B009G3EPMQ EBOK (3 page)

If we are being taken by ideologues who are out to make a political or religious statement, then there is nothing to be done for us. In that case, our only purpose here will be to endure a gruesome public execution.

Ideological attackers in this region will almost certainly be forces of Al-Shabaab. I try not to obsess over how they would use our torture and death to spread their message, but I’ve seen the same internet videos of doomed hostages as everyone else. The kindest end brought to those victims was the cessation of pain and terror with a single gunshot. If this is a death squad, that’s the best we can hope for, here in this twisted mirror world where oblivion translates as mercy. I think any American adult living abroad knows of journalist Daniel Pearl, snatched from the streets and butchered alive in horrifying close-up video. Too many other horror shows have taken place since then, and so far there’s nothing to indicate this isn’t going to be another one.

Meanwhile the car slams its way along the primitive roadways.
My head and shoulders keep colliding with the door frame. I silently push myself,
Think! Think!
I recall the main point of HEIST is to focus on surviving the first twenty-four hours. After that, survival percentages surge upward. If we can get through the first day, we might have a shot at entering that small golden ratio of people who actually come out of these things alive.

Some do
come out alive,
I silently tell myself.
The numbers are small, but they do exist.
Of course at this point we aren’t through the first hour yet, let alone the first day, so the twenty-four-hour tip is of no immediate help.

Ali wants everything Poul is carrying. He even demands the ballpoint pen in Poul’s front pocket. For some reason Poul refuses. I wonder,
What is he doing?
Is it a male thing?
He’s an old hand at the humanitarian expat life, and in his world you stand up to the man. Squawk back to authority.

I try to ignore their little spat so it won’t seem as if we’re acting in concert by refusing to cooperate, but out of the corner of my eye I see Ali rip the pen out of Poul’s pocket. He makes it a point to stare back at Poul as if daring him to do anything about it while he carefully dismantles the pen into its various pieces, then tosses them out the window. I can feel reality being twisted through some kind of terrible grinder. We’re up against schoolyard bullies carrying the weapons of mass murderers. I haven’t realized until this moment, when I see Poul’s tough-guy routine fail, that I’ve been hoping it would actually work.

Still no word on what their intentions may be. We don’t know who these people are and we can’t tell where they are taking us. The horror show proceeds to that point and pauses, as far as any information about what is actually going on here. After that, things happen but nothing changes. Time drips, while the sickly awareness of how toxic and deadly the situation is builds up in my blood.

Hours move along at a slow crawl, and still nothing gives away
their intentions. All Poul and I can do is exchange troubled glances. After a while I stop looking. It only makes things worse.

We stop several times and are forced to change into different vehicles. Somewhere during our ride in the third one, the sound of a certain voice inside the car finally registers on me. It’s so high and thin it could be female. I turn around to see instead a young boy who appears to be about eight or nine years old. He’s dressed like the others, in a billowing shirt over those loose trousers that are the alternative to saronglike
macawiis.
This child copies the older men’s fashion of wearing his traditional shawl around his head like a turban. The obvious joke about him being a miniature kidnapper doesn’t work at all. The sight of him is twisted and wrong.

I wonder,
Is he the
son
of one of these men? My God, is this kid here to
learn a trade
? The strangeness of this amps me up tighter. My muscles feel as if they’re about to start snapping my bones. The feeling doesn’t wear off.

The afternoon bleeds into evening while we go through a process of making a series of stops, one impoverished-looking location after another. The kidnappers go through elaborate changes in personnel and vehicles for reasons that I can’t fathom, and that Poul and I aren’t allowed to discuss. Whatever is happening, there are certainly a lot of people involved in this operation.

I have to wonder.
All this for us?

Every time we change cars or drivers, armed enforcers hop in carrying huge chains of ammunition around their shoulders. I can only guess that these personnel changes have something to do with various clan members guaranteeing safe passage from one contested territory to the next. Here again, this implies a large amount of preorganization. It demonstrates complex maneuvering on somebody’s part.

