B009G3EPMQ EBOK (29 page)

Even though I couldn’t see Mom’s star, I sent her my deepest feelings, my longing for the depth of love I once felt from her. The yearning for it wasn’t diminished after she was taken from us.

Mom, I just don’t think I can make it through any more of this. Whatever the plan for all this may be, I don’t think it includes my survival. I think this is what dying feels like. I’m so sorry, I know you would want me to stand strong. I know you would want me to believe Erik can find a way to make rescuers come, and I’ve tried to hold up in the face of this ordeal, but I don’t know anymore. I would never agree to leave Erik behind, but I can feel this body dying. Mom, you felt the shadow of death coming over you, and now it’s trying to tear me out of this world. Maybe that’s why the desert seems so dark tonight.

I’m not asking to be saved from this anymore. If I can’t survive this, please let me know I can somehow reach Erik with my love for him. It’s going to devastate him if I never get home. He’ll face such terrible loneliness, and it will be much worse than what I’ve been feeling, because he’ll have no hope at all of getting our lives back again. I’ve lived on that hope for so long, but it’s melting away now.

If there’s no hope left for Erik and me as a couple, can you help me cross over? I think I could die without fear if I could sense you there with me.

Noises stopped me. My concentration up to then had been nearly hypnotic, but these irritating little noises broke it. Those
faint animal sounds, insect sounds, whatever they were. The damned noises were nearly faint enough to ignore, but they hovered right at the edge of my hearing.

A tiny cracking of a thin twig, one dry branch of a bush scraping across another, a bouncing pebble. Like feathers tickling away at my ears, they refused to leave me to my thoughts.

“Aggghhh!” I said it out loud in spite of myself. This was really the end. A bunch of weirdly lethargic captors lay all around me, I couldn’t see a thing under this thick darkness, and I couldn’t even take advantage of the silence to reach out to my mother’s spirit without having my attention tugged by whatever was out there.

I decided the unusually deep darkness was fitting. Here in the final stages of this long execution by starvation and medical neglect, there really wasn’t anything to see anyway.

More little noises.
What’s out there?
Frustration and anger made me bold enough to stand up on the mat and switch on the flashlight. I played the beam all around the camp, looking for the source of the noises. Nothing.

I wondered again, was I hearing anything new? Or had my mental state simply combined with the darkness to make me start hallucinating?

I directed the beam around in a full circle one more time: still nothing, only the inert forms of a bunch of desperate men sleeping off their drug stupor, men who only used the drugs to pad the harshness of their lives within their broken society, who were playing this deadly kidnapping game as their best attempt to feed their families. My heart would go out to them, except they were attempting to do this by slowly grinding me to death in a bizarre game of “chicken” with my family and employers, to see how much of my misery it might take to pull maximum money out of them.

Their main question at this point was nothing more than whether I could survive long enough to make their game pay off. It occurred to me then that the only satisfaction I might see in this
thing could be my dying knowledge that my death itself would screw up their plans and leave them with nothing.

I snapped off the light and lay back down, but the “consolation” of thinking my death would cost them their gamble was cold comfort. The more rational thought of leaving Poul alone to their torments was enough to keep me from feeling any satisfaction at the thought of my own demise. There had been no offers of millions from the Danish side, as with the American side, and I knew there never would be. So once these desperados accepted the fact that I was gone and Poul’s people weren’t going to ride in with bags of cash, what would his life be worth? How much of their frustration and outrage would they take out on him? I had been forced to watch them beat him with branches for nothing more than showing them some resistance, some hesitation to snap to and follow their orders.

If I died, I feared they would sell him to Al-Shabaab. They’d have to. The only thing I felt certain of was that his death with that group would be worse than my death from illness, more terrifying and far more violent. I curled up in a ball again and lay with my back to the largest clump of sleeping men. It was a useless gesture, but it gave me the illusion of shutting them out in some way.

For the next minute or two I lay without moving, focusing on my breathing and trying to slow my thoughts. Each time I started to feel myself drifting there was another little noise. It sounded as if the giant beetles that populated the area were coming out of their nests for the night. The things were so large I sometimes heard them skittering across my sleeping mat, loud enough to wake me up.

But I’d already paused to listen, shined the light around, seen nothing, and that was all I could do about it. Now I just ignored the bugs while I heard them coming closer and I tried to find sleep again. Before long, I heard the little sounds right at the edge of the mat.

I didn’t bother to move. There wasn’t anything left to worry about. I had once been concerned about the possibility of poisonous bites from those insects, but what difference would that make now? It was over.
I’d rather get some stinking sleep.

I think it’s fair to say I was beaten, then. I curled up as tightly as I could. This was the deepest, darkest cave I’d ever been in, and I had nothing left by way of response. All my past promises about avoiding despair were smoke in the wind. There was nothing around me to come to my aid, and I had depleted my inner resources to the bone.

At that instant I heard someone, Dahir, I think, leap to his feet and give out an intense whisper, calling for his boss. I heard him cock his rifle. His voice was full of panic.

“Afree-cahn!
”

Nothing. No sound of African or anyone else reacting to the alarm. Dahir kept his voice low but tried again.

“Afree-cahn!
” There was a hanging pause, then sudden sounds of movement all around the camp, men jumping to their feet, weapons being cocked . . .

Then everything exploded. Instant Armageddon.

Gunfire broke out in every direction, and even the shock waves were terrible. All my pent-up fear and anxiety took over my thinking. I was aware of chaos but had no understanding of it. I’m sure I was screaming but couldn’t hear myself above the din. I don’t know if I was praying in silence or screaming out loud, but all I could think was the phrase, “Oh, God, Oh, God,” repeating on a loop.

