1Malik
Jordan, May 21, 2022
The bomb that didn’t go off was aboard a United Airlines flight from Jordan’s Queen Alia International Airport bound for JFK. It was another sweltering day in the hottest year on record, and the temperature inside the plane was insufferable. The pilot promised the restive passengers that the air-conditioning would kick in after takeoff, but a sandstorm suddenly swept out of the desert, pounding the windows like a desiccated hurricane and leaving the aircraft stranded at the end of the runway. The plane heaved. Passengers swooned. Eventually maintenance called the plane back to the gate and United scrambled to ready another aircraft, which would have to come from Cairo when the storm passed. Some of the passengers bailed out but most hung around the terminal, drinking cocktails in the bar, watching the sun surrender to a dust-choked sky.
It wasn’t until the luggage was transferred to the new aircraft that a detection dog froze in front of a metal suitcase. Instead of barking or nosing the offending article, which would alert his handler to drugs, the dog sat and stared, as he had been trained to do in case of explosives. Any slight movement could set off the bomb. Within minutes, the airport was evacuated—because of a gas leak, passengers were told—so they stood in the parking lot shielding their faces against the stinging sand and cursing their luck. Nobody knew that they might all be dead now, their bodies shredded by the blast and scattered across the Mediterranean somewhere near the boot of Italy.
The bomb squad arrived an hour later with a portable X-ray machine, which revealed the commonality of modern improvised explosives: batteries and copper wiring, and what could be an altimeter, designed to trigger the bomb when the plane reached a specified altitude. The device was implanted in what looked, in the ghostly thermal image, like a stuffed animal. It was surrounded by powder-filled packets and nails tightly crammed in—a huge bomb, far larger than anything needed to bring down an airplane. The nails were a pointless addition, useful only for killing crowds, not for knocking planes out of the sky.
The squad carefully loaded the suitcase into a ball-shaped containment vessel in an armored Humvee, which slowly made its way on the blocked-off Highway 45 to Zarqa. There, between the national police academy and the town dump, was a counterterrorism center run by Jordanian authorities in conjunction with the FBI. The Humvee passed through the gates of the dump and slowed to a near stop as it navigated the potholes with fearful caution, then parked in front of a small cement-block building the color of a tangerine.
Inside the counterterrorism center a team of American and Jordanian intelligence watched on video as the bomb-disposal technician fitted up. The bomb suit, weighing nearly a hundred pounds, was made of Kevlar and flame-resistant Nomex with a ceramic plate to cover the torso. The polycarbonate helmet was equipped with amplifiers and a defogger, lit within so that the technician’s face, known to everyone in the center, glowed eerily bright. He was Adnan, who was studying electrical engineering and coached a youth soccer team, but they did not refer to him by name. He was too deep in the death zone for anyone to save him, so they called him “the guy,” as if using his name was bad luck. Not a single person watching in the center had the nerve to do what the guy was doing. It was like watching a man on a tightrope crossing a rocky abyss a thousand meters deep.
He took possession of the suitcase and carefully placed it on a Styrofoam table designed to avoid splintering into shards. He could receive radio transmissions but he did not communicate himself— the frequency might set off the bomb—so he worked alone, silently, with the team in his ear but frustratingly out of reach. They could observe what he was doing through a camera on his helmet with high-intensity lamps on either side. Despite the body armor everywhere else on his body, his hands were uncovered. Dexterity was essential for sensing any hidden triggers or booby traps. If he missed the slightest trick of the bomb maker’s craft, the suit might save his life but his hands would be sacrificed. An ambulance waited outside.
The technician dusted the suitcase for fingerprints, then pointed at the luggage tag and shook his head. An operator inside the counterterrorism center was able to zoom in on the luggage tag. It bore the name, in English block letters, Yahya Ayyash.
“Ayyash? Is this a joke?” An American FBI agent, Anthony Malik, abruptly stood. Everyone recognized the name of a notorious Hamas bomb maker, known as the Engineer. Back in the nineties, Ayyash killed nearly a hundred Israelis using suicide bombers. There were streets named after him all over Palestine. He was finally assassinated by Shin Bet, the Israeli internal security agency, twenty-six years ago. Now he was back, at least in tribute. “How did this get through airport security?” Malik demanded. “It might as well have a sign on it saying, ‘I am a bomb.’ ”
No one in the center responded. There was only one answer: someone on the inside had placed the bomb. Malik wasn’t blaming anyone in the room. They all felt the same anger and anxiety; they were a team. But it was a colossal intelligence failure that might have led to hundreds of fatalities. Somebody had beaten the security and they were all more or less responsible. If some genius could slip through Jordanian controls, which were among the tightest in the region, where else might it happen? These things are contagious.
Malik, who was thirty-three, appeared a decade older with the severe lines that formed in his face, as if he had been mauled by age. His hair was dark and unruly, and his brows were black, but beneath them his eyes were green with flecks of brown—“hazel” is what it said on his driver’s license. His long, down-pointing nose and jutting chin awarded him a distinct drama; he could have been a wary nobleman in an El Greco painting, not handsome but striking, impressive, the kind of face that assumed command. When he smiled, the lines in his cheeks widened like a drawn bow, but when he was angry, as he was now, his eyes widened and his brows knitted together in a fearsome scowl.
