B009G3EPMQ EBOK (5 page)

Far worse, what if this “Matt” person was from the kidnapper’s organization, using a ruse to extract information? And there was Erik, chatting away as if he actually knew the guy. The dread surged so abruptly he nearly got sick to his stomach.

He asked the person calling himself “Matt” for a callback number so he could verify his identity, then hung up and called back through the American Embassy. There was a long wait for a pickup, but he soon breathed a sigh of relief when the guy calling himself “Matt” got back on the line.

So Matt Espenshade was really with the FBI team handling this, and there was a small group of very good agents working together to gather intelligence on these kidnappers. With that much reassurance in place, it felt good to have a safe source of information.

The unreal knowledge that the U.S. government was now actively tracking the pack of thugs who had taken Jess captive offered some immediate consolation, but with a little more time and thought he was left with the conclusion that he had no idea what the FBI could actually do about any of this.

But he also realized his state of overload was so severe, he didn’t know what to make of anything. He only knew he had to stay firmly in a functional mode or he would lose control of his emotions and do something rash. He could already feel the rising urge to personally rush down to the spot where Jess had been taken and start tracking her down.

Matt went on, “Now, Erik, listen to me—you can’t do anything
proactive
here.”

“What do you mean?”

“You can’t try to insert yourself into this. Even the best-trained professionals find it extremely difficult to get these things to play out right. If we get family members involved, you can slow the process. Anything you do can be counterproductive to our goal of getting her back. Or you’ll get yourself captured and just ramp up the danger to everybody.”

“Matt, I did counter-special ops in the military. I’ve got friends who’ll join me down here. It’s my responsibility to get her out. I’m her husband—and what if something happened to the soldiers who get sent in after her? I know Jess couldn’t live with that, and neither could I.”

“It’s no better for you and your friends to die. You have to listen to me, Erik. Do nothing. I know it’s the last thing you want to hear. But do nothing. . . . Tell me you understand me, here.”

“I can’t believe I’m hearing this! Matt, I need to get her out of there!”

“And I realize the helpless feeling is the worst part. It’s in your DNA to charge in and get her, especially if you have resources in the area. Not only that, I have to admit this part doesn’t get better over time. I know it sounds completely backward for you to stand down, Erik. It would to me. But you
cannot
insert yourself into this.”

Erik felt the jaws of a vise tightening on his throat. “Matt, I just, I just want to tell you, I hope to God you guys really will get on this. We need the U.S. government behind us. How am I supposed to rely on the local authorities to rescue her? I know the ways of this region. They can’t even keep order in the streets. We both know the local authorities could be involved, themselves! How can you ask me to do nothing?”

“Okay, here’s how I can ask: What you do is, ask yourself how it would be for Jessica—out there alone and surrounded by hostiles—if she heard you attempted a rescue and got yourself
killed? What is she supposed to do then? Can you even imagine her despair?”

The question sucked all the air out of the room. The call was quickly over.

Within hours, the couple’s immediate family members began a series of calls back and forth among their own group, burning up the long-distance lines to help pull each other back from panic. They asked the same questions of one another without arriving at any answers. They learned hardly anything, but gained some measure of relief in being able to speak among themselves.

Erik was especially grateful for the company of the other family members, even if just by phone, to keep him from buckling under the combination of primal fear and forced paralysis. He felt certain he couldn’t have kept the secret alone. So he got to work at closing down her social media sites. If they forced her to turn over the passwords, they could get all sorts of information and then use it to somehow strengthen their position. He knew of instances in which family members had been individually contacted by kidnappers and played off against one another to jack up the price.

Erik greatly regretted in those hours that he knew so much about the sorts of medieval torments the male criminals of that broken culture might inflict upon his wife. Against that toxic knowledge he could only apply his own insights. In addition to avoiding the media, he also determined to keep it secret in their home region and avoid discussing anything in the presence of his Somali staff. The strength of the fabled gossip lines in that country was not to be doubted, and even the most innocent-sounding information about Jessica might fan the flames in unpredictable ways.

