“Yes, my leg.” She pointed to the bloody spot. The pain wasn’t too bad. She thought it might be broken, but it didn’t feel like it had fallen off or anything. She’d heard of and seen too many unplanned amputations caused by bombs since she’d been here, and it was her greatest fear to come home missing a limb.
“I’ll help you,” he said, and bent down to pick her up. Carrying her in his arms like a baby, he stepped around rubble, pushed his way past a wall that was partially ruptured, stepped over a prone body and eventually brought her out to the street, where people were running around yelling amid smoke and dust.
When she looked from out of his burly arms at what was left of the school, she gasped. It was a miracle she was alive, she realized. Most of the building was gone, and flames shot from what was left of the wreckage. Ambulances zoomed up with sirens wailing, and U.S. and Iraqi soldiers ran around blocking off the street and pushing crowds away. Nancy wasn’t the only victim coming out, she noticed. U.S. and Iraqi troops carried screaming children from the building, and the scene was absolutely pitiful. One child’s legs were blown clear off, and she lay unconscious in the arms of a soldier. Blood poured out of her wounds despite a hasty tourniquet someone had wrapped around what was left of her legs. Nancy looked away.
Then Nancy realized she no longer had her bag. The bag had her computer and her notebooks. Luckily her Blackberry was still in her pocket. The man was hustling her to an SUV parked near the wrecked building. “Wait,” she called out. “My bag!”
“What does it look like?” the man asked in accented English. “I’ll go back for it after I get you into the truck.”
“The truck?” she said. “Don’t I need an ambulance?”
“The ambulances are all taken, so we’re taking the less badly injured in whatever vehicles we can find,” the man said. At this point, he’d carried her to a blue SUV and opened the back compartment. As he started to set her inside, she saw several Arab men already in the car, one of them holding a gun on her, and she started to scream. Instantly, the man’s hand clamped over her mouth, and he stuffed her in the rear of the vehicle, slamming the hatchback shut before she could scream again. She pounded on a side window and started yelling for help, but a man in the back seat pushed her down with a warning glare. Amid all the chaos, it didn’t appear any of the soldiers outside her window had seen what just happened.
Her “rescuer” now got into the passenger seat and yelled something to the driver. The SUV accelerated quickly from the scene and into a warren of streets Nancy didn’t recognize from the floor of the back of the vehicle, and her leg started aching worse. She reached into her pocket for her Blackberry, but it wasn’t there. The man must have taken it from her when he carried her to the truck.
“Where are you taking me?” she yelled. “I’m a journalist!”
“Don’t worry, lady,” said a man in the back seat, speaking Arabic, which Nancy was able to make out pretty well. “We’re not going to hurt you.”
“But my leg – it might be broken,” she yelled, feeling adrenaline course through her. “You’ve got to get me to a hospital”
“We’ll take care of you where we’re going. It’s not far,” the man replied, again in Arabic, which Nancy struggled to understand, what with the pain and the bouncing of the vehicle on the potholed streets. Each bump made the pain worse. She tried to keep from screaming.
At this point, Nancy had stopped talking and considered her options: they were disappointing. She could try to break out of the car when it stopped, but with her injured leg she doubted she could crawl over to the door of the hatch back. And even if she could, she wasn’t sure she could open it from the inside. If she did escape the car, the men would just stop it and come and get her. She couldn’t get very far on her leg. Also, an escape attempt now might antagonize them and make her treatment worse. Begging to be set free wouldn’t work with this crew, she thought. Best to stay quiet for now, as hard as that seemed, and see what would happen next. At least the men didn’t appear to be homicidal. For now, at any rate.
At some point, Nancy had fallen asleep back there, overcome by the pain and fear. When she woke and looked out the window, she saw they were no longer in the city, but on a road somewhere beyond its outskirts. She tried to recognize the place, but couldn’t really tell. She hadn’t been outside of Baghdad much since arriving, and from what she remembered, the scenery looked pretty similar whichever way you went. The road was only partially paved, and their vehicle was sending dust clouds into the air as it cruised along, going about 50 miles per hour, she guessed. There were groups of palm trees on the side of the road, and a telephone wire. The ground was covered with scrub grass, weeds and rocks.
