B009G3EPMQ EBOK (2 page)

I beam back at him. “So you won’t be upset with me if I go?”

“I wouldn’t go that far,” he replies, then laughs and adds, “Of course I can’t be upset with you. I get that you need to do this. Just listen,
please
: Don’t trust anyone’s judgment but your own. Don’t trust anything but your own intelligence. Stay aware and listen to your gut feelings.”

He takes a deep breath. “So just go get it done and get back here safely and let’s move past all this, okay?” He opens his arms for a hug. I throw my arms around him, grateful for his style of loving support. Of course I’m also instantly concerned that this now means the trip is really going to happen.

But neither of us wants to argue; we’re secretly nurturing a hopeful glow that after more than two years of marriage and recent efforts to have a baby, I might be pregnant. I’m only a few days late in my cycle, but hopes are high for both of us. I know how much he prefers for us to stay close and cocoon at home, to focus on willing this child into our lives. But part of Erik’s loving nature is that he really does want to give me the space I need, so even though it goes completely against the grain for him to relent on this, he somehow manages to send me off with a smile.

My colleague Poul Thisted and I bring along a few small work bags holding computers and training materials, plus one small personal bag apiece. That’s about it. He’s already left, so I grab a UN flight of several hours to the town of Galkayo. We spend the night at the NGO guesthouse just to the north side of the Green Line, in the safer zone. From there I send Erik two text messages that will always stick in my memory.

If I get kidnapped on this trip, will you come and get me?

He responds,
Nah, of course I will come but nothing will happen!! Make sure it doesn’t, ok? Love you too much to even think about that, so make sure you will be super safe.

“Safe” is a word whose meaning varies in our part of Somalia. I’m continually reminded of that after we arrive at our southern office and the training session plays out. Outbursts of urban violence can be heard all around the building. The gunfire becomes so bad outside the compound, people avoid sitting outside on the veranda for fear of a random bullet strike.

I spend the whole trip eager to be out of there and back home, feeling like time is just dragging along. Of course I do this still unaware of the very long and hard way time can truly drag. So far in life I have experienced time, at its worst, as a form of slow boredom—never as a form of torture.

Once we finish the training session and we’re ready to be on our way back to the safer northern zone, I send Erik the second of those two text messages. Sadly, this one is to let him know I’m cramping and it looks like I was wrong about the pregnancy.

Started period
: (
Guess there’s next month. Love you and miss you so much.

I assure myself that we’ll just have to keep trying. I’m only thirty-two years old. There’s plenty of time—
we have all the time we need.

Before Erik has a chance to respond, our convoy arrives to whisk us away from the south office and back to our guesthouse on the north side of the Green Line. The distance isn’t far, maybe twenty minutes of driving time. It’s going to be a relief to get out of there.

And so at 3:00 p.m. on October 25, I toss my small bag in the Land Cruiser and get into the backseat while Poul climbs into the passenger seat in front of me. Abdirizak, our locally hired security manager, climbs into the backseat behind the driver. I’ve already noticed this driver is new, but I don’t know anything about him. Ordinarily, I’d ask for an explanation, but Poul appears to be in a hurry to get going and doesn’t show any concern over the driver. I sit there balanced between relative safety or mortal danger and decide I’ve spoken too much of my concern.

After spending the entire training session eager to be anywhere but there, it feels wrong to second-guess things now. I remain quiet about this unfamiliar driver while the caravan pulls away with us.

It’s a routine ride—for about ten minutes.

•  •  •

The attack begins as if an umpire has just blown a starting whistle. A large car roars up beside us and careens to a stop, splashing mud all over our windows. Men with AK-47s encircle our car, pounding on the doors, shouting over each other in Somali. Their behavior is ferocious.

My heart goes straight to my throat. Adrenaline sends a jolt of fear from head to toe. The terror feels like heat, like we are suddenly being roasted alive inside this car.

The men scream in hyped-up fury; there are many distinct dialects in Somali, some unintelligible among the various speakers. I can’t understand any of it except by trying to read gestures and tones of voice. None of the messages are good.

