B009G3EPMQ EBOK (17 page)

There was no way to judge how the others felt. Their
khat
use numbed them to their true condition. It also seemed to numb them to everything that didn’t have to do with guzzling soft drinks, chain-smoking cigarettes, and babbling hyperventilated monologues at one another while nobody seemed to listen. It’s a strange drug. Give a man enough
khat
to chew and he can go completely paranoid over what your motives may be or what you “meant” by
what you just said—all the while remaining unconcerned about bleeding from a wound.

The other assault on our health was the dismaying fact that Poul and I had to make do with scraps of cookie wrappers or bits of cloth for toilet tissue. The indigenous plants out there don’t provide paperlike leaves, so their method of cleaning up after defecation was that method mentioned earlier, using a combination of water and their bare fingers. If they washed afterward at all, I didn’t see them, and it would have been with the tainted diesel water anyway.

Strange, Jessica, you’ve got a bad tummyache
 . . .

Poul wasn’t on any medication when we were taken, and so far he was doing a bit better, but we’d both been subjected to the same foul conditions. His body was objecting as well.

I heard a commotion over near the vehicles and saw about ten of the guards standing helplessly around. After a few moments I realized the friction was over keys being locked inside the car. Poul lifted his head off the sleeping mat and asked me what was going on.

“They’ve locked their keys inside the car.” I sniffed. “It’s official. We’ve been kidnapped by the world’s dumbest pirates.” The joke wasn’t funny, but we laughed about it for a long time just because of the subtle defiance in it and because it felt so good to have an emotion that didn’t involve concealing terror or swallowing outrage.

But then, as if one moment of levity magnetically attracted its opposite, Abdi started getting repeated calls on his cell phone, and each call left him more upset than the last. Abdi’s ring tone itself was no help, being a recording of a Somali news report. Amid the words we didn’t know there was always one we did: “Kalishnikov,” a more formal name for the AK-47. We were surrounded by the weapons, and the terrible guns were to be seen everywhere
in Somalia. I suppose anybody in that country would recognize the word.

We knew it wasn’t good for Abdi to get upset because any time he did, somebody had to pay. Jabreel made himself scarce while Abdi cooed reassurance into the phone, then hung up and found somebody to scream at, only to be interrupted when another call came in and the process repeated.

Kalishnikov. Down Africa way, you might say we’ve all got a little Russian in us, when it comes to the daily awareness of this particular killing weapon. Aficionados the world over appreciate its ability to deliver massive killing force, something that is especially nice when the forces of individual liberty are beset by forces of tyranny. The darker reality is criminals love them for their power to transform anyone—even a child—into a true force of doom.

All of this and more springs to mind for anyone who’s been down there long enough to notice that the scenery might change a dozen ways, but yet another AK-47 was never far away. And there was seldom only one.

We could tell by Abdi’s level of deference it was the Chairman calling each time—Abdi was never obsequious unless he was high enough to feel benevolent and had plenty of
khat
left over for later, or when he was talking to his boss.

Suddenly I didn’t feel the need to figure out what every word Abdi was speaking might mean. It was probably better not to know the details. We’d already heard enough to get the gist; the calls were not good and the repeated ring tone was pulling the other men out of their stupor. They took interest and started milling around, pseudocasual in movement. They weren’t surrounding us, necessarily, but suddenly there were a lot more of them, and they felt too close.

Abdi’s protests grew more frantic. He repeatedly screamed out “sagaal!” which means nine in Somali.

Nine million? They’re still trying to get nine million?

Wasn’t Jabreel able to talk any more sense into them than that? If he was their guy, and he was convinced we weren’t a million-dollar ransom, how could they be stuck on numbers so high? If they truly didn’t trust him, why was he still doing his job?

