The First Hostage

  “Clear,” I yelled again, coming back into the hallway and hearing Yael shout the same.

  Sharif was still in the hallway, watching our backs. But Ramirez wasn’t. Instead, he had just finished clearing the last bedroom on Yael’s side—a rather generous room with three rows of dilapidated bunk beds on one side and two more on the other. Now he was meticulously scouring a storage area on my side of the hallway. His night-vision goggles were off, and he was using a flashlight. Yael came alongside me as I watched the general getting more and more frustrated. He was yelling. He was still quite controlled, but his body language made it clear he was growing angry and perhaps not a little bit frantic.

  “No luck?” I asked, turning to Yael.

  She shook her head. “Same with you?”

  “Yeah—what are we missing?”

  “I don’t know.”

  The gun battle at street level was intensifying. The sounds were muffled, but I could tell things were heating up. And it wasn’t hard to figure out why. Dawn was about to break over the plains of Nineveh. The storm was dissipating. The winds were beginning to push the system off to our east. The sky was starting to brighten ever so slightly. And every minute that passed made our situation more precarious. The entire village now knew the Americans had arrived, and they knew precisely where we were. Any fighter who had been asleep ten minutes earlier was now awake, dressed, armed, and heading our way. What wasn’t clear yet—but would be soon—was whether any calls or other communications had gotten to ISIS forces in Mosul before the drone took out the cell tower. If so, thousands of fighters could be here in the next fifteen to twenty minutes.

  A series of explosions shook the foundations of the house. It almost felt like an earthquake, but as I steadied myself against one wall and pieces of Sheetrock fell from the ceiling, Yael said that was the sound of the U.S. Air Force dropping their ordnance on ISIS reinforcements who apparently were getting too close for comfort.

  Then Ramirez started cursing up a storm and stomped back into the hallway. He didn’t say a word to us. Instead, he began personally rechecking each of the rooms we had just checked ourselves, starting with Yael’s. His desperation was palpable and growing, and what little hope I had was draining away fast. Yael offered to stand guard, but I don’t think Ramirez heard her. I saw Colonel Sharif step into the first bedroom I’d checked back at the other end of the hallway, and I decided I couldn’t just stand there doing nothing. So I started rechecking the rooms I’d just been through. It seemed ridiculous. There was nothing new to find. These rooms had no windows. They had no other doors besides the ones to the hallway. Their closets were small. I’d checked under beds and behind dressers and in every other conceivable place. I was sure I hadn’t overlooked anything, but then I stepped back into the bathroom.

  And something wasn’t right. It’s hard to explain. It’s not that I saw anything new, but I felt something different. Call it a sixth sense, call it what you will, but I took off my night-vision goggles and started using the flashlight from my belt. Inch by inch, section by section, I reexamined everything—the shower stall, the tub, the toilet, even the bidet. All of it was dirty and disgusting, and I soon began to realize it stank as well, though I couldn’t quite place the source of the stench. This time through I noticed there were dead flies everywhere and various insects crawling about. But when I got back to the rusty, filthy double sink, I just stood there and stared. A layer of plaster dust covered everything, and there was more dust lingering in the air now that the fighter jets were dropping five-thousand-pound bombs on our next-door neighbors. But there was something else.

  Slowly, carefully, thoroughly, I shone the flashlight over every centimeter of that vanity. I was racking my brain for what was bothering me, but I still couldn’t place it. I could hear Ramirez tearing up the other rooms, convinced we were missing the obvious. And then the light caught something on the floor, at the base of the vanity. At first I thought it was just a few pieces of chipped tiles, but as I stooped down to examine it more closely—and poked a bit with my gloved left hand—it began to dawn on me that I was looking at drops of blood. They weren’t fresh drops, as if they’d been left here a few minutes earlier. But the spots weren’t completely dry either. They were tacky, sticky, like the blood I’d found in the hallway of that bombed-out apartment building back in Homs. These drops weren’t more than a few hours old.