It had to be another clan coming to steal us, or even a raid by Al-Shabaab. I put my heart and my mind with my family. I sent out my love to Erik the same way I would have released a homing pigeon with a message, if I could have done it.
I swear to God, Erik, I would have been a good wife, I would have loved you, I would have given you children. We would have been so happy.

Between the staccato gunshots, I heard the Somalis screaming useless orders to each other, then screaming with the impact of bullets, then screaming in their death throes. A flash lit up Dahir’s face for just an instant. I saw a mask of pure fear. It was the face of a man who knew he would never see his children again.

Someone shouted, “Oh, no!” It might have been Dahir, but I couldn’t be sure. I heard him gasp when the bullets hit him. Darkness hid his expression, so at least I didn’t have to watch him die.

Strong hands grabbed at my blanket. I put up a fight to keep it. I don’t know why it represented some primal security, but it did.

“Jessica!” a male voice called.

It stopped me like a slap to the face.
An American accent?

I relaxed a bit in confusion, and somebody snatched away the blanket in that instant, tricky bastards. My face was no longer covered, but the black sky blended well with the black masks I could see in front of me. They were like ghosts with deadly weapons.

Something in my brain couldn’t register that these people might be attempting to help me. I’d only heard my name—was I wrong about the American accent? Had I just been duped into confirming my identity? The magical effect of that American voice was gone. My brain couldn’t accept it. The optimism well was dry.

The only thought I had for myself was if this turned out to be a takeover raid by Al-Shabaab forces, then the one thing in the world that could make things worse than they already were was happening at that moment. The survival drive is such a powerful engine; I struggled and screamed with all my strength. Even though I expected them to kill me soon enough, I fought back out of instinct. Then I heard it:

“Jessica! This is the American military. We’ve come to take you home. You’re safe.”

Not “Jesses” but
Jessica
. My American name spoken by an American voice.

The light went on for me. It finally registered. I got it, got it, got it.

And those words were more beautiful than any piece of music I’d ever heard. “Jessica, this is the American military. We’ve come to take you home. You’re safe.”

Beginning with the second week of the kidnapping, attempts were made to get care packages to Jessica via different couriers and different routes. A new one went out every few days. Each was a knapsack filled with toiletries, basic first aid, snacks, anything they thought she might need. They kept on sending them all through those three months—fifteen care packages in all.

One method was to send the package to Galkayo, where the NGO’s staff then gave it to a taxi driver to transport down to “The International City of Adado,” where people had been located who promised to deliver it, for a fee of course. Not one of the packages ever reached her. Information came in saying several of the care packages actually got through to the kidnappers, but they also knew from Jessica’s remarks to the family communicator that the kidnappers refused to pass such sources of comfort along to her. All those efforts did no good at all, other than to confirm the level of inhumanity her captors were willing to display.

They also got a package through to the “doctor” in Adado who was supposed to carry it to her when he went to do a checkup on December 21, but even this “doctor” proved unable to convince the kidnappers of the importance of it, just as he couldn’t find it in himself to do any actual doctoring. Thousands of dollars went
into these repeated and maddening efforts simply because there was no way to know if they would work at all without trying again and again.

On the morning of January 25, Erik had finally managed to get back into a state vaguely resembling sleep after waking up too early and pacing the floor. But the sleep wasn’t the kind that makes you feel rested. He found himself back in the land of tormented dreams.

He dreamed the phone rang and it was Matt calling to tell him there had been a rescue attempt and another one of those terrible disasters had taken place. He ran from the dream version of Matt and his terrible news by waking himself up, but the fearful impulse driving the dream followed him. As soon as he began to drift off again, the same dream repeated. Ring, ring, bad news calling. It was so realistic that he thought he was awake and answering his phone.

Again he heard Matt’s voice on the other end. The sound of his pain at having to make this call was already telling Erik everything before a single detail came out. A clean rescue had been too much to hope for, after all. The unpredictability factor always rears its ugly head at the worst moment, and obviously this is what had happened with the rescue team.

The voice switched to Jessica. She sounded as clear as if she were calling from the building next door. There was no static, no background noise, nobody else talking over her. Every word she spoke was crystal clear while she screamed that Erik had failed to keep his promise. Instead of coming for her, he had listened to Matt and the Crisis Management Team and left the love of his life to the torments of those criminals. And as he feared, her voice revealed she had a mountain of rage and bitterness toward him for letting her down.

“Why did you listen to them?” she demanded. “Why didn’t you ignore them and come for me? How could you leave me here?”

And with that question, the dream that seemed real gave way to a waking world that didn’t. He sat on the edge of the bed in the early morning light and tried to think of a way to answer those questions if they ever got her back.

•  •  •

Jessica:

The gunfire slowed. I noticed that I wasn’t dead and felt astounded to be drawing breath. There was no time to see anything. It struck me none of the men seemed to need a flashlight. Still in pitch blackness, I felt myself picked up and thrown in a fireman carry position by a guy who took off running with me as if I were a student backpack. We were quickly away from the campsite. He put me down in a small clearing. The quiet was thick, pocked by isolated shots from that direction.

The same guy who carried me asked if I had shoes. “Uh, yes. But I can’t remember where they are.” Of course they had to be back by my sleeping mat, but my brain had no candlepower at all.

“Did you leave them at your blanket?”

“I must have. They’re actually sandals, but at least they cover my—”

He was already up and running. I could hear his footsteps recede. In moments he returned with my sandals.

“Did you just go back for my—”

“Yes. Is there anything else you need?”

“What? From back
there
?”

“Yes. If there’s anything, tell us now. We’re getting out of here.”

“My little black bag with my medicine in it is right there at the blanket, but don’t risk going back again just for—”

His footsteps sprinted away and he was gone one more time. I lay back and tried to get my breathing under control. Someone
handed me a bottle of water, I drank, then the bottle was gone again.