Captivity (46 page)

A series of rapid-fire explosions. I hit the floor. “What should we do?” I call. “Should we barricade the door?” Another set of explosions.

English voices in the stairwell. They’re coming up the stairs. My panic instantly evaporates. We’re safe. There are no captors up here. “We speak English,” I call out. “We’re British and Canadian.”

“British Special Forces,” we hear. “Is Mr. Kember there?”

“Present,” Norman cries.

“We’ll be right there, Mr. Kember. Close the door and wait where you are. Don’t open it until we get there. We have to clear the rest of the floor.”

It takes all of fifteen seconds. We hear a commotion of boots, doors busting open, more percussion grenades, and then they’re opening the door, stepping inside, desert-camouflage soldiers in full battle kit. They look at us, their eyes wide with surprise. One of them gives an order. A medic rushes into the room and goes right to Norman. Somebody tells us to sit down. The medic is followed by a soldier with a pair of three-foot-long bolt cutters.

“Is everyone okay?” somebody asks, maybe the medic.

“Yes,” we say.

“We’ll have you out of here in a minute.”

There’s a soldier with a camera. He takes pictures of us in our handcuffs and chains. There’s a soldier bending close to me. Is it the medic? “Do you know what happened to Tom Fox?” I ask him. “The American who was kidnapped with us. Was he released? Is he at home?”

“No.” The voice hesitates. “He’s … he’s dead.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes,” the voice says.

“How do they know? Did they find his body?”

“Yes.”

I’m about to ask another question. “You can find out more once we get you out of here,” he says. The voice changes the subject. “Are you okay?”

“I’m okay,” I say.

“Here, let me get you out of those,” another voice says. It’s the soldier with the bolt cutters. I hold my right wrist out. He places the ratchet into the jaws of the bolt cutter. The handcuff slips out of
place. “Here, let’s try that again,” the voice says. His movements are clumsy. He repositions the handcuff and closes the bolt cutter but the metal is too thick. He’s trying to get the whole bracelet off.

“Try doing it here,” I say, pointing to the chain that links the two handcuffs.

“Yeah, we can get that off later,” he says, referring to the main body of the handcuff.
Yes
, I smile,
with the Instrument of Grace
.

He has trouble getting the bolt cutter into place, his hands are shaking so much. He closes the bolt cutter across the link but the metal is too strong. “Just cut one part of the link, that should do it,” I say. He hasn’t done this before, I think.

“Sorry …” he says. The bite closes a second time and the link snaps.

“Thank you!” I say, immediately standing up. My arms are free! I am free! I clasp the handcuff around my wrist and marvel at the sudden loss of its power. It is now nothing more than a strange metal bracelet.

I look around me. Nothing is clear or distinct. Everything is a haze of commotion and sound. “Get whatever you want to take with you,” a voice says.

I have to change, wear my own clothes to freedom. I go to my little pile of clothes in the barricade. Another voice breaks through. “Do you recognize this man?” I look to where the voice is coming from.

There’s a man in a white
dishdashda
in the doorway. His arms are bound behind his back. A black blindfold has been lifted onto his forehead. There’s a soldier gripping each of his arms. He’s not very tall. He looks at me. His face is sad. There are dark circles under his eyes. The lower half of his face is blue with unshaven beard. Who is this man? I know I’ve seen him before.

“Yes,” I hear Norman say beside me. His voice is clear and certain. I look over at him, but he’s already turned away, busy with collecting his things. I look back at the man. He nods at me. I reflexively nod back. The soldiers pull the blindfold down over the man’s eyes and lead him away. He does not seem to have been tortured or mistreated.

“Was that Medicine Man?” I ask Harmeet, who is changing next to me.

“Shh! We’ll talk about it later.”

I’m totally confused. “All right,” I say. It doesn’t matter anyway. We’re getting out of here. I strip off my captor clothes and put on my own socks, underwear and pants. I need a belt. With glee I pull the string out of the waistband of my green track pants and pass it through my belt loops. For warmth I wear the Sacred Heart sweater over my collared shirt over my T-shirt over the vest. I joyfully fold up the rest of the captor clothes—green track pants, socks and underwear—and leave them neatly in the barricade. I slip into my shoes, grab my notebooks and pen, and take one last look around me: I want to remember everything. “I’m ready,” I declare to the soldiers.

