A Rope and a Prayer (45 page)

Part of me wonders if the escape is part of a deal—a planned release. Michael has been optimistic about a settlement of late. Yet when I call to alert him of David’s status, he is shocked as well. He assures me that no money has changed hands.

I return to a sunny apartment with papers scattered everywhere. My mother has called
The New York Times
. They, in turn, relay information to the office in Kabul and on to the families of Tahir and Asad.

My mother looks frazzled but maintains her composure. She has written the details of her conversation with David on a Post-it pad. We sort through all the stickies. Miran Shah. Tochi Scouts base. Captain Nadeem. We spend the next hour calling government officials—our travels to Washington come in handy after all. David McCraw and Susan Chira arrive. Among the four of us, we are able to contact Richard Holbrooke, Hillary Clinton’s office, and Ambassador Anne Patterson in Pakistan. This proves vital. The government officials alert their counterparts in Pakistan that we know David is on a scout base in Pakistan—and that we expect him and Tahir to be safely exited. Everyone is tense.

We fear the ISI will detain David for questioning. But Holbrooke’s involvement serves as a safety net. He has repeatedly raised David’s case with high-ranking officials in the ISI and pressured them to make the Haqqanis release him. As a result, the ISI insists on helping to facilitate David’s transport out of Miran Shah.

I have waited months for this moment. I never thought it would end quite this way, but I am thrilled. I realize that David is not completely safe yet, but my prayers truly have been answered. John, our contact and negotiator on the ground, calls after hearing the news from Michael. He is overjoyed and amused at the outcome. “What can I say,” John says. “Your husband saw an opportunity and he took it. He is a brave man.” Michael tells me that he knows one of the officials on the scout base and calls to alert them that David is a decent fellow and to not let anything happen to him.

Agent Jim from the FBI stops by briefly. He is delighted. He has devoted the past seven months to our case and feels a huge sense of relief as well. He tells me he will be in touch with Lee and me regarding arrangements to travel to Dubai to meet David.

A
half hour passes, and Captain Nadeem again agrees to let me try to call my wife. With each minute, I begin to believe that we may finally return home. The phone rings. This time, Kristen picks up.

“David?” she says, breathlessly. “David?”

“Kristen,” I say, savoring the chance to utter the words I have dreamed of saying to her for months.

“Kristen,” I say, “please let me spend the rest of my life making this up to you.”

“Yes,” she says. “Yes.”

My wife sounds exactly the same—calm, iron-willed, and utterly committed to me. I struggle to express all the regrets, thoughts, and emotion that have swirled through my mind and body for the past seven months. I also know that we are not completely safe and repeatedly ask her to help get us out of Miran Shah. I repeatedly praise Captain Nadeem and his men for allowing us on the base. I say we never could have escaped without their help. As he listens to my end of the conversation, I hope I am persuading him not to hand us back to the Taliban.

When I try to explain to Kristen what happened with Asad, I hear the confusion in her voice. I know part of me will never be proud of this night. Captain Nadeem urges me to finish the call and I tell Kristen good-bye. The conversation is rushed but blissful.

I ask the captain to let Tahir call his family. He reaches them and is ecstatic. Tahir—my sole friend and companion of seven months—looks as if he has been physically transformed. In captivity, a shroud seemed to hang over his features. His face now has a glow to it that I vaguely remember from our meeting at the Kabul Coffee House.

The captain’s phone rings and he begins speaking with someone in English. “Yes,” he says, “this is Captain Nadeem.” Someone speaks on the other end of the line and the captain states that I am, indeed, on his base. The conversation continues for roughly thirty seconds and Captain Nadeem hands me the phone.

“David?” a man with an American accent asks. “Is this David Rohde?”

“Yes,” I reply.

“This is Keith from the American Embassy,” he says. “I’m a security person here.”

