“Listen, Eric, we are going to kick some serious ass in tomorrow’s paper. You write up your story and file it. I want you to get one of the AP photographers to take a picture of you right now, while you still look like shit, so we can run it with the story. MIRROR MAN ATTACKED AFTER BRAVING TERRORISTS’ LAIR. I mean, holy shit! Is that a headline, or what?”

I sat down at the computer and typed like a zombie for three hours. I wrote a main news story, which led with the allegations Dr. Obado had made about French nuclear testing and quoted the repeated assurances of “Monsieur Afrique” from Gabon that the French would pay the ransom that had been demanded. Without saying so outright, the story implicitly questioned the official French account. I wrote a sidebar on the hostages, which led with the Washington lawyer George Frankheimer, talking about the wonderful lunch he had been eating before the terrorists arrived. I tried to find Frankheimer to ask him how it felt now to be a free man, but he was already on a plane back to the United States. Finally, I wrote a first-person color piece about my own adventures in reporting the story.

The Mirror ran all three pieces the next morning on the front page, above the fold. I had, indeed, covered myself in glory. Weiss told me so himself. We sat back to wait for the rest of the news media to chase our scoop. We had challenged the French denials that they were nuclear testing in Africa! But the reaction instead was a vast silence. The French media ignored my story, which I expected, but so did the other American newspapers. The local hacks acted as if I had done something wrong in pursuing it so aggressively. The buzz was that I had been a “hot dog,” and thereby violated the journalistic code of nonchalance. I felt sorry for my colleagues, I really did. They were sleepwalking.

Weiss’s plans to declare war on the government of France didn’t fare much better. The Mirror filed an official protest with the prime minister’s office at the Hôtel Matignon, protesting my detention and demanding an apology. The French responded tartly that I had been in the area without authorization, that I had repeatedly been warned to leave, that I had escaped police custody, and that the authorities therefore had good reason to arrest me on suspicion that I was working with the terrorists.