B009G3EPMQ EBOK (18 page)

The other men cheered at that like sports fanatics during the playoffs. No matter what words Abdi had actually spoken, the meaning they took was “success is inevitable!”

I’m sure my mouth was wide open, I was gobsmacked.
He can’t believe that!
Thirty-five million dollars?

I could only stare into Abdi’s opaque red eyes and conclude that on some level he actually believed his absurd fantasy. But I didn’t see anything on that clip about the Spaniards’ being released, let alone any news of $35 million, money supposedly paid out for two old fishermen and a dinky boat. It was so idiotic it made me want to scream. Frustration put a bitter taste in my mouth.

By the end of the day my fever began to spike. I felt my temperature rising and my overall condition heading for the tank. I asked the men over and over to get me a doctor, but couldn’t get the words out without sobbing. They hated it when I cried, and usually reacted with anger, ordering me to shut up. This time nobody bothered to threaten me. But I honestly couldn’t tell if I was crying in sickness and fear, or just from the humiliation of having to beg for things most people wouldn’t deny to an animal.

Poul finally dared to go to Jabreel on my behalf and plead the case for getting a doctor for me. But Abdi was nursing a
khat
hangover and anxiously awaiting their next delivery of the stuff. He flipped into a rage at the “insult” of Poul’s daring to take the initiative and do something so bold as to ask a favor of him. Abdi railed and shouted more angry threats, coherent only in manifesting his ill intent. I asked him if I could call the contact man calling himself
Mohammed, hoping that if Mohammed was really connected to my NGO he would arrange medical treatment. The request was dismissed.

I think I was saved by greed in that moment. At some point Abdi or Jabreel must have looked at me and realized they were closing in on having a dead American kidnap victim on their hands. I don’t think there is enough
khat
in Somalia to medicate away the anxiety over that. The concern I had heard from these men on the first day, when they were parroting “Amer-ee-cahn” and throwing glances at me, now came full circle.

They worried that my very presence in the plan was an unforeseen risk. If not, they had no reason to throw troubled looks at me and talk about an “Amer-ee-cahn.” And now, right at this point, I felt everything take a change of direction just as solidly as you feel a train hit a fork in the tracks and head off on a new bearing. The power of greed caught hold.

A few hours later a local doctor was brought in. Nobody told me where they got him or what he had been told about us. He may have been a freelancer, or he could have been part of their group. Their number seemed to grow larger all the time.

But there he was. He brought a little bag of tetracycline to fight the bug and some Buscopan tablets for the stomach cramps. His exam consisted of taking my blood pressure and tossing the bag of pills at me—not to me, at me. I guess he wanted to make it clear whose side he was on. With that, he went off to chew
khat
with Jabreel and the other men instead of returning to wherever he came from, saying he needed to remain close by for the night to “check” on me. He never came back. However, since ordinary sleep was out of the question, I was up often enough to observe him throughout the night, motor-mouthing his way through the
khat
supply. In the morning, I watched him leave after sticking around long enough for Jama, the supply guy, to show up with the group’s daily ration of
khat
.

The degree of control exerted by the ultimate operator of this venture was apparent in the handling of the
khat
deliveries. Each day’s ration came in an amount limited to what the men could use in a single day. The fact that
khat
has to be chewed fresh-picked meant nobody could build up enough of a personal stash to walk away. Yet the delivery brought plenty for all, leaving the true
khat
aficionado with the taste of what it was like to have all the
khat
he could chew while knowing the supply would stop the instant he strayed. The luxury of that steady supply was an impressive binding force. It struck me that these guys were prisoners just as much as I was, maybe more so. At least if I could get out of there, I would be free. Addicts pack their troubles along with them.

Once everybody had a good chew going with the new supply, Abdi assembled his “militia,” or unemployed pirates, or random criminal kidnappers, or whatever name best suited them. The purpose of the meeting appeared serious. He and all the men were in a somber mood. Poul and I kept out of the way and quietly attempted to decipher their purpose.

