A Season in Hell Page 2
At this point a pick-up truck appeared out of nowhere and was quickly overtaking us. Its speed seemed out of place, as we were doing about 120 kilometres per hour. As soon as it passed us, it slewed across our front, forcing Soumana to brake. “What the hell!” I exclaimed, woken out of my reverie with some surprise and annoyance, but by then Soumana was swinging out to pass the truck that had just cut us off. As soon as we moved left, so too did the truck, right off our front bumper, again blocking our progress and still slowing hard, forcing Soumana to brake to avoid plowing into it. As we pulled back into the right lane, so too did the truck, which now occupied the centre of the road, clearly positioning itself to block the possibility we might still try to pass either to the right or left.
With gut-wrenching dread, I understood that this was no crazy driver or road rage incident but rather the overture to a hideous nightmare.
Both vehicles were in emergency stopping mode. Soumana was standing on the brakes and it was all he could do to control our SUV. Before we came to a complete stop, I saw two African figures in the bed of the truck in front leap into action. One knelt, raising a Kalashnikov assault rifle, or AK-47, and aimed from about four metres away through the windshield into our driver’s face. The other, one hand on the tailgate, vaulted onto the road with his AK in the other hand. They were shouting. Soumana was frozen. I hadn’t yet looked at Louis, seated in the back to my left, but I was overcome with the hackneyed yet inescapable thought, “This cannot be happening to me!”
Time does slow in such circumstances, and I thought, “No—not here, not now. I know Africa. I have survived over forty-five years on many of Africa’s meanest streets: the three Darfuri states, eastern Chad, the Inturi and Kivu provinces in eastern Congo, the anarchy of Mogadishu, northern Uganda ravaged by the Lord’s Resistance Army, central Angola during the civil war, and two widely separated episodes of genocide in Rwanda. Now here it comes, in the 8 percent of Niger that everyone agrees is completely safe, where Guy’s staff picnics on the weekends. Not this appalling cliché!”
By then, Soumana’s door had been wrenched open and hands were dragging him out by the scruff of his neck toward the truck in front. I don’t recall exchanging a word with Louis. Few friends will be surprised that my first instinct was to protect my dearest possession, an expensive camera and valuable lens. I was placing it gently at my feet in the right rear seat-well when Louis’ door on the left was torn open and he too was being hauled out.
Through the windshield I saw Louis being frogmarched toward the back of the truck in front as Soumana was boosted, none too gently, over the tailgate. I looked out my window to the right, assessing the possibility of escape. There was a wide, cleared strip on my side of the highway—a line of scrubby bushes, down a slight slope, perhaps forty metres distant. Could I get the door open and run for and hide in that scrub? Would they shoot—how well? Would they linger long enough to come after me? Could I abandon Louis and Soumana to whatever fate awaited them? How much use could I be to them, anyway?
But before I had even fully exited my side, still undecided, the taller of the AK-waving young men had me by the upper arm. He shoved me toward the truck, shouting, “Dépêchez-vous,” then pushed and lifted me into the arms of his colleague. Once in the truck bed, I saw that he was standing on Louis and Soumana, who were lying prostrate with horrified looks on their faces. I was thrown on top of them.
The truck then performed a squealing, 180-degree turn and began to speed back in the direction from which we had just come. As my head was being forced below the side, I caught a glimpse of our vehicle across the highway, doors open and deserted. I was certain, however, that a fourth man, whom we had not yet seen (perhaps a passenger in the cab or in a following blocking vehicle) was about to drive it away. I knew that such a high-performance vehicle was probably the single most desirable commodity in Africa. It made sense that our kidnappers would take it straight into the inventory of one or other of the bands of smugglers, bandits, or rebels that frequent the largely lawless northern Sahel region, or at least to a chop shop.
