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It was about at that point when it struck me that I still had one big choice available. I could, if I so chose, die fighting the bastard off. Before I allowed him to torture me into giving in, I could force him to copulate with a corpse. Leave him to pay for his perversity with the outrage of the others, once they realized their hope for ransom was dead. If I dared, I could do that to him.

It’s never been in my nature to think such thoughts. I tend to avoid confrontation. But in that narrow list of choices left to me, there was nothing left besides how I chose to die. Rather, it was down to whether I chose to die on my own terms, or if I was prepared to allow them to decide my fate according to their whims and the quality of their
khat
supply.

I didn’t expect Jabreel’s fear of the other men to stop him from attacking me for much longer. So there it was: the brick wall—can’t get over it, can’t get under it, and there was no way we were going in through the door. I’d kept my sanity up to that point by giving in to the experience in every way I could, trying to avoid being in a state of friction all the time. But my limits of acceptance stopped at the wall. There was no acceptance for anything beyond it.

In the face of my alternatives, the grim choice of bringing on my death by attacking him before he got to me actually sounded better than all the other available options. After all, we were still on the other side of the looking glass, where you step up to go down, and step down to go up.

•  •  •

Erik couldn’t believe it was a coincidence when he came downstairs one morning to discover their car had been stolen. Because of the security at their compound, it was almost certainly an inside job involving the night guards.

Later in the day he learned that another car identical to theirs was also stolen in the neighborhood. It would seem the word was out on that particular make and model, possibly from a local chop shop, and somebody had paid off the guards. If so, this confirmed his growing suspicion that for people with a little cash to throw around, any form of live security protection could be penetrated.

The paranoia that had become a constant companion forced
him to wonder if the Somalis who were negotiating on behalf of the kidnappers were somehow behind the car thefts. Had he been targeted for additional “ransom” money he didn’t even know he was paying?

He filed the useless paperwork on the missing car, hoping it was a random event and not the first ransom payment. In a separate story, there was now word that a $6 million ransom payment had just been made to Somali pirates holding a hijacked oil tanker. The kidnapping industry appeared to be booming, right at the time when they were trying to convince Jessica’s captors their demands were completely unrealistic. He now feared that to Jess’s captors, the $6 million just paid to those others sounded tantalizingly close to the $9 million they’d last demanded for Jessica and Poul. The clear message these kidnapping successes sent was that all Jessica’s kidnappers had to do was to be brutal enough and hold out long enough—and magical millions of U.S. dollars would soon be coming to them, too.

Jessica’s family couldn’t stay in Africa any longer, and Erik sadly drove her father, brother, and sister back to the airport. With no end in sight, they had to face the reality of their own lives. He knew he would especially miss having John there. His steadfast belief that this would actually all work out had been a great influence to have around, and Erik hated to do without it.

He dropped them off thinking that being there had been good for them in spite of their having to leave frustrated, at least in allowing them to feel they were doing what they could to support her. The heartbreak lay in having to go back without being able to let her know they were there for her.

Erik’s day ended with a depressing call from Matt, who told him to prepare for the possibility these negotiations could take longer than they hoped—maybe months. As hard as it was to hear that, his knowledge of the region had already told him that was so. He felt a certain relief that his own view was confirmed, since his
world revolved around the absolute need to make the right choices in this.

He also heard the unspoken message in that call. It told Erik that Jessica’s health wasn’t going to hold out that long, and unless they found a way to get medicine through to her, she was unlikely to survive.

Jessica:

After weeks in the wild, the apparent identity of the true leader of the operation began to emerge. It wasn’t the Chairman, whom we never saw anymore, nor was it Abdi, even though he was still a ranking officer. No, the one who made the others tremble was the one called Bashir, a chubby fellow of thirty-five or so, with extremely dark skin and a complexion troubled by acne. He walked hunched over a heavy paunch and drove a silver Land Cruiser with delicate pinstriping.