  I examined the section of the floor in front of the vanity more closely. Everything looked different without the night-vision goggles on. What had previously appeared as streaks of mud I could now see were deep black scrapes in the tiles in two parallel lines, about a meter apart.

  “Yael, come here,” I whispered, not wanting to attract the general’s attention yet.

  “What is it?” she asked, coming to the door of the bathroom.

  “I’m not sure, but would you hold this for a moment?” I asked as I handed her the flashlight.

  “Sure. Why?”

  I didn’t reply. Not immediately. Instead, I moved my machine gun so it was hanging down my back and wasn’t in my way. Then I had Yael shine the flashlight at the base of the large vanity, pulled my gloves on a little tighter, and reached out and grabbed both sides of the wooden base of the sink. Then slowly, cautiously, and as quietly as I could, I started to pull. To my astonishment, it wasn’t heavy or difficult. To the contrary, the entire sink pulled away from the wall rather easily. I expected the pipes connected to the back wall of the bathroom to stop my progress any moment. But the pipes weren’t connected at all. And when I’d pulled the whole thing completely away from its base and pushed it over beside the shower stall, Yael and I found ourselves staring at a hole in the floor roughly four feet by two or three feet, with a wooden ladder going down at least twenty feet.

  59

  I was about to call to the general when a voice crackled over the radio.

  “We have a man down. I repeat, we have a man down.”

  It wasn’t immediately apparent to me who was speaking. I didn’t know each of these men well enough to recognize their voices. But I could hear the stress in this voice, whoever it was, and the cacophony of gunfire and grenades going off nonstop was clearly audible over the radio. From this I deduced the transmission was coming from the warehouse.

  Whoever it was gave no other details—no name, no rank, no description of how serious the injuries were or whether they were life-threatening. But before Ramirez or anyone else could ask, the same voice came over the radio with an update.

  “Cancel that. We have a KIA on level two of the warehouse. I repeat, we have our first KIA. Request more backup if at all possible.”

  I couldn’t believe it. I heard the words but couldn’t process them. The heaviness in the voice sucked the wind out of me. A moment earlier I’d been so excited to find this tunnel. Now the angel of death had struck this little team for the first time, and I couldn’t imagine how this death would be the last.

  I heard the general racing down the hall and bounding up the stairs. At the same time he was asking for a status report on the battle inside the warehouse. I turned to Yael, but she shook her head, pointed back at the hole, immediately clicked off the flashlight, and put on her night-vision goggles. I did the same, then squatted and aimed my MP5 down the shaft. She didn’t say it, but I knew she was telling me not to take my eyes off the hole under any circumstances. We had clearly found something we weren’t supposed to find, and there was no telling who or what was down there. She slowly lowered herself into a crouch and positioned herself directly behind my right ear.

  “I’m going to radio this in and get the colonel to cover us,” she whispered. “And then I’m going in.”

  “Shouldn’t we wait for backup?” I whispered.

  I highly doubted she had experience in tunnel warfare. I certainly didn’t. And Sharif—a trained commando who had served faithfully at King Abdullah’s side for years—was in his forties, which was why he was now a spokesman. Surely there were two dozen me
n more qualified to do this than any of us.

  But Yael was adamant. “There is no backup,” she said without any trace of emotion.

  “What are you talking about? There’s got to be—”

  But she quickly cut me off.

  “Trust me, J. B.,” she whispered with a level of intensity in her voice I’d never heard before. “The fight up top is getting worse. They can’t spare anyone. We’re it. Now make a space. I’m going in.”

  “Wait a moment,” Sharif said from behind us. “I’ll go.”

  I hadn’t even heard him enter the bathroom.

  “No, you stay here and stand guard,” Yael said.

  “You have no training for this,” the colonel insisted. “I do.”

  “What, twenty years ago? Twenty-five? I appreciate it, Colonel—really, I do—but we don’t have time to argue.”

