Captives

by Tom Pow

  “Mum.”

  “Yes, Martin.”

  “Is there anything else?”

  “No. Nothing. Just wondering what you’re reading.”

  “Just stuff.”

  “Oh, well.” She had moved into the room now and reached out a hand to stroke his hair, but he bent his head away from her.

  “Sure you’re all right?”

  “Perfectly. Now please, Mum…”

  His mother gave him one last weak smile and closed the door after her.

  * * *

  The diaries were published in magazine form as Exclusive: Captives, a lurid red title slantwise across the photograph of them all hunkering down in the forest. Below the photograph, The Diary by Tony Phillips was in sober black lettering. Of course, the published diaries could not show what the original diary did in its thick black notebook: namely, a deep triple scoring under the previous day’s entry, an over-poetic description of a day spent snorkeling in clear blue waters. These scores, more eloquently than anything else, marked the fearful border they had all crossed. Jesus, what has happened? What will happen now?

  Martin knew that finally he had to read the diaries for himself. It had been easier till now to let his father speak for them all—it had after all been a story his father was desperate to tell. But now was the time to get the measure of his father’s story and to test it against the one he had pieced together for himself. He was aware of the tangled landscape he would have to enter once more and didn’t know quite what he would find there—what false trails his father might have laid. He took a deep breath and opened the magazine.

  Naturally enough, as his father had admitted openly, the diaries had been rewritten—“lightly edited,” the editor more guardedly claimed—for publication, and there was evidence of the dead hand of a sub-editor at work in each of the headings. But it was clear to Martin that his father had thought long and hard about the best way into the story. In the end he had discovered that the best way in was simply to highlight the dilemma of where to start and to give the story straight.…

  [PART ONE]

  THE DIARIES

  [CAPTIVES 1]

  THE NIGHTMARE BEGINS

  Day One

  God, where to begin? How to write of this horror? We’re kidnapped—held hostage—Carol, Martin, and me. We don’t know where Nick is, but pray he’s escaped all this. There’s a great need, in spite of everything, to keep calm. Perhaps the diary can help to order my thoughts, to keep a hold on what’s happening to us.

  * * *

  Two days ago—only two days?—we turned up at Island Adventure to take up our booking of two days’ trekking in the National Park. There was another family going—a Frenchman, his American wife, and their daughter, who is sixteen or so: Martin’s age. The Frenchman is fair, tall, and athletic—the kind who look as if they could walk all day—and I noted a small wave of anxiety cross Carol’s face. I told her to take her measure not from him, but from his wife—already you could see sweat gathering behind her dimpled knees and edging the broad hair band that fought to contain the wild curls of her hair. Besides, I pointed out, there was also a couple in early retirement, the Lehmans, whom we’d eaten with at the hotel the previous evening.

  There was the usual lack of urgency. A small group of men in T-shirts and baseball caps came and went, greeting one another—Buenos días, qué pasa? etc.—the smiles broadening the more we looked at our watches. But I’ve learned that’s the way here; eventually things do happen. So we sat in the shade of the dingy office of Island Adventure—I could laugh at the name now!—our overnight packs by our sides, made small talk with the other couples, and waited. We learned the other family’s name was Deschamps—Jacques and Melanie. After a while their daughter, Louise, sighed loudly and went outside to sit on the wooden steps.

  Just when Martin and Nick had put that “Come on, Dad, make something happen!” look on their faces, three battered old taxis drew up. The man who’d introduced himself to us as “Gabriel, your guide”—a thin, jaundiced-looking man, who’d been passing the time scribbling notes and numbers on scraps of paper—came out of the shadows and told us the taxis would take us to the start of the trail. “Do we really need three taxis?” I said. I mean, I’ve seen them pack six people and their luggage into an average-sized family car.

  “Seguro,” the guide said. “Is better for you, no?”

  “Que faire?” I said to the Frenchman and was immediately embarrassed, as he speaks perfect English, though still with a trace of accent. He shrugged.

  “Please,” said Carol, “we’ve waited long enough. Don’t start an argument over nothing.”