He apologizes and says he must ask two questions to prove that I am, in fact, David Rohde. I name the university I attended and the town where Kristen and I married. As I speak with him, I feel my confidence rising. If the embassy knows we are here, the Pakistani military will have more difficulty turning us over to the Haqqanis. Covertly supporting the Taliban is one thing. Openly handing a kidnapped American back to a militant group, I hope, is another.

“Please do everything you can to get us out of here,” I tell Keith. “Please, we need your help.”

He says the embassy has contacted the Pakistani government and made it clear that our evacuation is vital. He promises to call back again with more details. I take down his phone numbers and say good-bye.

We move into Captain Nadeem’s regular office. Outside, the sun is rising over Miran Shah. His office is identical to Pakistani military offices I have visited countless times for interviews. Heavy wooden furniture gives the office a British colonial feel. Plaques on the wall list the previous commanders of his unit, the Tochi Scouts. The first names on the plaque are British and date back to their founding in the late 1800s.

The young captain is a Pashtun himself but attended Pakistan’s military academy—the equivalent of West Point. I will later learn that being posted in the area is extraordinarily dangerous for young officers. Pro-Taliban members of the tribal militia have killed or “fragged” young officers in the past.

With each passing hour, I am more impressed by his bravery and kindness. From the moment I met him, I have had the sense that Captain Nadeem will protect us. As we continue talking, I feel myself come back to life.

Keith calls back from the embassy and again asks if I feel safe in our current location. “Yes, yes, I do feel safe,” I say, looking at Captain Nadeem and smiling. “Captain Nadeem and the brave men on this base have been wonderful to us.” Privately, I hope that I’m adding to enormous pressure being placed on the Pakistani military. I repeat that we are eager to get out of Miran Shah. Keith says arrangements are being made to fly us out of the town. I thank him again for all his help and hang up.

More sandwiches and tea arrive. Giddy, I tell Captain Nadeem that he and his men, in fact, are the true Muslims, not our kidnappers. I tell him about reading the Koran and seeing the difference between the ideals the prophet preached and how our captors acted.

To my delight, Captain Nadeem agrees. He gives me a book entitled
The Glorious Islam
by a Pakistani writer. He says that the Islam followed by the Taliban is a distortion of his faith. As he speaks, my heart races in my chest. The world—and the Pakistan—I remember is still here.

I make him add an inscription in the book. In neat blue ink, he writes:

I will cherish this book for the rest of my life. He reminds me of all my other Pashtun friends—most of them fearless journalists who work on both sides of the border. Churchill was wrong. All Pashtuns are not inherently violent. They are deeply disenfranchised. The biggest difference between the Pashtuns who kidnapped me and the Pashtuns who saved my life is education.

Captain Nadeem tells us his men are reporting activity by the Taliban in Miran Shah. They are searching for us, but Captain Nadeem reassures Tahir and me that we are safe. Again I think of Asad. A Pakistani helicopter is on its way, Captain Nadeem says. We will be flown out of Waziristan in a few hours.

I
begin to feel that after seven months of working together as a team that my interests are suddenly at odds with those of the newspaper. Susan Chira, the foreign editor, is extremely helpful in assisting us to make calls to officials. Yet it becomes increasingly obvious that she is also under pressure to deliver a story about David’s kidnapping and escape. Periodically she turns to me and says, “At some point, we need to start thinking about what we are going to write, what the story will say.”

I tell her there is no need for a story now. In fact, I think it would put David in harm’s way to write about his escape before he has safely left the region. She presses the point all night. I feel the wall I’ve built around myself over recent months begin to collapse with the realization that our struggle is nearing an end. Unfortunately, this wall does not crumble quietly. Frazzled, I finally tell her to stop mentioning the story and demand that she leave.

I just want to take this in and focus on getting David out of Miran Shah. The last thing I want is publicity. Lee and I are on the phone all night. He gets us two seats on a flight to Dubai for this evening—it’s now early Saturday morning—from John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York. It was sorted out long ago that if David was freed, we would meet him in Dubai. I recall my conversation with Sean Langan, the British journalist and former Taliban hostage who contacted me several months ago. Sean urged me not to rush off to Kabul or Pakistan upon David’s release. He suggested I give David a moment to collect himself. “He may need the time to make himself presentable and get his bearings.

