So, like Donald Rumsfeld, we didn’t know what we didn’t know, and that bothered us a lot more than it seems to have him. What else could harm us? An Algerian or American or French or British air strike, certainly, but what about 54°C (129°F) heat, poisonous plants, or the hyenas we often heard yapping and howling at night? Our captors—particularly Omars One and Two—spoke obsessively and with palpable fear about ces monstres—that is, of the possibility of hyena attacks. They were full of stories of people walking home across the fringe of the desert and only a bloody belt and shoes being found in their wake the next day. This too seemed to be intended as an inoculation against escape but that realization did not mean it was ineffective.
Finally, there was the largely unspoken yet constant threat of being physically mistreated, beaten, or tortured. There had been a few signs in the early days of their wanting to abuse us but they had not been repeated. What, though, if negotiations did not go their way or a sadist among them (and a few candidates had already identified themselves) simply decided to have a go? Would Jack’s discipline prevail?
Without a doubt, my greatest and most debilitating concern was that one day we would be marched into a tent, required to kneel before the AQIM tableau of black flag and heavily armed masked men, and executed, probably beheaded, as the video camera rolled. It was a worry that never left me. Sometimes it was very present, sometimes more abstract, but it was always there. I knew with absolute certainty that their patience and fatalism could work both for and against us.
I thought there was a finite period over which whatever negotiations were ongoing could be stretched, then no further. But I had no idea what that period was. The two Austrians had been held for eight months in 2008, the thirty-two German, Swiss, and Austrian tourists for four months in 2003. In our case, they had thirty people tied up babysitting two feeble old men. I could perceive no capacity for or interest in long-drawn-out, multiyear sagas of the type associated with Hezbollah or FARC, which of course spelled good news and very bad.
The desert was well populated with birds of every description wintering over from Europe. Louis and I lay for hours watching pairs of hawks questing for prey in the sky above Camp Canada and we saw the odd vulture. Two sorts of bird became close companions. The first we named “Ted,” a small, black sparrow-like bird with a white patch on his head and white on the underside of his tail. The second was “Sven,” about the same size but in the livery of the Swedish flag, a brilliant blue and bright yellow. These birds had no reason to fear humans and either Ted or Sven sometimes perched on the toe of my outstretched shoe. The most interesting bird we saw, we ate: a large, turkey-like Houbara bustard with brown and white plumage that the mujahideen had shot on one of their cross-country travels. Big though it was, it did not go far among so many semi-starving people.
We were not bitten by snakes although we saw a few. Indeed, we had a number of close encounters with the Sahara’s dark side. One afternoon, I was sitting outside our tent-like shelter, which then consisted of our tarp hung over a collection of ropes tied together between two acacia trees and supported by stolen metal tent poles. I was observing a Ted foraging beneath another tree, about four metres distant. Suddenly the bird seemed to freeze in place, and then there was subtle movement, almost a vibration in the sand around him. I was curious but saw no cause for alarm, so I walked up to less than a metre from where the small black and white bird seemed to be glued in place. Despite my proximity, the bird did not move. I leaned myopically closer and realized that the jaws of a snake encompassed the lower part of the bird, and were rhythmically working to swallow the hapless creature.
Knowing nothing about desert snakes, we called to the guard on the nearby high point. On seeing it, he grabbed the antique entrenching tool we had been using and began hacking into the sand around the snake’s head. Soon it was in bits, but the head never let go of the bird. And it was the large, flat, triangular head of a viper. The snake was under a metre long but very thick, about the girth of my wrist. That same evening as we shook out our blankets to make our bed, out popped a light-green, almost translucent scorpion, six or seven centimetres long. I killed it and showed it to our jailers, who assured us that it was extremely dangerous.
Sleep did not come easily that night but finally I dozed off, only to struggle back into consciousness it seemed just moments later with my entire face and neck covered with hundreds of tiny, squirming caterpillars. They were harmless, but not pleasant.