  “You’re right; we don’t,” he said. “So step aside. It’s a dangerous job. A soldier’s job. A man’s job. You’re brave, Dr. Katzir. But this is something I must do myself.”

  “Forget it,” she shot back, though careful to keep her voice low. “I’m the smallest, and I’m the closest, and I’m going in. Now watch my six.”

  Before either of us could say another word, Yael slung her machine gun over her shoulder, took out an automatic pistol from the holster on her hip, and disappeared down the ladder even as she radioed the general and gave him a brief description of what we’d found and what she was doing.

  I was impressed with her courage, and I could see from the look on Sharif’s face he was too. But I was scared for her. Brave was one thing. Crazy was another. And I still thought it was crazy for her to do a job the Delta guys were eminently more qualified for.

  Still, I couldn’t argue with her logic. With the first of our team killed in action and the general calling in close air strikes, it was becoming clear to me we were in real danger of being overrun. If anyone could hold ISIS back, it was Delta, not Yael, Sharif, and myself. But that meant it fell to us to head into this tunnel and find out what was there.

  I looked down the shaft and saw Yael position herself flat on her stomach, pistol out in front of her. She said nothing for a full minute. Then she looked up at me. “We’re clear.”

  “There’s no one there?”

  “Not that I can see.”

  “Good, then get back up here.”

  “No,” she said. “The tunnel curves to the left about twenty meters ahead. I need to go see what’s up there. I’m going to scootch forward. You come down behind me.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me. I need you.”

  “For what?”

  “Backup. Now get down here, and bring your pistol.”

  So I pulled out the .45 Ramirez had given me, stepped around the vanity, and made my way down the ladder, heart pounding, sweat pouring down my forehead. I had no idea who or what I was about to find, and my claustrophobia was going crazy, especially when I reached the bottom. Sure enough, the tunnel ran in the direction of the warehouse. However, unlike smuggling tunnels I’d seen on the U.S.–Mexican border, or the ones in Homs, or the one I’d once been to under the DMZ on the thirty-eighth parallel between North and South Korea, all of which had been significantly wider, able to handle several people astride for hundreds of meters, this one was low and narrow in the extreme. At over six feet tall, there was no way I was going to be able to walk erect. Indeed, I gauged the height of the tunnel at no more than three or four feet, which meant I was actually going to have to crawl on my injured knees, and only a few feet wide, which meant I was already feeling cramped. That said, it had clearly been built by people who knew what they were doing. This wasn’t a mine shaft from the California gold-rush era with dirt walls and wooden supports. This was made of concrete and actually had a lamp hanging on steel supports in the wall every fifteen or twenty feet, providing plenty of lighting.

  I got down on my hands and knees and tried to steady my breathing, tried not to hyperventilate, tried to ignore the pain. I couldn’t wait for long. Yael was already crawling forward, and I needed to follow. Every ten yards or so, we would stop, lie flat on our stomachs, weapons ready, catch our breath, and look again for signs of movement. But continuing to see none, we kept moving.

  We made the first left and found that the tunnel did not exactly continue in a straight line. It zigzagged a bit, and at each turn I feared what we would find. But turn after turn, we found nothing. No terrorists. No president. No clues.

  After six or seven minutes, we were surprised to come upon a T intersection. In front of us was a much larger tunnel, at least eight feet high, and significantly wider. It, too, was carefully constructed of steel and concrete, but unlike the narrower tunnel we’d just come through, this one had metal tracks, like railroad tracks, running down its center. They appeared to be tracks for mine carts, though I didn’t see any at the moment. Then again, looking to my right, it was pitch-black. To my left, the new tunnel was much better lit than the tunnel we’d just come out of.

  My grip on my pistol tightened. Claustrophobia was no longer the issue. I realized now that there was a very good chance we were going to encounter the enemy, and soon.

  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 w
e’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.