Life or Death

by Larry Verstraete

  For my granddaughter, Raeghan — young, but already strong.

  — L.V.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  LIFE OR DEATH – Survive

  1: Ordeal on Mammoth Mountain

  2: Twenty-Two Years in a Tomb

  3: Completely Alone

  4: A Ribbon of Grey

  LIFE OR DEATH – Rescue

  5: An Epidemic of Fear

  6: “Houston, We’ve Had a Problem Here”

  7: Anywhere, Anytime

  8: Thirty-Three of Us

  9: Stranded

  LIFE OR DEATH – Liberate

  10: Behind the Brick Wall

  11: Reaching Every Village

  12: People, Have Some Shame

  13: Swept Into Oblivion

  14: Flying Like Superman

  15: 126 Days in Hell

  LIFE OR DEATH – Escape

  16: This Side Up With Care

  17: Vaulting to Freedom

  18: Chiselling Off “The Rock”

  19: The Brothers Three

  20: Now or Never

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  For Further Reading

  About the Author

  Also Available

  Image Credits

  Copyright

  Three life or death situations …

  A teenager is trapped somewhere inside a city sewer system, breathing toxic air, fighting hypothermia and swimming against swirling water. No one knows his exact location, how to reach him, or even if he survived his roller-coaster ride through narrow pipes and fast-flowing waterways.

  Minutes after takeoff a plane hits a flock of geese, destroying both engines and turning the aircraft into a dead weight. Airports are too far away to reach, and the plane is in a powerless glide, hurtling toward towering skyscrapers. The 155 people aboard brace for impact. In all likelihood, the death toll will be enormous.

  Camp 14 is a brutal place where torture and abuse rule. One political prisoner — a scrawny young man — dreams of freedom. Freedom is on the other side of a heavily guarded, electrified fence that rings the camp. In the long history of Camp 14, no prisoner has ever escaped. Will this young man be the first?

  In Life or Death: Surviving the Impossible, the stakes are high, the chances of survival remote and the path to a positive outcome riddled with pitfalls. In this book people come head-to-head with impossible situations. The odds are stacked against them. There is no light to point the way, and no map to follow that will lead them out. They must create their own.

  Just what does it take to turn the tables, to beat impossible odds and triumph in the end? That is a question the stories in this book might answer.

  1.

  ORDEAL ON MAMMOTH MOUNTAIN

  Time was running out for snowboarder Eric Le Marque.

  The moment he stepped off his snowboard, Eric Le Marque realized his mistake. The snow was waist-deep and in no time his gym socks and thin pants were soaked. The fierce wind whipped through his soggy clothes, sucking heat from his body. In the blizzard Le Marque couldn’t see the distant ridge or the far-off trail that led down the mountain. “It was like I opened the door to another world,” he said.

  Over the past year, Le Marque, a former professional hockey player, had become a heavy drug user — a “puppet to my habit” as he put it. That morning he’d hit the slopes of California’s Mammoth Mountain with his snowboard, craving excitement but hindered by the exhaustion, false sense of security and poor judgment that are a by-product of drug use.

  Caught up in the thrill of snowboarding, Le Marque had ignored dark clouds rolling in from the east. Hoping for one last run before the storm hit, he’d set his sights on the ridge and the trail beyond. Midway there his snowboard had stalled, leaving him stranded just as the storm struck.

  Le Marque was dressed in a light ski jacket and pants. He had taken along only a few belongings, things that now seemed pretty useless — like four pieces of bubble gum, a cell phone with a dying battery, an MP3 player, a twenty-dollar bill, the key to his condo and a baggie containing his daily dose of crystal meth. In his rush to leave, Le Marque hadn’t let anyone know where he was going. Now he was lost and alone, enveloped in a blanket of snow, but convinced that if he kept moving he would find a way out.

  Winds swirl around the heights of Mammoth Mountain.

