A Rope and a Prayer (35 page)

That night to our delight, Sharif tells us that our move to South Waziristan has been canceled. Overjoyed, we tell ourselves that this may finally be the breakthrough in negotiations that we’ve been waiting for. I again somehow think Kristen has managed to give me a gift on her birthday.

A week passes. Sharif announces that we will definitely be moving to South Waziristan. Again, nothing is as it seems. The following morning, we silently load our sleeping bags, clothes, and pots and pans into the back of an Afghan police pickup truck that has been captured by the Taliban. A green Ford Ranger with an Afghan flag painted on the door, the truck is one of hundreds of American-made pickups the United States has provided to the Afghan police as part of the American police training effort.

I lie down in the back of our station wagon, on top of blankets that our guards have placed there for me. The guards—Timor Shah and Akbar—insist they will continue living with us and we will not be handed over to the Pakistani Taliban. As we drive away, I feel an emotion I never expected: I long for Miran Shah.

For the next several hours, we drive south down a modern, two-lane asphalt road in broad daylight. I stare out the window at the green tree-covered hills. The landscape again reminds me of the Rocky Mountains.

We cross into South Waziristan and enter the territory of Baitullah Mehsud. At dusk, our car pulls into the parking lot of a large government building or school. Sharif says good-bye. “We’re bringing you here because you’re going to cross back into Afghanistan,” he says. “Ten days, ten days.”

A Pakistani Taliban commander politely ushers all of us into a room at the rear of the compound. I am told again that no one must know that I have arrived in the area. If local Arabs find out an American hostage is present, they will kill me. We are given fresh tea, rice, and bread for dinner. As we eat, the Pakistani Taliban commander stares intently at me. I’m sure I am the first American he has ever seen up close. The zoo animal phenomenon is happening again but I don’t care. As the months pass, the experience has become normal. After sharing a cup of tea with him, we drive in the darkness to a house that will serve as our new prison.

Over the next several days, it becomes apparent that the Afghan Taliban have not handed us over to their Pakistani counterparts. Instead, the two groups work seamlessly together. The Pakistani Taliban are giving the Haqqanis a remote house where we can be imprisoned. In military terms, they are providing logistical support for their Afghan allies.

Our new house has a half dozen rooms and is the largest we have been imprisoned in. It is also the most primitive. All the floors are dirt. There is no running water. Within days, fleabites begin appearing on my skin.

I feel for the family that normally lives here. A cowshed with heaps of drying manure is located inside the compound. Pots, pans, and other utensils in the mud-floored kitchen appear to be poorly washed, apparently due to the lack of water. Piles of ash show where they cooked food over an open fire. The people of the tribal areas are destitute.

M
y suitcase has been packed for nearly three weeks, but there has been no word from the captors.

Silence is torturous. Our imaginations run rampant when things are quiet. This leads to all kinds of impossible schemes. The latest: AISC, the private security team, wants to bribe David’s guards. They also want to enlist the help of the United States military to retrieve David. By official policy, our government will not interfere in Pakistan.

The FBI continues to maintain that David is in the tribal areas of Pakistan, specifically an area called Miran Shah, known to be a Haqqani stronghold. But the private security team says David continues to be moved between Miran Shah and surrounding border areas of Afghanistan. We spend hours on noon calls and follow-up calls debating these issues. It passes the time, but gets us nowhere.

There are three tracks our team is simultaneously pursuing: the moral track, which consists of pressuring the mullah in Swabi to continue to plead for the release of our three on humanitarian grounds; the monetary or negotiation track, which at the moment has come to a standstill; and the bribery track, which seems highly unlikely since none of us know for sure exactly where David is.

Word comes back to us from John that Siraj and the kidnappers are now demanding $5 million and prisoners. They are sure that we actually have the $5 million. They will not settle for less. This is a far cry from the report a few weeks ago from an Afghan journalist that they were “hopeful” about a deal. Someone has apparently told the kidnappers we have $5 million. Something has happened to stop communications.

Soon after, we find out that the State Department has recently raised the bounty on Siraj Haqqani’s head from $200,000 to $5 million. This is a stunning example of the lack of communication between government entities. How hard would it be for one agency to touch base with another? We have kept the State Department and FBI aware of our progress and of the captor’s slow decline in demands. The State Department and the FBI clearly have no plan to keep each other updated on current cases. We know the captors are Internet savvy, despite their archaic beliefs. It’s quite possible they set up a Google alert and found out about the increase in bounty that way.

The private security team blames the FBI. The FBI claims another agency has set the government’s bounty and that they are not responsible. I fire off an e-mail to Richard Holbrooke, asking what the State Department was thinking—is this a tactic or negligence? He says he had no idea they’d raised the bounty. He calls me soon after to tell me in no uncertain terms that any other course of action beyond family negotiations is futile at this time. He feels the contractors are grossly misleading us and “playing a dangerous game” with David’s life in considering alternative options. A rescue operation is out of the question because our government believes David is in Pakistan. And the diplomatic approach, meaning pressuring the Pakistanis, has yet to yield a tangible result. Holbrooke advises me to ignore the advice of AISC. “You are the only person in this situation who has David’s interest purely at heart. Everyone else has to worry about setting precedents.”

I appreciate his candor, but I am frustrated by our exchange. I feel caught between a rock and a hard place. Even if we do raise some substantial money, what good is it going to do if we can’t communicate with the kidnappers?

