Read an Excerpt

Detained

The Navy JAG

ZONDERVAN

MEDIA CENTER SS ABRAHAM LINCOLN ATLANTIC OCEAN 45 MILES EAST OF HILTON HEAD, SOUTH CAROLINA 11 YEARS LATER

In a room about half the size of a tennis court, a dozen American sailors, most wearing standard-issue blue-gray camouflage Navy working uniforms, stood in line, waiting for a seat to open up at one of thirty computers lining the bulkheads.

"Now hear this. This is the executive officer. Set condition River City in five minutes. Repeat. Set condition River City in five minutes. This is the executive officer."

The announcement did not sit well for the sailors in line. Some crossed their arms. Many cursed under their breath. Others cursed aloud. A few checked their watches. Others eyed clocks on the bulkhead.

The Navy used the term "River City" for a communications blackout regardless of reason. The XO's announcement meant that a communications blackout with the outside world was about to take place. For those standing in line, hoping to drop a hello to a spouse or a child or a parent or a girlfriend, the dreaded fear was that the blackout would come before they could get to a terminal.

Although a powerful supercarrier like the USS Abraham Lincoln possessed tremendous broadband capabilities, most of its broadband remained devoted to the ship's war-fighting capabilities.

"Come on, man!"

"Hurry up."

"We got family too!"

Some of the more sanitary comments coming from several of the waiting grumblers were exhorting their shipmates to hurry along.

"Now hear this. This is the executive officer. Set condition River City in three minutes. Repeat. Set condition River City in three minutes.

This is the executive officer."

"I ain't got time for this." The chief petty officer, who was next in line, checked his watch and cursed. "Good luck, bud," he grumbled at the aviation boatswain's mate third class standing behind him.

Just then the Marine corporal sitting at the far right terminal stood, prompting the duty officer to ask, "All right, who's next?"

"That would be me, sir!" The sailor next in line waved at the duty officer.

"Make it fast, Makari," the duty officer said. "Lights out in less than three."

"Yes, sir. Just need to check my e-mail, sir." Najib Makari made a beeline for the vacant terminal at the end of the line.

He sat, tapped the Enter button on the right of the keyboard, then typed the URL for his e-mail.

Connecting ...

Connecting ...

"This is the executive officer. All hands prepare for communications blackout in sixty seconds."

The inbox popped onto the screen.

Najib pressed the Control and P keys at the same time, sending the email to the laser printer.

"This is the executive officer. Set condition River City in three ... two ... one ... All hands to duty stations. Communications blackout is in effect."

Thirty monitors in the media center went black, prompting a collective groan from those sailors still in the middle of their personal business.

Although his screen had blacked out, Najib's printer kept printing. The message had reached the printer's memory cache before the blackout.

When the printer stopped, Najib retrieved the message from the outbox tray.

From: hasanmakari@beirut.com

To: nmakari@Cvn72.navy.mil

Subj: Visit to America

Najib,

This will confirm my flight to America in two days, arriving in Philadelphia on May 1. From there, I will catch another flight to Norfolk and await the arrival of your ship. I will contact you in Norfolk.

This will be a glorious occasion! The most glorious since the morning we went to see the ambassador!

God is great!

I shall look forward to our experience together.

With love, Your Father

"All hands. This is the captain. Prepare to resume flight operations in fifteen minutes. All hands report to your duty stations to resume flight operations. AIRWING, stand by for further instructions from the CAG commander. This is the captain."

Najib's heart leaped with excitement. Indeed, God was great! Just as his father had taught him all those years ago.

He folded the message, stuck it in his shirt pocket, and headed up toward the flight deck.

* * *

BRITISH AIRWAYS FLIGHT 442 15-MINUTE FLIGHT TIME TO PHILADELPHIA INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT MAY 1

"Ladies and gentlemen," the voice announced in a heavy British accent, "the captain has turned on the Fasten Your Seat Belt sign. We should be on the ground in Philadelphia in less than twenty minutes."

From the back right window seat of the 757, just two rows in front of the rear toilets, Hasan Makari fished for his seat belt buckle to comply with the captain's instructions.

There. Found it.

As he brought the canvas belt across his waist and clicked it, the giant 757 passenger jet banked in a slow swoop to the right.

The open blue water below gave way to a long, sunlit, green-colored coast off to the right of the plane.

The shoreline of America!

Goose bumps crawled up his arms as he stared out the window in a near-paralyzing amazement, transfixed at the sight of the American Atlantic seaboard.

To many around the world, America no longer represented the shining city of freedom that she once was.

But to Hasan, America had never lost her luster. Not as a boy. Not as a young man. Even now, as he approached his fiftieth birthday, the dream that America represented, the dream of freedom from religious persecution, that dream had never died.

