A Rope and a Prayer (43 page)

I am a big believer in the power of intention, and in writing things down. With this in mind, I compose a written prayer to Mother Teresa, who died in 1997 and is on the road to sainthood, having been beatified by the Church. In doing so, I feel I am recruiting a higher entity to share in the responsibility for David’s release. Over the past few months I have written to my husband, government officials, CNN reporters, former CIA officials, newspaper editors, Taliban elders, religious extremists, and Siraj Haqqani. By now, writing to a Catholic icon on her way to sainthood doesn’t seem far-fetched in comparison. And it doesn’t seem any less likely to produce a response. It’s a surrender of sorts. A last-ditch effort.

I ask for the safe return of David, Tahir, and Asad, by whatever means possible. I believe in and would welcome a miracle.

In the days ahead, I make an effort to fill my time with activities that will boost my spirits—catching up with friends, talking with family, walking along the Hudson River—which is particularly meaningful because David and I did this weekly. I recall David’s romantic marriage proposal, and how nearly a year has passed since then. My only comfort is the realization that nothing is permanent. Things are inherently ephemeral. At some point, this situation will change—it will end. I desperately hope it resolves with David’s release and our reunion, but if it ends otherwise, there is some small relief in knowing that this suffering will cease. We have been in limbo for far too long.

I
lie awake in the darkness and wonder if the guards have fallen asleep. Their breathing is heavy and regular but I cannot see them. I blink over and over in the darkness but see no difference when my eyes are open or closed. I turn around and look at the orange light on the swamp cooler—an antiquated version of an air-conditioner—to make sure I can still see.

It is roughly 1 A.M. on Saturday, June 20. After seven months and ten days in captivity, Tahir and I have decided to try to escape. I fear that the guards will wake up and catch us. I fear even more that our captivity will drag on for years.

The confidence I felt while walking around Sharif’s house—the belief that we would be released if we were patient—has faded. The determination to survive in Makeen, the willingness to wait as long as it took, has been replaced by a searing rage at our captors. As my abject hatred for Abu Tayyeb, Timor Shah, and Badruddin has grown, my judgment has weakened and my patience has wavered. As I lie in the darkness, I wonder if trying to escape is another rash decision that will have disastrous consequences.

I try to calm myself by praying. In February, Sharif told me that if I said “Forgive me, God” a thousand times each day, our captivity might end. I have done as he suggested for the last four months with no results. But I do not care. As it has for months, prayer soothes and centers me. Each day, I stare at the ceiling and say, “Forgive me, God” a thousand times while the guards take naps. Counting on my fingers, it takes me roughly sixty minutes to reach one thousand. Tonight, as I wait to make sure the guards are sound asleep, I ask God to forgive me two thousand times.

That day, Tahir and I were told yet another lie regarding the negotiations for our release. Timor Shah said that an Afghan government negotiator had failed to show up at a scheduled meeting in the Pakistani city of Quetta. Instead, he had departed on a religious pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia. The negotiator was supposed to be finalizing the deal that Abu Tayyeb had told us about on June 4: the exchange of all remaining Afghan prisoners in Guantánamo Bay for the three of us. Tahir and I knew Timor Shah’s claim was absurd.

Since we returned to Miran Shah, we have been talking about trying to escape, but disagreed on exactly how to do it. Infuriated by Timor Shah’s lies that day, we finalize our plan. I will get up first, go to the bathroom without asking the guards for permission, and wake Tahir as I leave. If the guards remain asleep, Tahir will follow.

Following our plan, I slowly stand up and creep across the room. I pass Timor Shah on my left and then crouch down and tug Tahir’s foot. Tahir groans and I fear the guards will wake up. But their heavy breathing continues.

To my right, Akbar is sleeping with his head a few feet from the door’s hinge. I worry that opening the door will wake him, but I have no choice. I’m desperate to proceed with our plan. If Akbar wakes, I will tell him I was simply going to the bathroom. I open the door and the roar of the swamp cooler and ceiling fan seems to drown out the noise. I slowly step outside and gently close the door behind me.

