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There are times when frustration is more painful than terror. With any form of fear, the message running through the body is simple: run or fight. Frustration occurs when you can’t run, can’t fight, and can’t stop the torment. It not only fills you with the pain of an intense fight-or-flight adrenaline dose, it forces the muscles themselves to strain against the brain’s demands to act, act, act.

If I had allowed myself to scream I wouldn’t have been able to stop. I had no power to keep the tears out of my eyes or prevent them from running down my face, but I refused to openly cry. The only source of dignity left in that hour was to deny this man the satisfaction of goading me into some sort of hysterical response.

I glanced over at Poul and saw him crying, too. I think even the biggest and strongest man could be reduced to childhood emotions when sustained evil is done to him and he is powerless to fight back. I had seen interviews with war heroes who claimed
anyone can be broken in captivity, no matter how strong he is, how well trained, how macho and defiant. They talked about how we all have the tiny and frightened child we once were still residing somewhere inside us. These guys had found ours with a few simple phrases.

“You die here!” and “I send Mohammed
your head
!”

From the first FBI phone call with Agent Matt Espenshade, Erik was informed that the situation would be monitored “at the highest level” of the U.S. government, and that if any military action came down in the form of a secret raid on foreign soil, the order had to originate from the Oval Office itself. It was helpful to have the chain of command explained to him, but there was no way to determine how much conviction stood behind the words. Was that explanation only a way to tell him the U.S. government was either too distracted or too uncommitted to help?

Everyone on the Crisis Management Team assured him the international diplomatic implications were disastrous for the United States if Jessica died before they got her out, or if any mission to save her and her colleague failed. Still, the list of obstacles facing any potential rescue team offered little chance of success. The same victims whose rescue was intended could easily become casualties amid the chaos of battle with a panicked band of drug-fueled fighters, most of whom had nowhere else to go and little to lose.

In the daily briefings, whether with Matt and the FBI or Dan and the CMT, Erik always made it a point to have questions ready, aimed at getting the others to consider things they might not have thought about yet. He repeatedly raised the question of risk to
potential rescuers, the ones who would actually go into harm’s way if there was no other choice. He spent days running around to the pharmacies and doctors to get her necessary medications to send to Jessica’s captors. But the results were discouraging. He was able to be fairly certain the packages were getting as far as the town of Adado, near the kidnappers’ camp, but at that point he had no way to know that the kidnappers were convinced there were tracking devices hidden inside the medicine packs, and therefore refused to let any of it near her, no matter how sick she became.

In the meantime he also used his knowledge of the Somali gossip line to deliberately spread rumors, especially when he was on a work trip in Somaliland, saying negotiations were going on but that the family had no idea where she was. He sent out another rumor saying both families were selling off private possessions to raise money, struggling for every dollar to raise the ransom money. The intent was to encourage overconfidence in the kidnappers and tempt them into relaxing their guard. He sent word via the local clan grapevines: There was no reason to panic or do anything rash; the kidnappers’ plan was working so far—the families had no idea what to do and were raising money as fast as possible. It was a blind effort, blowing a fog of confusion toward the enemy, but he knew the landscape and trusted it to function.

Erik also worked to discourage Jess’s family and friends from losing patience and expressing their frustration to the media or anyone outside their circle. Everything about this situation forced him to consider how the smallest slip of electronic information between two private people could be hijacked for use by distant criminals. His experience with local politics made him leery of discussing the case with anyone who might use it for personal promotion without regard to Jessica’s welfare.

So far, no one could be certain the Somalis had any intention of selling off the hostages, so this meant that condition number one
for mounting a rescue attempt (if Jess was known to be in immediate lethal danger) had not been met. And while Jessica’s health had to have been badly affected by this entire experience, there was no specific information on that. Up to now, the kidnappers’ communicator, Jabreel, hadn’t allowed her to talk long enough to describe her physical state, so condition number two (that Jess’s health was failing) had not been met either.

Condition number three (that negotiations had stalled) was drawing closer. Longer periods between calls were being enforced by the captors. Negotiations weren’t going well at all. Even though Erik and the family were kept out of the dollar negotiations, they had to be told the ransom demands were far out of range in order to allow them to participate in strategy discussions.

This Jabreel character seemed to go into a rage every few seconds. More than his interest in communicating on behalf of the kidnappers, he constantly changed the topic to insist he was not one of “these pirates,” and that he ran “a local NGO” and was “a respected citizen.” He insisted he’d been brought in especially to give weight to the negotiations. Any comment made to Jabreel indicating he might be anything less was met with another emotional outburst from him, wasting valuable bits of communication time.

Erik’s years of experience in the Somali political scene gave him certain insights into the reasons for the kidnappers’ irrational demands, beyond what he was officially allowed to know as the husband of the American hostage. He had a good idea of what the American agencies in the area might be capable of doing in gathering intelligence. Having followed current events in Somalia over the years, he could imagine some of the surveillance methods used by Matt and his colleagues. It was public knowledge throughout the media that American drones were used in the region, and he had a few guesses about what other methods were employed.