I therefore assumed that my camera bag was now in the hands of my captors. Inside it was a USB key containing many of the documents relevant to my mission, something I had not trusted to the safe in my room. Some of these reports were sensitive, particularly those relating to my views on the bona fides of the government of President Mamadou Tandja. Also in that bag, I thought, was my Amazon Kindle—an electronic book containing about fifty titles, among them Kill Bin Laden: A Delta Force Commander’s Account of the Hunt for the World’s Most Wanted Man; The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals; and Sniper One: On Scope and under Siege with a Sniper Team in Iraq. There was also a series of books by Daniel Silva, whose protagonist is a Mossad agent in the business of eliminating the enemies of Israel. I didn’t know who had taken us, but I didn’t relish the prospect of any kidnappers in that part of the world discovering my reading preferences.
From my what-the-hell realization that something was seriously amiss to our being slung aboard our kidnappers’ truck and driven off in the opposite direction, no more than forty seconds had elapsed. It had been, I regretted to conclude, a slick, violent, well-coordinated, and impeccably executed grab.
Much later it occurred to me that it was odd there had been no traffic moving in that long valley in either direction over this admittedly short period. While not impossible, the odds of that occurring so conveniently were low. It seemed likely, therefore, that our kidnappers had had collaborators blocking the traffic. I suspected the sheep-laden van might have had that assignment, but of course that was mere speculation.
As soon as I had been flung down on top of Soumana and Louis, our abductors shouted at us in French to remain absolutely silent and still, while speaking to each other in a language I couldn’t recognize. They threw a foul, stinking, oily blanket on top of us, on which they then sat. My face, in the suffocating darkness, was a couple of centimetres from Soumana’s. In a whisper, I asked him if he could recognize the language they were speaking. When I received no answer, I asked again and again in an ever-louder whisper, which earned me a haphazard but forceful thump from above and a further admonition to remain quiet. I thought that the language might provide a clue to who had grabbed us, so I persisted. Soumana was almost literally petrified. Eventually I received a whimpered “I don’t know, I don’t know.” I took this to mean either he really didn’t know or he didn’t want to risk the further ire of our captors. I decided to shut up, and listened for sounds from Louis below and behind me. Hearing nothing, I whispered his name and heard a grunt to signify he was at least still with us.
After ten or fifteen minutes of smooth, fast driving on blacktop, we braked sharply and, though I could see nothing, it seemed as if we had turned right, northeast, off the highway. Now we were clearly running off-road as the bumps and smacks were horrendous, the three of us rising, it seemed, nearly a metre before being slammed back onto the metal truck bed. This merciless pounding continued for maybe another thirty minutes. As we continued to be smashed about in this manner, I heard groans from both Louis and Soumana—and from a third person, whom I eventually recognized as myself.
Suddenly, we stopped in an area of thick brush and the three of us were hauled over the tailgate to join our abductors behind the vehicle. There were three of them: the two twenty-something Africans who had grabbed us and an older, light brown, Arab-featured man of medium stature in his mid-forties, who subsequently identified himself as Omar. He was clearly in charge.
Omar demanded our papers, and Louis produced his UN laissez-passer (a travel document that looks like a passport and contains essentially the same information, in addition to a description of the bearer’s UN mission). I had a fair quantity of cash in U.S. dollars and local currency but no identity documents, a fact that irritated our kidnappers no end. First they couldn’t understand how I could be so irresponsible as to go forth into the African hi
nterland without papers, and then they began to believe that I had somehow disposed of my documents in the course of the kidnapping. They asked, again and again, who I was and what was I doing in Niger. While my answers were congruent with the information in Louis’ UN laissez-passer, my captors were frustrated that they couldn’t objectively confirm whom they had taken, or as I was soon to surmise, that they had indeed lifted the guy they had been sent to grab.
