B009G3EPMQ EBOK (25 page)

•  •  •

Before Jessica’s family left Nairobi, Matt Espenshade and his wife invited them all to their home for dinner with their small children. Over the meal he made it clear that he understood that the effect of the kidnappings would be felt not just by Jessica and Erik, and
their families, but by everyone who cared for her. Such crimes represented an ominous threat to the future of anyone daring to enter the region. This couldn’t be tolerated, because the Horn of Africa had sunk into such economic and political chaos that to date nobody had found any way to recover without outside help and intervention. If this was to be the fate of those who brought that help, intervention and change for the better would be a long time coming.

He repeatedly assured Erik, “Once the FBI is on a case we never give up. There are dozens of people working on this. The FBI is dedicated to getting Jessica out. We won’t rest until we do. I have the privilege of dealing with you and the family every day, but there are dozens of others, and I tell you, they’re working tirelessly on this. These are people you’ll probably never meet.”

He added, “We’ll get Jessica back alive.” Erik was glad to hear it, but he had to wonder how Matt could know that.

“I’ve got eight years in the army,” Matt told the family, “seventeen with the FBI. And I’ve never seen so many people working to retrieve one American citizen.”

“Well, there’s Poul, of course.”

“Yes, but our mandate is to act on behalf of the American citizen. We have to hope Poul will benefit from that.”

“So you’re saying if you have to get kidnapped, try to be American.”

“If you want American military help, it’s the only way we can offer it. Now Jessica has that going for her, and it’s no small consideration. Here’s the thing: There are two potential outcomes here. One is that we can get them to agree to a ransom somebody can actually pay.”

“The other one?”

“The other one is the armed rescue that we’ve already discussed. You know the dangers.”

“Let’s be positive for a minute here. Suppose they stage the raid and get both Jessica and Poul out?”

“Then the first leg of your journey is over and the next one begins. It could be just as rough in its own way.”

“I don’t like the sound of that.”

“I wouldn’t be helping you if I sat here and told you pretty lies.”

Erik recognized the truth of that and felt grateful for someone who actually spoke straight to him. Matt showed compassion while staying away from false hope. By an expert associated with the Crisis Management Team, he was told, “The first concern is short-term medical, and that will be taken care of according to her initial evaluation, as soon as they pick her up.”

“Good so far.”

“So far. Then after short-term medical care comes the possibility of long-term medical care.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Beyond any specific injuries, you have to consider post-traumatic stress disorder. The torment inside a person’s mind can be much worse than anything the physical world can throw at you.”

“But it can be treated, too?”

“Sometimes. We’ve had discussions with the Department of Defense, and they run a program aimed at rehabilitating returned war captives. It could also work for Jessica. The point is, you have to think about how she is going to pick up the reins of her life. This program acknowledges that it’s not reasonable to expect anyone under these circumstances to just go back home and return to living as if they’ve been out on vacation.”

“So it involves a stay in a hospital.”

“It’s whatever that person needs.”

“In that case, I’d like to have a program like that available for her if she’s willing.”

“That’s good. Are you certain about it?”

“Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. If she’s doing it, it means she’s back here again.”

Jessica:

There’s no point in talking about Christmas. We spent Christmas at gunpoint in a scrub desert surrounded by the same essential collection of stooges who had cackled their way through Thanksgiving. The fact that some breezed into camp more frequently than others indicated the command structure almost as well their personal attitudes did. By now my waking hours were mostly spent firmly in the zone of an inner world. The ace up my sleeve was its invisibility, or they would have surely taken that away from me as well.

After December 27 I never saw Abdi again, which was nothing but a relief, but before he left he made sure to stamp his cruelty onto us. I became so numb to the constant threat level that I simply could not keep my moment-to-moment survival at the front of my mind every second. And even when I went about whatever little mundane activity I was permitted, somebody always found a reason to scream at me about something.

