Under an Afghan Sky (31 page)

Now, alone, I wondered if something had happened. The voices inside my head were out of control. What if the negotiations weren’t going well? What if the whole notion that someone was even negotiating was just a figment of my imagination and no one was trying to secure my release on the outside? Maybe my kidnappers were sick of how long it was taking and were going to leave me there to die. What if they didn’t come back? What if the real Taliban found me? What then?

I realized my heart rate was starting to speed up again and I forced myself to take a few deep breaths to calm down.
Don’t worry,
I told myself out loud.
It will be okay. They’re looking for you, and the Afghans will come back for you. Don’t worry. You will be home soon.

Khalid had left enough slack on the heavy chain to allow my hand to reach out a little. I grabbed my new notebook and removed the pen from the spine.

Dear P,

I don’t know what is happening, but my kidnappers have left me alone in this hole for the first time since they took me.

I’m scared, darling. I don’t know what they’re planning, but my fear is that no one will come back here. I’m afraid—for the first time—that I might not survive this ordeal. You know that I am not afraid of death.

What worries me more is what will happen to my family if I never come home. I’m afraid it will permanently damage them. I know that life goes on after someone dies, but I still worry.

I worry less about you. You will move on, I know you will. You must. For me. I will be okay, hopefully up there in heaven. You have to know that. Death is
something I’m ready to accept, if it’s really my time. It will just be really unfair if we don’t have more time together.

I am so sorry for everything I’ve put you through. I promise I will make it up to you if I get out of here. I hope you can forgive me.

I love you, P. I know you’re not religious, but please try to find a prayer for me tonight. I’m scared.

xox

The tears finally flowed, freely and openly, and I was sobbing as I closed the notebook. I hadn’t really cried hard since I was taken. Now, it was as if I was finally releasing everything—fear, hope, anger, sadness—all in one fell swoop. My body shook with it, and shook for a while. It was a real deluge, and I let the sobs overwhelm me and take over.

Okay, enough, I finally told myself, wiping the tears from my face, stop it. Stop crying. Stop being a frigging wuss. What good is it going to do you to feel sorry for yourself? Stop crying and try to think of what you can do to get yourself out of here.

Dearest M,

I’m afraid you’re going to be a prisoner for a while longer, as much as that overwhelms me with fear and anxiety. And that’s why I woke up at four in the morning and couldn’t get back to sleep. And of course, I always turn out the light dreading a “bad news” call in the middle of the night, and then breathe a sigh every morning when the sun comes up.

I’m sure you’re hearing and seeing the storm that’s moving through, and I think of you being cold and wet and utterly miserable. I know you don’t have any warm clothing, and I hope they brought something for you. This is the most depressing thing that could happen this afternoon. It marks the arrival of winter and will only get colder in the days to come. Oh, M, what a mess we’re in.

I struggled again with the chain, trying to free my wrist, but it was on too tight. I stood up and tried to walk, but there was very little slack in the chain, so I could barely take baby steps. Still, I got on my knees and, holding the lamp in my left hand, crawled—slowly—up the tunnel on my belly, moving my knees forward together one step at a time, past the stinking toilet can and the urine-filled water bottle the captors were using. I held my breath so I wouldn’t have to smell the stench. When I reached the end, I stood up in the shaft and pointed the light upward.

The covering of the hole. It looked like a piece of wood, but I couldn’t be sure. I would have to climb the sides to get to the top, and the shaft was about eight feet deep. There was no way I could climb with my ankles chained together and then chained to my wrist.

I thought I heard rustling outside, a fair distance away. Maybe it was a villager.

“Salaam!” I called up. “As-Salaam Alaikum!”

Silence greeted my words. Dead silence. I tried again. Louder.

Nothing.

I couldn’t think of anything else I could do. If only I had something—a pole or a stick or something—I could try to move the hole covering. Then I could call out, despite Khalid’s warning.

But there was nothing in the hole itself I could use. I knelt down and made my way back inside the cave. The chain was again
digging into my ankles, and when I got back to my blue duvet I could see that my right ankle was red and raw. My captors had obviously known that I would try to get away. Of course they had known. What normal human being wouldn’t try to escape? I wondered if other hostages had escaped. Surely, everyone who is ever captured would think about it, and maybe attempt it, at some point. I wondered if I could have escaped on that first day when they were marching me through the mountains. Maybe I should have run. I was in pretty good shape then and might have been able to outrun them and their bullets. Yes, that was probably the best chance I had of getting away. Why hadn’t I taken it? Instead, I had let myself become their prisoner, let them keep me hostage in a hole for three weeks. Why hadn’t I tried harder on that first day to get away from them?

But there was no point in asking. I hadn’t run for obvious reasons. I had been stabbed and was bleeding. I didn’t know where I was going; the kidnappers had guns.

I sat back down and crawled onto my blanket, trying to rest my ankles so the chain would stop digging into my skin. Bending my legs sideways seemed to work the best—but then I couldn’t get my right arm in a comfortable position. If sleeping in the hole had been uncomfortable before, this was a whole new level of discomfort. I wished I had sleeping pills to put myself out for the night.

My prayer strike was short-lived. With my free hand, I reached into my pocket for the rosary. There was nothing else to do but pray, and it was usually how I got to sleep. So I started with the Hail Marys again. I focused on Mary herself. I imagined that God was too busy dealing with other, much more important things, like the war I had come to Afghanistan to cover, global warming, and AIDS in Africa. Things that needed his time and attention much more than little me in a hole. Mary would be my intercessor. She
was the mother figure, the one who could make things happen.

I had never prayed so much or so hard in my life. I wasn’t overly religious, but I knew my mother was, and she’d probably have her entire parish in Vancouver praying for me. I wondered if God could really ignore the prayers of all those people. I was sure he couldn’t. The more people prayed, the more he’d have to do something to answer their prayers. He’d have to listen, if an entire congregation was praying, no?