“It’s got to be TATP,” Malik continued, referring to the unstable, highly explosive formulation that Ayyash used. “It’s way too volatile to be handled. There’s a reason they call it the Mother of Satan. It blows up if you sneeze. We’ve got to get the guy out of there. Detonate it remotely.”
“This guy is a pro,” Husni Obeidat, the officer representing Jordanian intelligence, protested. He and Malik were close, they played tennis together at the American embassy. “There’s valuable information to be gained,” Husni continued. “We don’t place people in danger for no reason—”
And that’s when Malik’s memories were blown out of his brain.
He had horrible dreams. At times he was aware of people in the room, but they vanished or turned into cartoonish monsters. He tried to flee but he couldn’t move. When he awakened he discovered he was paralyzed. This happened several times. When he woke again to find a nurse at his bedside he didn’t remember waking before. He tried to talk but couldn’t.
He fell back asleep. He had a sense of being lifted out of some dark spot, as if he were deep in the ocean and was slowly floating toward the surface, away from the safety of unconsciousness. He was so cold. Blood raced through his capillaries and his body tingled. The gathering brightness was alarming but he didn’t want to be in the dark anymore. He heard voices. Someone said, “There he is.”
His eyes opened although he realized he could only see out of the right one. Three people stood around his bed wearing tactical scrubs.
“Mr. Malik, welcome back to the world,” said a man with wavy white hair. His name tag said “KUMAR.” The silver oak leaf on his sleeve marked him as a lieutenant colonel.
“Where . . . ?” was the only word Malik could utter. It came out in a croak.
“Landstuhl Medical Center in Ramstein, Germany,” Dr. Kumar said. “Our records show you’ve been here before.”
Malik nodded. The scar on his leg from a Taliban AK-47.
“I know you’re confused and your throat is raw. We just pulled out the intubation tube and it will take a while before you’re able to speak easily. Also, you’re probably not going to remember much of what we say today, but Lieutenant Adkins here will be helping you.”
He gestured toward a nurse with a medical bonnet and a few strands of blond hair spilling out. “Can you tell us if there’s anything you need?” Adkins said. “Like are you hungry? You can just nod or blink.”
“Cold,” he muttered.
“That’s something we can fix right away,” she said, as an orderly manifested a blue blanket.
“You’ll be stronger and more alert tomorrow,” said Kumar. “We’ve handled thousands of TBIs—traumatic brain injuries—and it takes a while for your brain to relax and begin forming new memories. Don’t get frustrated. I’ll check on you again tomorrow.”
Malik was asleep by the time the door closed.
The next thing he knew a doctor held a bright light in his left eye. “The dilation is less pronounced,” the doctor said. His name plate said “KUMAR.” Malik had no memory of ever seeing him before.
“What’s wrong with me?” Malik said. His voice sounded like he was speaking underwater.
“Say that again,” the doctor said, “slowly.”
Malik repeated it several times before the doctor understood, but Malik couldn’t remember the response. This would happen twice more before Malik recognized Adkins when she came to take his blood pressure and told him once again about the bomb.
He summoned a name from the basement of his memory. “Husni Obeidat?” He didn’t know why or how that name came to mind.
Adkins took his hand. “All gone. Five of them. You can’t imagine how lucky you are to be alive.”
Malik nodded, then turned away. To his astonishment, he began to cry. Adkins gently rubbed his wrist. “Listen, it happens. These kind of injuries turn up a lot of emotions.”
“How long?” he asked.
“How long have you been here? A little over two weeks. Most of that time you were in a coma. It takes time to fully wake up from that.”
Dr. Kumar was examining him again. Apparently he had been doing so for some time. This may have been a different day. “How is he sleeping?”
“Irregular,” said Adkins. “He tends to sleep in two-hour segments.”
“Headaches?”
Malik nodded vigorously but the nodding made the pain worse.
“We can’t do a lot about that,” said the doctor. “We worry about bleeding.” He turned to Adkins. “Acetaminophen. Five thousand. Nausea?”
“No,” said Malik.
“He vomited twice in the night,” said Adkins.
Wouldn’t he remember something like that?
“Seizures?”
“None in the last three days.”
“Looks like our boy is getting better,” said Kumar.
Was that true? The boy in question had no idea. His head was exploding. His ears were ringing. He couldn’t process what happened to him. He was nauseous at night. Apparently he had been worse.
“My eye,” Malik managed to say.
“We’re trying to save it. Despite your amazing good fortune to be still with us, the bomb did extensive physical damage. The femur in your right leg is broken as is your left wrist and several fingers in that hand. Those wounds will heal, I promise you. You’re very strong. You’re young. But you suffered a severe head laceration that involves the left orbital bone. Your doctors in Jordan sewed you up nicely but the eye itself is in jeopardy. We’ll know better in a few days. But the eye is not the main problem. Your challenge is the trauma of the explosion itself, which damaged your lungs and may impose cognitive difficulties. That’s something we’ll have to sort out. The main thing is to get you moving, and that’s the project for tomorrow.”
Dr. Kumar left, trailed by interns who had come to observe and hadn’t said a word during the visit. Adkins remained. “It’s a shock to hear all that, I’m sure,” she said. She held his undamaged right hand. “Do you have any questions about what the doctor said?”
Malik thought a moment, then said, “Mirror?”
Copyright © 2025 by Lawrence Wright. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