  Le Marque wandered for hours, shifting direction often. Using his snowboard as a shovel, he carved paths through ever-growing drifts. Sometimes, on downward slopes, he hopped rides on it. Then, well after midnight, Le Marque hunkered down for the night among blackened stumps in an area destroyed by a forest fire. Driven by hunger, he devoured the bubble gum in his pocket, the only food he had.

  That long night was the first of many. By day Le Marque fought the cold, talked himself out of growing despair and tramped through snow. At night he found shelter in trenches or among trees. He hacked off bark and small branches with the sharp edge of his snowboard to make a mattress and ate whatever he could find — cedar bark, pine needles, seeds. When thirsty, he sucked on small quantities of snow. Sometimes he even drank his own urine. One day, frustrated and parched, he dumped out the crystal meth and used the empty baggie to melt snow. It was a critical moment — a first step toward overcoming his drug habit.

  Occasionally there were glimmers of hope that he might survive. One day Le Marque found an empty beer can. He ripped off the top and bottom, then flattened out the middle. He tied the top and bottom pieces to his bindings to make shiny reflectors, believing they might signal would-be rescuers. The middle section of the can became a crude animal-alert device. Fastened to his jacket, it clanged as he walked, sending noisy warnings to wolves that lurked in the forest.

  Sometimes Le Marque’s flashes of creativity just spawned greater misery. Dehydrated, he searched for running water and found a fast-flowing river. Unable to reach the water because of deep snow, he remembered the twenty-dollar bill. He rolled the bill lengthwise, making it into a straw. Then he spread his body on a snow shelf above the river and stretched as far as he could to suck up cold water. Suddenly he heard a sharp crack. He felt the snow shift and his body slide. Before he could react, he was neck-deep in the icy river, being dragged by the swift current, his knees and shins bumping along the jagged bottom.

  Eventually Le Marque pulled himself out, but the encounter left him bruised. The wind fanned his wet clothes, draining precious heat from his body. He lost feeling in his feet, and when he took off his waterlogged boots and socks, patches of frozen skin came with them.

  His cell phone proved useless. There was no signal and the battery was nearly dead. Le Marque wandered, carving trails through the fresh snow, hoping that one would lead him out of the wilderness. Hunger pains were constant. He lost muscle mass, and his frame, once athletic and trim, took on a skeletal look. He plodded on feet black from frostbite and dead to all feeling. To keep moving, he set small goals. “I have to take at least ten steps,” he told himself.

  To boost his morale, Le Marque listened to his MP3 player. Then on the fourth day, he tried something new. Switching the MP3 player to FM mode, he turned the dial and locked on to a broadcast from a local radio station. The signal was weaker in some directions, stronger in others. That gave him an idea.

  “By pointing the MP3 player at slightly different angles, I was able to get a bead on where the signal came in strongest,” Le Marque wrote later. “That was the direction I headed in. I had come up with a crude sort of compass and could only hope that it would lead me to safety by the most direct route.”

  Over the next two days, Le Marque struggled up a steep slope, certain that there was
a ski lodge somewhere on the other side. Hypothermia muddled his brain. He saw ghostly images in the forest, heard sounds that didn’t exist and replayed nightmares that seemed all too real.

  On the morning of the seventh day, Le Marque heard the drone of a distant plane. Desperately he tried to send a signal by turning on the MP3 player and pointing the tiny blue LED screen skyward, hoping that the pilot might see the faint glow. Instead the plane turned and disappeared, sending Le Marque into greater depths of despair.

  He was dying. He knew it now. “For the rest of that day,” he said, “I never left the shelter I had dug. The sun rose, clouds rolled overhead and the hours unwound as morning turned to midday and moved steadily on into the afternoon. It all passed me by. I may not have been dead yet, but it was hard to tell the difference.”

  Hypothermia muddled his brain … He was dying.

  On the morning of the eighth day, Le Marque had a remarkable moment of clarity. It was, as he put it, “as if a dense fog had lifted just before the onset of total darkness.”

  The battery on his MP3 player was almost dead, but Le Marque wondered what would happen if he turned the dial slightly, just enough to veer away from the radio station broadcast that he had captured earlier. Would that send a fuzzy signal, a beam of some kind or an electronic disruption, to alert those who might be searching for him?