Nothing else we overheard clarified any of it. Apparently the boss kept on making those annoying, “and one more thing” calls. Each one whisked Abdi into turmoil so hot I knew the topic had to be money. I wondered how the Chairman could possibly understand the speech of a man in Abdi’s condition. His naturally guttural speech had become even more distorted by the combination of drugs and emotion. Maybe that was why the Chairman had to keep calling back. And of course with each new call, the ring tone jabbered the same Somali newscast, indecipherable except for that word, “Kalishnikov.”

And the kidnappers were still demanding $9 million for two broke-ass humanitarian aid workers. Under these circumstances, we each had the life expectancy of a soap bubble.

•  •  •

With the passing of days and weeks, Erik had come to the point where he could think things through in a more rational way, even though his rage at the people holding Jessica was still very much present. His strongest desire was to be a bridge between her family and all the people working on the case. Besides keeping up the pressure on her employers to negotiate aggressively for her, he hounded the Crisis Management Team for as much information as possible.

The Crisis Management Team knew Erik was valuable for validating information on her or on her kidnappers as it came in, because of his experience in the region. Though some felt strongly that he and the entire family ought to be kept out of the negotiations as a form of information control, they were overruled.

It gave the families comfort to see that he was able to put some degree of influence to work when needed. In the unfamiliar position of being the one who must stand back instead of the one who is charged with fixing things, it was torturous for Erik to give away responsibility for Jess to strangers. But he knew Jessica’s father, sister, and brother were in an even more disturbing condition. Sitting on another continent without knowing the people working on the case, they had no useful knowledge about the environment Jess was in.

A deep bond was shaped between them, growing stronger with each phone call, and they continued to talk over the phone every day. They came to the collective decision that all three of them would come down to Africa in the coming week if nothing new happened.

Erik knew they still wouldn’t be told much, either, and that simply coming down to Africa wasn’t going to change that. The taboo about sharing information with the kidnap victim’s family would still be in place.

He understood the FBI reasoning on that, but it felt cold as steel.
Yes of course, perfectly reasonable to keep me off the phone so I can’t be forced to witness Jess’s torment.

The kidnappers already had his head in a vise, and they were giving the handle one twist after another. He ended the last CMT call of the day glad to be alone again with the memory of the prior night’s dream.

He wrote to Jessica about it right away. Finally, something good came from sleep: one of those dreams so real you don’t dream at all, but are transported with all of your senses.

I am sailing a small boat into a Cape Town slip to buy a great bottle of celebratory wine. Then the scene changes to Somalia, and I’m carrying my wine bottle along with me while I go straight to the location where they’re holding you, and I smuggle you out from under their sleeping noses.

It’s easy. We blink and are both returned to our apartment in Nairobi, standing together out on the balcony with candles burning and the city spread out below us. Smulan comes running over, behaving joyfully for the first time since you disappeared. We sit down and take our time to talk about this future we hold again in our hands, this miracle of a new beginning together.

The dream was so real it left a kind of hangover, but it was a sweet one, like a subtle perfume that hangs in the air of an empty room.

Erik met with Dan Hardy to discuss the idea of getting a doctor from Adado to go in and check out Jessica’s and Poul’s condition, maybe deliver some medication. Hardy agreed that the idea of a doctor was good, since a local doctor was far more likely to receive the kidnappers’ trust.

After being warned about his “need-to-know” status, Erik could only hope there wasn’t bad news about Jess’s condition motivating them to intervene, while keeping him in the dark for their own strategic reasons. He knew she needed her thyroid medication, and there was no guarantee it hadn’t been taken from her. If she didn’t have it, then she’d been without it for long enough that adverse reactions would soon begin to trouble her.

But it could easily be that Dan Hardy and his colleagues were concealing worse news, to keep him from organizing his own rescue.

Jessica:

My imagination had begun to occupy more of my awareness than physical reality. As happens with anything practiced for hours every day over a period of months, I had developed visualization skills that made living either in memory or in fantasy a convincing experience. I spent a lot of my childhood in solitary activities, so I had a vivid imagination. I enjoyed that part of life almost as much as having a few good friends and participating in social activities.

