B009G3EPMQ EBOK (13 page)

The persistence of misery was fierce. Erik was unable to turn off the thoughts of Jessica’s torture, rape, murder—any of the most vile possibilities. It still felt like a betrayal of her to even consider such things, but his personal knowledge of the region tormented him. Moments after he forced himself to quit a negative thought pattern and switch to something positive, the terrible thoughts were already back. They returned and intruded, seeping in like poison gas, finding every crack in the house.

•  •  •

Jessica:

Our fifth day in captivity started out like the others during our stay at the “Banda place.” We were rousted off the dew-soaked sleeping mats and got up shivering. I was so thirsty I might as well have had a mouthful of dirt. They moved us back under overhead cover to spend the daylight hours.

The survival instinct was my substitute for a cup of coffee. The challenge of getting to a toilet bush and back while out in the open in front of a dozen men lifted the morning fog right out of me. I took the last scrap of thin cardboard from the cookie package and headed for a bush that was close enough so that nobody got nervous about an escape attempt, but also hidden enough that I could pretend there was a little dignity left to the situation. The pretense itself was worth something.

I got back to the Banda structure without trouble from any of the thugs, who mostly looked strung out, as if they had been up all night and were ready to quit their shift. But there was nothing else to start the day, not even any water. The small bottle given to us once each day was far too little. They were also holding back on getting me antibiotics from any decent source for the inevitable urinary tract infection burning away inside me as a result of our medieval sanitary conditions. This was on top of the strain to our kidneys already caused by depriving us of water and forcing us into dehydration. Poul was just as concerned about water and got assertive with one of the guards, pantomiming the need for water and persisting when the guard hollered to silence him.

But a moment later Poul grew angry and began shouting back at the man. It happened quickly—the voices hit just the right pitch, things ignited, and the guard leaped toward Poul. He cocked his AK-47, pulled the trigger, and held it down while the firing mechanism went
click
on the empty chamber.

It was only a second later that I realized I should have been looking at Poul’s dead body and expecting to join him. But no, it was only a joke. A power play. A little reminder that Poul’s macho display had been recognized but slapped to the ground.

Good morning, then. Pretty sure I’m awake now.

Abdilahi, the young boy I’d been seeing around since the beginning, happened to walk close to me. I noticed for the first time that he was wearing one of the Mine Risk Education bracelets my NGO gives out to all the kids after they attend our classes on avoiding war munitions. I had to swallow hard to keep from gasping out loud while the thought hit me:
This boy was one of our students?

I might have trained the teacher who taught this boy’s class. The visual materials I helped create to effectively convey information to people whether they are literate or not were most likely used in his class. This was one of the kids we were fighting to
protect. I forced myself to look away from him.
Thank God I haven’t been teaching locally, because if this kid recognized me, he might feel the need to impress the elders by revealing that. Who can tell what sort of resentment they have toward my NGO in spite of our work?

A few seconds of casually observing him confirmed his exaggerated macho posturing as an obvious bid for authentication from the adult males. This was a kid who could cut your throat for pocket change.

I couldn’t take my attention off him. He was a bomb with an invisible fuse. Swaggering, grinning, compensating for his youth with loud behavior and an aggressive voice, he seldom spoke in a normal tone. I searched for anything about his behavior to give a clue to how and why he happened to be in this place, a pubescent boy swaggering around with a deadly weapon and chewing through the daily
khat
ration of a grown addict. I didn’t get his story, but he effectively communicated his mindset when he took off the Mine Risk Education bracelet and used it to fasten a front bipod to the barrel of a machine gun.

Well,
I thought, s
o much for winning hearts and minds.
More than anything so far, that little detail made everything I hoped to accomplish in Africa just seem ridiculous. If we were truly dealing with people who could take our help with one hand and do this to us with the other, then what was the point of my presence there? I reached out for my usual internal assurance that the work was worthwhile even if many local people didn’t acknowledge it. Our work could be called infidel propaganda and every other hateful thing a person could dream up, but surely some of these men had relatives we had saved from the land mines and other unexploded munitions littering the region. The fact that every one of them had at least one relative with one or more limbs blown off was a virtual certainty.
Surely,
I thought,
no matter what they think of Americans or Westerners in general, everybody can agree on the
desirability of keeping one’s arms and legs?
Then I remembered the Islamist punishment for theft. So maybe not.