Bashir was the closest thing to an operational commander we were able to identify. Maybe he was also the money man and maybe not, but he was certainly the top dog, and he had emerged as the one with the iron fist. In recent days, Bashir had begun to display a much greater level of impatience over the stalled ransom negotiations, far more than any of the other men. When he flew into a rage, everyone ducked out of his way, including Jabreel and Abdi.

After one fruitless ransom call, Bashir got into a heated discussion with his lackey, a fat and disgusting guy we nicknamed the Turd, because he made it a habit to loudly pass gas at every opportunity. The Turd might have been answering questions. I could tell
Abdi was upset about money, about the pitiful ransom offers they were getting from our side. Even after demanding that the families’ communicator Mohammed be replaced, this time by a female named Lisa, they were more unhappy with every passing hour.

Finally Bashir broke from the group and stormed over to the spot where Poul was being held under a tree. “Big money!” he screamed at Poul. “Where is big money?” Poul just looked at him and held up his hands in a gesture of surrender, trying to placate him.

Bashir stomped over to me. “We
kill
you! No big money, we
kill
you!” He rushed at Poul with his AK-47 pointed at him. “You stand up! Stand up now!” He pointed the barrel at Poul’s long-sleeved shirt, lying on the ground.

“Put that on! Now! Now!”

Poul just held out his arms in a gesture of no-contest and quietly asked, “Bashir, why are you doing this?” He added some simple pantomime to reinforce his question, “What did I ever do to you?”

Bashir just glared at him for a charged moment, then screamed, “You come now! I sell you now! I get five million for you from Al-Shabaab!”

Poul glanced at me with deep worry on his face. “Bashir,” he began, “please don’t—”

“Walk!” Bashir screamed. “You walk!” They headed away toward the cars. I began to cry uncontrollably, forgetting all about their repugnance for displays of emotion from women. If they were splitting us up, it meant they were giving up on the negotiation process. It meant everything was over. I didn’t even bother trying to hide my fearful crying. They knew I had good reason. They all knew.

Bashir vanished with Poul. Jabreel came over and knelt to me to offer “comfort.” He made sure to put a consoling hand on my upper back, rubbing it in little circles.

“These men crazy (rub, rub, pat, pat). Pirates! You cannot talk
to them for anything (stroke, stroke). They no believe me for the money. Bashir say he want me to leave.”

I sighed, knowing what he wanted to hear. Even fleeing for his own safety, the same games applied with Jabreel. I was still crying, but now the tears were of frustration and personal humiliation.

“Jabreel . . . We need you here . . . We need you to speak for us . . . We need you to speak on the phone. Please. Make them let you stay.”

The hypocrisy of my request, made to a man I had come to hate, left a foul taste in my mouth. If I hadn’t already been sick from the microbes in the food, my own words would have been enough to turn my stomach.

At that moment Bashir returned alone, noticed me crying, and came over to roughly shove his gun barrel into my shoulder. “Shut up!” he bellowed into my face. Then he pulled out a Nokia cell phone and ordered Jabreel to call our NGO one more time.

“You tell them we now sell the man to Al-Shabaab!”

Jabreel dialed the number for our contact, and our director got on the line. When he handed the phone to me I couldn’t help but fall into hysterics while I told the director they had just disappeared with Poul and had announced they were tired of the game and they intended to sell Poul to Al-Shabaab.

“Please!” I begged between sobs. “You know what that group will do to Poul! You have to stop this somehow. You have to do something!”

Our NGO’s director had the impossible job of trying to assure me they were “doing everything” they could while I shouted back that it sure didn’t look like anybody at all was doing “everything they could.” Now Poul was gone, and I was getting sicker by the day, alone in a camp full of angry-looking males who were all stoned out of their minds.

“You have to get us out now! You have to get us out now!” I cried out to our director without listening to his spluttered replies.
I was openly in hysterics at that point and didn’t care. This time nobody among the kidnappers put up an objection. My emotions played into their plan by turning up the pressure on the people on the other end of the line. I saw what was being done, but there was no way to stop it. I was grateful they never got any working personal phone numbers from me, or they would be calling our loved ones and letting them listen to me scream.

All I could think about was getting the man on the other end of the line to understand that we were living on the surface of a soap bubble here. The bubble couldn’t last.