  “Nothing, yes,” said the guide, and smiled weakly at Carol. I felt irritation rise in me, but then again, what was the point? We’d paid in dollars beforehand and I couldn’t think how they could profit from us further—but I wouldn’t have put it past them to try. We grabbed our bags and stepped outside the office into the morning sun. The white face of the church was dazzling.

  Nick, Mr. Sociable, said he’d go last with the Lehmans. They were delighted: “Hey, we’re a family too!” We got into the cars—smelling of hot earth and rubber—and soon were heading along the waterfront and out of town. We held on to the seats as the car rolled to avoid potholes, lorries packed with people, bicycles, walkers. The driver smiled at us in his mirror, his eyes masked with sunglasses. Our guide, who was sitting beside him, turned around once to apologize for the state of their roads. As we left the coast and cleared most of the signs of small villages, the road got even rougher, the vegetation denser, and I felt excitement at the promise of adventure.

  What happened next is a blur.

  * * *

  There are petrol gasoline barrels across the road. Our car stops. I glance behind and see the Deschamps’s car right behind us. It’s a large sedan and I can’t see past it to the Lehmans’ taxi. Shadows cross the windows of our car. Three men in shabby gray uniforms open the doors and wave guns in our faces. They reach in and pull us out by our shoulders. We never see our driver’s face or the guide’s to know whether this ambush has been expected or is a terror for them, too. Towels are put over our heads, our wrists bound, and we’re pulled past the petrol gasoline barrels up onto the back of a lorry. There’s shouting—harsh orders from them, terrified shouts from us. What did I manage? “Keep calm, do as they say.” Something like that. There’s the hollow sound of the petrol gasoline barrels being tipped over and rolled to the roadside, and then the lorry fires into life. From beneath the rim of my hood, I see Martin has a trickle of blood from a gash on his shin, I imagine from when he’s been pushed into the back of the lorry. I also see worn black boots and metal gun barrels resting on knees. My own tied hands are shaking. I glimpse other hands reaching for our bags and rifling through them; catch that twist of a lower body as something is thrown far away.

  We continue down the road for another few miles. This driver’s not concerned with avoiding potholes and we roll into each other helplessly. The hoods have made us silent, each of us locked in our own terror. The only sounds that escape are either curses or prayers: “Jesus, Jesus, what’s happening?”

  The lorry slows, turns, and dips into a ditch with such suddenness, we’re all thrown forward. It feels as if the lorry could roll over completely. “Save us!” shouts Carol. Our guards push us back, and the lorry revs till its front wheels are pushed out and it bucks and rolls its way across what I realize is a ford, and finally we’re off the road and onto a dirt track. I tilt my head back and see a half-moon of green and the red track lengthening behind us. After half an hour or so of this, the towels are removed from our heads. For a few seconds, sunlight blinds us.

  Carol’s wide-eyed, frozen with horror, even as she’s jiggled about on the lorry.

  “Look,” I say, “maybe it’s a good thing he’s not here. He’s not been taken. He must have got away. With the Lehmans.”

  But it’s as if she hasn’t heard me.

  “Nick, Nick, N
ick.” The last word she almost screams, and one of the captors frowns at her and wags a finger.

  “Oh my God,” she says. “Oh my God.”

  She’s still saying that as the lorry gutters to a halt, and they pull us down off it by our shoulders, and throw our packs after us. One of the men takes my wrists and, with a machete, slices through the twine that binds them. The machete’s a polished blade the length of my forearm—the man half smiles as he gestures to the others to hold out their hands too. We glance at one another—six of us—through faces stained with dirt and sweat and tears. The lorry turns, the dust settles, and we start up a narrow track, heading for the hills.

  “Oh, God, where can Nick be? Pray that he’s safe.”

  * * *

  There are five guerrillas—what else can they be?—three men, a woman, and a youngster who could be little older than Martin. But they’re all armed with light machine guns and we are all—the Deschamps and us—terrified.

  The woman looks at Martin’s shin as if in disgust. We wait as she takes a tube of something and a bandage out of her backpack and hands them roughly to Carol.

  “Bind tight,” the boy says. “Take no chances in this place.” He speaks each word clearly and frowns to make his point.

