B009G3EPMQ EBOK (21 page)

Once they were a bit done on the outside and firm enough to gently handle, the inside still had to be cooked, but direct contact with the fire gave them too much heat. They would burn before they cooked through. The trick was to use a stick to make a hole in the sand, then place the bread in the hole, bury it under more hot sand, and then pile hot coals on top of the protective sand layer. About five minutes later, after using the ground for an oven, I used the stick to dig up a hot piece of something resembling bread. As for the final yield, you may wonder: Was the earth-oven roll tasty? Oh, yes—if you were one of those kids who ate paste in grade school, you’d love this stuff. What Dahir the “Helper” showed me how to do, to create what became my regular breakfast when we could have it, was to rip the bread into pieces and pour hot sweet tea over it. No, it wasn’t a breakfast pastry, but the combination of bread and sugar brought that to mind.

To battle for survival among so many hostile males, I instinctively took to behavior I suppose I shared with female captives as far back in time as you’d care to go. I did everything I could to avoid provoking what might be called an “enthusiastic male response.” The precautions included letting my appearance completely go except for basic cleanliness, such as that was. I also apparently guessed right in advertising my status as a “mother.” As far as I could tell this was keeping the men at bay. Fortunately, Poul and I were kept so isolated that even though the men were in the camp area, there wasn’t much occasion for any of them to interact directly with us.

This, as you can imagine, was more than fine with me. But Jabreel was another matter. Unlike everyone else except Abdi, Jabreel’s job made it necessary for him to interact with us a great deal, now that the negotiations were underway. Jabreel seemed to be feeling the heady rush of being the contact point for the ransom they all anticipated. And like men down through the ages who suddenly find themselves in a key position of power, he was feeling frisky.

He fancied himself an artful molester. He made weak excuses to justify sitting next to me, maybe placing a reassuring hand on my shoulder, my arm, my thigh. He always acted with the thinnest possible cover, just “passing by” and passing too close, “guiding” me in one direction or another by physically handling me instead of just pointing. He might offer a sympathetic pat of “encouragement” or some piece of flattery about my light hair while he stroked his filthy hands over it.

At first he reacted playfully to me when I removed his hand, but it never discouraged him for long. While the days and nights progressed, the excuses for the touching became ugly satires of affection and kindness.

“Jesses, I come to America (stroke, stroke, pat, pat). Stay with you.”

“No, Jabreel. No. I’m married.”

“I am your good friend (stroke, rub, pat). You’re my good friend?”

“I am your married friend, Jabreel.”

“Erik?”

“Yes, Erik. I love Erik.”

“I come to live with you and Erik! We are happy! (pat, pat, pat). I will sleep on floor. By your bed.”

“By my . . . God.”

“What you say?”

“I said I’m
married,
Jabreel. So are you.”

“You are beautiful” (stroke, stroke, pat, pat, pat).

He had not become a rapist, quite. He was more like those memories so many women have: that one especially awful backseat wrestling match with some seriously wasted horndog, pawing you like a St. Bernard and smelling of flop sweat.

Poul saw it, but there was nothing he could do. By now, I’m sure he knew as well as I did that another ticking clock had just appeared. Now, within that larger time pressure of the money negotiations was a secondary timer. It was measuring out Jabreel’s dwindling sense of personal restraint.

He seemed to need secrecy to make his advances toward me. That was good in that it sharply reduced his times of opportunity. The brain of every Western woman working in the region, including mine, was imprinted with images from news footage of the bodies of female abductees, recovered long after a vicious gang rape and a final, merciful gunshot.

I made it a point to twist away from him as discreetly as possible. With a man as volatile as this, I had no doubt it would be suicidal to add public humiliation to the rejection of his poisonously childish advances.

On the night we recorded our first video message, he paused in his drunken frat boy behavior while he frowned and got to his
feet. Our people, he said, were not cooperating, and their offers were much too small: less than three hundred thousand dollars. An insult. He sniffed at me when he said it, leaving me to wonder which insult he had in mind.