Omar One had been assiduous in teaching us about the need to honour all God’s creations, animate and inanimate. However, while all of Allah’s creatures were to be protected even if they could be used to sustain life, there were, as we suspected, exceptions, though they delicately omitted infidels from the list. Prominent among the exemptions were poisonous snakes, scorpions, and hyenas, which were to be dispatched on sight. Their fear of these things was contagious and neither their fatalism nor mine was sufficient to overcome it.
One night at Camp Canada, Louis awoke with a shriek, sitting bolt upright and thereby jerking the tarp away from the barrels behind our heads and bringing down the retaining stones on top of us, loudly proclaiming there was a snake in the bed. We extracted ourselves from tarp and blankets in a flourish and the sentries came running with Kalashnikovs ready while Louis breathlessly explained the situation. We then began a methodical and careful disentanglement of the tarp, the rocks, and the bedding, seeking the offending reptile. Suddenly, in the otherworldly glare of a sentry’s LED flashlight, a tiny desert mouse scampered into the night.
Often on our cross-country treks the driver or the boys in the back would spot a desert lizard, a somewhat iguana-like creature. They were usually about thirty-five centimetres long and the big, sand-coloured males carried vivid patches of red or yellow on their backs. The mujahideen loved to eat them and had a very specific way of hunting them. As soon as one was spotted, the driver, helped by kibitzers in the back shouting conflicting directions, looked for the lizard’s burrow and then blocked it by placing a truck wheel over the entrance. That accomplished, the boys would leap off the truck and seek to grab it as it skittered among them. Once captured, it would be dispatched the way all living things were killed: throat slit while the mujahideen intoned, “Bismil Allah” (In the name of God). Always, for me, a chilling ritual.
The dung beetle was our constant companion wherever we travelled in the desert. These hard-working little insects left endless tiny tracks in the sand and seemed to like building their burrows close to where we slept, inevitably heading in our direction. Although they were harmless we did not relish their crawling over us at night and were taught by our guards to blow in their faces to divert them from their invasion of our blankets. If flicked away, they would do an ostrich-like faceplant wherever they landed and remain motionless in this ludicrous position until they summoned the courage to scuttle away, often hours later.
The plant life was sparse and unremarkable. In widely separated locations, or oases, a variety of types of acacia thorn trees and a good mix of scrubby bushes and grasses grew, most of them capable of giving a nasty cut or puncture. Very little in the desert was without defence mechanisms. Aside from the shade-providing acacias, the most valuable vegetation was dead, furnishing the only fuel available.
The nomads are herders of goats and sheep but above all of camels, and some have herds well in excess of a thousand. Often in the most desolate places, we came upon camels spread across a wide area, apparently grazing, but there never seemed much for them to eat or drink. They came in all colours from snow white to almost black. Only very rarely did we encounter a herd on the move with minders in evidence. On those occasions we would be instructed not to show our faces.
A couple of times a campagnard, as the mujahideen called them, led a string of two or three camels right through the camp or majestically posed, backlit, at the rim of the depression in which the camp lay. Usually Omar One would amble out, unarmed, to chat them up. Our abductors were very
careful about maintaining good relations with the local population, sharing what little food and medicines they had and generally treating the nomads with openness and respect, a policy that clearly paid dividends. Our kidnappers claimed that the Algerians offered a $100 reward to anyone calling in with an AQIM location.
I’ve already discussed how the desert antelope formed an important part of our diet and one Louis and I very much looked forward to. In addition, our captors would—relatively rarely—buy a sheep or goat when they encountered nomads moving through the desert. Sometimes, even when we hadn’t seen any protein in a week or two, a truck would return from a water or telecommunications excursion without a trussed, bleating beast in the back and our abductors, armed to the teeth, would explain that the price had been too high.
Louis and I were awoken one night by a loud commotion right beside us. It sounded as if some savage beast were being abused, or, more precisely, like the much-amplified voice of Han Solo’s sidekick, Chewbacca (the Wookie). A tethered three-year-old camel, which Omar One had purchased for the kitchen, was reluctantly being unloaded from the back of his vehicle and loudly protesting such an indignity.