We knew enough about our surroundings at this point to convince us that in spite of all the jumping around these guys did, we were still spending our time just about fifteen minutes outside
Adado. I clearly recalled the sign welcoming all to “The International City of Adado.” When the weather was right, we could see the lights of the city, not so far away, not really. Maybe not close enough to run to, but close enough for walking.

I could dream or daydream about escaping, as each day became more like the other. I could drift into a fantasy of slipping away and finding help there in Adado, so temptingly close by. The problem, of course, was that we weren’t prisoners held by chains or bars. The most effective jail for us was isolation. No matter how metropolitan that “International City” might be, we could expect that for many miles in every direction, there was no one to help us.

Even for the greatest desert survivalists, there would be no way to get around the fact that you were surrounded by people who would consider it their great and grand duty to turn you back over to your pursuers. So the days and nights blended. We sat beneath scrub trees until around five in the evening, then boarded Land Cruisers and were driven to the opposite side of the town to sleep under the stars for the night. They always drove us through town by passing quietly along side streets through the outskirts of town to avoid drawing attention to us or the campsite, protecting their assets from theft.

Their maddening mix of compulsive detail and lack of reason never waned. They proved that on the day they took us directly into town, instead of sticking to the back roads—perhaps when they knew the region was safe from competitors—and they not only made no attempt to hide us but actually left us in the open on public display.

It began when we had passed a tiny airport at the edge of town, little more than a short landing strip, but with a good-sized plane sitting on the runway. Poul was still with us then. The driver, by instruction from Abdi, turned into the airport road as if the plane was our destination.

But as we got closer to the plane, we didn’t slow down, didn’t
stop. We rode right on by. Abdi turned around from the front passenger seat and directed a cruel grin at us. He lifted his hand and waved, saying in a sing-song voice, “Wave good-bye, Poul and Jesses! No big money, no Nairobi! Bye-bye airplane! Bye-bye!” and started laughing.

The rest of the guys followed suit while I fought back the hot tears stinging my eyes and did my best to deny them the satisfaction of seeing how deeply they were tormenting me. Apparently, I did the job too well and deprived Abdi of the pain he wanted to see in me. So just to be certain we got the idea there was no hope, he had the driver take us directly into town this time. I looked at him and saw nothing in his seat but a monster poorly disguised as a human being.

Later he had them drive us through the center of a bustling little downtown area in some nameless desert town. This vehicle had tinted windows, which helped keep us from public view as long as we were moving quickly enough, and as always I kept my
hijab
on while we were away from the camp, which also helped a little.

But once the car stopped, anybody who took more than a passing glance could see there were two white people inside. This is rare in that region. The kidnappers pulled to a stop in town, either to actually conduct business or simply to leave us in the street on display, and it didn’t take long for the locals to realize there was a show to be had inside that vehicle: two white people, two Westerners, two kidnap victims being held for ransom—we didn’t need to understand their words to grasp their thinking. Men of all ages and a few females as well surrounded the car and gawked at us. They seemed to regard our misery as some sort of triumph for them.

The oddest thing about such an experience wasn’t just the menace of it, since we were surrounded by deadly threats all the time; it was the blank eyes of the people staring back at us. I learned what it is to be a freshly captured zoo animal, trapped inside a tiny cage with nothing left to do but watch the creatures staring in at you.
I saw no sense of recognition from anyone outside those windows that they were looking at a fellow human being. I merely saw the idle curiosity of unfeeling people scoping out an interesting pair of unusual animals.

This particular crowd didn’t directly menace us; they probably feared the guns of our captors too much to do anything like that. They were merely indifferent to our situation and to whatever human commonality we shared with them. They didn’t gawk at us necessarily as people they wanted to see dead, they just made it clear our survival was a matter of indifference. It was our only visit to that place and did nothing to make me want to return. The most important lesson that day was to never forget that the silent roadway stretching off into the distance was only an illusion of freedom. In fact it represented nothing more than an opportunity for everything to quickly get much worse.