Hasan had studied American geography since his childhood. His mother was given an atlas of the United States by Christian missionaries from America, Carol and Eugene Allison.

Eugene Allison always took time to visit with Hasan. When the Allisons were called from Lebanon by their missionary organization, they presented the Makari family the atlas and a Bible as gifts of remembrance.

"Please make good use of these books, especially the Bible," Eugene told Hasan and his mother and brother around the dinner table on the night before they left Lebanon.

The departure of the Allisons left a painful hole in Hasan's heart. Eugene Allison had served as a surrogate father figure for Hasan, whose own father had been caught up in the cross fire of a battle for which he did not pick sides. The elder Makari left the small family flat one morning to buy vegetables at the market. He would never return. Mohammed Makari was killed by a stray mortar shell fired by pro-Syrian forces against anti-Assad rebels in Tripoli. As a seven-year-old boy who idolized his father, Hasan was crushed by Mohammed's death. For weeks he grieved the loss.

Eugene Allison had five children of his own, most of them adopted. When the Allisons arrived in Lebanon just months after Mohammed Makari's death, Eugene took to the Makari brothers as if they were his own. Hasan's older brother, Jamal, was seventeen. Hasan had just turned seven.

Hasan gravitated toward Eugene Allison, who read to him, played games with him, and told him stories about America and about Jesus.

Eugene also taught Hasan about American football. On Saturday afternoons, Eugene and his sons, Joel and David, would pick up Hasan and drive down to the "corniche," the two-mile stretch of palm-tree-lined, wide, flat beach along the Mediterranean that stretched around the thumb-shaped peninsula and the old city of El-Mina.

They all played "tag" football, as his American friends called it, on a sandy beach in northern Lebanon. Proclaiming himself to be a lifelong Washington Redskins fan, Eugene pretended to be someone named "Joe Theismann." Hasan played the role of a person called "Art Monk."

Hasan never acquired the knack for throwing the awkward, oblong-shaped football. But as it turned out, he became the best receiver of the bunch, earning himself the American nickname "Art."

Sometimes the Allisons called him by his Lebanese name, Hasan, and sometimes by this bestowed nickname, Art.

Hasan loved the nickname. It gave him a sense of identity, making him feel a little bit part of America.

"Here, my son." His mother came into his bedroom the morning after the Allisons left. "Eugene wanted you to have it. Take this." She handed him the atlas that the Allisons had given the family. "There's a note on the inside cover."

Sitting on his bed, Hasan took the atlas, stared at it, and then, with a slow reverence, opened it to the inside cover. His eyes fell on the handwritten note penned by Eugene Allison.

To Hasan "Art" Makari.

We love you and will miss you. I will miss our talks and our football games!

Please keep this atlas of America as a remembrance of our time together. I hope that one day we will see each other again.

Perhaps in America!

Remember Romans 10:9.

With much love, The Allisons

From that day forward, Hasan had kept the atlas in his bedroom and opened it almost every night for the next two years. Years after he lost touch with the Allison family, he still treasured the atlas and had become a self-taught expert on American geography. Not long before the assassination of the ambassador, Hasan presented the atlas to Najib.

As the British Airways plane crossed the shoreline, jetting west over the mainland, Hasan remembered the atlas and let his mind wander.

Below them, the state of New Jersey.

Out to the right, just out of sight beyond the horizon, loomed the great New York skyscrapers.

Somewhere off to their left, a hundred miles or so away, was the American capital city, Washington, DC, with the White House, the Capitol, and all the great monuments of marble to the great American presidents.

Washington was three hours by car from Norfolk. Before he returned to Lebanon, he and Najib would rent a car and visit the world's greatest capital.

Perhaps they could see the stadium where the Redskins play!

That brought another smile to his face.

The plane began its descent. Pressure mounted in his inner ears.

Hasan popped two sticks of gum in his mouth and started chewing, which at least seemed to neutralize the buildup.

Closing his eyes, he uttered a silent prayer of thanks to God.

* * *

FLIGHT DECK USS ABRAHAM LINCOLN ATLANTIC OCEAN 62 MILES EAST OF CAPE HATTERAS, NORTH CAROLINA

The warm summer breeze gusted onto the great ship's flight deck, carrying with it a distinctive salty smell that reminded Najib of the ambassador's assassination. For on that day, all those years ago, in the minutes leading up to the killing, sporadic sea breezes had blown in from the Mediterranean, giving relief to the crowd from the oppressive heat.

He was a boy then.

Now he was a man.

But eleven years later, Najib Makari—now Aviation Boatswain's Mate Third Class Najib Makari, United States Navy—still had four indelible memories from that fateful day:

The scorching heat on his head and shoulders.
The salty smell of the Mediterranean breeze.
Bright orange flames engulfing the ambassador's limousine.
The sound of sirens and helicopters.