  “Take no chances,” Carol repeats to herself. “Take no chances. Take no chances.” She looks a slight and fragile figure, kneeling before Martin, binding his wound.

  When it’s done, I squeeze Carol’s arm and Martin’s and I note Jacques does the same to his wife and daughter. I think panic has silenced us all.

  What surprises me is that we’re still in the farmed fringes of the foothills. We walk through fields where cows are pastured and pass the occasional simple farm with a couple of plots fenced in by cacti and pigs rooting about outside. Sometimes there’s someone working, cutting at an old tree with a machete or hoeing the red earth. They look up and wave their machetes at us. Our captors wave casually back, as if we’re all just out for a stroll.

  We’re not. A dog runs too close to us, barking. One of the men, the huge black one, grabs the back of its neck and slits its throat with his machete. There’s a gush of blood, then the carcass is thrown into the undergrowth. Carol leans into me, but we daren’t stop.

  * * *

  We walk the rest of that day in our enforced silence—fear has given us all the energy, for the pace is as brisk as the slopes allow and we don’t stop for rest. Finally we reach two old shelters in a clearing—simple struts designed to support a roof of palm leaves. They’ve not been used for a long time. The palms are brittle, the ash from the fire trampled into the earth. In one shelter a rusted old pot is tipped on its side. We eat what we’ve brought with us for lunch—a ham sandwich each—with what’s left of our bottled water. One of the men comes over to us with the boy. The man is thirty or so, with dark brown cropped hair and the beginnings of a beard. Without raising his voice, he has issued most of the day’s orders. The boy tells us we are to do as we’re told and nothing will happen to us. But we must expect to be with them for quite some time.

  “What do you want of us?” says Jacques. “Let our wives and children go.”

  But the leader shakes his head. “You are to ask no questions,” says the boy. “You,” he says to the Deschamps, “other shelter. Sleep now.”

  * * *

  We spread out our cotton sleeping bags on the earth. The sun is gone, as quickly as if the leader took it with him when he turned his back on us.

  “How’s your leg?” I ask Martin, knowing there’s a million questions I could ask, but am too scared to raise for his sake, for Carol’s, for mine.

  “It’ll be OK.”

  We sleep with Martin between us, sleep out of utter exhaustion. During the black night, I think I must have dreamed this. The dawn brings the truth that the nightmare is real.

  Day Two

  We walk another day along forest tracks, till our muscles ache and our clothes stick to us. We stop in a clearing—I can’t tell one from another—and make a kind of encampment.

  “You must build two shelters—like last night,” says the boy, and one of the men, the one who killed the dog, hands Jacques a machete, handle first, with a slight smile. Jacques glances at me, taken aback. But should either of us have been surprised? Earlier in the day we climbed up to a kind of saddle in the hills that gave us a view of the valley and beyond. Nothing. Nothing but thick forest in every direction. Through the boy, the leader told us that if we run we are lost, and we put the rest of the group in danger. Then he tapped his gun, as a warning. Still, though they keep their guns with them at all times, they point them at us a good deal less and they clearly don’t fear giving us a machete. Or letting us go a little off the trail to do our business. Nor do they make any effort to prevent us hearing their names. Between us, we have worked out that the leader is called Rafael and the boy Eduardo. The woman’s name is Maria, and the names we had to work hardest to get are “the silent watchers”—as we call them—Miguel, the dog-killer, and El something or other.

  We all do our bit in constructing the shelter, but Jacques especially sets about the task as if to show them what we are made of. Tall and muscular, he was born, you would think, to wield a machete—he knows the proper weight to put behind it and each stroke falls with the same accuracy. He strips branches for uprights and makes niches to slot in the smaller branches, which will support the thatch of palm leaves.

  “One here, here, here, and here.” Two of us to each one, we grip the uprights and drive our weight down on them, turning as we do so, till they are rooted in the earth. The guerrillas have finished their shelter. They sit a little away, talking and occasionally looking across at us. Once there is laughter. Then we captives are all at it, collecting palm leaves that have fallen or those they’ve cut and not used for their own shelter. We weave them in. It’s not perfect, but it’s pretty damn good for a first effort and I think that concentrating on the activity does something to lift our spirits. The second shelter takes half the time and there’s even a feeling of pride when the leader, Rafael, passes each of them and says, “No está mal. No está mal.”