But these guys behave like morons. They must be acting out a plan controlled by somebody smarter.
Needless to say, my attempt to
rationalize this as a simple carjacking and robbery hasn’t survived the evening. This isn’t just some local gang.

I’ve worked in the region long enough to understand our kidnapping presents dangers far beyond whatever intentions drive these men. A greater risk is that if we are spotted by a larger group, we could be kidnapped a second time—maybe by unorganized opportunists and thugs, or perhaps by people convinced they represent the will of their God. If that occurs—and it suddenly feels like it easily could—this lunatic game will become even more deadly.

But by this point in the night I’ve been convinced the scope of the operation makes it clear—at least to me, since I can’t discuss it with anybody—that either we are in the hands of the same people who control the Somali pirates at sea and who have moved their ransom schemes onto land, or this is an Al-Shabaab operation.

I remember breakfast this morning. It was normal.

In this fashion, “likely to die” meets “certain to die” and finds us trapped between them. We continue late into the night, rattling along over roads of inconsistent quality. I’m feeling all the little places where the bruising is beginning set in. Eventually the kidnappers seem to get some invisible clue among themselves and pull our latest vehicle to a stop.

This time it’s different. There’s nothing here. And now Ali demands that we both get out. Until that moment, sleepy boredom was just beginning to fill me. Now it instantly gives way to a cold rush of fear. It’s a bad one, like freezing and boiling at the same time.

“Walk!” Ali shouts, pointing out into the open scrub land. Then, just in case we haven’t heard, he shouts again, “Walk!”

With that, he stomps off and disappears. Ali is not coming on our “walk” with us. But I have to believe he really has left us. We appear to be in the middle of nowhere, but he moves off like someone who knows his destination. Anyone would recognize his movements as the intention to be gone.

His job has apparently just been to lead the muscle attackers in grabbing us and delivering us here to this place that looks like every other. With that done, his part must be complete. So he’s likely off now to collect his fee from whoever is behind this. I hate to lose a translator, but he doesn’t seem like the conversational type.

After that, everything is shouted in Somali. There isn’t even an occasional English word to clarify a meaning. It doesn’t really matter. The language difference doesn’t shield us from knowing what they want of us from one moment to the next.

And now rough shouts and the waving of gun barrels make the message all too clear—they repeat Ali’s order for us to start walking away from the vehicle.
So he wasn’t just being melodramatic about his exit; they actually want us to head out into the scrub desert.

I can’t keep quiet anymore. Somebody here has to understand me, understand my intentions if not my words. “Why?” I cry out, trying to look each man in the eyes. “Why go there? There’s nothing out there!” Now I’m crying, but no tears are allowed. Everybody out here has a broken heart; what they don’t have is money.

To me, this new development has all the earmarks of a prelude to an execution. My stomach is a ball of ice. I refuse to go, clinging to my spot while the men scream orders. Every one of them appears loaded on
khat.
Their eyes are completely bloodshot and they’re hyped to frantic levels.

I feel desperate to stall them for no more reason than the sheer terror of the moment. I point at the small suitcase they took from me and try to get them to understand, “There is a little black bag inside and I need to bring it with me. Medicine!” I cry, pointing at the bag. “It has my medicine!” I have to regulate my thyroid levels with regular medication. Without it, the wheels tend to come off as far as the rest of my physical system goes: deep fatigue, rising inflammation, obviously a long-term problem and none of this is related to the moment, but I’m grasping at shadows.

I stare into unblinking faces. “Medicine! I need my medicine!”

With Ali gone, I don’t know if anybody here will even bother to try to understand me, but I repeat over and over, “I need my medicine!” while I point at the large bag, scraping for any way to convey the information. Finally somebody seems to catch on and I’m allowed to go remove my small powder bag. There is absolutely nothing I will actually need if we’re about to be put to death. But I’ll grab at anything to slow this down. So the bag, sure, the little bag, got to have the little bag.