Even now, sometimes when Navy Seahawk helicopters performed touch-and-goes off the flight deck, or with the salty smell of a gust from the ocean, he experienced chilling flashbacks to that fateful hot summer day.

Najib's father had taught him about America from the time he could walk.

"America is a place for freedom. There we can play, speak, and worship without fear of persecution," the elder Makari had told his son.

On the morning that the ambassador came up to El-Mina from Beirut, his father had gotten him up early.

The new American president at the time, Mack Williams, had reached out to Christians in the Middle East, reversing a heavy-handed pro-Islamic policy embraced by some of his predecessors. The ambassador had come to meet with the patriarch John X of the Greek Orthodox Church.

Williams's "fair and balanced approach" started with America extending a hand of friendship to the Greek Orthodox Christians of northern Lebanon and Syria.

And so on the day that Najib would never forget, the American ambassador arrived in a gesture of friendship, to show America's respect for Christianity in the Middle East, to address the perception that some earlier administrations had become too Islam-centric.

Despite Najib's initial nightmares and the sense of horror that had haunted him after witnessing the explosion at such a tender age, he had in time overcome the nightmares and fears because of the encouragement of his strong-handed, stable father.

Over the years, Hasan Makari had never wavered in his support for the American ideal of freedom of the individual, and a commitment to Christianity remained at the core of Hasan Makari's household.

When Najib learned of a program that would allow him to further his education through an educational visa to the United States, his father had approved of the plan. Then, when he learned that he could speed his quest for United States citizenship by enlisting in the United States Navy, Najib, with the help of a crack immigration lawyer from church, withdrew from his classes at George Mason University. The lawyer helped him get a work permit that he used to secure work as a janitor at a local church, and then a permanent resident card. One month later, he took an oath of allegiance to the United States.

He had joined the Navy to chase away his own fears and to fulfill his dreams and his father's dreams.

And now, a world away and a lifetime removed from that day of the ambassador's death, here he stood in protective helmet and jacket on the flight deck of a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, one of the most dangerous yet exhilarating work environments in the world.

Despite the temporary flashback evoked by the scent of the ocean breeze, he could not dwell in the past.

Not even for a second.

The steel deck of an aircraft carrier might resemble an ordinary land-based runway, but because of its much smaller size, launching and recovering Navy jets at sea made the deck a much deadlier environment than any land-based airport.

With flight operations under way on this late spring afternoon sixty-some miles off Cape Hatteras, planes launched from and landed on USS Abraham Lincoln's flight deck at a furious rate in the limited space.

Crew members on the flight deck, wearing a variety of different colors depending on their job, had been selected based on testing, psychological maturity, and motor-skills coordination.

Under windy skies, Najib wore his green jacket and helmet, signaling his status as an enlisted member of the "catapult crew." The other crew members wore jackets of blue, purple, red, green, brown, or white to signify their jobs on the flight deck.

The Navy handpicked each flight deck member, emphasizing no room for a slipup. In one careless moment, the twin jet engines of an F/A-18 fighter could suck somebody into the back of a jet or blast a crew member off the deck into the Atlantic.

Najib's catapult crew operated the giant steam-compression-powered steel catapult. When launching aircraft, the catapult crew performed the most important job on the flight deck.

Because the carrier's runway is not long enough for a jet aircraft to take off on its own, Navy jets are literally thrown off the end of the carrier's flight deck by the giant steel catapult that the crew attaches under the nose of the plane. Then the jet's twin engines provide the forward propulsion as the jet climbs sharply into the sky.

In simplistic terms, the catapult system serves as a giant slingshot. The steel cable acts like a giant rubber band, with an F/A-18 "Super Hornet" fighter playing the role of the stone being shot from the slingshot.

"One minute to launch. All nonessential personnel, clear the area."

The announcement echoed across the steel flight deck. Crew members not needed for the launch scrambled back, away from the ship's forward section.

Najib stayed in place, as green- and yellow-jacketed air-handling officers and plane directors moved to the front of the runway alongside the jet out to the left.

The jets roared with a shrill whiney sound that could bore a hole through a man's eardrums if it weren't for special protective gear worn over the ears.

Standing between the plane's left wing and the ship's edge, under brisk winds blowing off the bow, Najib watched as the jet blast protector, the garage-door-sized steel section of runway rising up from the deck at an angle, was pushed up by hydraulic steel arms behind the jet's twin turbo fans.

The blast protector inched upward, rising into place at an angle about forty-five degrees off the flight deck.

As steam seeped up through the catapult track, sweeping across the deck in a fleeting wisp, Najib held his right hand in the air and commenced a clockwise swirling motion, signaling that the jet blast protector was in place, ready for launch.

---

Excerpted from Detained by Don Brown. Copyright © 2015 Don Brown. Excerpted by permission of ZONDERVAN.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---