B009G3EPMQ EBOK (30 page)

The soldier made it back quickly, and I noticed the gunfire had completely died out. I don’t recall just when it stopped; it seemed to be over as suddenly as it had begun. But I felt amazed and grateful that a soldier would make two trips back into that place just to get my things for me. He had to do it without knowing whether somebody else was lying in wait for him, ready to shoot as soon as he got within range. And yet there he was, back with my things like a guy just returning from the store.

Even though one of them had specifically told me they were there to rescue us, my brain couldn’t process the information. I’d lived in my head so much of the past few weeks that I was having trouble getting a fix on reality.

“You’re Americans?” I asked. “Americans? You’re Americans?” I must have sounded like a drunk.

“Just wait here,” one told me.

Wait here?
Why would he want me to wait there? Why weren’t we running for our lives? We were still in grave danger. We had to be. Was it possible these guys didn’t understand that? I knew the darkness could explode with rocket fire and blow us up at any second. Fear and shock made me shiver so hard my teeth chattered.

“No! Don’t leave us here!” I tried to cry out, but my voice was tiny. “We have to get out of here! They’ll be coming! Where’s Poul? Did you get him?”

Someone took my hand and extended my arm. I touched Poul, who was already there next to me in the darkness. He was fine, but clearly just as stunned as I was. I moved close enough to see that at least he had managed to get out with his pants and shoes on. We couldn’t talk there, but we had discussed a possible escape often enough that we both knew without talking about it: If our captors had the smallest ability to retaliate, they would certainly be doing it any second now.

While we huddled on the ground in the dark, some of the soldiers tried to comfort me with normal conversation. That may be something they do under such circumstances to help rescued people adjust, but at the time the ability to converse was way beyond me. My memory wasn’t working well, either. I couldn’t get anything to stick.

The soldier who went back for my things amid the gunfire did much more than just carry me out of that camp; he took me all the way back out through the looking glass. And now, just like that, here we were again on the normal side. After months in the company of captors whose sensibilities seemed to leave their humanity largely unused, right there was a knight in armor who made two trips back into a hot shooting zone, just to retrieve things I might need if we got out of there alive. After spending those months having to ask permission just to pee at night, the thought of someone assuming such risks simply to make me more comfortable or safe was astounding. It added itself to the list of things that were leaving me speechless.

Still, we couldn’t get out of there fast enough as far as I was concerned. I’ll bet the feeling is known to anyone who’s ever had that nightmare of running through sand or deep water with a monster in hot pursuit. At last we began to move and the group quickly went into a brisk jog. Someone held me up and guided my steps.

There were lots of footstep noises around me. I had the sense of people running along right next to me, others a few yards away. It didn’t sound like there were many of us out there, given what we were up against.

Poul and I had come to know the men of this criminal militia and we had seen their heavy weapons, the rocket launchers that could take out all of us with a couple of rounds. I didn’t want to guess at their savagery in open combat if they had the chance to steal back their prize captives.

But even in that early hour, these SEAL warriors were already
heroes just for getting me out, just for getting me this far. If we never made it all the way home, they had nevertheless given me a chance at least to die in the quest for freedom among my own people, after so long. From my standpoint, I was surrounded by magical heroes. They brought this terrible explosion of violence that popped the locks on our invisible prison. They reached in there and snatched us out alive—I couldn’t see how, but I was impossibly alive—and there we were, getting the hell out of there.

Most of our captors would have killed us, if they could have, before allowing us to escape. And it had torn a piece out of me to see Dahir’s terrified face in the flashes of the guns. I felt another piece of myself tear away when I heard him cry out. He alone among them had made a point of behaving with respect and without arrogance. There was no way for me not to feel pain on his behalf.