When I was able to exchange a few words with Poul about it, I whispered to him, “Poul, that boy’s bracelet—”

“Yeah. I know. I saw it.”

“It’s from our—”

“I know.”

“But he must have—”

“I
know,
Jess.”

“I feel like I’m losing my mind.”

“Welcome to the club. Listen. We have to establish some ground rules.”

“For what?”

“To keep up our spirits. You know, places we will not allow ourselves to go, not with each other and not with ourselves.”

Ground rules to guide our thinking? This was one my dad would understand. So there in plain sight of these armed men and their constant shouting spats we whispered our way through the resolution until we fleshed out the general idea:
You can acknowledge feeling fear and loneliness. You can get mad, bored, resentful, anything at all. But despair is the one big no-no. Despair isn’t just a mood or a state of mind, it’s a disease and it can kill you by making you give up. Despair is a killer as sure as the Black Plague.

We agreed not to allow hopelessness into our conversation, and neither would we permit it in our thinking. We resolved not to indulge in a single moment of it, because while it couldn’t be of any positive use, it could surely start either of us down a path to disaster.

So. Good, then. No despair. It’s a fine idea, to be sure. But we all recognize how easy it is to say that, yes?

I was still longing for the fundamental dignity of feeling reasonably clean; the filth covering us only added to the demoralization
we were trying to combat. When at last they relented and allowed us a bucket of washing water, though, I was pushed into the next concern: how to wash myself and maintain a reasonable level of modesty.

It was a matter of common sense—there were a couple of dozen males milling around the Banda place, most were loaded on
khat,
and they all appeared capable of rape if the notion struck them. I couldn’t leave the camp, so what to do? Bathe with my clothing on?

The best solution I could come up with was to take my small share of the bathing water and carry the little bucket over to a deep depression in the earth that allowed me to stay down out of sight from ground level, if I squatted low enough. So with the men close by in all directions, I undressed down in that hole and ran water over myself as well as I could, spending more energy in watching out for any male who showed too much interest than I did in the bathing itself. When I finally ran out of water and was ready to climb back out, I felt as if was a notch or two cleaner, but the anxiety of the experience made the payoff of getting clean hardly worth the effort or the risk.

Next a new man arrived on the scene and came over to introduce himself. He was an older man who walked with a slight bend to his spine, and when he opened his mouth to speak it was obvious his top teeth were missing. But he spoke passable English and told us his name was Jabreel.

Jabreel identified himself as a “neutral translator” from Mogadishu. The strangest thing about Jabreel was that he immediately began to ingratiate himself with us; it was unlike anything we’d experienced in this place. Then there was the idea of a “neutral translator” and whatever that might actually mean.

“These men—pirates! Crazy! Stupid crazy! They want $45 million U.S. for you!”

“What?” I cried out. “Forty-five million? Do they even know how much that is?”

“No! Stupid crazy! That’s why I say they crazy! Unreasonable!”

“Jabreel, please listen. Listen: This is not possible. Impossible, Jabreel. We are aid workers. None of us have money. No money, Jabreel!”

“They say NGO pay for you.”

It’s odd how pidgin English comes naturally, almost without thinking, when someone speaks it to you. I guess it’s just the desire to communicate without cluttering speech with too many qualifiers.

“Jabreel, you say crazy? You’re right: crazy! Not $45 million for us, not 45 million Somali shillings! Nobody pay so much for two aid workers. We only have family! Private money. Small family money, Jabreel.”

“Yes, yes! I tell them: You make crazy demands, you get nothing. But they only pirates! No brains!”