I understood the delicate situation, but I was just as perplexed by all the protracted negotiations as any of these kidnappers. I also couldn’t help but wonder—
What is going on with the negotiators back home?
As with so much else about the experience, there was only silence for an answer.

Before long, we were rousted and thrust back into the kidnap cars and driven for hours out into the desert. The striking thing about each of these trips was that they were so long, apparently aimless, but determined in their length. We rolled out into the desert and pulled far off the track into the low brush to another anonymous location that looked like any other to me. Nevertheless, more men were waiting there, with Jabreel among them.

As soon as I saw him I asked what was going on. He responded, “Not good. They are fighting me because your people are not cooperating.”

He then explained that we were going to make a video to see if that would speed up negotiations. Before showtime, Jabreel decided to play the happy salesman and brought us each a can of soda, a rare treat—warming us up for the camera, I guess. He walked us over to a nearby tree where several other men joined us. Jabreel pointed in their direction while they approached.

“Journalists!” he announced. The “journalists” brought one tiny video camera that they proceeded to mount on a huge tripod, creating a contraption that looked as if it belonged in an animated cartoon. There was no time to find any humor in it.

Jabreel told me in a grim voice, “You say this message. Say what I tell you.”

They focused the camera against the brush in the background. Two guards, the “Colonel” and Mohammed (another Mohammed),
wrapped their sleeping sheets around their heads and faces. The pastel sheet around one guy’s head might have looked like a ridiculous excuse for a scary mask, if not for the belt of ammunition over his shoulders and the assault rifle pointed at me.

They took up menacing positions behind us, holding their weapons at the ready. All the elements of a viral death video.

My brain spun out desperate optimism:
At least this is only a video message. They’re not going to kill us. Even if they put the words in our mouths, it’s just a message. It’s a proof-of-life type of thing—that’s all.

On the bright side this could have been, but apparently was not, our night to star in an execution video. Plenty of others already had. According to Abdi, we had yet one week before it came to that.

At first it seemed as if only Poul would be allowed to speak on camera. They put him on, and he began the speech they required of him, telling the camera we were “both okay,” and stressing “there must be no attack by American military forces or any other forces acting on their behalf.”

I expected that much, I guess, but then Poul went on to add a part I hadn’t heard them tell him to say, imploring our families to get more directly involved and tap their own personal wealth on the ransom efforts. That gave me a real shock, though I was confident our families would see the video and realize we were being coached; there wasn’t any “wealth” for them to tap, and they knew that I knew it. My head immediately filled with the pictures of Erik and of my family seeing this in the international media, whether that meant the internet, Al Jazeera, or the BBC. The desired effect was obviously to scare the hell out of them, and I doubted the Chairman understood how well that was going to work.

I certainly didn’t want them to resort to mortgaging their homes, since it seemed to me that the people at my company needed to be the ones to make this work. Otherwise any money
they came up with had to be from whatever my personal insurance policy would cover. There wasn’t any vast reserve being held back out of sight. I knew the amount they offered had to be at the ceiling of what they could raise, and even that much would financially destroy them. It really took the shine off the thought of getting out of there via ransom and release.

My turn came to speak my forced spiel for the camera. Oddly enough, Abdi didn’t seem to want us to repeat their announcement that we would lose our heads in a week if the money situation didn’t improve. I was happy to forget that one as well. However, the message he wanted me to give was, essentially, “We know you have more money than this. Get serious.”

He made a gruff poking gesture at me, his way of calling “Action!” I’d been placed in front of a giant scrub tree, and I knew the masked men with guns were directly behind us on either side. It went off like the world’s weirdest screen test. I went passive on them, forgetting my lines over and over, thinking I was blowing my big moment. But eventually they seemed to get enough to satisfy them. Poul chimed in again to take up the slack.

With the video done, that was it. Finished for the night. No phone calls, no negotiations. Making the video was all they wanted and all they would allow.

