The Third Target Read Online Free PDF Page A

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. Icannot 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