We then had to empty our pockets. Aside from our cash, which they pocketed, there wasn’t really much to take. They took Louis’ watch (an anniversary gift from his wife, Mai) and his laissez-passer along with his late edition, government-issue BlackBerry, which attracted a lot of interest. They demanded that he immediately turn it off and remove the battery. Still perplexed by my lack of documentation, they withdrew into a huddle some metres away. I used these moments to say to Louis, “No matter what happens, tell the truth; even if it’s not the whole truth. If you don’t, you will inevitably be caught in a web of lies, which, at best, will lose their confidence and can only cause problems for us, whatever awaits us.” This was also, of course, advice to myself and I hoped that such a guideline might marginally ease Louis’ stress level, just as it had eased my own.
I don’t recall where Soumana was at the time; perhaps they were questioning him. As Louis and I stood alone together, sore and terrified, I noticed a gash across Louis’ left eyebrow, eyelid, and upper cheekbone, which had bled onto his shirt collar. It didn’t look deep, but nor did it bode well. He insisted that it wasn’t serious and did not hurt much. He said that the son of a bitch we subsequently came to know as Hassan had raked him, quite gratuitously, across the face with the foresight of his assault rifle while Louis was being loaded into the back of the truck. We spoke briefly about who our captors might be but had drawn no conclusions by the time they returned.
When they did return, Hassan, the shorter and stockier of the two Africans, was tightly masked, ninja like: very different from the turbans worn by virtually every male in the region and different again from the Tuareg-type turbans, which hid everything save a narrow slit for the eyes in carefully prepared folds of material covering the head, face, and neck. Hassan’s covering was tightly wound around his head and across his face, so that the outline of his skull, cheekbones, nose, and lips was visible through the material. From that point onward, we never saw him unmasked and, given the stresses and strains of the previous forty minutes, neither Louis nor I retained the least idea of what “Ninja Boy” actually looked like.
As soon as they returned from their caucus, I urged them to let Louis and Soumana go free, insisting that to keep all three of us was a burden they didn’t need to assume. I explained that I was the prize (something for which they would clearly have liked to have had documentary evidence) and that by the time the other two found their way back to the highway, the rest of us could be long gone in any direction. When this was dismissively rejected, Louis tried to get them to agree at least to release Soumana, who had nothing to offer them. But that too got no useful response.
Louis and I were then instructed to stand face to face about a metre apart, with our forearms stretched out toward each other. They used packing tape to bind (happily, over our long-sleeved shirts) my right wrist to his left, and his right to my left. With words that I did not understand and gestures that I did, Omar instructed Hassan and the tall, thin African, referred to as “le Sénégalais,” to load us into the back of the truck with Soumana, who had not been bound but seemed utterly traumatized.
As the two young, pumped-up kidnappers moved to carry out this instruction, I pointed out rather matter-of-factly to Omar that we would not survive long being bounced around in the back of the truck. Surely, I continued, dead hostages were not in his interest, and on the basis of the pounding we had received since leaving the highway only thirty minutes earlier, there was no way we could take much more—particularly if we could not use our arms and hands to mitigate the punishment we would be receiving over any additional cross-country travel.
Omar gave me a long, appraising look. Unlike me, he knew the full extent and nature of the journey we would be undertaking. He could see that we were old (I am about twenty-five years older than the life expectancy of the average Sahel resident) and—compared to them—relatively frail. His eyes told me that he realized that indeed these ancient, soft, Western white guys would be terribly damaged in such circumstances. Soumana was clearly suffering the effects of being repeatedly smashed hard onto the metal truck bed. He was cradling his left arm and seemed to be experiencing some kind of stomach pain. Louis’ bloodstained shirt added force to my argument. Further, I had lost my regular glasses as well as my prescription sunglasses in the initial grab and was staring myopically at anyone who spoke.