We gorged ourselves on fresh meat the next day and almost everyone was involved in the butchering process. Thirty-centimetre-long narrow strips of camel meat were hung from every acacia tree in camp and thoroughly dried in the intense sun within a few hours. We ate that camel for the next seventeen days. The chewing became ever more challenging, claiming one of my teeth, but the meat remained entirely palatable.
On the day after the camel was slaughtered, Omar One offered us a large, odd-shaped flap of skin, which he said was a delicacy, the fatty camel’s face. I’m afraid that despite our need of fat we declined. The next day, looking a little green around the gills, Omar allowed we were right to have refused, as he had found it much too rich.
Every now and then we would see a wary desert jackal crossing an open space in the distance, but it was the hyenas, barking and howling singly or in packs, seemingly close by, that got everybody’s attention.
I was surprised, given the variety of drinking water sources (and the fact that now and then tiny swimming things could be observed in our cup), that we were not plagued by dysentery. In fact, my problem was quite the opposite, and it threatened my life very directly. All that worry and the bad back, coupled with poor water quality and a diet bereft of fruit and vegetables, consisting of little more than rice cooked in powdered milk, did not make for regularity.
Almost from the moment of capture, constipation became a worry. Shortly after we reached Camp Canada on Day 6, it had become a concern. I would ask to go loin and remain squatting and forlornly hoping for great lengths of time. Then my captors would—to the embarrassment of all concerned—come looking for me. Louis usually asked, as we walked and walked, whether I was receiving any “signals” to suggest, finally, that relief was on the way. And always, always the answer was negative.
I began to limit my intake, but there was still no output. As I grew increasingly concerned, the resolution became the more elusive. By Day 41 (23 January) I had been sixteen days without a bowel movement of even the most modest kind. My belly was distended and I felt nauseated and light headed. I knew water should help but the quality was so iffy that I did not drink as much as I ought to have done. I genuinely believed that there was a real likelihood I would die of peritonitis following a ruptured bowel, and I was at a loss to know what to do about it. I asked Omar One repeatedly if there were any pills in their rudimentary medical kit that might encourage a resolution, and I was swallowing two or three gulps of their olive oil each day from a small bottle that constituted their entire supply. Omar seemed to understand that this was not a trivial issue and he too began to worry, albeit for more mercenary reasons.
Louis was as concerned as I. He kept asking what could be done and I replied that absent appropriate medication, the only solution was an enema, which we did not have. Knowing that some of the sorties were not exclusively for water and phone calls, I urged our guards to seek medication from a pharmacy and to see if an enema of any kind could be procured. But to no avail. By the sixteenth day it was clear that no help would be forthcoming from outside and that I was on my own. I determined we would create the required instrument ourselves. Louis asked me what the component parts of an enema were. When I told him and drew diagrams in the sand, his scrounger/Boy Scout mind began to machinate. He solicited Omar One’s assistance as I walked for longer and more desperately in an effort to get things moving.
Omar agreed to furnish one of the Mylar bags that had contained their staple powdered milk. Louis asked for the Bic ballpoint pen we had seen from time to time in the hands of our kidnappers. Sorting through his hoard of foraged stuff he came up with a piece of inner tube. He asked for a knife, and with some reluctance it was produced. Louis then cut a thin strip of rubber from the piece he had saved.
We had been provided with a bar of soap, so we built a small fire and heated water, then stirred in the precious soap in our borrowed tin cup over the flame. We punched a small hole in the bottom of the Mylar bag, removed the nib and plastic ink reservoir tube from the pen, inserted the wide end of the Bic through the hole in the bag and sealed the pen in place with the rubber strip.
Soon we had a concentrated warm soapy mix, which we poured into the bag so we could cook up a second batch, explaining to Omar what we were up to because he was going to have to allow us to go extremely loin and together.