I am still too petrified to obey their commands. The moment hangs like a pendulum at the tip of its arc. Then I see movement in the corner of one eye. Poul slips over to me and gently takes my arm. “It’s all right, Jessica,” he quietly lies. “It’ll be all right. Come on. We have to do what they tell us.”

“Poul,
no
!” I whisper. “We can’t go out there! They’ll kill us!”

Why doesn’t he see that? We cannot go out there. We can’t go
.

“Jessica, listen . . . no matter what they have in mind, unless we cooperate we’ll have ourselves a fatal confrontation, right here.”

I look around at the other men. Several have their rifles trained on us.
They will slaughter us as easily as blowing away a mountain goat.
The truth of this registers with a part of the brain that’s been around for a long time. There is no hope in this moment except to perhaps earn another few minutes of life.

I check Poul to see if he’s come up with any great ideas in the past couple of seconds, then look around one last time at the useless “safety” of the vehicle . . . and give up. Now the only control I have over anything here is to attempt to keep from dissolving into hysterics, if for no other reason than to avoid letting my life end that way.

So we walk off into the wilderness. “I’m too young to die,” I blurt out to Poul. He gives me a blank look and keeps on walking. I know by panicking this way I must seem weak, but there is nothing I can do about how I feel. I keep my mouth shut from that point on, while my obsessive inner voice switches from reminding
me how bad this is, to:
I’m too young to die, I’m too young to die,
repeated in a loop.

The men fall in behind us. My God, there are a couple of dozen, at least. And those are heavy machine guns carried by some of them. A few of the men also have those long belts of ammunition I’ve been seeing all day, slung over their shoulders. The caliber of the bullets is very large.

I want to scream out at them.
You think you need enough artillery to stage a military assault, just for me and Poul? What’s the matter with you?

What do they think we’re going to do? Do they really believe we might make some sort of hero play? I don’t even know karate.

I have to think. Clear my head. Have we done something terrible without knowing it, some cultural mistake? Do they think we’ve got something to do with their enemies, whoever their enemies happen to be?

Because otherwise, what possible purpose could it serve to use up this much manpower on the two of us? Why would anybody commit these sorts of weapons for two unarmed humanitarian aid workers?

Right there, the thought occurs: Heavy weapons only make sense if they are there for protection. But what would other attackers want that these men have? Well, there are the guns, the ammunition, and of course, there’s always Poul and me.

The heavy weapons aren’t there to keep us from running away. They’re there to keep us from being stolen. This thing is closing in around us like a cave-in.

They move us farther into the scrub desert and keep us walking out there for a long time. The night air is quickly cooling off. I’m shivering steadily now and can’t stop. We are walking in the middle of the group and all moving quickly. I guess that’s good, since it helps to generate a little body heat. Poul is close by, but we are forbidden to speak.

The darkness is heavy, no moon, no ambient light. The sky is crystal clear and the stars are brilliant, comforting in their familiarity. Nothing else about this situation or these people is familiar in the least.

We stumble between the low thorn bushes. I’m not wearing boots or sneakers, but at least my heavy sandals are tough enough to stand up to the terrain. Still I keep scraping the tops of my feet on low-hanging branches.

A river of small noises follows along with us. People recognize it from war movies. Soldiers call it battle rattle: the sounds of dozens of guns and ammunition belts being carried by dozens of men. Even if they aren’t talking, these men are putting out that low undercurrent of metallic noises. I suddenly hate the fact that my taste for clunky large necklaces and bracelets too cheap for kidnappers to bother stealing means that I now make similar sounds. I’m harmonizing along with their battle rattle and for some reason I am angry about it. There’s nothing to be done with the anger, so it just adds to the curdling sourness out here.

I can’t keep myself from crying in fear, but I do my best to keep it quiet. Some of the men talk in low voices, but most of them just march along. They seem particularly grim. I wonder if they know something to be grim about.