My natural optimism had me hoping they were meeting to discuss accepting a ransom settlement. That thought didn’t last.

Instead the very nightmare that first called me to the African continent played itself out in front of us, because Abdi’s current manic swing had convinced him the “militia” men needed some early morning training. Many of them were boys. Teenagers. And yet most appeared to weigh something like a hundred pounds. They were nearly skeletal.

Abdi ordered them to assemble into marching lines, and there I saw it: child or teenaged soldiers, in the terrible flesh, alongside the other grown men. Most were still in their underwear and all looked badly strung out or hung over.

More information was conveyed to me in that instant than I could absorb for many days afterward; those boys-who-were-not-boys had come to this place to do this dark work
because somebody promised them all the
khat
they could chew, and maybe some goat meat once a week with a little powdered milk. And if the ransom came through, there might be some share of the spoils.

I figured that each guard’s share would be minuscule. As bargaining positions go, what could be offered by any one of those boys? Each one knew there were countless lost souls who would do the same thing he was doing for the same compensation and same hope of reward. His share, if he ever saw it, would certainly not be enough to change his life. It would not buy him a new home. It wouldn’t get his family out of poverty or even feed them for long. If he brought home significant money and allowed it to be known in a region so desperately poor, the word would spread like radio waves until the entire family was besieged by demands from every quarter.

It was a desperation they, as the new “rich” folks, would be obliged to relieve by Somali customs, whether from the kindness of their hearts or simply out of knowing what was good for them. If a soldier boy lived alone, the simple fact that he had anything more than the rags on his back would reveal money to one and all. His friends would be as desperate as anyone else, perhaps even more inclined to use violence, and here again the boy would share, either out of kindness or because he wanted to stay alive. I had lived with this culture long enough to know that whether he was alone or was part of a family, that kidnapper’s share of the ransom would be gone in days.

Now against the African desert backdrop I watched mirror images of the lost souls who had first called to me years before, when I first learned about child soldiers. I had strained to make myself believe such a thing truly existed—artificially created juvenile psychotics, “soldiers” turned into killing machines by enforced drug addiction and the resignation of those with bridges burned beyond repair. Right there in front of me was the grotesque irony of my own good intentions turned back upon themselves. I watched
my vision of coming to Africa to combat this dreadful phenomenon morph into a badly told joke.

I saw it, then: the piece missing from my original inspiration to come and work with such young people. My mistake had been to picture myself working with a human presence who hears you, one who sees you, one who—at the very least—has a functional consciousness you can engage.

None of that was present here. The damage done to these dead-eyed souls was now physically affecting them, exposed by their attempts at close-order drill; they all seemed to have bad motor skills. Whether it was their drug use or just the effect of long-term malnutrition, something had seriously reduced their level of physical control.

The impression was that their bloodstreams, flooded with
khat,
had reacted to a head full of memories of crimes committed against their families, and that the power of the mixture converted each one into a living zombie. Now they stumbled along glassy-eyed in their stained underpants. I saw nothing to connect with in their eyes. Nobody was home. It was as if the termites from the colonies out there had mystic powers, and now occupied these bodies, wearing them like giant meat sweaters while they shuffled around fingering their high-powered weapons.

By this time we’d come to call the youngest boy, Abdilahi—the one who used his mine awareness class bracelet to fasten a bipod to a gun barrel—“Crack Baby.” Jabreel had kindly made sure we knew that “Crack Baby” was said to have killed three people already in his young life. His unpredictable behavior was a frequent source of menace. The dead eyes told a story so compelling I felt the impact in my bones. Upon an order by the Chairman, or by Abdi, perhaps even by Jabreel, any one of these parading kids would kill us. They could do that as easily as asking about the weather.