“Okay, Jabreel. Please, now. Please listen. If you want money—”

“Not me. Not for me. I not pirate. I have NGO here. Very important! I only want to help! I tell them the most they get maybe $900,000. Less than one million. Not like big ships full of oil.” He snorted at the idea of big ships full of oil.

At last, here was someone who seemed to have a reasonable appreciation for the realities of the situation. I couldn’t evaluate his inflated claims about himself or how they applied to the task of negotiating ransom demands. At least his sense of money was better than the drug-fueled fantasies entertained by the others.

After darkness fell, the Chairman himself finally arrived, and the camp got active. He looked to be in his late thirties or early forties, balding, with thin facial hair and a mustache. He addressed the men in a quiet, hoarse voice. Jabreel took his orders from the Chairman along with the others, and when the Chairman decided the time was right he muttered something to Jabreel, who simply said to us, “Phone call.”

Phone call! At last, it was time for our “proof of life” call, basic
to every ransom scheme. I think my adrenaline spiked even higher at that than it did at Poul’s mock execution, because that little episode was quickly over and done with, before fear could set in. But the prospect of a phone call indicated some sort of action, at least. Action meant a chance to get this thing worked out and get ourselves out of there. I felt like E.T. about to phone home.

At that point, five days seemed like an eternity to wait in the company of these wasted marauders before letting people know we were alive, but I knew that kidnap victims at sea have waited far longer. Some spent months in the hold of a captured ship before anyone at home was contacted. Some were never heard from at all.

Therefore, under the realities of our new situation, this was what “luck” felt like. “Luck” was now the chance to bathe in a hole without getting raped and then make a call home, so a fortune could be demanded for your return. “Luck” was meeting a man who claimed to understand that $45 million was too much but who thought $900,000 sounded about right. Here in this place on the other side of the looking glass, we were having ourselves a lucky day.

He and the other men piled us into a silver Helux Surf, a typical type of SUV there, and drove for a few minutes until they were able to locate a decent cell signal. They gave us cell phones and indicated it was time to make our first contact with home. I immediately tried Erik’s number in Hargeisa, but it was disconnected—which was very strange under the circumstances. I explained to Jabreel that Erik must be in Nairobi and something was wrong with that number. Next I tried my father’s number in the United States and to my utter consternation that one also had a recorded message: disconnected!
Could it just be the network? Are we getting a bad signal out here?
I knew better than that, since I’d seen the men place other calls without a problem, but once again I found myself grasping at straws.

The strangeness of the moment was amplified another notch
when Jabreel announced that he had a number to call “for” us. I watched him dial, and the country code looked like Kenya. With the phone on its speaker setting, I heard a man answer and identify himself as “Mohammed.”

“Mohammed?”
That made no sense at all to me. I had no idea who this Mohammed was or who he actually worked for. In my confusion I wondered if he was using a fake name and if he might actually be our NGO’s security manager. Then he identified himself as the assistant to Daniel Hardy, our regional security advisor. I knew Hardy well enough that it would have been consoling to hear his voice. I had no idea why we weren’t speaking to him instead of this stranger, leaving me to wonder if something was wrong on their end as well.

Finally something happened that was recognizable from the world of sanity. Mohammed announced he had a few security questions to ask me by way of confirming my identity. I knew the office kept questionnaires we all filled out for just such emergencies, containing preset personal questions.

Mohammed asked me the name of my first dog. I told him it was Sadie and added we got her in Indiana. He liked that answer and asked a second question, then a third. I was only too happy to play the game until he was satisfied, if that was what it took to get a message to Erik and my family assuring them I was unharmed.

But at that point Jabreel snatched the phone away and began challenging Mohammed himself. He didn’t know Mohammed either, and he sounded suspicious. Jabreel paused and asked me if Mohammed worked for the NGO, so we both lied agreeably and answered, oh, yes, he worked in Nairobi and was a colleague. Even though it wasn’t true, there was no reason not to vouch for him. If Jabreel didn’t know him then he wasn’t on Jabreel’s side, and if he wasn’t on Jabreel’s side we had to consider him on ours.