“Where are we going?” she asked, surprised by the timid sound of her voice.
“We’re almost there,” one of the men in the back seat said. “Just five more minutes.”
“We’re taking you to headquarters, young lady,” the man in the front passenger seat called out in English. “We have people who will take care of your injury. Don’t worry.”
“What headquarters?” Nancy asked. “Who are you people?”
“You ask too many questions,” the man in the front said. “You’ll find out everything in due time.”
Nancy half-smiled to herself, thinking of the irony. All her life, wherever she went, whomever she was with, someone always told her she asked too many questions. Especially her school teachers. Now some Iraqi militant was telling her the same thing. Only this time, instead of it meaning a poor grade, it could mean her life.
Yet questions were her stock-in-trade. Finding answers, figuring things out, making sense of lies and inuendos, all tools she needed if she were to survive. She swallowed her fear and looked with new eyes at these men. They didn’t look Iraqi at all. A few wore thick beards, which were unusual for men in Iraq. And although she was no expert at Arabic, the bearded men didn’t seem all that comfortable with the language. And while Arabic was obviously the native tongue of the guy who’d lifted her out of the rubble, his accent in English wasn’t like the ones she heard every day around Baghdad.
Fear rose inside her again. She realized then who had kidnapped her. These indeed weren’t Iraqis. They must be from an outside group, perhaps one affiliated with Al-Qaeda that were spreading through the countryside, fomenting terror and sectarian attacks. These groups, which until mid-2006 had been led by a charismatic but bloodthirsty terrorist named Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, were still potent even now that Zarqawi had been killed by American bombs. From what Nancy knew, the groups were even more dangerous now than they had been during Zarqawi’s lifetime, and were bent on revenge for his death. Kidnappings and terror bombings were their stock-in-trade, and apparently, Nancy had become victim of both in a single moment.
Just then, the man in the back reached over and put something over her head – some sort of hood – and she couldn’t see.
“Don’t worry,” he said in Arabic. “This is just so you can’t tell anyone where we are. We won’t hurt you. The prophet tells us never to hurt women and children.” Nancy said nothing, thinking of the scene back at the school, with the little girl’s legs blown off. She decided this wouldn’t be a good time to argue.
The smelly hood covered her face, but Nancy didn’t make any move to tear it off. Her main concern wasn’t so much what would happen to her next as the worry she’d be causing Joanna and her parents.
“Can I call my family and let them know I’m OK?” she asked. The truck was turning right off the main road and onto a bumpy, rocky track. Her leg cried out every time they hit another pothole, and she had to clench her teeth to keep from groaning from the painful bumps.
“We have your phone,” the man in front called back to her. “We’ll let them know. Don’t worry.”
That’s a laugh, Nancy thought. Don’t worry, indeed. Don’t worry about being kidnapped. Don’t worry that she had no idea where she was. Don’t worry that she appeared to be in the company of some
branch of Al-Qaeda militants. Her gut clenched at the likelihood of her deadly fate, but then she realized that in a sense, her wishes had come true. She’d wanted to track down Al-Qaeda and interview them, and now, through no planning of her own, she was among them. At least she thought she was. Her wish may have come true, along with her deepest fears.
At last, the truck slowed and then stopped. The driver turned off the engine and she heard the men getting out, talking to each other in a strange language. The hatchback opened, and someone pulled her out gently and carried her away. She could hear birds calling, but there were no other sounds. The air felt warmer and wetter than it had in the city earlier that day, and there was no way to tell the time. It was a vulnerable feeling, being blindfolded and carried by a stranger to somewhere she had never been. She had no reason to believe they had been telling the truth about not harming women.