So, rather pompously noting that his instructions had been specific regarding the fact that we were to be bound as well as blindfolded and placed in the back of the truck, Omar allowed that, as “mission commander,” he could modify such instructions to meet operational requirements. After a moment’s further reflection, he told his boys to cut the tape binding my left wrist to Louis’ right, leave the other binding in place, and get us into the cab. I went first, hoisting myself into the relatively high cab with my free left hand, and then half dragging Louis in after me with our bound wrists. Once inside, we tried to settle, one cheek each, into the single passenger bucket seat. As “le Sénégalais” slammed the cab door, he noted casually through the window, “If the government helicopters find us before dark, we are all dead.” I was rather encouraged by the prospect that there might be even a chance of government helicopters looking for us, but I considered this a very remote possibility.
Their truck was the pick-up version of our Toyota Land Cruiser, and was the ubiquitous vehicle of choice for all those who roamed the Sahel. This band of desert and semi-desert stretches from Mauritania’s Atlantic coast across Mali, Niger, Chad, and Sudan to the Red Sea, and, effectively, on through the Horn of Africa to the Indian Ocean.
Because our wrists had been bound while we were facing each other, rather than side by side, it was extremely difficult for either of us to protect ourselves in the cab against the brutal buffeting we suffered over the next three days. The way we tried to brace against the dramatic bumps and twists was for Louis, with his window wide open, to hold tightly to the roof with his free right hand, as I reached behind the driver and grabbed the far side of his seat back with my free left hand. We would then twist our bound hands into an X to allow his left and my right to grasp the handle mounted above the glove compartment. Doing this tightened the tape around our wrists, however, and every three or four minutes we had to let go, point our hands in the direction they were in when they were bound, and flex our fingers until circulation had been restored. All in all, it was not a perfect solution to the challenges of the fifty-six hours of hard driving between the moment we were taken and our arrival within the Al Qaeda area of operations in the far north of Mali. Nevertheless, it was an awful lot better than being slammed around in the truck bed, as was Soumana’s fate, albeit unbound.
While we crossed two or three open, relatively smooth stretches of desert, in the main the going was rough. In the beginning, we crashed across hand-plowed fields, along wadis (dry, boulder-strewn, seasonal stream or river beds, which could be anything from slight indentations in the desert floor to deep canyons), and up and down the sides of impossibly steep ravines, weaving among mesa-like outcroppings. When we reached the Sahara proper, we forced our way over and through massive, vehicle-gobbling sand dunes.
A measure of what this journey was like would be to calculate that about every ten seconds we would bounce in such a manner that, when we had not been able to brace properly, we smashed our heads on the roof of the cab or slammed our faces into the dashboard. This tended to occur when we let go of the handle above the glove compartment in order to restore circulation to our fingers. As a result I suffered a damaged coccyx and a significant compression f
racture of my L5 vertebra. In the weeks following this descent into hell, sitting upright was impossible, lying down and getting up were painful, and turning over at night was excruciating.
Omar was a traditionalist. He navigated by the sun and stars. Even I can find Polaris, so I was able to watch him follow the North Star hour after hour, sometimes stopping and walking around to get his bearings but always finding the track or direction he was seeking. Sometimes that meant doubling back for twenty minutes to find an obscure turn-off on a route he had obviously travelled before but that I could not make out.
We bumped across maize fields, the dead stalks whipping against the windshield, and crashed straight through collections of huts but generally avoided inhabited areas—something that became ever easier as we proceeded north. Omar used the headlights rarely and we travelled on a road on just one occasion that first night, and even then for only twenty minutes. From time to time we would see a light from a cooking fire or hut far in the distance and I would try to mark its position and then calculate the distance from that point in the ever more forlorn hope that somewhere ahead we could escape and then make our way back to that beacon of freedom. My calculations were far from scientific and certainly inaccurate. The one constant was our heading: due north.
In addition to the fifty-six hours in the trucks were four or five periods of rest, lasting one to three hours each—perhaps ten hours of rest in total.
These were psychologically tough times as we blasted into what promised to be a bleak future. When would we be missed, and when we were, what would happen? We took some comfort in the fact that Guy Villeneuve would be waiting for us to join him for dinner at 7:30. How long, then, before he knew something was amiss, an hour—two at most? How long after that before he sought police and government assistance?