A Rope and a Prayer (36 page)

In addition to pursuing a negotiated release, AISC, through the use of their local Afghan network, is also trying to infiltrate the guards. A few days later, a report comes in from AISC. Their local sources claim that David is being guarded by as many as ten people. They rotate in and out and include several foreign militants. Our security team’s informants on the ground claim they have succeeded in bribing David’s guards to walk him out when the time is right. They also claim that David has been separated from Tahir and Asad and is being held at a village named Kharcin along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

Their report is rather detailed. They add that some of David’s guards are so young that they are devoid of facial hair. The specificity of this report temporarily gives us hope in its veracity; they even send us coordinates of the village and a Google Earth map to match. Still, I decide not to hold my breath on this one. Misinformation and false reports from local Afghans has been rampant. While we have received information of a potential location, we have not received proof of life. The FBI still maintains that our three remain in Miran Shah in the tribal areas of Pakistan—far from the border—and that they have been there since my first phone call with David in November. They say there is no benefit for the kidnappers in moving David over the border and into Afghanistan, where they would be vulnerable to surveillance, rumors, and military intervention.

A week later, we hear from our team’s Afghan network that David has been moved and is once again being held with Tahir and Asad. They are now in a village called Shinkay. The number of guards has increased from ten to twelve. One of the bribed guards has agreed to bring in a beacon to show their exact location. Once again we are reminded that he is standing by to walk our three out.

At the beginning of April, a third update comes in from the local network. Our three have been moved to a house in Miran Shah. Their guards have changed and now include young men from Chechnya and the Pakistani province of Punjab. Later we will learn that most of the reports from the Afghan network are wrong.

It has been five months since David was abducted. We have spoken only twice. I make a list in my journal of all the things he’s missed, from holidays to disasters and personal milestones: Thanksgiving, the Mumbai attacks, Christmas, Gaza, New Year’s, the inauguration of Barack Obama, the miraculous landing of a plane on the Hudson River, Valentine’s Day, my fortieth birthday. We are nearing Easter. More important, we are nearing the six-month mark. I feel this as an ominous shift: from months to a half a year. I fear this will drag on indefinitely.

The security consultants have told us to sit tight and wait. But Lee and I feel we need to expand our outreach once again to the United States government. If David is indeed in Pakistan, they can continue to pressure the Pakistanis to find him and pressure for a release, assuming they can get word to the kidnappers. It is tough to accept that the American government can do so little to effect change.

T
wo deafening explosions shake the walls of the compound in South Waziristan. My guards and I dive to the floor as chunks of dirt hurtle through the window.

“Dawood?” one guard shouts, saying my name in Arabic. “Dawood?”

“I’m okay,” I reply in Pashto. “I’m okay.”

The plastic sheeting covering the window hangs in tatters. Debris covers the floor. Somewhere outside, a woman wails. I wonder if Tahir and Asad are alive. Chunky grabs his rifle and orders me to follow him outside.

“Go!” he shouts, his voice shaking with fury. “Go!”

Our nightmare has come to pass. Missiles fired by an American drone have obliterated their target a few hundred yards from our house in Makeen, a remote village in South Waziristan. Dozens of people are probably dead. Militants will call for our heads in revenge.

Outside, shredded tree leaves litter the yard, but the house and its exterior walls remain intact. Tahir and Asad look worried. No one is hurt, but I know the three of us may not survive for long. It is March 25, and for months the drones have been a terrifying presence that has unnerved and angered the guards.

In the courtyard after the missile strike, the guards clutch their weapons and anxiously watch the sky. Fearing a direct attack on our house, Timor Shah orders me to cover my face with a scarf and follow them outside the compound. I know that enraged Arab militants or local Waziri tribesmen can identify me once I am outside, but I have no choice.

They hustle me down a hillside to where our station wagon is parked between rows of trees. Opening the rear door, they order me to lie inside and keep the scarf on so passersby cannot see my face. Then they disappear.

