B009G3EPMQ EBOK, page 11
All Erik could do was write his daily letters in hopes she would live to read them. He wondered if some element of magical thinking was involved, as if he might convey some unknown power to her, generated by holding the thought of her as close as possible. He concluded science couldn’t prove any such thing was possible, but neither could it prove that it wasn’t.
I’ll understand if when you return you feel resentment and even want to never see me again. If so, I will do whatever you feel is right for you, but I will always be there for you. My love for you is without conditions, any rules . . . I will always be there for you even though I don’t know where you are now and it breaks my heart completely. I don’t know what to do, I just don’t know what to do . . . I’ve talked with Dan, I’ve talked with [the] FBI, with all kinds of people . . . everyone says that we should be hopeful and I am, I know you are strong, but I’m just so afraid for everything that can happen. . . .
You need to come back here. I can’t live a life without you, I just can’t. There’s nothing the kidnappers can do that can make me stop loving you, there’s nothing they can do that can lessen my love for you.
He found himself repeating the same things, over and over. As if it was a sacred duty. He wrote as if the idea of stopping the imaginary conversation was a form of giving up.
• • •
Jessica:
There was a bad argument going on between Abdi and Jabreel, and while I didn’t understand them word for word, the conflict was obviously over money. Nobody in the upper echelon of this gang seemed to believe that I really wasn’t worth the many millions of dollars they wanted for my return. In Poul’s case, they appeared to accept that there wasn’t any golden treasure there; at least I never got a sense of their concern over it. The mere fact of my American citizenship was enough to convince these men there had to be barrels of money involved. I wondered if part of the reason America is so resented around the world is the result of the Western entertainment world’s false rendition of our culture. These guys were essentially demanding that we make Santa Claus appear and spill out his big toy bag, just for them.
The day after that fiasco of a proof-of-life call, which we had no way of confirming, things deteriorated around the Banda place. There was a lot of verbal aggression coming from Abdi against Jabreel. Jabreel was older, smaller, crooked, and toothless, but he stood up to Abdi and was giving it right back to him. We couldn’t get the details, but I also couldn’t avoid the mud-sucking feeling that their dispute was all about us.
Poul and I were being allowed to sit together that afternoon, close enough to risk quietly rehashing our “phone home” event and trying to make sense of it. Meanwhile, Abdi started shouting with forceful anger at Jabreel. Jabreel kept insisting on something right back at Abdi, and he wasn’t backing down to the younger and fitter man. That sent Abdi into such a fit of anger that he threw a full roundhouse punch to Jabreel’s belly. The older man doubled to the ground.
Fortunately Dahir, one of the drivers, hurried over and pulled Abdi off him, leaving Jabreel to hobble away, crying out in pain and outrage. This was completely unexpected even in that bizarre environment, and whatever the details of their argument happened to be, there was no way it could be good news for us. Jabreel was our point man, and yet he had just lost a major notch in his standing with these men.
Before long he limped over to us and whispered, “I cannot stay here! You see. You can see. He say less than one million not enough for you. Maybe eighteen million.”
“Eighteen million! They can’t be serious!”
Jabreel nodded. “Too much khat for them. They want everything.”
“Oh, my God. Please tell me these guys aren’t insane on top of being morons!”
“All evidence to the contrary,” Poul muttered.
Jabreel spoke with real urgency. “I think Abdi kill me now. I must go.”
“Jabreel,” I protested, “don’t go! You’re important to us! Very important!”
“Abdi thinks I will keep the money. Because I speak English, he says I work for your people against Abdi. Against the men.”
“No, Jabreel! We’ll talk to him. We’ll tell them you never did anything to interfere.”
“He will say you lie.”
I felt myself starting to cry and hated the feeling. We might as well have been perched on a high cliff in a huge storm, with Jabreel our only lifeline. When I tried to speak, my words got trapped between sobs I couldn’t control.
“Jabreel, nobody else here can speak with us. Please! Please don’t go!”
I remember Poul appealing to him, assuring him he was of great value to us. But we also knew it would be a fatal mistake to offer him a side bribe of any sort. If he reported it, we would fall into a sinkhole.
Jabreel just stared at me for a long time before he looked back and forth at both of us and nodded. He quietly said, “I stay for you for longer, but I am now afraid for my life in this place.”
“Yes, Jabreel,” I agreed in solemn tones, nodding. I made it a point to acknowledge him out loud in front of the others with an obvious display of respect and gratitude, just in case any of the horde were taking note.
What I did not allow myself to do was grab him by the ears and scream up into his nostrils hard enough to vibrate the nose hairs, “You’re afraid for your life? You’re afraid for your freaking life? Welcome to the cluuub!”
But at least he hadn’t left us, even though he was now thoroughly plugged in on our shared afraid-for-your-life thing. It was great to have common ground. If we were going to get more communication with home, we needed someone capable of navigating the language with the others and a clear sense of what we were experiencing here. Jabreel appeared to have a reasonable grip on reality so far. At least he wasn’t screaming about cashing us in for tens of millions, amounts so huge and fanciful the numbers didn’t matter.