While they drove us back, Jabreel went off with some of the other guys. It kept his hands away from me for the rest of the night. But I spent the long ride back to their camp with the sinking sensation that this video was about to pop up on the Al Jazeera network and go viral on the internet. What would it look like to outsiders? They had deliberately made it as menacing as possible. I had no doubt our poor families would be convinced we were in the hands of terrorists and doomed.

As of that day, that night, I’d sunk down from taking one day at a time to taking one little piece of a day at a time—just what I could carry—and those little pieces of the day kept getting smaller.
The men drove us for hours, this time. My back ached from bouncing over the terrain, my neck was on fire with muscle tension, and deep inside my body I was getting all sorts of little signals that things were not holding up well.

They had my medicine in their possession but kept finding excuses to “punish” me by withholding it. There was no discernible logic to any of it. They allowed me to keep my thyroid medication but withheld medicine for the infections that plagued me in that filthy camp. I could feel my state of general weakness growing each day.

The journey back to their camp was so long they stopped for the night in the middle of the dirt track, and in spite of our attempt to cooperate with the surprise video shoot, they took away our sleeping mattresses and pillows as “punishment” for the insulting amounts of money our people had been offering so far. It didn’t seem to matter that they were responsible for the fact that there had been no fresh communication that night and no chance to improve things. It was punishment time, and they seemed convinced we needed it.

We lay still and managed to sleep a little bit, there in the roadway. Fortunately it was already late when we stopped, and sunrise seemed to come early. I awoke ready to rise and shine and get the hell out of there. Funny, but spending the night on the road—literally on the road—made going back to the wilderness camp seem like an improvement. While we climbed back into the cars, Poul got close enough to whisper, “This is going to take months.”

No despair allowed. I didn’t say what I couldn’t help thinking:
Except Abdi just told us we only have a week.

•  •  •

Abdi’s way of dealing with the one-week deadline was to ignore it when the week passed. I tried to be thankful for the reprieve,
but it felt dangerous to assume we were out of the woods. When Thanksgiving approached, it was nearly a month since we were taken. At some recent point I suppose Abdi was either persuaded by Jabreel or had come to his own realization that if he killed us, all promise of money vanished. It was much better for him, he now realized and frequently assured us, to get far more money than this measly ransom offer by going to Al-Shabaab. They would pay well for us, and at least these poor guys could turn some measure of profit from all their hard work.

“I sell you Al-Shabaab! Five million!” He strutted around the camp glaring at us as if we had personally stolen his fortune. Abdi no longer believed our spokesman Mohammed was telling him the truth. And while he couldn’t quite figure out how the “conspiracy” worked, he was committed to the suspicion that Mohammed was playing him off with the small offers because he intended to keep the bulk of the “millions” in ransom for himself.

Have you ever tried to convince someone you don’t have money when he is convinced you do? Very hard to do, if it’s possible at all.

It was about this time that word came down to Jabreel that he would no longer be allowed to speak with Mohammed until Jabreel got either my husband or Poul’s wife on the phone and negotiated directly with one of them. He was to get them to personally confirm that Mohammed was truly speaking for us, for our families, and for our employers.

Jabreel had the phone number for the director of the Danish Refugee Council for the Horn of Africa. It was on an emergency card they found in our belongings, which they still kept away from us as punishment for the fact that we were failing to make them millionaires.

Poul had a longer relationship with the NGO staff, so he made the call to the director’s number and gave his instructed lines, which in this case happened to be true. He revealed the kidnappers
or pirates or whatever they ought to be called had demands about verifying Mohammed and added they were furious over the low amounts offered for our ransom.

I could faintly hear the director’s voice. Then first thing I noticed was his attitude; he sounded engaged and concerned. His tone made me glad somebody was awake at the wheel on the other end. He assured Poul he would have Erik personally call Jabreel the following morning to confirm Mohammed’s validity. It was all good to hear, and a few weeks earlier I would have been jumping out of my skin at the news. But I had already learned not to put faith in mere hopes.