“If you could just wait out in the hall for a moment,” a voice tells me.

I go to the
hamam
first. I close the door. I stand over the shit-stained toilet and urinate. I pour water from the
hamam
jug into the bowl to flush the urine down. I go to the sink to wash my hands. I look into the mirror. A gaunt, clammy, bearded, greasy-haired man with blue eyes looks back at me. I laugh.
Hey good lookin’! What’s cookin’?
I wipe my hands dry on my pants. I decide to leave the toothbrushes. I turn away from the sink and walk out into the foyer.

There are soldiers everywhere. I look at their faces but I can’t find their eyes. These are not fresh-faced recruits. These are battle-hardened vets bristling with years of specialized training and what must be a hundred pounds of equipment—full-body armour, helmets with Plexiglas visors, headset communicators, guns, ammo, fierce-looking knives, pockets everywhere filled with the tools of their trade. One of them brings me a chair. I sit down.

I’m ecstatic. It’s over. We’re safe, we’re free, we’re going home. I’m wildly grateful. Astonished. They came, they risked their lives for
us
. Simply because it’s their job. At the same time I am sad, troubled, aching. That it had to come to this, a special forces commando rescue. How strange and paradoxical: we have been delivered by the very thing we were kidnapped for setting our lives against.

“How’re you doing? Is everything okay?” a soldier voice asks.

“Oh, yes, just fine,” I say, grinning madly. “It’s just that I never expected it would end this way.”

“It never does,” the voice says.

Harmeet sits beside me. He’s brought his own chair.

“Shall I bring the toothbrushes?” I hear Norman calling out from the bathroom.

“We’ll get you some toothbrushes,” a soldier voice says.

“It’ll just be another minute,” another soldier voice says. “As soon as we secure the perimeter, we’ll get you out of here.”

There’s no rush, I want to tell them. I want to go into every room, look in every nook and cranny, touch and feel and freely see everything. I look around me, look at everything, the once-forbidden foyer doors all broken open, light flooding the terrazzo floor, the high, whitewashed ceilings, the dust-coated walls.

Norman emerges from the bathroom. “I brought the toothbrushes anyway,” he tells us. “Just in case.”

“Okay, we’re ready to go,” a soldier voice says.

“Thank you,” I say.

“Just doing our job,” the voice says matter-of-factly.

We walk towards the stairway, soldiers in front and soldiers behind. I feel like I’m in a dream moving in slow motion. I look around me, wide-eyed, for the first time unafraid. We’re walking down the stairs. I turn to look back, one last time, at the foyer we’re leaving behind. I look down at the filthy, threadbare carpet that covers each stair tread, the translucent windows at the landing. We turn, go down the second flight of stairs, descend into the grand hallway of this grand house. Ahead of us, twenty-five feet away, is a set of wood and glass doors I never noticed before that open into a formal reception area.

We’re down the stairs. Five steps ahead and we turn to the right. To my left, the entrance to the butterscotch blue-curtained room. The door is closed. Three steps ahead to the left. The entrance to the red-curtained dining room is open. The plastic chairs we sat in last night are still in their exact same place.
Goodbye plastic chairs!
Two steps ahead
the hallway sink.
Goodbye hallway sink!
Four steps ahead and we’re in the kitchen. The door leading outside has been smashed open and shards of tempered glass are strewn everywhere. I look closely at the lock. It’s a deadbolt you can only open or close with a key. I take a breath and step across the smashed-glass threshold. Across and out. Into fresh flowing air, good morning sunlight, a breeze on my cheeks, freedom!

I look up. It is stunning, miraculous. I want to open my arms, somersault, jump, dance. Above me blue, an ocean of blue! And green! The green growing fronds of a palm tree!

“We need to keep going,” a voice behind me says. I’m standing in the middle of a gauntlet of soldiers lining both sides of the driveway. They’re looking at us, smiling. I want to stop, shake their hands, look in their eyes, ask them their names, thank them. But there’s no time. We have to keep moving. Through the gauntlet. My feet move me towards an armoured personnel carrier. It’s a squat, desert-camouflaged steel bunker on a rolling tread of metal plates, thirty feet away. There’s an eight-foot wall to my right. A blindfolded man standing with his face to the wall. He’s between two soldiers. His wrists are bound with white plastic ties. He’s wearing a white
dishdashda
.