Bashir ordered Jabreel to give his phone back to him, and Jabreel promptly snatched it away from me. Just that quickly, the plea-for-ransom call was over. That was fine with me, odd as it may sound. Begging a stranger is a disgusting thing to have to do, and it was hardly more tolerable because it was forced on me.

Still, in spite of the fact that I knew the NGO’s policy was not to pay ransom to criminal forces, I still believed they would do anything in their power to get us out. I reminded myself we were their employees, captured while doing their work. I knew the situation wasn’t easy for anybody on the other end of that call, but I prayed they would take any gamble necessary to get us out. My most heartfelt desire was to have the chance at freedom, even just the chance of it, knowing any form of escape or delivery could go entirely wrong right at the point of exchange but desiring the chance to make a go of it anyway. These drugged-up speed freaks were as likely as not to find something to set off their paranoia, and end up opening fire on all of us. As far as I was concerned, any chance at all to make a break for it was better than this endless stalemate.

I wondered if Bashir was going to punish me now for my distasteful emotional display during the call. But this time, instead of registering any objection over my emotions, he just stared at me with a mixture of amusement and contempt. Apparently, I had performed just right for him, putting my fears and tears to work
for the kidnappers in their quest to raise the price on us.
So be it, then,
I thought.
I’ll help them if it helps us.

Even knowing I’d played right into their hands and delivered what they wanted, I was glad for the chance to speak to the director myself. If I was going to die out there because of their inaction, I wanted him to have to hear straight from me before the end came. And who could tell, perhaps it would increase his sense of us as individuals and get something going while there was time. If there was time.

After the call, everybody else found an excuse to drift away and put distance between themselves and Bashir. That left just me. I was so filled with outrage and resentment that I found it easy to get my tears under control in his presence.

That flipped some kind of switch. The Turd lunged for me, pointing his AK-47 and screaming at the top of his voice, “You f**king shut up! F**king arms! Up! Shut! Up!”

In that instant I was too angry and disgusted to feel my natural fear of him. I deliberately glared right at him, boring a hole through him with my eyes, daring him to react. A typical Somali man is unaccustomed to seeing any women glare at him, unless she’s his mother or his wife. It made these men ill at ease to be presented with defiance from someone expected to grovel.

I was too angry to care. After having watched him beat Poul for no reason and then take him away to whatever he had in store for him, I had reached the point where I needed to defy Bashir more than I needed to live. He looked surprised by my stiff reaction to his intimidation. For a second, he didn’t appear to know what to do. Then he shook his gun in my face and marched away.

It was terrible to know after this I would be alone in that camp with those men. But at least Bashir’s leaving and letting quiet return was some improvement. I needed to think. There was no safety or satisfaction to be had anywhere around me; the only place I would find any was within my imagination. A few hours
of peace and quiet were what I needed most of all to put up my best memories and walk around inside them for a while. It felt as necessary as leaning my face out of a burning building in order to breathe clear air.

Lately it was taking me longer to get the images to zoom in and focus. My imagination was active, perhaps too much so, but I was having a harder time controlling what I’d see. In the beginning I’d been able to call up my store of beautiful memories practically on demand. All I needed to do was center my breathing to relax out from under the fear; better images and feelings would follow. In my current state it was getting much harder to concentrate. My physical weakness matched my sense of failing mental strength while these jackals gradually drained the life force out of us.

It was some measure of consolation that my brain appeared to be less and less interested in focusing on the kidnappers and more concerned with calling up memories of life as I once knew it. We had ended the second month. The daily routine hadn’t varied much, but it was less and less a part of my conscious experience. I had earned enough trust that I was allowed to fix our food regularly. I could sometimes cut up potatoes and fry them in oil and salt. It gave me back a little control over food sanitation. While Poul was still with us, both of us felt sick most of the time with GI tract troubles. The other men didn’t seem bothered by microbes nearly as much, even though most of them looked malnourished. Apparently a life of exposure to viciously infectious agents had tempered their immune systems, in spite of their poor nutrition.