  Le Marque fumbled with the dial. The radio crackled and stuttered. Suddenly he heard his own name on a news report announcing that he was presumed dead and that a search for his body was underway.

  Hope replaced despair. He wasn’t dead. Not yet anyway, and to hear that searchers were looking for him was encouraging. He vowed to stay alive, to hang on just a bit longer.

  Shortly after, Le Marque heard the sound of a helicopter. He struggled to his feet, searched the horizon through eyes blinded by the sun and spotted a blurry object in the sky. As it approached, he waved frantically. The helicopter hovered over him, whipping clouds of snow with its blades. A door opened. A figure in a silver suit slid down a rope.

  “Are you Eric Le Marque?” the man asked.

  Patrollers on snowmobiles searching for Le Marque had discovered a snowboard trail heading south. They’d passed on the information to the National Guard, who’d sent a Black Hawk chopper to scour the back side of the mountain. Using infrared imaging, they had detected a heat source — Le Marque, still alive, staggering through the snow.

  Although Eric Le Marque’s ordeal on Mammoth Mountain was over, the road to recovery was just beginning. His body temperature had dropped to 30° Celsius, 7° below normal. He was hypothermic and dehydrated. In eight days he had lost 18 kilograms, about 20 per cent of his usual weight. Worst of all, his feet were severely frostbitten. Pus oozed from cracks and blisters. The skin was mottled, black as charred wood in places, vivid red in others. The dead feeling had advanced, too, creeping beyond his feet and farther up his legs.

  Le Marque emerged from his ordeal a changed person, and went on to become an inspirational speaker.

  Eric Le Marque spent months in hospital undergoing rounds of surgery. To save his life, doctors amputated his legs below the knees and fitted him with prosthetic limbs. With typical determination, Eric fought through depression and painful therapy, adjusting to his new legs, overcoming his dependency on drugs and creating a new life for himself.

  2.

  TWENTY-TWO YEARS IN A TOMB

  To stay alive, Juad Amir Sayed had to convince others that he was already dead.

  On December 2, 1981, twenty-four-year-old Juad Amir Sayed disappeared. His neighbours in Karada, Iraq, never saw him leave the house. Even his closest cousins didn’t know his whereabouts. Sayed was there one day, gone the next.

  During the regime of Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, citizens often disappeared. Saddam’s secret police combed the country, hunting those suspected of being threats to the dictator. Arrests were common. Arrest led to prison, sometimes torture, and often swift execution without so much as a trial. Sometimes those arrested simply vanished, never to be heard from again.

  Juad Sayed was one of the hunted, a man marked for arrest by the secret police. A young soldier, he had deserted the Iraqi army during the Iran-Iraq War, an act of treason punishable by death. On top of that, Sayed was a follower of the banned Dawa Party, a Shiite Muslim group that had opposed Saddam for decades. Then there was a foiled escape attempt. Desperate to leave Iraq, Sayed had planned to flee to Iran with a cousin. The secret police discovered the plan. His cousin was arrested and hanged. Sayed feared he would be next. It was just a matter of time.

  When Sayed went missing that December day, his neighbours and relatives assumed that the secret police had captured him. They assumed he was either dead already or languishing in some far-off prison, another victim of Saddam’s madness. And that is exactly what Sayed wanted them to think.

  “I was trapped in Karada and there was nothing else I could do,” he said.

  It took him a week to enact his plan. With the help of his mother, Aziza Masak Dahish, Sayed packed his Dawa books into a flour sack and buried them in the ground. To eliminate all traces of his existence, he burned his identity card. He dug a tunnel that led to a concrete room he had built below the family kitchen. The room was small — just 1 metre wide by 1.5 metres long. A vent up to the roof of the house brought in fresh air; a tiny peephole let in a ray of sunshine.

  Juad Amir Sayed began a life of self-imposed exile.