I told Louis that I was embarrassed in the extreme that this had to be a two-man job but, thankfully, we were both way past such niceties. We retreated to a spot beyond our habitual latrine in a small cave high among the rocks, and found a suitable and fairly inconspicuous location among another group of boulders below the cliff face to the west. I stretched over a reasonably smooth rock and inserted the business end of the ballpoint pen while Louis squeezed the bag. And the liquid all went where it had to go.
It seemed to be working. I was filling up with warm soapy water. I asked Louis to refill the bag from the second batch in the heated cup. In it went and the pressure deepened and increased. Then we waited. Remembering the experience of previously endured medical tests, I sought to keep that solution inside for as long as possible—then longer. Soon I became very excited by the increasingly urgent signs suggesting that relief was indeed on the way. Within a few minutes I waved Louis away, staggered behind the rock and let go the most satisfying bowel movement of my life.
Louis insists that his subsequent sighting of that long, very compact, glistening turd was one of his life’s finer visions. He may have been overly taken with the joy of the moment or, then again, maybe you just had to be there. Be that as it may, my immediate and extremely acute problem was solved. And at least as important, we had proven the technology and if the problem recurred, we had the solution, as it were.
It was a good day. We had rectified (I’m getting carried away) a life-threatening issue, and even our kidnappers were taken with our ingenuity, much as they were with our various structures. Both Omars sometimes asked, “Which of the brothers showed you how to do this?”
When we replied, with ill-disguised pride, “Nobody” (and after they had checked the veracity of that response), they were gratifyingly impressed by our creativity.
We suffered all the usual scrapes, blisters, burns, and bruises that are the stuff of any extended camping expedition. Unique to our particular situation were the constant piercings by thorns: hands, arms, and even faces but, thank heavens, not eyes. At one point Louis’ foot was deeply impaled by an eight-centimetre thorn right through the sole of his shoe but, again, we were fortunate that the desert climate is unfriendly to infection. At that point, “the doctor” was in camp, a figure only ever seen in the far distance, but he flatly refused to see Louis. They did, though, provide alcohol to allow us to clean the wound.
We removed small splinters with the sewing needle we had been lent, and were very careful about av
oiding serious sunburn. Our teeth took a beating and we were all too evidently losing weight, which worried me more and more as I contemplated how long our ordeal might last. Beyond the ever-present concern about execution, a significant threat throughout our captivity remained the possibility that we would be killed or maimed while travelling across the desert, either in an attack by the various armed forces looking to wipe out AQIM or in some freak accident. We spent hundreds of hours in and on those damned trucks, covering huge distances.
Our kidnappers were, in the main, instinctive, highly skilled drivers but the risks they took were well off the reasonable scale. Often, particularly when driving far too fast across flat, hard desert surfaces, we came close to hitting other trucks at speed. Regularly we skidded to a halt, at night, at the very edge of a steep wadi: a near-vertical cliff, perhaps fifteen metres high or more, dropping into blackness almost beneath the front wheels. We would crash over—really through—the tops of knife-edged dunes without knowing anything about what kind of slope was on the other side, and it is fair to add that drivers who did not approach dune passage in this manner but flinched before their trucks reached the top generally became deeply embedded in the sand, which required twenty or thirty minutes of hard labour before they were in a position to back down the dune and try it again.
At one point, Omar One returned to Camp Canada a day and a half overdue with a harrowing tale to tell that says a lot about our kidnappers. They were on a communications run and, he explained, he had stopped at the edge of a steep wadi to make a sat-phone call when he felt the rim begin to give way. He stood on the brakes and then attempted to reverse, but his truck began to slide inexorably over the edge. He screamed at the four in the truck bed to abandon ship, which they were already doing, joined in short order by the young mujahid in the passenger seat, who rolled out of the door cradling his weapon. Omar decided to ride it down and as the truck, almost vertical, began to gather momentum, he succeeded in preventing it from flipping or rolling with judicious application of the brakes and minor steering corrections.
A Season in Hell Page 11