But so far they had held back. Why? Something had stayed their hands from us, at least up to that point. After all, they only
needed us “alive” to assure the ransom, and there are a lot of degrees of “alive” that fall far below “alive and well.” Why were they not more physically abusive? Poul got slugged around, but he hadn’t been seriously injured by anyone, at least not yet. And while I’d been roughed up somewhat, we could have easily been in much worse condition. Past abductions of Westerners in this region included routine beatings during which victims were pulverized for nothing more than their captors’ amusement. Some were tortured with thirst in more extreme versions of what was done to us; others had seen their families contacted directly by the kidnappers and emotionally tortured, thus raising the stakes for negotiators.

And yet something was preventing them from doing that degree of harm to us, even though they clearly had the capacity for it. Moreover, they acted amused by the prospect and had displayed their humor in fake-shooting us and continually pointing loaded weapons at us. Their abuse took the form of passive aggression instead of overt torture, denying us nearly everything we needed to survive and then grudgingly giving out little bits of it—but always only a little, nothing you could store up for a breakout.

Anyone keeping a score card of the ironies piling up would have made another entry, noting that the kidnappers’ determination to make certain we never had more than we needed to survive that day was, in fact, the same strategy they lived under with the
khat
supply. We were all just prisoners there, not of our own device, as the Eagles song goes, but rather the devices of the Chairman, and perhaps someone else, if the Chairman was using an investor’s money.

Irony functions poorly in the absence of an appreciative audience. The men didn’t show any signs to indicate that anything about our common captivity humanized me in their eyes. Naturally, in such company the term “humanized” would be literal. As a woman and a foreigner, full human status was not mine to claim.

Poul could occasionally get a bit of conversation going with
one of the men, but I would occupy the same social stratum as one of the termite stacks out there, if not for the ransom potential attached to me. At least the termite stacks had a clear function in helping provide better cell reception.

I searched in vain for signs of guilt in the eyes of anyone who looked at me. Sometimes they averted their gaze, but instead of shame what I saw there seemed more like a complete lack of interest. Some of the men obviously took personal amusement in my illness. When they looked at me it was clear they saw a spoiled American who deserved her fate. Nothing in any of that explained what element of restraint was operating here on my behalf, or whether that restraint would hold. Whatever was controlling their violence up to that point, the force of that invisible thing was keeping us alive.

It wasn’t any form of affection. I didn’t bother to attempt to position myself as one who had earned any special consideration from them because of my work, to let them see I was in this place to help their people regain a functional society. Here, those goals sounded like crap.
You’ve been in our country doing what? Really? And why is that?

My mouth tasted of the bad diesel water we used for washing when we were lucky enough to get it. My lower torso throbbed with nausea while I got lost in silent arguments with myself:
I didn’t put myself here.
But I did.
I didn’t put myself here.
But I had.
I didn’t put myself here.
But there I was anyway, stuck amid the jabbering of green-lipped zombies.

Surely one of the circles of Hell is where they make you wait for you know not what, and you are given no sign when it will end.

Now that the Crisis Management Team had a line to the kidnappers, one of the essential challenges was to handle the delicate negotiations in such a way that the kidnappers wouldn’t give up and sell their “property” rather than continue talking. The kidnappers’ spokesman, Jabreel, repeatedly cried out, “Pirates crazy!” and warned them the crazy pirates were threatening to sell Jessica and her colleague to the Al-Shabaab network because the drawn-out negotiations were costing them too much. It was a tiresome threat, repeatedly raised, but the prospect remained too real to ignore.

Erik had always carried a certain sense of pride in his ability to show patience when necessary. Many times in his work, the ability served him well while he threaded legal needles in delicate negotiations. From the day of Jessica’s capture he began learning about levels of patience unknown to him. Until then, patience had been the capacity to hold his tongue when somebody got hot under the collar in a negotiating situation and went overboard on the tough talk and the threats. But the cost of that sort of patience was nothing, truly nothing, compared to the cost of silence now.