B009G3EPMQ EBOK (14 page)

There was no more communication than that. What a disappointment. Although I was glad to send a proof-of-life message
back home, even by a circuitous route, I had no explanation for not being able to connect using the phone numbers for Erik or for my dad. What was that about? There was nothing else to cling to but the voice of a man we vouched for but actually didn’t know, who claimed to work for our company. But being in communication with
somebody
was at least something to cling to. It was a bit more than just another straw to grasp at—maybe something closer to a good-sized stick.

Throughout the short phone conversation the Chairman stood back with Abdi, staring at us with bleary red eyes. With the call finished, the Chairman barked an order, and we were herded back into the cars and driven back to the Banda place. There they force-walked us back out into the open field and placed us down on the ground again and onto the damp sleeping mat, ending that day the same way the four preceding days had ended, with the waving of a gun barrel and the shouted command, “Sleep!”

They were several days into Jessica’s kidnapping, and the phone conversations between Matt and Erik were becoming contentious. Erik knew Matt was on their side, but it fell to Matt to be the messenger of misery in keeping Erik’s expectations in line with those of the experts on the Crisis Management Team.

“Matt, I still feel ashamed for not going in to get her. I think my contacts could track her down, and I know trained men who will go with me! I’m telling you, I think we could locate her.”

“Erik, I promised you we would put all our resources into this. I’ve kept that promise so far and I’m going to keep it until we have Jess back here with you.”

“I trust you, Matt, but do you know where she is? I need to know.”

“I can’t say.”

“What?
Matt
 . . .”

“I can’t tell you, Erik.”

“What? Why?”

“She needs you here. We can’t risk having you attempt to go get her yourself.”

“Wouldn’t you, if you were in my shoes?”

“I might. Plenty of guys would want to. But if I did, it would be
a stupid mistake. I would be letting my feelings get the best of me and cause me to make some macho dash to get her. Even an assault by the best-trained men in the country is full of risks.”

Erik sat on the edge of his bed and gave a heavy sigh. “All right. All right. I want to do this however it’s best. So—what options do we have?”

“There are three conditions that have to be met before we can go in for Jess: one, if we believe her to be in immediate lethal danger; two, if her health fails; and three, if negotiations have completely stalled.”

“Okay, but since you convinced me about the risks of an assault I don’t want anybody authorizing a raid without telling me, you understand? She’s my wife, Matt. And if there’s just one guy with a gun to her head when your men get there, it won’t matter how many soldiers you send.”

“My point exactly, and that’s the same reason I need you to promise you won’t try to go cowboy on us.”

“I won’t. I promise you, Matt. Just please, if you believe Al-Shabaab holds her or will be in a position to get her, tell me you’ll go after her then. Because if that’s the case, a raid is the only hope we’ve got.”

“The decision to go has to come from the highest level, Erik. But I can assure you we have the best guys anyone could ever ask for, and if anyone can do it, it will be them.”

“I just need to know I won’t be sitting here in a week’s time, looking at my computer screen and seeing video of Jess being killed.”

“Erik, we need to focus on what we can do. And you need to be there for Jess’s family, for your family in Sweden. And when she comes out she’s going to need you more than ever before. This is not the time to let emotions take over.”

“I know. I know, but you have to understand, I promised her if something happened—”

“Anything
you do that increases her jeopardy—you won’t be doing it for her. You’ll be doing it for you.”

Erik found that the truth of that was like a gorilla blocking the doorway. There was no way to ignore it.

“Damn it, Matt.”

“It’s a rough road. You have to hold steady.”

“What about an exchange?”

“Of what?”

“Prisoners. I’ll go in. They can swap her for me.”

“No we can’t.”

“What difference does it make to them? They just want money, yes? If it comes to a point where Jess is sick and we can do an exchange, I want to do it.”

“We’re not even going to talk about it. Desperation won’t help. Give us a chance to get things working.”

“It’s been six days.”

“Right. And these situations never get resolved quickly. They take time.”

“How much? That could mean anything.”

“That’s right. And the answer is, nobody knows. But it seldom takes less than a matter of months, Erik.
Months
.”

That night, alone in their apartment, Erik felt one of those particularly dark waves of emotion pulling him down. The doubts he had been holding back about his responsibility for Jess’s predicament ran through him like vandals, in spite of the fact that he knew there had been no stopping her from going on that trip once she agreed to go. It was, as she said, the work she had come here to do.

But this—this ordeal of waiting. It was not improved at all by the cultural experience he’d gained there over the past six years. The hot zone of southern Somalia is a place an entire young male population is confronted with virtually no opportunity. In some parts of that country, crime openly rules the streets. That didn’t
mean these criminals knew what they were doing. Successful ransom kidnappings have always been notoriously tricky. A kidnapping that didn’t go wrong was far more rare than the ones that fell apart and got people killed.

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?