My heart is rent. My feet step towards him. My hand reaches out to touch his shoulder. He jumps. He doesn’t know who I am.
I don’t mean you any harm
, I want to say. My mouth opens, almost says it,
Medicine Man
, but then I realize he doesn’t know that name. The tables have turned. Just like that, in the snap of a finger. My heart is flooded with an immense sorrow.
I don’t want this, what’s happening to you now. I don’t want you to suffer
.

The soldiers beside him are becoming anxious. My mouth opens and closes like a fish gasping for water. The words won’t come. My hand pulls away, my feet step back, my body turns towards the armoured personnel carrier and my feet start walking again. With every step the chasm between us widens. I am in the land of freedom now, and he is being taken into captivity.

I join up with Norman and Harmeet. I look around me. We’re on the edge of a big traffic circle. There’s a monumental piece of
architecture on the other side of the circle. I turn towards the house. It’s big and respectable, tidy, festooned with flowering roses, surrounded by high walls, indistinguishably ordinary. They tell Norman he’s going to ride in the Humvee parked behind the tank. A soldier points Harmeet and me to the armoured personnel carrier. We climb up the ramp into the dark interior.
^*

There’s a soldier inside. “Watch your head,” he says. We duck. He motions us to sit on a bench seat. He’s wearing a helmet and a headset that’s plugged into a jack somewhere.

“My name is Jim,” I say, extending my hand to him.

“And I’m Harmeet.”

“Yeah, I know who you are,” the soldier says, shaking our hands.

“What’s your name?” Harmeet asks.

“Rob,” he says. He looks to be no more than twenty.

My name! I should’ve told Medicine Man my name! There isn’t much time. “Who’s your commanding officer?” I say. “I’d like to ask him a quick question.”

“You want me to get ’im?”

“Yes, if you wouldn’t mind. I just have a quick question.”

The soldier shouts out of the hatch. A face appears in the hatchway. It’s a steely-jawed, tough-as-nails warrior face. “What do you want?” he says.

“That man over there,” I say, pointing to where Medicine Man had been standing. “Could I talk to that man over there? Just for a second. There’s something I need to tell him.”

He looks confused. “That man over where?”

“The Iraqi man in the blindfold and handcuffs.”

“No,” he says. “It’s not safe here. Our job is to get you out of here. There’ll be time for all that later.”

“We can talk to him later?”

“Yes.”

The door closes. We’re inside the war machine. It takes a moment for my eyes to adjust to the darkness. I look around me. We are sealed inside what must be twelve inches of metal. Everything around us is dark green, machine-tooled functionality. We’re surrounded by pieces of equipment held in place with strapping and netting, flat metal boxes, mysterious switches and levers, conduit tubing for wiring, all the hard forms of the tank’s inner structural works, CAUTION and DANGER stencilled everywhere, instructions stamped on little metal plaques explaining things, like what to do in the event of a rollover. We have gone from one tomb to another.

“Where are you from?” I ask.

“Indiana,” Rob says.

“How long have you been here?”

“Nine months. Going home soon.” Silence. “And you?” he asks.

“Four months,” I say.

He nods. “Are you hungry?”

Harmeet and I look at each other. Yes, we say.

He points us to a khaki bag. “There’s a muffin inside there. It’s not much,” he says, “but it’s all I got. They’re not the best. You know, it’s army food.”

We break the muffin in half. It’s chocolate with chocolate chips. I eat it slowly. It is, I’m certain, the most delicious thing I’ve ever eaten. I look at the packaging. It was made somewhere in Ohio. A muffin, shipped to Iraq from Ohio! The ingredients list is as long as my arm—all long, hyphenated, incomprehensible chemical names. I show it to Harmeet. “They won’t have to embalm us now when we die,” he says.

Rob points to a rectangle of light behind his shoulder. It’s four inches wide and one inch high. “There’s a window here if you want to look outside,” he says.

I look through what must be a foot of glass. I see a distorted, blurry, convex slice of a small piece of the world outside. Underneath the window is a Velcro flap that functions as a fold-over curtain. I sit back to let Harmeet take a turn.
So this is what the world looks like from inside the war machine
, I think.

We are moving. Rob’s mouth is moving. He’s shouting something, but the engine roar-clang-pound is deafening. I can feel the power of it shuddering in my bones.