At this point, I am going to work three to four days a week and dedicating the rest of my time to David’s case. I feel like I am living a double life, experiencing global terrorism at the most personal level. There is a constant influx of information and misinformation. Sifting through it proves to be exhausting, maddening. Each entity involved in David’s case—the newspaper, the government, the security team—has its own bias and agenda, despite their good intentions. I do not fully trust any of them. My own agenda is simply to secure my husband’s release. I listen to all opinions, but trust no one. It is not unusual for me to spend entire days on the phone or computer, contacting government officials, sharing concerns with Lee and McCraw, and following up with Michael Semple. Days have lost their significance. I am stuck in a seamlessly never-ending season of waiting. I feel I am in the middle of a complex game in which time and silence are my opponent’s greatest weapons. I have no control over the situation. Despite the collective efforts made on David’s behalf, only the captors have the power to release him. I am increasingly convinced that our fate lies in their hands.

 

 

On March 22 we receive a message from Team Kabul concerning the engineer, the go-between whom the Haqqanis dispatched in David’s case. The plan was that the engineer would work on a negotiated resolution for our three as he made his own attempts to free his son, who was also being held by the Haqqanis.

The message from Team Kabul is that the engineer’s son has been released. Their report reads: “Approximately two weeks ago the engineer was finally successful in resolving his son’s situation. He was able to convince the Haqqanis that he had no power to enable prisoner release and that the governments were not going to help. In addition to whatever had been paid on his release, he was able to negotiate a payment of $60,000 for his son (down from $100,000).” The update continues: “The engineer continued to make efforts to call Atiqullah on behalf of Team Kabul/ David. He states that Atiqullah has not taken his calls for approximately sixteen days. He states he will continue to try.”

Not a good development. And local negotiations through John have produced no better results. The kidnappers have turned off or dumped their cell phones. Michael still tries to create a channel directly to Siraj, the older brother of Badruddin whom the FBI has identified as one of David’s kidnappers and who he believes has the authority to strike a deal for our three.

I have spent most of my work day securing a location for an upcoming celebrity cover shoot. I have successfully negotiated a 20 percent discount on the day rate for a Malibu beach house and booked an on-set chef to cater a vegan meal. I have also learned that in addition to being an avid vegetarian, the young actress is very concerned about our environment and requests that she be chauffeured to the shoot in an environmentally conscious vehicle—a Prius or similar.

Meanwhile I worry David is stuck in a cave somewhere, eating nothing but rice, or that he is being shuttled through a war zone. It is amazing to think our two disparate worlds coexist. And that my life is now in a constant state of tug-of-war between the two.

At home, bills mark the passage of time: another maintenance check, an outstanding invoice, a payment to a trauma therapist. March is nearly behind me. In an attempt to spark communication once again, Michael asks that I compose several letters: greeting cards for the mujahideen.

 

 

I have accumulated a strange arsenal of pen pals. “Pals” is a misnomer; it implies a two-way communication. I send letters out into the great void, hoping they will have some impact on David’s release.

The men Michael has suggested I write to are Haqqani elders in Afghanistan and Pakistan, including the mullah who may have direct contact with Siraj. The others are to Siraj’s uncle and to an aspiring politician who was once an underling to Siraj’s father, Jalaluddin. I have no idea if these messages will reach the intended targets. If they do, most likely the recipients will reject them, for fear they are sprinkled in a magic dust that doubles as a tracking device. I am told by American officials and security consultants that the Taliban believe such things, including that beacons are placed on objects like letters to guide drone attacks. These beacons, they think, can take many forms: liquid, solid, particles.

I have mixed emotions about this task. On the one hand, it is hugely time-consuming and a bit unorthodox. Yet it makes sense to try to establish a point of contact and seems no less plausible than other channels we have tried. Now that the engineer seems to be out of the equation and no one is contacting Team Kabul, I feel I have nothing to lose. I wonder if this is merely a way to keep me occupied and optimistic—if so, this is perhaps one of the kinder agendas I am tasked with in these long months.

It is impossible to apply logic to any considerations at this point, given how irrational the whole situation has become. The strangest of my “greeting cards” is to Siraj himself. Michael has advised me to “just briefly make the moral case.”

“You should use a slightly anonymous form of address instead of his name so that our contact does not feel vulnerable carrying it,” Michael writes to me in an e-mail. “I suggest something like ‘Dear Brother in God’—Charm him! We use the letter to establish direct connection and a lever that our contact can work on. In other words, you do not have to agonize too much about the wording—it’s our contact’s job to advocate.”

I have no idea if this is an exercise in futility, but I compose the following and ask David’s young friend Ruhullah to translate it into Pashto for me. It may read like a second-rate soliloquy, but it is certifiably culturally sensitive:

I cannot help thinking what the Hallmark equivalent might be, imagining a category for “Captives and Their Handlers” somewhere between Birthday and Sympathy cards. This strikes me as precisely the kind of art project that would garner a rave review in the New York edition of
Time Out
magazine.

Michael also suggests that I write a letter to David, in case one of the elders has the ability to pass it on. I will also e-mail a duplicate to the International Red Cross, even though they have been unable to confirm the status of my previous letters. In it, I refer to a conversation David and I had the day after our wedding along a rocky coastal park in southern Maine. Following the torrential arrival of Hurricane Hannah at our reception, the day after the wedding was calm, sunny, and clear.