In any case, I kept praying to Mary. I imagined she was telling me it was going to be okay, and that everything would work out, that I was not to worry. I imagined she was stroking my matted hair while I kept praying and praying and hoping that I would fall asleep.

Sleep would not come, so I kept praying.

Please, Mary, tell my family that I am okay. Please don’t let anything happen to them. Please take care of my friends. Please give them all some comfort from the constant worrying about me. Please tell them I will be home soon, and it will all be okay. Please, please, please.

Soon, the alarm clock told me it was six o’clock. It was morning, and I hadn’t slept at all. The lamp was dimming and I was concerned that the bulb might not last much longer. I looked
around and saw that Khalid had left a new bag, which I hadn’t noticed the night before in all the mayhem. I opened it and looked inside. Four spare batteries, a few juice boxes, and three packages of cookies—the cheap fruit creme kind. A package of cigarettes. He had also left his lighter, which had a small flashlight on one end. I decided not to change the lamp batteries right away, to conserve as much power as I could, since I didn’t know how long it would be until new supplies came. Maybe they’d come and slide stuff down the pipe, as they’d done before.

I opened a package of mango creme cookies and ate a couple, taking the top off first and trying not to chew too hard. I’d felt a bit of a toothache in my back teeth a few days ago—probably all the sugar I was consuming was eating into the enamel of my teeth. I wasn’t even hungry, but I stuffed a couple more cookies down my mouth. I was only eating to kill time, and to make sure that I had a little energy. I dug through the juice boxes looking for apple, but there was only mango, which was my least favourite because it was thicker and coated the roof of my mouth in a sugary syrup. Still, my body needed fluids, and I wasn’t about to drink the water in the can, which had been there for a few days now.

I played with the lighter for a while. I took the English schoolbook that my kidnappers had been trying to read and tore off a page. I held the flame under the bottom right-hand corner of the page and watched the paper catch on fire. The dampness in the room made it harder to burn, and the fire stopped halfway up the page, just below a drawing of a young boy, one of the characters in the story. The smell of burnt paper was a welcome relief to the stench in the hole, and I burned the rest of the page. Maybe the smoke would signal that there was someone here. Maybe if ISAF—International Security Assistance Force—troops were in the neighbourhood, they would follow the smell of smoke to the hole, and then I could call out and guide
them to come and rescue me. I tore out a few more pages and burned them close to the pipe hole, the smoke carrying my hopes up to the surface. I closed my eyes and breathed in the smell of the smoke—it was something different for a change, and I imagined I was building a fire.

I’ve always associated fire with the comfort of home. My father’s charcoal barbecues of my childhood, where he cooked amazing meals for our family—steaks and chicken and oysters—either at home or at the beach during a family picnic. The fireplace at Kelly’s house on the beach in Tofino was the last place I had held a flame to paper to try to get a fire going. It had been a cold and grey West Coast summer day—I’d just come in from a few hours on the surf, ripped off my wetsuit, and was about to head to the shower, but I wanted to get a fire going first. It took a while, and Kelly and I were laughing at our inability to light it. The wood was damp, which was always my excuse. But eventually, we had a roaring fire, and we sat around reading and sipping Scotch, cozy on the couch under a fluffy blanket.

I suddenly remembered that I’d put Kelly’s name down on my list of emergency contacts before I left for Afghanistan, and that her last message to me was that she had lost her cell phone. Or that it had broken. I couldn’t recall now which. But I’d put Kelly down as a contact because she is the most organized and responsible person I know. She is meticulous and thoughtful and smart—which is why she is such a good journalist. She had left the CBC years before to become an independent producer, and in recent years had been travelling the world doing stories for National Geographic and Discovery Channel. I knew that if anything happened to me, she would be able to pick up the pieces and work through whatever complications might arise in my absence.

Kelly—or “Mooey,” as I had nicknamed her because the two of us are known as “the cows”—had been nominated for
a television award for one of her Discovery series and was supposed to be in Toronto the week before. I felt a pang of guilt for whatever I was putting her through, and for having to deal with the CBC and whatever authorities were handling my kidnapping back in Canada. As if she didn’t already have enough on her plate. I’d put her down as an emergency contact without thinking that anyone would ever have to call my emergency contacts. I reached for my notepad.

Dear Mooey,

I am so sorry that you are probably having to deal with my disappearance back home. Or maybe you’re not. Maybe your phone is dead and no one was able to get hold of you and you’re blissfully unaware of what’s going on.

Okay, so maybe that’s wishful thinking on my part so I wouldn’t have to feel so guilty about whatever it is I’m putting you through right now. Because I know it can’t be good. You’re dealing with the CBC, my parents, and probably the RCMP or CSIS. I think I owe you a lifetime’s supply of Lagavulin, just for that.

I’m doing okay. My kidnappers have left me alone, and I have some juice and cookies to last me for a while. Hopefully, it won’t be much longer before they realize they’re not going to get a lot of money for me and let me go.

I’m not sure if you made it to Toronto, but if you did, I hope you won the Gemini and we can celebrate when I get home. I’ve been thinking a lot about Tofino, and the idea of getting back on a surfboard is inspiration enough to get me through the bad days. I hope we can hang out for a bit out there when I get out of here.

And lastly, I just wanted to say thank you—for everything you’re no doubt doing while I’m away. You’re the best friend anyone could ever ask for and I’m grateful to have you in my life. I know we joked about what we should do if one of us meets an untimely end, and I just wanted to remind you that I want half of my ashes scattered in the Pacific in Tofino and the other half dropped off the Empire State Building in New York. I’ve also left you some insurance money to do that.