Still, I thought they had to be coming. We represented a major investment. I knew there had been nine guards on duty, at least—maybe more, if some had arrived while I was sleeping. In addition, the rest of the crew had to stay close enough to the camp during their off hours to be able to get back and forth when they took over their next shift. Surely some of those guys were coming for us, by this point. All anybody needed to do was get off a call to the Colonel or to the Chairman. Cell phones, walkie-talkies, ham radios, signal drums, the sound of distant gunfire, that was all it took. The fighters would rally. They would roll down over us with an avalanche of bad news.

We probably only ran for a couple of minutes, but they were the kind that each takes an hour. Then helicopters appeared out of nowhere. Three of them, I think, although the noise and downdrafts made it hard to tell. The soldiers started guiding me toward a specific chopper, but I sprinted the last few yards on my own and dove into the open hatch, then skittered across the fuselage and plastered my back against the side. Lights were muted inside the aircraft. I could only make out silhouettes. The soldiers
all wore helmets and face masks with special goggles. It looked as if I’d been picked up by space aliens.

The strangeness of each coming moment surpassed the one before. I had no control over any of it. Nothing felt real, and it certainly didn’t seem to be possible that both of us could actually be out of there alive after such a vicious firefight. But before I knew it Poul and the soldiers all piled in, and we took off. I tensed and waited for the explosions from the incoming Somali rockets or their heavy machine guns. Amazingly, nobody tried to shoot us down. We were quickly out of the neighborhood. Before much longer it was too late for them to try.

It was only in that moment that it hit me—I had stopped expecting to see this day. Whatever the outcome was to be, I had let go in my attempt to die with some measure of dignity. Instead, my fate had just spun on its heels one more time and delivered the very escape that had been withheld for so long.

By the time Erik’s phone rang at 6:41 a.m. on January 25, he was seriously doubting whether he had really been reasonable in standing back and letting the authorities handle Jessica’s rescue, instead of going after her himself. His early morning news feed that day told of a Vietnamese kidnap victim in Somalia, captured by pirates who decided to stimulate ransom money by chopping off one of his arms and sending it to his family. The story further agitated Erik’s state of mind. He answered the phone after the first ring, but it was with real trepidation.

“Erik, it’s Matt.”

Cold fear shot through him. Who ever gets good news at that hour?

But this time the dreaded words didn’t come. “She’s free, Erik. We got her.”

“What? Matt, we—we what?” He automatically gave himself a reality check. Was he dreaming? Was this real?

“We got her, Erik. Both of them. Unharmed.”

“Matt! Matt, I . . . Are you
sure
?”

“I can tell you at this moment, Jess and Poul are at our base in Djibouti for debriefing and medical care. Jess is sick but her
condition’s been stabilized. The main thing is, you don’t need to be worried anymore, Erik. She made it. You both made it.”

The news smashed Erik open like a
piñata.
He screamed for joy at the top of his lungs, dancing around the room half naked, crying, shouting “Yes! Yes!” If anybody had video of that moment, it would have convinced them he was crazy, and of course he wouldn’t have cared.

Jess was coming home. She would be back here in their home with him before too much longer. They might somehow have a chance at a future together, after all—if she still wanted him after the treatment she had endured.

It took him awhile to reach John Buchanan, who happened to be in Washington, D.C., with Jess’s sister for a meeting with the FBI and Jess’s organization. Erik kept trying until he got a decent connection. He thought he would be breaking this incredible news that she was out and safe. But when he finally got through, he heard a joyful and highly relieved father on the other end of the line, who already knew the whole escape story. Somebody had gotten to John ahead of Erik and stolen his thunder on delivering the big news.

At 10:32 p.m. in Washington, D.C., President Obama had called Jess’s father to break the news himself. So John got the chance to personally convey his deep gratitude to the president for taking the political risk to send in SEAL Team Six after his daughter, in spite of the countless hazards.

Finally, Erik thought, it was a good day to be John Buchanan.