I slip on my sandals, walk to the bathroom, and wait for Tahir to emerge. My heart pounds. Twenty feet away, on a shelf outside the kitchen, is a car towrope we plan to use to lower ourselves down the ten-to fifteen-foot wall ringing the compound. I had found it two weeks earlier on a shelf beside motor oil and car wrenches. Compulsively cleaning as I had in every house, I placed some old clothes on top of the rope to prevent the guards from seeing it. The discovery, I thought, was the first stroke of good luck in our seven months in captivity.

Several minutes pass, though, and Tahir does not come out of the room. I stare intently at the door—roughly fifteen feet away and directly across the courtyard—still Tahir does not emerge. When I pulled his foot to rouse him, he had groaned and I assumed he was awake. As the minutes pass, I’m unsure what to do. I stand in the darkened bathroom and wonder if Tahir has changed his mind. If the guards catch us, they might kill me, but they will definitely kill Tahir. Part of me thinks it was wrong even to have asked him to do this. I wonder if we are still capable of making rational decisions.

Even if we make it over the wall, we will have to walk for fifteen minutes through Miran Shah to reach a nearby Pakistani base. The town is full of Afghan, Pakistani, and foreign militants. Whoever catches us might be far less merciful than our current guards. And we are not necessarily safe once we get to the base. We could fall into the hands of members of the ISI who are sympathetic to the Taliban. They could simply hand us back to the Haqqanis. Months ago, our guards had told us that the Pakistani tribal militia had handed back one escaped prisoner to the Haqqanis and they had executed him. A week ago, another worrying sign of cooperation had emerged. The Afghan Taliban in Miran Shah had apparently received orders from Haqqani commanders to not fight the Pakistani army if it tried to regain control of Miran Shah. Instead, the Pakistani Taliban would fight them.

But I desperately want to see Kristen and my family again. And I want our captors to get nothing in exchange for me. The last video I filmed with Abu Tayyeb was enormously liberating for me. I felt I had signaled to them that if I died they should feel no guilt and move on. I alone was responsible for the situation.

In the three weeks since taping the video, I’ve felt more and more willing to take risks and plan an escape. I started performing tests in the last house we inhabited. In the middle of the night, I got up and walked to the bathroom without asking for permission from the guards. To my surprise, they stayed asleep. Then I walked to the compound door, pulled on the handle, and found it locked. When I told Tahir about my test run the next morning, he said I was crazy to try such things. Along with finding the rope in our current house, I found a set of padlock keys and tried to see if they opened the padlock on our compound’s exterior doors. None of them worked.

Now, standing in the bathroom, I try to decide what to do. I could walk back in the room and go to sleep, or I could follow a seemingly foolhardy backup plan that Tahir and I had devised to make sure he woke up. Telling myself that we may never have another chance to escape, I push ahead.

In the darkness, I step out of the bathroom and pick up a five-foot-long bamboo pole that’s leaning against the adjacent wall. I walk to the living room window and peer inside to make sure the guards are still asleep. I slowly open the window beside the cooler, point the pole at Tahir’s side, and poke him. I quickly close the window, walk back to the bathroom, and lean the pole against the wall. I step inside the bathroom and wait again. Still Tahir does not appear. I am convinced that he has changed his mind. It isn’t fair of me, I think, to expect a man with seven children to risk his life.

Then like an apparition, Tahir’s leg emerges from the window. His upper body and head follow and, finally, his second leg. As he stands up, I rush out of the bathroom to meet him and accidentally kick a small plastic jug used for ablutions. It skids across the ground, and I motion to Tahir to freeze.

Tahir and I stare at each other in the darkness. The cooler roars. No guards emerge from the room. Taking a few steps forward, I whisper in Tahir’s ear. “We don’t have to go,” I say. “We can wait.”

“Go get the rope,” he says.

 

 

Inside the room, Asad is sound asleep with the guards. This afternoon, Tahir and I made the gut-wrenching decision to leave without him, fearing he would inform the guards of our escape plans—as he had repeatedly in the past.