I lie in the back of the car and silently recite the Lord’s Prayer. In the distance, I hear men shouting angrily as they collect their dead. For months, I have promised myself that if they tape our execution I will remain calm for my family and declare our innocence until the end.

After about fifteen minutes, Timor Shah returns to the car and leads me back to the house. The missiles have struck two cars, killing seven Arab militants and local Taliban fighters. I feel a small measure of relief that no civilians have been killed. But I know we are still in grave danger.

For the next two hours, I do my best to placate the guards. I do not walk in the yard. I do not speak unless spoken to. I praise God for saving us. Later, I learn that one guard was so enraged that he called for me to be taken to the site of the attack and ritually beheaded as a video camera captured the moment. Timor Shah rejected his suggestion after Tahir argued furiously with him and again threatened retribution from his tribe if I was harmed.

Several days later, we hear that foreign militants have arrested a local man. After the militants disemboweled the local man and chopped off his leg he purportedly “confessed” to being a spy. Then the militants decapitated him and hung his body in the town bazaar as a warning to the local population.

 

 

In the days after the drone strike, my focus begins to slowly shift. Instead of thinking I need to be patient, stay calm, and serve out my time as a captive, my goal becomes simply to survive.

Nestled in the mountains, Makeen is colder than Miran Shah, and frequent rain and frigid temperatures create miserable conditions. Hail-storms are common and viewed as punishment from God by our guards.

Timor Shah gives me additional chores. Along with sorting stones from our rice before it is cooked and the Sisyphean task of sweeping dirt floors, I fill the barrel in the bathroom with water twice a day so that we can clean waste from the toilet, a porcelain hole in the floor. Using a tube the guards placed in a nearby stream, I fill two fifty-gallon plastic drums with water once or twice a day. As we quickly use up water for ablutions, cooking, and cleaning, I see it more and more as a magic elixir that I took for granted when it surged out of a pipe in New York at the twist of a knob.

The chores are demeaning, since elders are normally treated with reverence in Pashtun culture, but I do not care. The tasks help me pass the time and appear to give the guards the sense that I am loyal.

Rarely allowed outside the house, I see my world shrink to a few dozen square feet. Training my mind to stay optimistic becomes more difficult. Walking back and forth in the yard is complicated by the drones. Tahir struggles as well, telling me at times that he can no longer remember the faces of his seven children. “This is not life,” he says. “I want to die.”

I urge him to be patient. He prays more and memorizes larger portions of the Koran. He prepares for salvation no matter what happens to us. His faith seems to give him peace and strength. To me, it is an example of religion as a positive force. Tahir has no fear of death because he is absolutely certain he will go to heaven.

Two weeks go by and Sharif’s promise we would be crossing into Afghanistan proves to be another lie. With each passing month, we feel increasingly forgotten by Abu Tayyeb and Badruddin Haqqani. Abu Tayyeb talks with our guards by phone but refuses to speak with us. One day, Timor Shah speaks with Abu Tayyeb by phone and tells us there is an agreement for our release. We are elated. The next day, Timor Shah says there is no agreement.

We are now at the mercy of the young guards who control our daily existence. Soon after we arrive in Makeen, Timor Shah begins pocketing some of the money given to him by Badruddin to buy our food and supplies. He dares us to try to escape so he could end our captivity with “one bullet.” He complains that “great mujahideen” are dying in the drone strikes yet enormous attention is being wasted on one American prisoner.

When I show Timor Shah several dozen fleabites on my stomach and arms, he buys a farm pesticide and suggests that I put it on my sleeping bag. Fearing it will make me sick, I decline. When the bites continue, I show Mansoor, our other guard. His response is to show me his own stomach, which has no bites on it.

“I never get sick while I’m on jihad,” he says.

