B009G3EPMQ EBOK (15 page)

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.

To them I was a compliant captive who tried to do nothing to provoke them. But in truth I was more like a human radio beacon. I beamed out to the universe, out to any source in this world, in the next world, to please stop this. Somehow, put a stop to all this.

I struggled for some evidence of logic or clear reasoning in their
behavior, for anything that would bolster me in rejecting the prospect of my destruction on these ridiculous terms. But I discovered how hard it is to think coherent thoughts when fear seizes you. The best I could come up with was the notion that if unimaginably bad things can strike against all odds, then the chance of some sort of miraculous escape must also exist. I had to find ways to live long enough for one to appear.

When it came to petitioning the universe, I learned I can scream bloody murder without making a sound. Without moving a muscle, really.

FBI Agent Matt Espenshade made arrangements for a special crisis counselor to meet with Erik. She began the conversation by letting him know she had previously met Jessica through their work and thought highly of her. The fact that she was an admirer of Jessica’s was a bonus for Erik. While they talked, he felt reassured by her quick mind and evident compassion. He had already quit one therapist who just didn’t resonate with the situation in a way that was helpful, but this time he sensed someone who could help him work through the acid drip of his outrage over the situation.

He explained to her that he was tormented by feelings of guilt for not fighting harder to keep Jessica at home. First there was his concern for what she was going through at that moment, but just behind that was his fear of alienation from her when she made it back home again. Would she feel somehow betrayed by his failure to stop her from taking the trip? Would she think he had abandoned her by not going after her, once everything went bad?

The therapist’s manner was consoling. She offered assurances, but they were much like those expressed to him by friends and loved ones, all of them good to hear, but somehow ineffective against the gnawing sense of failure that just wouldn’t leave him alone. He agreed to check back with her again in a couple of days
to let her know how he was feeling then, but couldn’t imagine how things could be much different then unless he got word Jess was safe and on her way home.

•  •  •

Jessica:

After they separated me from Poul and took him to the rear car in the caravan, the engines all started up again, and we pulled away. We moved along the bumpy ruts of a road and I used the way the car threw our bodies around to sneak glances back and see if Poul’s car was following us. I couldn’t get a solid look, though. At this point my first full-blown anxiety attack hit me with a vengeance.

I called to Abdi to have the driver stop the car, gesturing to them I was going to be sick. I didn’t expect them to care, but I hoped they didn’t want to ride with vomit on the floor. They let me out long enough to run to the nearest bush, fall to my knees, and empty my guts out. The fear and my sense of outrage combined to eject what little food I had in my system. After that came the dry heaves while the emotions twisted through me. When my body calmed down a little bit, Abdi appeared with a diesel can and told me to hold out my hands. He splashed diesel-tainted water over my skin to replace the smell of vomit with the smell of petrol. It was an improvement. What can I say.

An odd air of compassion came over Abdi, unexpected and unreliable but no less welcome. He understood separating me from Poul had caused my panic, and quietly assured me the car holding my colleague was right behind us. Then he surprised me by asking if I wanted milk or meat to make me feel better. It was the first real food I’d been offered by these goons, but I was still too sick to have an appetite. I asked if there were any soft drinks around to help settle my stomach; he shook his head. But I’d seen others
with them. Either they didn’t have any more or I had reached the limit of his empathy.

Abdi tried to calm me down by asking if I had any children, which seemed a bit out of place under the circumstances. But something perked up in me; his questions contained an opportunity. I seized it and began to lie. Because Abdi’s culture places a far higher value on mothers than upon more “disposable” single women, I spoke my first lie to him and replied yes, I have a one-year-old son. He asked my “son’s” name and I was about to make one up when I realized they might make mention of my “son” in the negotiation phone calls. They could easily discover the ruse.