Unfortunately his efforts didn’t do much to slow down the flow of information. Within hours, a number of his colleagues from the local population began stopping by to express their concern over Jess’s disappearance. He was touched by their show of sympathy,
but it was a jolt to see how efforts to restrict information did nothing. He smiled and thanked them on auto-pilot, eager to regain his privacy.

A new fear hit—the telephone. Had he already managed to make things worse for Jess simply by using the phone? For all he knew, the kidnappers might have tapped his line to track the family’s strategy and siphon the same information he’d been pulling down from the internet. When desperation is everywhere, great profits can be made by eavesdropping. In Somalia, freelance spying is a cash-and-carry business.

He had to wonder—how much of a bribe would you have to pay somebody at their phone carrier’s office to pull that off? Maybe twelve hundred dollars? Two years’ wages. After all, how many people who work at a phone company in a developed country would refuse to grant unauthorized access to a single phone line in return for two years’ wages?

Just take a break for a coffee and let us put a tap on this line, then forget you ever saw us.

If they’d already hacked his phone, then he had been helping them just by talking to their families or the FBI. He resolved to make it a point to deal with the authorities in person whenever it involved sensitive information.

So he was left with the long wait for a ransom call and the knowledge that if Jessica was carried too far south of the Green Line, she was unlikely to return alive. In spite of the fact that nobody could see the Green Line and it held no official status, it was one of the most important borders on the African Horn. With the economy of that region broken, desperation lurked amid civil chaos. The kidnapping itself was a crime of opportunity. Erik’s and Jessica’s good intentions had somehow exposed her vulnerability and desperate people had seized upon that.

Paranoia became the order of the day.

O
CTOBER 1993

Jessica Buchanan was fourteen years old and living in rural Ohio in October of 1993 when the “Blackhawk Down” ambush of two American Special Forces choppers took place in Mogadishu, Somalia. The helicopter crews had thought themselves protected because they were in the country to guarantee aid shipments to the people. Instead, Delta Team Master Sergeant Randy Shughart was pinned down there and used up his ammo to provide as much covering fire as he could for team members who were too badly wounded to defend themselves. Shughart died without knowing he would be awarded the Medal of Honor.

In the following days, the Western world blanched at the searing images of dead American soldiers dragged through the streets, bodies violated by screaming mobs of young Somali men. It’s natural to imagine the emotional effect on the American people because the dead men were their own, but as it happened, there were other places around the world where private citizens were also appalled and greatly concerned.

One of those places was in Sweden, in the household of Johan
Landemalm and his wife, Lena, their young daughter, Linnea, and their seventeen-year-old son, Erik. The household took sharp note of that story because Erik was already considering a life in international aid work. Thus Somalia’s surprise failure of money-and-food diplomacy was of special concern to him.

Erik had the same view shared by many people of the region, namely a personal appreciation for negotiated positions, instead of the confront-and-conquer mentality. He loved the image of well-negotiated agreements forming paper bridges to carry opposing sides away from the sort of warlike contests that get sponsored by whichever hothead is in charge.

His concern was a natural product of his upbringing. Erik’s parents were not only vocal supporters of beleaguered people throughout their own country, they also held sympathies that extended to any group of nonwarlike people. They amplified Erik’s concern by observing that the tragedy went much deeper than a loss of American soldiers; the ambush spoke out loudly against the rule of sanity and reason. The rule of mob violence called into serious question an entire system for capping the wells of passion in international conduct.

His background supported that worldview. Swedes have survived on the concept of neutrality, and have long kept a wary eye on international politics, living as they do in a small country vulnerable to European warfare.

Unlike other passing news stories, this one got to Erik. He was otherwise consumed with his junior year of high school, in days filled with his passion for soccer and for spending time with a wide circle of friends, so remote disasters seldom had much impact on his life. This one was different. The Somali massacre made his dream seem naïve, and he hated the feeling that it was merely some callow, boyish fantasy to think he might one day actually work to help boost the process of peaceful reason among nations.