Still, I’ve always been a social person who enjoyed the company of others. And I felt how deeply this kidnapping ordeal had amplified my natural desire for human closeness, far beyond anything I’d known before. On most nights, that meant a silent conversation with my mom. Her passing in July 2010 was quick; she fell ill on a Friday with a case of severe flu. Nothing went right for her, and she was gone by Monday. That fast.

I happened to be home at the time on my annual leave, and I witnessed my grieving father standing in the kitchen of their home and shuddering under the weight of the news that his childhood sweetheart and lifelong companion was gone. In that moment,
both of us were emotionally broken. I watched him stand gripping the back of a chair, head hanging.

He prayed, “God, I don’t understand this. I don’t understand you . . . but
I choose to trust you.” It’s the reason we all played “I Don’t Understand Your Ways” at her funeral, a statement of acceptance of the unacceptable, of a higher purpose than we can comprehend.

When I lay on that sleeping mat and recalled that moment in his life, the darkest cave he had ever been in, I realized his choice was pivotal in his recovery. Not by making it easy, but by making it possible.

Even as confused as I was on spiritual issues back then, I felt the sheer power of that statement as soon as he made it, because in his case I knew his faith in that moment wasn’t about religion; it was the acknowledgment of his subjective experience of the spiritual aspect of his life. It was a conscious decision to trust that spiritual sense, whether or not he could explain it.

After that day, he remained alone in their family home for the first time and began quietly grieving. Eventually it had been time for me to leave him there and return to Erik and our work in Africa.

I had seen for myself that he didn’t just say the words “I don’t understand you, but I choose to trust you.” He lived by them. He went on from that moment, hour to hour and day to day, conducting himself the way he knew my mom would want him to do. I had already drifted from a lot of my childhood religious thinking, questioning various things, but that didn’t seem to have anything to do with this strength of spirit I saw revealed in that hour.

So during my time in the desert, at nights under the desert stars, I discovered that I took some of that strength from remembering my dad’s steady conduct. I echoed his words and willed them to be true for me as well, “God, I don’t understand this, but I choose to trust you.” Any degree of peace I was able to attain out there began and ended with that conviction. I planted my feet on it and put down roots.

•  •  •

The scrub desert region seldom gets rain, but when it does it comes in a liquid avalanche. I spent an entire day shivering in the kidnap car of the one called Dahir, with my clothing already soaked and the downpour drenching the rest of the camp. By this point we had nicknamed Dahir “Helper,” because once in a while he would extend a small favor—in this case, allowing me to sit in his car while the world washed away. The stomach bug passing through the camp was wringing me out. I had to keep leaping out of the vehicle and running to a nearby bush through the pouring rain while diarrhea twisted through me, alternating with bouts of vomiting. Each time I got back to the car I was weaker.

This was the first time despair hit me so hard nothing I did could push it away. Since the first day our condition had steadily degraded, and nobody in the camp seemed to have the clarity to pull things together. Dahir didn’t even look at me, though I couldn’t tell if he was avoiding my eyes out of shame or if he just found me disgusting in my reduced condition. For that I couldn’t blame him.

We weren’t without entertainment, though. One of the pirates downloaded a news video to his cell phone, a real Saturday afternoon at the movies. The clip showed Somali kidnappers standing behind two captive Spanish sailors who had already been held for three months to the north of us, off the coast of the Puntland region. They were interviewed by Somali journalists. The video showed the two men sitting under ragged orange tarps and looking beaten down and forlorn. Somebody off-camera asked them about their experience in captivity. The poor men just kept saying they’d
been held for months without any word from their employer, nothing from their government. They added that on some days they weren’t even permitted water.

Abdi gloated and chuckled and preened, mouthing a mix of broken English and making dramatic gestures so expressive he could have been a street mime. The gist was the two men in the video had just been successfully ransomed for $35 million!