At last, the man set her down on what felt like a soft couch. “Here, drink,” he said, and a bottle was put to her lips under the hood. She hesitated. “It’s just water,” he said, soothingly. She opened her mouth and let in the liquid. It felt good, erasing that parched feeling. She wondered how much blood she’d lost. Her leg felt strange, as if it were somehow turned the wrong way, and she guessed it was broken. Maybe something had fallen on it when the bomb went off.
The man took the hood off her face.
She was in a room with mud walls and thin fabric curtains covering the windows. The room seemed to be part of a bigger house or building, because there were doors leading out of it in both directions. The couch she lay on was threadbare with yellow stuffing coming out of it from a number of holes, and across from her, on an equally shopworn piece of living room furniture, sat the man who had lifted her out of the rubble. He was now wearing white robes and an expensive-looking silver watch. He was middle-aged, with a full black beard, dark, bushy eyebrows and somehow soothing brown eyes. His skin looked weathered and rough – as if he spent a lot of time in the sun. He didn’t hold a gun, but standing behind him were two other men in similar dress, and both carried automatic weapons.
“Please,” she said. “Please call my family and let them know I’m OK.”
The man smiled. His teeth were yellow and crooked.
“Don’t worry,” he said in accented but perfectly understandable English. “We’ll make sure your family knows you’re safe. I’ll keep your phone and you may get it back at some point.”
“Why did you bring me here?” she asked. “Do you know I’m an American reporter?”
She immediately regretted saying that, wondering to herself if that would set her up for some extra punishment. Well, nothing to do now but hope she hadn’t set herself apart in a way that would come back to haunt her.
“Yes, yes, you told us you were a journalist,” the man said. “You are Nancy Hanson, from The New York Times, correct?”
At first Nancy was befuddled, and then she realized how they knew. It was her phone. They must have checked her emails, calls, everything on it. She felt naked.
He smiled again, as if this were some pleasant afternoon they were spending at his invite. “We’ll have plenty of time to get to know each other better, and then you’ll learn more about us. Right now, your leg needs tending to. We also need to get you something to eat.” He had a formal way of talking, and his accent made him sound somewhat cultured.
He made a strange sort of whistle, and two men came through one of the door openings.
“These two will take care of you,” he said. “They both know how to splint a broken leg. And don’t worry about the blood. It looks like you just had some minor cuts. You haven’t lost much blood. But your leg is broken.” He motioned the men to come over, and Nancy saw one of them carried a medical box with a red cross on it.
An hour later, with her leg splinted, some painkillers swallowed, and Nancy eating the bread and hummus the men had provided her, she felt a bit more like herself. The pain was now a dull ache, and she felt sure the injury wasn’t life threatening. Her kidnapper ate the same meal, washing it down with tea, which he offered Nancy. She tried some, and it was a green tea, but stronger than the green tea she’d had in the past. And it had flavors of cinnamon and honey as well. Her kidnapper had dismissed the men with the guns, and it was just the two of them for now.
“Do you like it?” the man asked in English, taking a sip himself. “It’s a specialty in the land of my friends here.”
“Really?” she asked, feeling more comfortable. “This is Iraqi tea?” She’d never heard of such a thing, but there was a lot about this culture she didn’t know.
“I didn’t say our land was Iraq,” he replied, smiling again. “Some of us are from Afghanistan, and that’s where the tea originated. I personally am a Yemeni. But we are all Muslim, and that’s what matters.” He took another sip and Nancy once again pleaded for him to let her talk to her daughter.
“We have notified the public that you are with us and safe,” the man said. “Your family will be aware of this, so there’s no need for us to do more at this time.”
Part of her was grateful to the man for the food and for making sure that her family knew she was safe, if that part was even true. But she resisted the urge to feel any gratitude; she wouldn’t let herself become a victim of “Stockholm Syndrome,” where the victim becomes sympathetic to her kidnappers. And just what had “the public” been told about her anyway? What game were they playing with her and the media? “How long are you going to keep me here?” Nancy asked.