Two days after the proof-of-life call we sat stranded beneath the cover of the Banda place roof, which for some reason they’d decided to put us under for the day. The air was dry, disturbed by a warm dusty wind. It was hot, not at the level of the open desert’s kill-you-in-a-day heat, rather just hot and dry enough to gradually suck the water out of your body. Since the Chairman’s goons refused to give us enough to drink, the inside of my mouth came to feel like a realistic sand carving of itself, devoid of all moisture. The nagging sensation of thirst combined with the feeling of having a thick layer of dust covering every inch of my skin.
The two acted together to weave a blanket of misery. I’m no princess and I can rough it when I have to, but this feeling of being filthy and unable to do anything about it was something I could have happily gone a lifetime without knowing. It had a surprisingly oppressive effect on morale. I couldn’t help but react to my strong sense that when a person gives in and accepts that level of filth, some line is crossed into territory where further difficulty, perhaps lethal difficulty, is guaranteed.
We appealed for some water to wash our clothing, and a resentful young man brought a ridiculously small container of it. The same guard who pulled the machine-gun prank on Poul, who we later learned was called Fizel (or Failsel or Faisal; Somali names have multiple spellings), waited nearby until we moistened the clothing and rubbed in some soap before he sauntered in and kicked over the little container of remaining water. Boy, was he proud of himself for that. He looked like he could flap his wings and crow.
We had to stretch out the soapy garments to dry as they were. By the time we put the crusty laundry items back on it was hard to tell if the whole endeavor got us any cleaner or if it just gave us something to do. Still, it was better than sitting idle and getting stuck thinking about all the things that could go wrong with this picture.
Jabreel’s continued presence there paid off that same afternoon when he hurried over to us and announced we were going away to make another international phone call. I was ready to go in a heartbeat, eager to do anything to move this train along. I dared to wonder if this meant some sort of deal was in the making? My optimism ran too far in the other direction, and I found myself wondering if Erik and I might still be able to meet our friends in Zanzibar as we had arranged. Sure, our little vacation for four. Maybe it wasn’t too late. Why not? Why not?
I kept right on grasping at straws while they drove us out into the middle of nowhere, but I couldn’t tell if their purpose had anything to do with getting good reception or if they thought they would somehow fool potential aerial surveillance by moving us around that way. They continued to be aware of the sky and watched for aerial traffic.
Sure. The U.S. government knows all about this and they’re tracking us as we speak.
I only found one explanation for this odd mix of carelessness and paranoia. Although these men understood how to use a cell phone and knew how to drive and do basic maintenance on vehicles, they were also unschooled in Western popular culture and they had major holes in their knowledge. For example, they knew about airplanes and international travel, but it was likely the closest any of these men had been to an airplane was to drive by the local Galkayo airport.
Holes in their knowledge. It was the only place in the region where major air traffic could land, but the city was too poor to have landing lights. Planes operated in or out of there only during daylight hours.
Holes in their knowledge. These men who had learned how to seek out phone signals by going to higher ground and who knew about airplanes capable of seeing us from above also had an important blank in their knowledge of flight—they had concluded from observation that planes did not operate at night. Pilots are only human, and see in the dark no better than they do. But they appeared not to have heard of infrared night vision cameras, or unmanned drones that can stay aloft for many hours, day or night, and even see you clearly in the darkest of night and under thick cloud cover.
I filed away that piece of speculation with a mental note to watch them during this phone-home excursion for any sign they might know about night vision, or that someone had alerted them about it. But I never saw any indication of that, and the pattern of marching us out into the open for sleeping was repeated every night. Whatever their purpose, they were consistent.
Jabreel dialed the phone this time. He handed it to me once the connection went through. I heard a woman’s voice on the other end, but didn’t recognize her. She sounded British or possibly South African when she spoke my name. She claimed to know me, or know about me anyway. I asked who I was speaking to, but she only replied that she worked for something called “Mine Action.”
The name didn’t sound familiar to me. I felt a strange mix of hope and skepticism. She went on to assure me “everyone” was working around the clock to secure our release. I had no idea what that actually meant.
And I wasn’t sure I heard the next part right at all—she asked what I would want to have in a care package if they were to put one together for me. She meant it as a gesture of consolation, but all I heard was, “Get ready to spend serious time in captivity.” The idea of a care package was even more upsetting than being provided with replacement clothing; they both implied a much longer stay. I was already counting the minutes before my sanity broke.
Jabreel put Poul on the line and had him give a rehearsed speech about how the military must not try to stage an attack on us. Poul also had a few other locations he had been instructed to pass along as “no attack” zones, if we were to ever be returned alive. With that Poul lost patience with the idea of speaking to yet another stranger instead of any of our known people. He told her to get off the line and keep it clear for our people to reach us.
But that was it. No more calls, no explanation for the “disconnected” numbers of Erik and my family. They packed us into the SUV again and drove us back to the Banda place. The loss of the optimism I felt when this trip began was as abrupt and hard as a belly flop.