My brain is seizing up from trying to process this. I hear a little version of my own voice in the back of my skull chanting:
This is really bad this is really bad this is really bad,
and for some reason I can’t get myself to stop.

Two Somali men outfitted in Special Protection Unit (SPU) uniforms yank open the doors. They may or may not be real SPU members, in this zone of dubious authority. Whatever they are, the men close behind them have gun barrels trained on us.

I know nothing in this moment except to show no reaction, avoid doing anything that looks aggressive, but also not to cower. Hold still. With or without training, every mouse knows to freeze in the presence of vipers.

The attackers leap into the passenger compartment. One pulls
open the rear door and grabs Abdirizak, our useless “security manager,” from behind the driver’s seat. The attacker looks somewhere between thirty and forty years old. His face is a tarmac of acne scars, punctuated by the crazed eyes of somebody who has had plenty of
khat
leaves to chew that day. The stuff is a stimulant in low doses and a mind-bender at higher doses over time. It’s a national scourge because those higher quantities are eventually sought by all regular users.

The attacker will later tell me his name is Ali, though he doesn’t just yet, and he is bigger than the average Somali male, maybe 1.8 meters—around six feet in height. His amped behavior is completely intimidating. I turn to our Abdirizak for a little assistance, but that’s really grasping at straws, because I can’t help but notice good old Abdirizak really could look a lot more surprised. Predictably, he does nothing at all to defend us, and in the next instant the crazy-eyed Ali drags him through his seatbelt and out of the car.

Ali makes a show of beating Abdirizak to the ground to establish superiority, but he doesn’t appear to inflict any damage. It’s mostly an assault of stark male voices bellowing at the top of their lungs. They behave more like brothers in arms who just happen to be on opposite sides of the fence on this day. Maybe they’ll go for a beer tomorrow.

And with that, everything slips into slow motion.

Crazy-eyed Ali climbs in next to me with his AK-47 pointed at my head. The moment plays out in a language of images—he is close enough that I can see the weapon’s ammo cartridge, glimpse the bullets, notice there are plenty of them. The beat-up gun is probably older than I am. I imagine it’s been used to kill plenty of people.

My body constricts, moving on its own with the expectation of being shot. The other attacker scrambles through the rear hatch, and our last line of hope for escape collapses when our
“this-is-my-first-day” driver reveals who he is really working for. He speeds away with us like a furious drunk, slamming us around in the passenger compartment while Ali screams the first English word to us I have heard so far:

“Mobile!” (meaning our cell phones) and then, “Thuraya!” (satellite cell phones). He and his cohort wave their gun barrels in our faces as if there’s a chance we haven’t noticed who’s in charge.

The fact that they immediately rob us actually calms me, a bit.
Maybe
they’re just going to carjack us. Maybe they’ll push us out, take the vehicles, the cash, and drive away!
A rash of carjackings has recently occurred in nearby Kenya where victims were simply driven to distant locations and pushed out, but left otherwise unharmed and allowed to walk back home. So if we’re simply being robbed and carjacked, then walking home suddenly sounds like a great way to finish off the day.

And in that fashion my name is changed to “Alice” and I am plunged through the looking glass. Here inside the mirror world, the notion of a gunpoint robbery passes for positive thinking.

The vehicle plunges out into the wilderness, slamming over rough roads. There is no way to avoid wondering whether an impact with a pothole will cause one of these slaughter weapons to go off. I still have no idea who has attacked us, but the way they’re bouncing us around, it might not matter. All we need is for one hard bump to meet one careless trigger finger, and there we are: dead or maimed in the middle of this horror show. For all I know the only upshot to that would be Mr. Crazy Eyes giggling over our corpses and exclaiming the Somali equivalent of “oops . . .”

As soon as Ali takes our phones, he decides Poul should sit in the back next to me while he climbs into the passenger seat—just Ali and the driver with Poul and me behind them, plus one creepy-looking little guy who jumps into the very back and starts going through our belongings.

