He reported that the slope was long and steep and the ride down terrifying, and finally he was unable to avoid a large boulder near the bottom that brought him sharply to a crunching stop, seriously damaging the heavy bumper, collapsing the bodywork around the front, and smashing the radiator. Also, somewhere in the precipitous descent, the muffler and tailpipe had been torn off.
At first look, Omar said he was convinced the vehicle was a write-off, “good only for parts.” But then, divinely inspired of course, he summoned his crew down from the lip of what was more a deep, not very long slit in the desert floor than a wadi, and began to calculate how he might extract his damaged vehicle. His young colleagues were unanimous that it was an impossible task but Omar, calling for Allah’s assistance, instructed the five of them to completely unload the truck and schlep everything up the slope and then to get behind the truck and push as he engaged the four-wheel drive. He set a shallow zigzag pattern, and with straining muscles and engine, they made thirty to forty centimetres before the truck stopped its forward motion, whereupon one of them would hurl a sizable rock behind a rear wheel to stop it from slipping backward. And so they proceeded for seven hours without a break.
Omar recounted that at one point his second-in-command on this mission shouted through his window that the boys needed water and was dispatched up the slope to get some. He returned in a panic to report that the water drum was all but empty; whoever was supposed to have checked it prior to departure had not done so. Omar shushed him into silence to avoid discouraging the crew, who still had to push a heavy truck up a cliff in the middle of the Sahara without water. Omar then demanded that personal water bottles be collected to ensure that all the available water would be used only to refill the broken, steaming radiator. Yes, they had a satellite-phone and knew their GPS-generated coordinates, but to call for help would have been risky and a humiliating defeat.
They reached the top—those few centimetres at a time—and draining the last liquid they could find into the radiator, limped slowly back to camp in the cool of the night. When they showed up, utterly broken, there was quite a commotion as many believed they had been ambushed and killed by some passing patrol. One of the children, who had been talking to us at the time, threw himself at Omar’s feet, forehead pressed to the ground and arms stretched forward, shouting “Sheik Omar is safe, al-hamdu lillah”—praise be to God.
For weeks afterward they took turns hammering away, hour after hour, attempting to repair that radiator, but eventually a replacement radiator and muffler had to be installed. The bodywork and bumper were beaten out. Omar was not criticized—at least not within our hearing—for driving his truck over a cliff, but he was widely praised and admired for his stalwart faith and perseverance in bringing it back in not quite one piece.
In its stark variety, the desert is as stunning as it is daunting. Unlike Louis, though, I had trouble appreciating beauty in such circumstances. Yes, the plethora of stars in clear air so very far from any light pollution was stunning. And it’s true that the many faces of the Sahara, from the high ridges of classic, shifting dunes standing across our route to the absolutely flat, almost pure white, horizon-less shimmering pans of the Malian desert, or the sharp, rugged, black and red stone mountains rearing out of the desert—some streaked laterally with white salt deposits—were all dramatically different, imposing, and not a little frightening in their harsh and unforgiving primordial vastness. To me, however, that all highlighted our lack of freedom and a terrifyingly uncertain future. Louis enjoyed the glorious sunsets but I had trouble seeing past the circumstances in which we were viewing them.
From time to time, when we remarked on some aspect of our desert surroundings, our AQIM captors—usually Ibrahim or Omar One—would point out how fortunate we were to be touring the Sahara and ask if we were aware of the exorbitant prices European tourists and Saudi princes paid to see such sights. We usually just shrugged and stared them down and they grew tired of that play.
Aside from the tiny salt-mining settlement at Taoudenni, where only a couple of dozen hardy miners remain year round, there are no permanent communities in the vast region of Mali north and west of Tessalit, rather similar in its unforgiving austerity, dramatic weather, and stark emptiness to the Barren Lands of northern Canada. Nor is there an effective police or military presence anywhere in this bleak region. Mali’s ill-equipped, underfunded, and poorly trained army ventures warily and rarely into the Sahara, which is the realm of a variety of nomadic peoples, and dominated by rebels, bandits, traffickers of all kinds, and, of course, Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.
The nomadic population is predominantly Tuareg, a Berber people who have a distinctive language, culture, and rather violent history, and only the vaguest allegiance to any of the half-dozen countries through which they roam. They never accepted French colonial authority and whereas boys of my generation in North America were brought up on tales of cowboys and Indians, in France it was all about Legionnaires defending little white crenellated forts against indigo-garbed Tuareg hoards mounted on pale camels and wielding flashing sabres (the archetype being the 1939 movie Beau Geste).
There have been a succession of Tuareg rebellions in both Mali and Niger, and in every negotiated settlement, usually brokered by not necessarily benevolent outside interests—most notably those of Algeria and Libya—hold-out factions have insisted on continuing their struggle against the governments in Bamako and Niamey. Yet Tuareg serve in the armies of Mali and Niger as well as in specially raised militias in northern Mali, and, of course, in AQIM. More recently they became the core of Muammar Gaddafi’s “African mercenaries.”