Jabreel told us of the men’s concern about surveillance satellites and high-flying planes with tracking capability. They seemed to think we also had these things at our disposal. At least that would justify the constant paranoia about keeping us under cover in the daylight, even if it failed to explain why they didn’t fear night vision when they made us sleep out in the open.
I tried to play it as casual as I could and rolled my eyes at the idea of anyone coming for us. “We’re just aid workers,” I assured them. “Nobody would use such things to look for us. Our government doesn’t know we exist.”
After nightfall, a caravan of four SUVs pulled into the camp. Poul and I were loaded into the back of one with a guard on each side of us. There were three men in the front seat and four more in the rear, along with a stack of supplies. My anxiety began to spike, partly because I couldn’t see Jabreel anywhere in the caravan but mostly out of intuition. Whatever was happening with these men, they were plainly jumpy and paranoid over something or other, and I had a sick feeling it had to do with us. More specifically, I feared it might have to do specifically with me—not as a woman, the way I initially feared, but as an American.
Maybe they hadn’t bargained for an American captive after all. The men kept jabbering to one another and glancing over in my direction. I couldn’t understand them, but once again I could make out the word “Amer-ee-cahn.” Either they were coming around to deciding my presence was a mistake or talking about how to raise the ransom fee because of it.
We moved out and kept moving. I could sense the ride moving steadily south. We drove for hours, again with no explanation and without Jabreel anywhere in sight. All I could think about was, to the south lay the highly dangerous Al-Shabaab territory. Given the arguments over how much money we were worth, it began to look more and more as if the Chairman had decided to sell us off to them for a price closer to his liking, and let them use us either for ransom money or for torture toys. I knew rape would be the least of my worries in their hands.
Loud Somali pop music blared from the car stereos, driving the hyper mood higher among all the men with green slime running out of the corners of their mouths. They regarded us the way people look at cows in a 4-H Club competition. I knew about panic attacks from personal experience and felt a doozy coming over me then: the tight constriction of the chest that felt like suffocation, the need to break free into clear air. I was painfully aware that in the past these groups have been quite keen on selling off their captives to other groups when negotiations didn’t go well. Ours were apparently going so badly the men were beating each other up and spending a lot of time arguing about their “Amer-ee-cahn” captive.
Poul and I had already agreed: Whenever we can, we’ll try to stick with the devil we know, meaning it was better to stay with this group, crazy and dysfunctional as they seemed, than to take a chance on the mental stability of the next group’s leader. We were, at least, alive so far. Poul had not been badly beaten and I hadn’t been raped. It was hard to imagine better treatment from some other group. If we left this one there was no place to go but down.
They stopped the cars. There was no way of telling why. Someone pulled the doors open, and they ordered Poul and me to get out. With my anxiety mounting I saw them wave Poul back to the last of the four cars.
They’re separating us! Why?
I began to cry and beg them not to split us up. Poul pleaded with them to be human while I clung to his arm. Did they understand us? Probably not the words but certainly the intention. It did no good. They ripped me away from him and escorted him out of there. He looked back and called to me to “be strong,” and then they were gone with him.
The sense of time slows down and there is the actual, physical feeling of my stomach dropping like a bowling ball down an endless well. I’m keeping vomit choked back because it will surely trigger their outrage, giving them an excuse to explode. They all appear to be burning with an urgency so deep that it would be a relief to them to fall into slaughter mode and feed us their choice of knives or bullets.
So they’ve separated us now. They spent the evening talking about the “Amer-ee-cahn” and glaring at me. My God—Jabreel has disappeared. Poul is off with others, for some reason. I think he’s back there now in the last of the four cars. We don’t know if we’ll see each other again.
I focus on my breathing and teeter on the edge of a drowning panic. And because I pray, I call out to God in my heart, please make them kill me quickly. Whatever they are going to do, have mercy on me and make them kill me first.
On top of losing my only companion in this grotesque experience, I instantly felt the loss of his point of view on things. Poul had so many years in the region, his study of the intricate clan structure gave him insights into their status structure, their volatility, their possible reactions to the stress of bargaining in a hostage situation like this one.
Plus, he was one of us. On the most basic level, he was a companion, no matter what other attributes he had. His overall worldview was vital in helping me retain my own. When there is a genuine “us,” countless tiny references back and forth are instantly understood, confirming dual membership in some meaningful slice of humanity. With Poul gone there was no “us” left. Now it was only them, and they were many, all with the eyes of the heavy khat users that seem dead and angry at the same time. It reduced their behavior to insistent monologues with nobody in particular, cackling and flashing their green teeth, then later crashing and flopping down to sleep in any spot at all.
People say the threat of immediate death concentrates the mind. I found it worked too well for me. A jerky freeze-frame of bizarre and terrifying moments ran past in a strobe. Each one landed a punch. Sneering faces. Screamed orders. Gun barrels waving.
Before long the agreement I had made with Poul about not allowing despair to take control of us began to feel starry-eyed to me, foolish. I couldn’t help but look at our situation and think, Oh, I am so screwed. We’re in this way too far.
