On Assignment: Minders, Fixers, Troubles – Lens

It’s New Year’s Eve in Dakar when the call comes from the editor in New York. A Nigerian man, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, tried to blow up an airliner headed to Detroit six days earlier. I’m told he’d studied in Yemen. Steven Erlanger, chief of The Times’s Paris bureau, is already there filing stories. I’m to join him immediately. I fly to Paris, pick up money and gear at the bureau, then rush back to the airport to catch a flight to Dubai. Thirty-six hours after leaving Senegal, I’m in Yemen.