  “Pah,” says Maria through puckered lips.

  It’s not the time to speak of luck, yet even in this terrible situation I think we are lucky with our fellow captives. Both are practical and calm in the circumstances and I think Louise could be a companion for Martin through whatever we must endure. We take some comfort in that.

  Day Three

  Today our mood darkens. We’ve nothing to occupy ourselves, so we sit in the green shadows, overseen by the silent watchers. They’re each so different. Miguel is a giant of a man, dark as teak with intense eyes. El Taino—he sounds his name out for us, almost like a challenge (Ta-ee-no)—is small and lithe, his skin almost bronze in the sunlight. Two of the fingers of his right hand are twisted and stiff from some old injury. He carries his hand across his chest, so his damaged fingers are impossible to miss.

  We’re trying to work out why we’re in this mess. The Deschamps received the same embassy advice as we did. They too were told that unrest is reported in isolated parts of the island, mostly in the mountain regions. But the tourist centers are heavily protected and the National Parks contain no dangers. The insurgents, in short, we were told, are interested in government installations, “not a bunch of tourists.”

  Jacques and Melanie have been more thorough. He consulted the Internet, but much the same advice was posted there: “No viable reason why tourists should not enjoy a holiday with a difference on the small but enchanting island of Santa Clara.”

  “‘Holiday with a difference,’” groans Melanie, and it’s the first time that any of us has smiled since our capture.

  “So why are we here? What can they want with us?” Carol asks. “I mean, what good can we be to them?”

  “Well, what I know,” says Melanie, “is that the guerrillas want to be rid of General Quitano—head honcho, El Presidente. He started out as a reformer, a champio
n of the people, but his government’s now mired in corruption and he’s desperately clinging to power.”

  “Impressive,” I say.

  “‘The Trip of a Lifetime,’ according to the ad,” says Melanie. “I at least wanted to read about where I was going.”

  “And,” says Jacques, “clinging to power means being up America’s backside and taking the tourist dollar.”

  “So that’s what all this is about,” I say.

  “Am I missing something here?” says Melanie.

  “Well, it’s obvious—it’s an attack on the tourist dollar. There’s no surer way to cripple the island’s economy than to show it’s not safe for tourists anymore.”

  “Yep,” says Melanie, “and while we’re on it, no surer way to draw attention to human rights abuses than to kidnap a few rich westerners.”

  “But what’s wrong with the tourist dollar? I thought they were all desperate for it,” says Louise.

  “Right,” says Jacques, “but that’s only because their own money’s next to useless. How many times have you had a peso note in your hand since we got here?”

  “Will they kill us?” asks Martin. The sudden question sends a chill through our discussion. For a moment I don’t know what to say.

  * * *

  Martin raised himself up and turned to face the small mirror on his bedroom wall.

  “Will they kill us?” He asked it. And again, “Will they kill us?”

  Taxi Driver. It was one of his father’s favorite films. Robert De Niro, isolated and crazed, turning to a mirror again and again: “You talkin’ to me? You talkin’ to me?” Of course, Martin couldn’t match De Niro’s intensity—there was still too much of the boy’s softness in his adolescent face—so there was a slight unsteadiness in his voice as he held his own gaze.

  As he read, he could see himself so clearly, huddled in the green margins of the diary, bent over a tin plate of rice or listening to the sense others were attempting to make of what was happening to them. All the time he’d wanted to be different; to be lithe, to be able to flow up hillsides without panting, to trim a branch without sweat running into his eyes. Instead he’d found himself to be the owner of a large, ungainly body that constantly betrayed him. There were times when he felt the only power he had was to will invisibility upon himself. But there were other times, like this one, when he needed to hear his own voice—the silence which followed it, the concern on his father’s face—needed to feel his own words rolling from his mouth like four single beads. And he needed to hear himself again within these white walls, to be sure he had been there and would be again, as far as his imagination would let him.