Thus the Sahara houses a complex netherworld of people operating outside and beyond any law. Gun runners bring weapons and ammunition of every description, mostly of Soviet-era origin and mostly from Sudan, Somalia, and Chad, to clients across the western Sahel. Drug traffickers are reportedly paid $40,000 by Colombia’s FARC rebels or their West African partners to run a shipment of cocaine from, say, Guinea-Bissau across the Sahara to the eastern Mediterranean littoral, from where it is taken into Europe’s soft underbelly or to the Arabian peninsula and the Gulf States.
Such vast sums of drug money are wreaking havoc within the traditional Tuareg leadership structure. The elders find it increasingly difficult to hold sway over, and can exert little discipline on, the flash kids with weapons and pockets full of cash. Absent the traditionally strong Tuareg cultural foundation and clan discipline, the kids are easier pickings for AQIM as the region drifts toward the anarchy of Somalia and the turmoil of Darfur, which, my jailers told me, was very much their objective.
Then there are the people movers—the African equivalents of the Asian snakeheads—who for a substantial fee escort desperate people from West Africa who brave the perilous Sahara and the Mediterranean crossing to attempt illegal immigration to Europe. Their hope is to find employment in those lands of plenty so they can send money home to their all too often starving families. Many of these people had been awaiting their moment to get across the Mediterranean when they were caught up in the piteous suffering, turmoil, and upheaval currently besetting Libya. And finally, there are the ordinary smugglers who have worked these regions for millennia.
Escaping from AQIM into the clutches of any of these shadowy groups would not necessarily have changed our circumstances for the better.
CHAPTER 7
SURVIVAL IN THE DESERT
His great bright eye most silently
Up to the Moon is cast—
If he may know which way to go;
For she guides him smooth or grim
As we took stock of our surroundings and as the miasma of terror and pain that had been the currency of our first five days of captivity began to dissipate, we girded ourselves for the long haul. But how long was that going to be?
Louis was adamant that we must set our clocks to eight months, for we knew that had been the period the Austrian tourists had spent as hostages of AQIM
in northern Mali. This seemed an awfully long time to me but I could not fault his logic, nor did I want to contemplate the implications of other models, most far longer and tougher than the ordeal the Austrians had faced. Still, eight months—240 days—seemed longer than I could bear.
We understood from the outset that our greatest strength was each other. So far, we had remained together. We had been able to help, comfort, support, assist, cajole, challenge, shame, sustain, and encourage one another. We had not been close friends before this nightmare nor had we worked together for very long on this UN mission, but we understood that we were fortunate to be in this mess together. We were also well aware that alone the chance of coming through unscathed would be considerably diminished for each of us.
We decided that we needed a business plan. We would strive at all costs to maintain healthy bodies in the extremely hostile environment in which we found ourselves, with the hope and expectation that physical health would help preserve mental health and maintain morale, which we took to be our greatest challenge.
To achieve this we determined to institutionalize that first walk among the desert melons at TV Camp, so we designed a track, or piste, in the immediate vicinity of our designated acacia tree at Camp Canada: one sufficiently modest in its dimensions, we hoped, to avoid arousing the suspicions of our kidnappers that we might be up to something. We paced out a richly contorted route, nineteen circuits to the kilometre, and decided to walk it twice a day—at dawn and dusk—with a view to putting in a total of between four and six kilometres each day.
Usually we managed two and a half or three kilometres by breakfast, and thus had a minimum of one to one and a half to do in the evening. Although four was our minimum, we often managed five or six each day. Our cost–benefit analysis of the physical and psychological advantages to be derived from exercise versus the calories we had to expend, which we knew were not being adequately replaced, capped our ambitions at six, although on rare occasions of extreme stress I would exceed this.
Louis would carefully mark each circuit in the sand with a twisted stick. Six kilometres meant 114 circuits on this track so the markings stretched half way around. Our captors became so used to this ritual that we would see them in the far distance mimicking our gestures, no doubt mockingly, but relatively good naturedly, which we took to be a good sign.
Initially, this regime was quite a challenge: first because this was more exercise than either of us had managed for decades in Canada; and second because we had not anticipated any of the psychological, climatic, or nutritional challenges we would face in maintaining such an exercise regime. Still, we stuck with the program, and while there were always reasons why one or the other of us should not proceed with what our abductors came to call votre sport (as in, “Est-ce que vous avez déjà fait votre sport?”—Have you completed your exercise?), we almost always reached our target.
At first we began with various warming-up exercises—knee bends, body twists, and a variety of stretching exercises—but Louis wasn’t very interested in such things. So I resolved to embellish my walking with some of the upper-body moves, switching them every few circuits. Needless to say, these additional antics only added to the amusement of our captors.
We usually began before sunrise and as the rim of the sun appeared above the horizon the flies would begin to gather and I would estimate their numbers on Louis’ jacket. Often I counted more than a hundred and, of course, they covered his pants and turban as well. I knew I was also covered with flies but focusing on Louis helped me to ignore mine. Soon, though, our exercise would be augmented by a jerky flailing of arms as we sought to rid ourselves of the gathering swarms. For each of us our exercise regime was very therapeutic. It never failed to reduce anxiety and help us to sleep in the evenings. Not at all incidentally, it also helped to ease the pain in my lower back, which never felt better than when I was walking.