•  •  •

Abdi’s disappearance had little impact on the amount of casual cruelty displayed in that unhappy camp. The duty just seemed to fall to the next guy in line. In this fashion we greeted the New Year. I rose early at sunrise that morning, grumpy over pick-your-reason but glad to have a chance to make bread again that day. My first item of business was to get water heated over the fire and make tea, which could have been the beginning of a passable morning if we actually got a chance to have tea with sugar and dip our campfire sand bread in it.

We did not. The camp was favored by a visit from Abdilahi, the same young boy I saw on that first stinking day of this ordeal, the one who used to wear one of our mine awareness graduation bracelets, the one rumored to have killed three people already. His erratic personality and vicious flashes of
khat
-fueled temper made me glad he was usually someplace else. Though our code name for
him was “Crack Baby,” it wasn’t much of a code. If any of the other guys spoke English, they would have recognized exactly who the name Crack Baby referred to.

There was a genuine “chicken or egg” conundrum in this remnant of a departed child. I wondered how badly scrambled his brain had already been, through trauma, disease, or genetic glitches, when he discovered
khat
and managed to get in the way of a daily supply. Who could say how many bales of leaves had passed through this kid? I tried to recall, had anybody ever studied the long-terms effects of
khat
use on a brain so young? But philosophy didn’t matter here for Abdilahi, our Crack Baby, the miniature trouble zombie. Everything appeared to have been burned out of his brain except for a surprising capacity for meanness and provocation. Crack Baby walked through life pecking at trouble the same way a bird pecks at the ground: randomly, relentlessly, and without a moment’s thought.

This morning, sorry to say, our Crack Baby was right there among us, swaggering and talking at a pointlessly loud volume and glancing around to lock eyes with his next target. Maybe I did something to draw his attention, maybe I just won the backward lottery that day. He and another youngster with the common name of Hassan were the only other people stirring in the camp then, and I’d had plenty of opportunities to see how these two fed one another’s meanness.

So with the two camp delinquents as my sole companions, I moved away from the fire with my tea and walked a few steps over by the parked Land Cruisers. I tried to quietly blend into whatever I was standing next to and immediately noticed it hadn’t worked.

SsssSSSTTT!
That sound. Instantly recognizable. The sharp noise of air blasted from a soundless whistle. I recognized Crack Baby’s trademark combination call and taunt, like yelling “Hey!” with a smile while flipping the bird.

I ignored it, which might have bought me a few more seconds but essentially didn’t work. He had just “summoned” me, after all, and my response was not to his liking. Now he had his excuse. Hassan ricocheted attitudes back and forth with Crack Baby while they approached me over near the cars. This time he flicked his hand at me and did his noise:
ssssSSSTTT!

Man, I hated that noise.

SsssSSSTTT!
Like something whizzing past your ear. I think, when primates in cages run out of feces to fling, they will stab at one another with that noise.
SsssSSSTTT! SsssSSSTTT!

Finally he adds a word:
“Move!
”

I think, What? Move? I’m not obstructing anything. I try to ignore him, but the noise is back:
SsssSSSTTT! SsssSSSTTT!

“Move!” he hollers again, pointing at the ground a few feet from where I’m standing. “There! There!
”

But there was nothing over there, no reason for me to move those few feet except for Crack Baby, who apparently wanted to show off for Hassan and make me jump through a few hoops.

I am really not a confrontational person; he just caught me on a very low morning, alone in the camp, no food today, seasonal cold air, chilled and damp with morning dew. Not a set of circumstances to keep one reminded of how easily an annoying kidnap victim can get killed out there.

I didn’t shout my defiant English retort in his face, but I said it loud enough for him to hear. He either understood the translation or read the tone of voice. It was plain he got the gist of it. His face went dark with fury and he grabbed for the camp’s only butcher knife, the long blade used on goats. He charged the eight or ten feet separating us and put the blade to my neck.