Excerpt from Unforeseen
Copyright 2022, 2024
JACK MACDUBH KISSED HIS WIFE Gabrielle goodbye absently-mindedly on the forehead, then pushed a lock of his mahogany brown hair back into place. His calculating eyes — verging on stop light green, thanks to contact lenses that enhanced his own hazel — looked into the distance.
His thoughts were an hour ahead of his body, anticipating the meet up with the Kurdish informant at the obscure café in Hanau. He had worked for months to get this interview on background, agreeing to voice recording only, no cameras.
That was fine. This guy wouldn’t be the only source for the story of atrocities their people were experiencing. He understood the apprehension about providing names, dates, and places, and respected the need for protection.
His go-between contact had assured the informant that he could be trusted. Keeping his word with any bargains made with sources for his news reports, in addition to a deep dimple in the right cheek, was his personal trademark.
Working as a foreign correspondent for the BBC was the dream job Jack had long aspired to. The adrenaline rush of danger, deep curiosity about how people deal with suffering, and belief in exposing awful truths had put him in harm’s way more often than he could remember. He wouldn’t give it up for anything, not even for his wife’s pleading that he do something safer like become a nightly news reader, or stay home and write books.
Jack wasn’t the safe, stay at home type. He’d rather be shot.
And he had been shot, and shot at, more than once.
Myanmar soldiers had no respect for journalists. He’d taken a bullet in the leg there. Rebels in the Congo had held him hostage for a week, treating reporters as brutally as they treated government forces. He’d been lucky to escape that assignment with a bullet merely grazing his shoulder.
Afghanistan was a lawless hell hole again. He’d caught a piece of shrapnel there even though he’d been twenty yards away from the car bomb that had killed his soundman.
Covering the white supremacists in Portland during the summer of Black Lives Matter protests and counter-riots had been one of the more dangerous assignments. He’d had a bad feeling about that story due to the plethora of guns allowed in the States and the anger and hate boiling over from anti-diversity, anti-equity, anti-inclusion citizens.
He’d been right to worry. He’d taken a shot to the chest there. Fortunately, the combat quality Kevlar vest supplied by the network stopped the bullet.
But today, on this trip to Hanau Germany, it should be a simple in and out conversation in a safe neighborhood, he told his wife. There was no need to travel this time with the BBC provided security team. Low key, low profile was his best chance of getting information out of this scared rabbit, he had said, packing just one extra shirt in a small backpack with a number of essential electronics accessories.
He’d be back in two days.