•  •  •

Jessica:

It took us about thirty minutes to get to a drop point on the northern side of the Green Line. Throughout the flight, I kept
trying to fight off the shock and clear my head, but my thoughts were slow and thick. I could barely understand the questions being put to me. I realized the soldiers were trying to be kind, and I certainly didn’t feel threatened anymore, but only about half my brain power was working at the moment, and there didn’t seem to be much I could do to speed it up. All I was certain about was my deep gratitude for this rescue, this second chance at life. I thanked the men and kept thanking them, over and over. They must have thought there was something wrong with me, and I suppose there was. But my mind was clear enough to know how much I had to be grateful for. It was either a bona fide miracle or something very close to one.

“Can we call my husband? I have to call my husband and let him know!”

“Not yet,” one soldier shouted over the noise of the rotors. “But you can call him from the base.”

On a more earthly level, I soon noticed that my need to urinate was strong and quickly growing worse, but there was no toilet on the helicopter. They asked if I could wait a few more minutes, and I told them there didn’t seem to be much choice.

The men were heartbreakingly polite. They made special efforts to be kind, these athletic hunter-killers who had just taken out a camp full of armed men. They tried to engage me in conversation to determine how well I was processing my thoughts. The simple truth is that I was not thinking clearly at all, but they were kind enough not to mention it. Instead they just directed friendly one-liners to me, sort of open-ended in nature, the kind of thing you can either reply to or let pass by. They brought me up to speed on the Super Bowl game between the Giants and the Patriots, only eleven days away. They groused about the NBA strike.

I nodded from time to time to let them know I was taking it in, but I couldn’t get much of a response to come out. A young medic who looked just like one of the muscular athletic department
students I used to see around back in college knelt by me to take my vitals. With that, I experienced what may have been the very first blush of a reawakening of my identity as a person in the civilized world: a flash of embarrassment over my condition. I had been tall and thin back when this began; now I was just emaciated.

In terms of my self-image, the sudden embarrassment was condensed from the worst part of my youthful self-consciousness as a thirteen-year-old beanpole. Except now I was also deep down dirty, half starved, dressed in a filthy cotton
deera
that was ripped down the back. I was painfully aware that I had on no proper underwear, just the men’s athletic shorts which were all I’d been given. I’d lost so much weight I no longer need to wear a bra. I just wore a faded and ripped tank top under the
deera,
while I walked in the same sandals I’d been wearing when we were taken and every day since. I was months away from anything resembling a real bath. Many captive animals, upon release after months in a cage, would probably step out with the same sensations of confusion and uncertainty I felt swimming around inside me.

I still couldn’t conceive of how they had pulled off the attack. Because of the merciful darkness and the chaos of gunfire, I saw nothing of its inner workings except to say it was hard and fast. It was unbelievably hard and fast. I gained instant insight into why the SEAL teams are said to train with such intensity. The depth of violence in the attack hits you all the way down to the bones. It sets off deep instincts to either flee or dive for cover. It must take a special form of hardening of the nerves to be able to remain calm and do your job in the midst of so much heavy gunfire. I had learned firsthand that morning that in such moments our untrained, non-SEAL survival instinct wants nothing but to hide or flee.

As soon as the chopper put down on the airstrip in Galkayo, I told them I really had to relieve myself now. I asked if there would be a toilet on the plane that we were supposed to board next. They
regretfully informed me I would have to pee on the tarmac next to the plane. They looked as if they expected me to balk at that. Who, me? Me, in my gross condition? Surrounded by hostile men for ninety-three days? It would take a lot more than that to shame me. I could pee anywhere.

Still, a couple of the men gallantly stepped out onto the tarmac with blankets and held them up to form a little booth so I could relieve myself with some privacy, since by this point it was going to happen no matter where I was. But even through the fog of my confusion then, I was struck by the civility and the casual decency of these men. Without their masks, some were my contemporaries, some were even younger. And they were nothing whatsoever like those images of jeering, sneering young manhood permeating our media-driven culture.