The guards begin blaming me for things I did not do. Someone places a piece of toilet paper in a bucket the guards use for ablutions and I am accused of putting it there. Mansoor announces one day that I was about to pick up the machine gun when he walked into our bedroom. In truth, I had been sweeping the floor and was startled by his arrival. Another Pashto expression I researched as a possible book title refers to Pashtuns’ reputation for tenaciously fighting their enemies. “A stone will not become soft,” it says, “nor an enemy a friend.”

For hygienic reasons, I decide in Makeen to cut my hair for the first time in four and a half months. I had refused to do so because I felt cutting my hair was an acknowledgment that we were still many weeks from being released. Asad cuts the hair on my head but we do not trim my beard. The guards urge me to grow the beard until it is the length of my fist, the way the prophet wore it. My beard is gray, like my father’s and grandfather’s before me. I look like an elderly man but relish it. I want the guards to feel ashamed for kidnapping an old man.

Several hourlong conversations between Tahir and me have prompted the guards to accuse us of planning an escape. As a result, we speak less and less. Some days, we talk only for five to ten minutes. At the same time, the guards are furious that I have not converted to Islam despite reading the Koran for several months. I stop reading it in an effort to decrease tensions. As these sources of stimulation disappear, I become lost in my own thoughts, and memories of the world I had known begin to fade.

Trying to stay connected, I begin listening to the BBC’s shortwave radio broadcasts for hours at a time. I hear my colleague from the newspaper, Jane Perlez, interviewed by the BBC in Islamabad. I know she is roughly a hundred miles away, but I feel physically farther and farther away from the world I knew.

News stories about New York make my heart leap and I instantly think of Kristen. I relish an arts program called
The Strand
, a celebration of human creativity. I follow English soccer teams, something I have never done in my life.

I listen to an interview with a Baghdad-based mediator who tries to resolve kidnapping cases. He says that cases involving foreigners can drag on for years. I do not tell Tahir what I have heard.

On weekends, I try to catch a show called
The Forum
, in which British hosts discuss contemporary thought and life. In one program, a guest declares that humanity has finally reached an age where people expect to work at jobs that fulfill them. Human existence has moved beyond simply subsistence toiling to feed one’s family, they say. The comment—and my surroundings—make me realize how truly disconnected some Americans and Europeans are from the rest of the world.

On another BBC program, a writer describes how there are two narratives in life. There is the narrative that we actually experience each day and the narrative we create in our minds of how it occurred. I wonder what narrative I will construct of our captivity if we survive.

The BBC broadcasts raise my spirits each day, but they also give me the sensation of being in a coma. I can hear how the world is progressing but cannot communicate with anyone in it.

 

 

The video image is grainy but I immediately recognize the Polish hostage.

“Hello, Peter,” an off-camera questioner asks. “How are you?”

“Fine,” answers Piotr Stanczak, the Polish geologist who was kidnapped by the Taliban six weeks before us.

“Fine?” the questioner asks.

“Fine,” Stanczak answers, nodding. Two masked militants holding Kalashnikov assault rifles stand on either side of him. A black sheet with jihad slogans in Arabic is tacked to a mud-brick wall behind him.

I read about Stanczak’s execution in a Pakistani newspaper a month ago. Our guards have somehow gotten a copy of one of the videotapes made of him while he was in captivity. They are playing it for me, Asad, and Tahir on a small DVD player that Mansoor has bought.

“You feel good?” the questioner asks.

“Yes,” Stanczak answers, again nodding. He is soft-spoken and appears to be in his forties.

“Okay,” the questioner answers. “And what is your message for your people, for the people of Poland?”

“I would say to my people, to people from Poland, to make pressurize for my government,” Stanczak replies in broken English. “Because government send too much army, too much soldier to Afghanistan, and to Muslim country. And I want stop this fight.”

Seated on a plastic mat, Stanczak appears calm. He holds his hands in his lap and occasionally glances to his right as he speaks. He is dressed in tan local clothing. He wears a dark brown winter jacket as well. His clothes are more or less identical to mine.

“Okay,” the questioner answers. “And what is your message for the government of Poland?”