“Meeting in Kabul would be tense,” he cautioned me, adding, “most likely it would consist of the two of you in the backseat of an armored vehicle, covered or with a third party urging you to keep your heads down for security reasons.”

Sean told me that his own debriefing was tiresome after the Taliban freed him, but it also made him feel like a journalist again, giving him a chance to tell his story and in the process resume his professional bearing. He advised me to keep the return as low key as possible. His own return was rather public and proved challenging when he was immediately confronted with cameras on the tarmac in London.

When David McCraw leaves the apartment, at 3 A.M, we are still awaiting confirmation that David and Tahir have been helicoptered out of the scout base in Miran Shah. My mother retires to the couch. I head to the bedroom to pack for tonight’s journey. I am overjoyed at the thought of seeing David again, and slightly overwhelmed that this time tomorrow I will be on a flight to Dubai. It is impossible to sleep.

I’ve said countless prayers over the last seven months. They have taken various forms—from spontaneous pleas to personal rituals and traditional recitations. For me, prayer is a conversation of sorts. A give-and-take. A question seeks to be met with an answer or to elicit greater understanding. Occasionally the response is unexpected and unpredictable, yet makes complete sense at a deeper level.

I’ve always believed David would return—even though I could never pinpoint when. My internal clock never had a sense that it would be anytime soon. The conversation seemed to be lagging as I felt my questions were always met with an unsettling reply:
Wait.

Tonight my lesson in patience is approaching an end. My prayers—and those of friends and family—have been met with a surprising response.

As I lie awake, I utter two simple words:
Thank you.

A
t roughly 9 A.M., Captain Nadeem brings Tahir and me to his personal quarters. We have now been on his base for roughly five or six hours. A television plays a Pakistani news station. Captain Nadeem changes the station to CNN International and I stare at the television transfixed. The studio and stage lighting have changed slightly since the last time I saw it seven months ago. Images of protests in Iran flash across the screen. We are back in the universe I have inhabited all my life. I am amazed that I have been so physically close to civilization but felt so far removed from it.

Captain Nadeem lets me take a shower. When I return to his room, a Pakistani military officer is present. He welcomes us, takes photos of us, and asks us a few questions. All of them focus on Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of the Pakistani Taliban who is considered an enemy of the state by the Pakistani military. He shows little interest in hearing about the Haqqanis, Abu Tayyeb, or the Afghan Taliban. He leaves after half an hour.

Tahir and I are taken to an ornate bedroom for VIP guests. We are given more food. Sitting alone for the first time, we recount our escape. Tahir worries that something could still go wrong. I tell him what I have repeated for months: I’m confident my family is doing everything they can to help us.

There is a knock on the door, and two beardless Pakistani men with neatly trimmed mustaches, crisply ironed salwar kameezes, and sunglasses greet us. They announce that they are from the ISI, Pakistan’s premier military intelligence agency said to still tacitly support the Haqqani and Afghan Taliban. This is the moment we have feared.

At first, they are friendly. “We have been looking for you,” one of them says as he opens a thin green file. Inside is a white sheet of paper that looks like a news story about me. A photo printed out from the Internet is on top of it. I ask him why they were unable to find us, given that we were so close to the base. They insist again that they have been looking for us. As the conversation continues, it becomes clear they, too, are more interested in getting information about Baitullah Mehsud than about the Haqqanis.

One of them pulls out a video camera and begins filming us without asking. I don’t trust them and demand that they stop. The ISI operative continues filming. I stop answering questions and demand to see Captain Nadeem. The two men disappear and Captain Nadeem arrives and apologizes. He insists that a helicopter is on its way to evacuate us. It should arrive in two hours.