As we walked and thought about if and how we were going to get through all this, being a tidy bureaucrat I developed guidelines, which were effectively rules to govern our behaviour.
First rule—no what ifs or if onlys. We agreed, first tacitly and subsequently explicitly, that it would be perilous, counterproductive, and downright self-indulgent to wallow in any musings about what had brought us to this pretty pass. Thus we never—not once—discussed whether or not I should have accepted this assignment from the UN Secretary-General; whether Louis should have agreed to sign on as my assistant; if we really had to make the trip from which we were abducted or whether we ought to have remained by the pool at the hotel in Niamey that Sunday afternoon; or, indeed, to play the blame game of wondering if we would be in this pickle if only the other guy had …
Second rule—no discussing bad stuff after midday. Very soon we realized that if we shared our worst worries and fears late into the night, we would not be able to sleep with such thoughts chasing each other toward what my brother, Bruce, calls “the hour of the wolf”: that period just before dawn when even at the best of times everything looks bleak. Thus, in a ridiculously effective act of self-delusion, we decreed that those dark thoughts could be aired and dissected in the morning, and they regularly were, but not after lunch. Often, though, one of us would start to verbalize a thought only to bring himself up short with, “It will wait until tomorrow,” and the other would not press. Sometimes this ritual became blatantly ridiculous as one of us would suggest, “Remind me to ask you about [whatever horrible thought] tomorrow morning.”
Third rule—no discussing anything sensitive after dark. We could not tell where our kidnappers were and they might be close enough to hear, which they tried to do at least once.
Fourth rule—absolute avoidance of rabbit holes. This was the most important and had to be strictly enforced. As soon as one of us started into some spiral of desperate worry, the other was to use every wile or insult to pull him back out. Such dangers were ever present. Sometimes such pits of despair were easily avoidable; on other occasions and with no warning, one of us would begin to slip into such a hole and resist very aggressively the other’s rescue attempts. I always knew, though, that Louis was there when I was down and my feelings of responsibility for him meant that I would not let myself, or him, wander too far or for too long underground.
We both understood that we had to be particularly vigilant about diving down separate holes, or the same rabbit hole, simultaneously.
Our daily routine could not have been more rudimentary and it varied very little. We would get up before sunrise, discreetly splash a small handful of cold water over our faces and work at our teeth with the faux-arak-root sticks, rinsing with a small mouthful of water. Then the walk and breakfast as we stood trying to find warmth in the rising sun.
After breakfast we would shake the sand out of the blankets and spread them over rocks and bushes to air in the sun. Sometimes I might fiddle with improving our position in the shade of the acacia by using the purloined entrenching tool with a broken handle to build a long, curving couch around our tree in the sand and Louis might work at improving the imperfect shade offered by the thin canopy of the acacia by collecting armloads of long, sharp grass and spreading it in layers among the thorny branches above our heads.
We were then chased by the growing intensity of the sun onto that couch and would move along and around it as the sun ever so slowly tracked across the sky. Eventually the uninviting, battered aluminum bowl of lunch was dropped nearby and we would dutifully dig in, with little enthusiasm.
Both Louis and I are pretty gregarious guys but even I was surprised by how rarely we ran out of conversation. We spoke of everything, ranging over our upbringing, our families, our children, and our professional lives, to politics, national and international, the state of the world, our friends and colleagues, public service, the private sector, religion, music, even sports, and the physical environment and, inevitably, updating our exhaustive analyses of our captors, individually and collectively. Always, the conversation would turn to our curren
t circumstances, a reading of the latest indications from the behaviour of our kidnappers and speculation about what might be occurring back home vis-à-vis our families and efforts to get us out of there—and what it would take to find freedom.
One or both of us would usually drift off into a fitful sleep in the building heat, but we were mindful that if we did too much of that we would not sleep at night and we knew we needed that sleep to keep our wits about us.
In the late afternoon, as the sun began to set behind the cliff face to our left, we watched the shade line stretch across the space in front of our tree and, when it reached a designated bush, it would be time for the evening portion of our walk, if, that is, Omar One had not shown up for a reading from the Qur’an, or Omar Two did not loom above us to assess our readiness to become his brothers in faith.
Those sessions, or our walk, would eventually be interrupted by their evening prayers. After some discussion Louis and I decided, almost from our arrival at Camp Canada, that we would show respect for their so deeply cherished religion by standing—during the daylight prayers—while they assembled in a single line facing east fifty metres away from us. That practice was fiercely resented by those few who believed it to be cravenly designed to curry their favour but admired by most, who took it to be a freely offered sign of respect. In fact, I found the chanting, rhythmic, soft voice of the imam rather soothing, and those became welcome contemplative moments during which I developed a ritual of my own.
A Season in Hell Page 12