  Sayed equipped the tiny space with a few necessities — a small hot plate to heat food, a battery-operated radio with headphones to keep track of the news, a bare light bulb wired to the wall for times when there was electricity, a kerosene lamp for times when there wasn’t. He installed a small toilet and added other features: a clock, shelves to hold books, hooks to hold a mirror, a toothbrush and other essentials.

  Feet first, Sayed squeezed his bony frame through a small square hole in the kitchen floor. His mother slid a concrete lid over the opening, covered it with a flattened cardboard box and pushed an empty bed over top. And with that, he began a life of self-imposed exile.

  Only Sayed’s mother and his four siblings knew of his underground existence and they were sworn to secrecy. While the family lived a normal life above, Sayed lived below, squirrelled away in the tiny chamber, protected from Saddam and his mob.

  Day after day Sayed followed a similar routine. He prepared simple meals of beans and rice with supplies his mother passed to him through the hole in the kitchen floor. He washed his frayed robe in water drawn from a pipe hammered into the ground which served as a well. To pass the time, he practised calligraphy and spent hours reading prayers from the Koran, the Muslim holy book. At night he slept on the hard-packed dirt, his body curled to fit in the small space.

  Life below was often lonely. “Most of the time, it was very, very quiet,” Sayed said. “I think only death could be so quiet.”

  A tiny peephole, barely the width of a finger, became Sayed’s window on the world. When his brother got married in the courtyard, Sayed watched through the peephole, rejoicing from a safe distance. Through it Sayed studied nature, finding happiness in small changes — the wind bending branches of nearby trees, the sky turning pink at sunset, water spilling off the roof after a rainfall. Each moment was a golden promise that life would be better someday.

  As years passed, the view through the peephole became smaller. A date palm outside grew tall and spread its branches over the opening. In time it blocked the peephole completely, eliminating the source of Sayed’s simple pleasure. Still he hung on to hope, counting down the days to freedom.

  There were a few close calls. Once, while the family was asleep, a policeman entered the house. Sayed’s mother found the man searching the kitchen, dangerously close to the bed that covered the opening. She screamed. A neighbour rushed over firing a shotgun and the intruder ran, never to return. Sayed’s location remained a secret.

  Sayed’s mother came to his rescue another time, too. While bu
ilding a cesspool in his yard, a neighbour used a backhoe. The machine chewed the earth, coming close to Sayed’s underground cell. Fearing that the wall might collapse and bury Sayed, his mother ran out and threw herself in front of the machine. Construction stopped and her son was saved.

  Another time, while visiting Sayed’s family, a thirteen-year-old cousin rolled under the bed in the kitchen. He discovered the lid, opened it and came face to face with Sayed, a man who was supposed to be dead. In shock, the boy ran home. “A ghost! I’ve seen a ghost!” he told his mother. Guessing that it was Sayed, the boy’s mother swore her son to silence and mentioned it to no one.

  To keep abreast of the news, Sayed listened to his radio. As the years clicked past, he tracked major events: the dismantling of the Berlin Wall in 1989; the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990; the election of George W. Bush as president of the United States in 2000. In the fall of 2001, shortly after the terrorist attacks on the United States, Sayed heard George Bush speak, promising that the terrorists would be hunted down.

  Then in early 2003, Sayed heard another announcement. The US and a coalition of other countries were beginning a new campaign. Claiming that Saddam had been instrumental in the terrorist assaults of 9/11, and that he might be harbouring nuclear weapons, coalition forces were launching an attack on Iraq.

  A statue of dictator Saddam Hussein is pulled down in Baghdad in April 2003.

  For Sayed, this was good news. The dictator was a marked man, his days of oppression were numbered … and so were Sayed’s days of confinement in the cramped space below the family kitchen.

  Sayed’s home was near an air base and ammunition depot, and from his secret place he heard sounds of hope — the scream of coalition aircraft as they raked the base, the rat-tat-tat of artillery fire, the thunder of bombs as they detonated.

  Then on April 9, 2003, three weeks into the campaign, Sayed’s radio crackled with exciting news. Coalition forces had been successful. Saddam was on the run. Iraq was free of the dictator.