Two weeks ago, after Abu Tayyeb had me make the last video, Tahir had whispered to Asad “Let’s escape” at night while the guards slept. Asad did not reply, according to Tahir. Instead, a guard told Tahir that he had heard Tahir was talking about trying to escape. Finally, Asad had seen me trying the keys in different padlocks in our current house and told the guards, according to Tahir.

Our rupture with Asad has become the darkest aspect of our captivity. Over the months, the solidarity the three of us shared immediately after the kidnapping frayed under the threat of execution and indefinite imprisonment. Yet Tahir and I also know that Asad is under enormous pressure. He may be cooperating with the guards in order to save his life. In the end, though, we decide we cannot trust him. If Asad tells the guards, we will squander an opportunity for freedom we might never have again. We know that this house is closer to Miran Shah’s Pakistani military base than any we have been held in.

Since we arrived in the house two week ago, we have been trying to think of ways to flee. When the guards let me sit on the roof with them as they prayed at dusk, I noticed that a five-foot-high parapet surrounded it. If we could hoist ourselves over the wall, I thought, we could use the car towrope I had found to lower ourselves the ten to fifteen feet to the street.

At the same time, Tahir had surveyed the area around the house when the guards took him outside to buy food and watch cricket games. He plotted a route to the Pakistani military base. Finally, a few hours after Timor Shah lied to us about the negotiations, electricity returned to Miran Shah for the first time since fighting cut power lines six days earlier. We knew electricity meant the swamp cooler and ceiling fan would help conceal any noise we made when we fled. Unsure when we would have power again, we decided to make our attempt that night. We also added one last touch. We agreed Tahir would try to keep the guards up late playing Checkah. If they were tired, they would sleep more soundly.

Our plans for how to get over the wall were in place. Unfortunately, we disagreed about what to do next. Tahir believes the militiamen who guard the military base will shoot us if we approach them at night or hand us back to the Haqqanis. He says we should hike the roughly fifteen miles to the Afghan border. I do not think we could ever make it that far without being caught. Going to the Pakistani base is a risk we have to take. If we surrender to an army officer, I told Tahir, he will protect us.

One of our guards then walked into the room and Tahir and I stopped speaking. For the rest of the evening, we were not alone again. Our plan still had no ending.

 

 

After Tahir and I meet in the courtyard, I retrieve the rope and we slowly walk up a flight of stairs leading to the roof. Threading the rope through a drainage hole in the bottom of the five-foot parapet, we tie the rope to the wall and throw the long end toward the street below. Placing his toe between two bricks, Tahir climbs to the top and peers at the street below. He steps down. “The rope is too short,” he whispers.

I shift the knot on the rope to give it more length, pull myself up on the wall, and look down. The rope does not reach the ground, but it appears close. I glance back at the stairs, fearing the guards will emerge at any moment. “We don’t have to go,” I repeat to Tahir. “It’s up to you.”

He signals that he wants to try again. I get down on my hands and knees. Tahir steps on my back and lifts himself over the wall. I hear his clothes scrape against the bricks, look up and realize he is gone. I grab his sandals, which he left behind, and stuff them down my pants. I climb over and momentarily snag a power line with my foot as I slide down the wall faster than expected. I land in a small sewage ditch. I look up and see Tahir striding down the street in his bare feet. I run after him.

For the first time in seven months, I walk freely down a street. Glancing over my shoulder, I don’t see any of our guards coming out of the house, which looks even smaller than it felt like inside. We head down a narrow dirt lane with primitive mud-brick walls on either side of us. Makeshift electrical wires snake overhead in what looks like a densely populated neighborhood. I have no idea where we are or where to go.

I follow Tahir and we walk into a dry riverbed and turn right. I keep slipping on the large sand-covered stones and feel punch-drunk. I catch up to Tahir and hand him his sandals. “My ankle is very painful,” Tahir whispers as he slips them on and continues walking. “I can’t walk far.”

A large dark stain covers his lower left pant leg. I worry that he has ripped open his calf on his way down the wall. At the same time, my left hand stings. I notice that the rope has made a large cut across two of my fingers.

“Where are we going?” I whisper to Tahir as we quickly make our way down the riverbed, afraid someone will see or hear us.