For a moment, I lock eyes with Poul and silently mouth the words, “What’s happening?”

He answers in a soft, grim voice, “We’re being kidnapped.” The words are so quiet I can barely hear them, but they feel like they were shot out of a nail gun.

The men scream at Poul to shut up and force him to turn around. We don’t need to speak their language to understand their commands for silence. They keep whipping out cell phones to call distant cohorts, shouting at the top of their voices.

Still, even here in these first few moments, it seems apparent to me that their level of hysteria far exceeds the need. After all, they pulled off their first phase without a hitch. They have us in a clean capture and they escaped without a struggle. No one is in pursuit, as far as I can tell. But from their behavior, you’d think the guns were being held to their heads, not ours.

This hysteria is surely fueled by their
khat
use, amplifying their emotions. But they have us, and that’s the truth of it. The result is that every skill and ability I possess has been pulled away. Nothing else I know is of any use, in this moment. Nothing I can do in my working life is relevant here. The person I am to my loved ones, my husband, my friends, doesn’t mean anything. My colleague and I are objects of pursuit, nothing more.

The glaring difference between Poul’s situation and my own is both simple and deadly. Poul is a sixty-year-old Danish male and I’m a thirty-two-year-old American female. The proverbial elephant is not only in the middle of the room, it’s high on
khat
leaves and waving automatic weapons. Homophobia is dominant there, so Poul has little reason to fear gang rape. But I do. And while the news media here did carry that story of mobs protesting outside the Danish Embassy after the uproar over cartoon images of the Prophet Mohammed, in most neighborhoods there is generally not the same danger in being Danish as in being American.

As the only female here, my local experience curses me with the knowledge of what has happened to many other women, Somali or otherwise, taken by these roving gangs of criminals. The horrible irony of my recent attempts to get pregnant with Erik is not lost on me.

All that remains of me as I know myself, in this moment, is this little voice chanting
this is really bad this is really bad.
The thought is just too awful, that I might die with my joking text message to Erik about getting “kidnapped” now playing out in earnest. Regardless of what I think I can accept, the attackers continue screaming orders and arguments back and forth, always seeming to be in conflict over something or other.

“Money!” Ali now bellows, waving at us to give him ours. For some odd reason, Poul responds to their demand by claiming not to have any. I wonder what he intends to say if they search us and find it. Fortunately, they let it go for the moment. Ali gestures to our few pieces of jewelry and shouts something in Somali that we can tell is a command to part with our bling. I start to remove my chunky necklace of costume jewelry, but he sneers and shakes his head. They only want the good stuff. My rattling hippie junk is of no interest.

I’m worried about losing my wedding band and a diamond of my mom’s that was given to me after her passing. I am somehow able to make my shaking hand still enough to palm the diamond down into my bag, and then offer Ali a less precious ring.

At first it seems to work. But my heart sinks when he confiscates my bag and keeps it at his side. He’ll obviously go through it at some point and catch on to my ruse, leaving me in the same dangerous position Poul just assumed. I can only hope when he finds the diamond it might make him happy enough to forget about my attempt to deceive him.

Beyond that I can’t move. All I can do is struggle to recall anything useful from our pitifully brief hostage training session,
which was taken from a larger program called HEIST, for Hostile Environment Individual Safety Training. I rack my brains for every scrap of information given to us, wishing I had memorized it all.

The HEIST instructors impressed on us the importance of hiding our anger and avoiding any unnecessary conflict. They stressed that attackers will likely be in such an excitable state, they may be provoked into killing even if they don’t plan to. The trainers urged everyone to memorize a reliable phone number of someone who would be the right person to receive a “proof of life” phone call. Their reasoning was grimly practical—the only way to aid your own survival in a kidnapping is to have a line to a potential ransom source. Your chance for life is your captor’s hope for money.

Coming up with a phone contact is the easy part. There’s no chance I’d forget Erik’s number. But I also can’t help but recall the instructor’s warning that a “proof of life” call only matters if a kidnapping is done for money.