He had knowledge of many of the local people who could
tap into the region’s gossip network, and for all of technology’s advancement, this network remained blind to the latest spy machinery. In this manner the old ways returned, back from the time before these dazzling things. This was the safest way for Erik to get messages to the kidnappers that they would not realize originated with him, hints of misinformation to help keep the kidnappers off-balance. On the verbal gossip network, communication was done quietly, one person to another, along a chain of speakers known to one another. Each one is responsible for whatever he speaks into that network. Liars wake up to groups of angry people crowded at their door. The fear of vengeance from one’s neighbors keeps the network safe from loose lips. But it does not keep the network safe from outside information, clandestinely fed into the arteries of the community.

On the ground in Somalia, the kidnappers were plagued by ignorance of the capabilities of their opponents, but they used what they knew to put up their best defense. They kept the hostages covered under scrub tree branches during the daylight hours, which effectively concealed them from overhead observation. But their nighttime procedures failed them, when they consistently moved the hostages into the open for sleeping.

The raging paranoia of the kidnappers—their long trips into the desert to disguise their location with the cell signal, the days spent holding the hostages under tree cover—had a firm basis in reality, as far as it went. Although they held the upper hand through the blunt-force tactic of surrounding their hostages with armed fighters, their dominance ended with that one cold fact.

The Americans knew exactly where they were.

The Crisis Management Team was also gathering as much intelligence as possible on the daily life in the camp and what resources were consumed there. It was logical that the town of Adado was where they received daily shipments of everything they
needed. Jabreel and several others stayed in or near Adado when they weren’t out in the bush with the rest.

At this point the CMT knew which subclans were involved and even which of the clan elders and local political leaders could be trusted. Most important, they knew the local authorities were either too corrupt or too compromised to offer meaningful intervention. Uniformed authorities could not be counted on to participate in any part of a rescue, because in the planning stage there would be no way to seal the flow of information in advance of the attack. They could never rely on an air strike or a proxy attack by local authorities. Options began to crumble away.

Jessica:

I don’t think a person gets used to being forced to live in filthy conditions, but I found for the sake of my sanity that I had to give in to the idea of it, at least: using the “toilet” behind bushes, with men wandering in all directions, furtive body washing using a small bottle of water while huddled in a depression in the ground behind anything that could obscure the view. We had to use the same water for bathing they used for making tea or soup, and it all tasted as if they’d actually filled the cans without bothering to rinse out the traces of diesel fuel already in them. Eventually they must have realized diesel fuel can kill you, and began supplying us with bottled water for drinking, but the diesel water remained standard for any washing. The toughest part was trying to avoid the feeling that I was descending into an animal existence I would never escape.

To raise my spirits and give me something to do, I capitalized on the fact that the men were getting too lazy to bake bread, so I persuaded them to let me do it. My fledgling efforts amused them no end, but I soon got the hang of it. What a relief to prepare food that might have some sand in it but was at least free of the communal bacteria line.

I mixed several handfuls of flour with water and used my hands (washed as clean as possible) to knead the dough over and over again, then divided it into pieces about the size of a baseball. I pounded each “baseball” out into a disk shape, almost as flat as a pancake.

Poul and I found an excuse to spend a few minutes together each time I did it because he volunteered to gather armloads of thin, burnable sticks for firewood. Even though they kept us apart most of the time, we were able to manipulate them somewhat by playing on their laziness.

But what little conversation we could manage consisted mostly of mutual complaints, and yes, I believe the scale leaned hard toward my side. These angry thugs had managed to smear so many aspects of my dignity, of my sense of myself as a person. Somehow it felt as though I would have been cooperating with them by remaining silent and not complaining when I could.

We could absolutely agree on a few things: Most of these guys were drugged-up morons. We made small exchanges of passing remarks, and I found that I needed this conversation. The topics were all shallow enough, but that didn’t matter at all. The power in it lay in simply having a few moments to speak with someone from your own world, all the while surrounded by so much that was not merely foreign, but also twisted and malignant.

On some mornings they would allow me to walk in circles with Poul around our tree, stretching our legs and doing a little deep breathing. We couldn’t make noise or sing out loud for fear of drawing attention and causing somebody to get irritated, so while we shuffled along in those monotonous circles I sang under my breath, usually the same music we played at my mom’s funeral. The version I knew was done by the singer Rita Springer.
“I don’t understand your ways, but I will give you my song
 . . .”

The familiarity of it put me in close touch with my mother, made me sense her energy. I always thought of her and Erik at the
same time. The combined sense of each one’s love for me formed a joyful wave. I felt it lifting me to its highest point every time I came to the lyric,
“I’m desperately seeking, in faith still believing, the sight of your face is all that I’m needing. And I will say to you—it’s gonna be worth it, it’s gonna be worth it, it’s gonna be worth it all.”

More than any other piece of music, this song was my soundtrack to those monotonous circular walks. I’m sure there are many other ways for someone to deal with this particular form of tedium and danger. I sang my way through it. I freely admit to using the uplift from that lyric as a load-bearing wall for my morale and for the connection it represented to powerful forces in my life.

With the morning constitutional done, I made the bread dough for “Jessica’s Captive Campfire Sand Rolls” while Poul built a roaring fire, then let it burn down to coals. We threw the pancake-shaped pieces of dough on top of the coals for a minute on each side, using a stick to turn them. No matter how long I spent pounding the dough, there was always sand left in it. But you go with what you’ve got.