too much of a professional for that. She let Ari defend her, and Ari was doing a fine job. But I was livid, about to explode. Sharif tightened his grip on my arm, silently imploring me to stay calm and let others defend our honor.

  “General, these are two people who risked their own lives to save the life of this fine and honorable king from these ISIS monsters,” Ari responded. “Perhaps you’re not aware that Dr. Katzir killed dozens of the jihadists, or that she was engaged in hand-to-hand combat with them. Perhaps you’re not aware that she personally shot and killed Jamal Ramzy or that Mr. Collins was the one who had the wherewithal to recover Ramzy’s phone, which has given us such critical intelligence. Or that he was shot and wounded protecting the lives of the royal family. Or that he drove the vehicle that whisked not only the king and his family to safety but also the Palestinian president and my prime minister. Rather than cowardly insinuations, I believe everyone in this room owes these two people a great debt.”