“I don’t have answers to all of your questions,” the man said gently, putting down his cup and staring at her with his somehow friendly brown eyes framed by that thick black beard with no signs of gray. “I’m not the one who makes all the decisions. You will be here for some time, and we will make you as comfortable as possible.”
“What’s the point?” she asked, her voice rising a little. “Are you going to ask for a ransom? Are you going to threaten to kill me? What do you get out of this?”
“So many questions,” he replied, waving his hand a little as if to brush away a fly. “I will tell you what I can. We are fighters of the Mujhadeen. Your country has done a great deal of damage here and to our people in other Muslim lands. Your country is our enemy, and you have no business being in our lands. How many of our people has your country killed? Too many to count.” As he spoke, his voice grew louder and his formerly calm eyes flashed with anger. “Our children are sick and dying from war in Palestine and here in Iraq. Your country supports the dictators who deprive our peoples of their rights, and who falsely claim power over our holiest land. What is one kidnapping compared to all of that, I ask you?” He leaned forward on the couch, glaring at her, all pretext of civility gone.
“Yes,” Nancy replied, squelching an inner shudder at the man’s sudden change of character, but determined not to appear weak. “I’m very sympathetic to what people here are going through. I’ve seen many of them killed and injured, and I’ve seen bombings…” She stopped, struggling to think of something she could say to calm him down. But he broke in, this time, more angrily.
“Sympathetic!” he yelled, jumping up and standing over Nancy, who was lying on her couch with her splinted leg balanced on the end. Nancy shrank back against the cushions. “Sympathetic? If you’re sympathetic, what are you doing here, writing about your country’s war against the Iraqi people? Your newspaper is one of the evil ones that preached in favor of sending your troops here. If you write for them, you’re part of the problem! Don’t ever tell me you’re sympathetic!” His eyes, seemingly so friendly before, now looked piercing under furled brows, and at his rage, the other men stepped through the doorway, checking to see what could have happened to make him so angry. He saw them and waved them away. His face had reddened behind his beard, and sweat dripped down from his forehead.
Nancy wasn’t easily intimidated by noisy, angry men, having dealt with politicians in Washington for so many years. Of course, the politicians hadn’t
kidnapped her or held her at gunpoint, but she knew the best way to get respect in situations like this was to not show fear.
“I am sympathetic,” she replied, looking right at him as he sat down again, the redness in his face retreating a little. “I am. But when I see things like I saw this morning, it’s hard to feel that way. Your men bombed that school and killed those little children! I saw it! How can you justify that? If you care so much about people, why bomb them? And if you’re from Yemen, what are you doing here?”
He looked at her, the sparks in his brown eyes subsiding, his tone soft once again.
“All of that may become more clear in time. For now, you don’t need to know.”
“Are you Al-Qaeda?” she asked, looking right back at him.
“That too, you may find out in time,” he replied. “I see no need to tell you now. Enough questions. And enough arguing. I need to calm down a little.” He whistled again, and the same two men came back through the door. He spoke to them in the same language she’d heard earlier, and the men came over to her and lifted her off the couch gently so as not to hurt her leg.
“What’s going on?” she asked as they started carrying her toward the doorway.
“Oh, so many questions!” he said again, but this time with a smile. “I will answer you.” He got up and walked behind the men as they stepped through the doorway into another room, this one with a cot and a small pot that she guessed was a toilet. There were no windows or other doorways in here.
“This will be your room for a while,” he said. “We may have to move to another site if it becomes necessary. I’m going to ask that my men not chain you or make you feel uncomfortable. I’m certain you couldn’t get very far on that leg even if you managed to escape, anyway.”
The men laid her gently on the cot, which had a small blanket and an even smaller pillow. There was no other decoration or furniture in the room, and it was dark except for light coming through the doorway. She realized that when they left and closed the door she’d have no light at all.
The Towers Still Stand Page 14