In spite of the distances and cultural differences separating
Erik’s family in Sweden and Jessica’s in America, his parents were just as concerned about instilling a strong moral code in their children as Jessica’s folks were. His father worked as a specialist machinist in the nuclear industry and his mother taught special education programs for adults. While the driving motive in Erik’s life wasn’t a matter of spirituality, as it was for Jessica’s Christian family, it was strongly propelled by the desperate straits of so many of the world’s people. His parents lived out the reality of their social concern, which was to
do something
with one’s time in this world, in this life, and make things better for others.

They didn’t need to force lectures on him; he witnessed their daily commitment to standing against unfair social forces in favor of the health and dignity of the individual. He observed that in his household, such sentiments were not matters of table talk but of practical and proper survival.

In this fashion, as early as 1993, the lives of both Jessica and Erik were already charting a course to intersect. The forces at work had begun to weave the invisible net that would ensnare them, first as individuals and later as a couple.

•  •  •

During the same hours of 1993 when the chopper crews in Somalia were slowly being overpowered and gunned down, there were twenty-four young boys back in the United States who would grow up to be future players in that African struggle. They had no way to know anything yet about the unique fighting group every one of them would eventually strive with all his determination to join. They also couldn’t know, though they would one day find out in person, that this particular battle corps is so elite, the candidate must first be a Navy SEAL just to attempt to get through the training—and even then, three out of four of those superb warrior-athletes fail to qualify.

The group has had numerous military names during its long rise from the murky history of the early “frogmen” swimmers, to the black operations of the Underwater Demolition Teams whose only calling card was to render their targets dead, to the latest appellation as the U.S. Naval Special Warfare Development Group—or DEVGRU, for those who prefer names ugly and short. But the group is better known to the general public as the near-mythical warriors of “SEAL Team Six.” Their complex training supports a brilliantly simple task: to be the very last thing their opponents see, if they are ever seen at all.

•  •  •

While the battle of Mogadishu flared in Somalia and those two dozen young boys peacefully slept in the United States, a young Harvard Law School graduate was building a new life as a married man. Young Barack Obama settled with wife Michelle into their new home in the liberal middle-class neighborhood of Hyde Park in Chicago. Having married a former staffer for Mayor Richard M. Daley, Obama was a Chicago newbie eager to make friends.

His personal ambition had already displayed itself at Harvard, but no doubt he would have been astounded to learn he would one day sit as chief executive in the White House and—as a part of the covert side of his daily duties—approve a plan to send SEAL Team Six into Somalia. Their lethal mission: to attempt a night-raid rescue of American citizen Jessica Buchanan and her colleague Poul Thisted from their desperate criminal captors. Complication: The target subjects were known by photo evidence to carry the highly lethal Russian AK-47 automatic rifles and rocket-propelled grenade launchers.

But in the Chicago of 1993, the young future U.S. president was still far from the apparatus of power. He learned about the fates of the stranded American fighters down in far-away Africa
through the same channels and from the same helpless standpoint as any other observer.

•  •  •

At best, the story of downed Blackhawk choppers registered indirectly on Jessica. Her perch in life was that of a fourteen-year-old living at a distance from the city, safe from much of its danger.

She lived close enough to feel its urban influence, but the city was there as a resource and never represented a trap. And while she and her teenaged girlfriends didn’t deliberately follow international news, sometimes pieces of it filtered into her line of sight for other reasons. In this manner the Africa connection for Jessica began with her awareness of child soldiers in Africa and the Middle East: girls and boys kidnapped by brute force and used as cannon fodder in local wars. Her sister, Amy, and brother, Stephen, had been raised with the same Christian values and weren’t immune to news of a foreign tragedy, but it was Jessica who found the plight of many children in Africa a source of torment that wouldn’t go away.