A Season in Hell

by Robert R. Fowler

  After the calls, we all made our way unsteadily down the dune and milled about as the sentries were brought in and everything was packed up. Nobody seemed in any particular hurry. It must have been nearly three o’clock in the morning when we set out and I was drained. I had been assigned to a truck driven by the camp emir, Jaffer, who spoke not a word of French, and we were joined in the cab by New Guy.

  After bouncing against each other for an hour or so, as we shared the passenger bucket seat, New Guy turned to me and said, in passable French, “You don’t recognize me, but your friend does.”

  Confused, I replied, “Without my glasses, I wouldn’t recognize my own children,” and he let the matter drop. Then, as I knew conversation was possible, we exchanged a few innocuous words about the night and the desert, and I stayed well away from the personal questions such as what his name was or where he was from. He could see that I was still discombobulated from the phone call and I was surprised to see that he clearly wanted to extend some sympathy.

  Suddenly he said, “Allah will ensure it will be all right. You are not to worry. It will end well.” I sneaked a look at Jaffer at the wheel. Either he had no idea what we were discussing or he did not care. This was one of the most unambiguously positive statements we had heard from one of our captors. Of course I knew that this generously proportioned mujahid, who was obviously not part of the command team, had no idea how it would turn out, but I was touched that he would wish to diminish our worries. Without any prodding from me he said he had committed himself to jihad following “Bush’s crusade” (the 2003 invasion of Iraq) as he had found this further and unprovoked “invasion of Muslim lands” intolerable and the stated purposes unworthy of consideration. And then we talked of—what else?—God, and soon he was seeking to add me to the multitudinous slaves of Allah.

  Some hours later, when the drivers simply could go no farther and we had come closer than ever before to pitching into deep ravines, we ground to a halt. Everyone piled out and bedded down around the trucks in the open desert, and we were soon asleep. This was Camp Nowhere. Louis and I were so exhausted that we could hardly summon the energy to talk about the most important thing to have happened in eighty-seven days: our phone calls. Just before dropping off, we assured each other that all was well with our respective families, and I told Louis that Mary was fully engaged, threatening to have us back by Day 100. I then recounted the bizarre comment from New Guy: “You don’t recognize me but your friend does.” Louis shrugged his shoulders, saying he did not know what the hell he was talking about, and was asleep in an instant.

  A couple of weeks later, apropos of nothing, Louis had a slap-yourself-on-the-forehead moment: “I know where I saw that guy! It’s all very clear. It was outside the Grand Hotel in Niamey as we left for the visit to the mine.” This had been early in the morning on the Sunday we were taken. Suddenly everything clicked into place, confirming what we had already suspected but been unable to confirm. New Guy had been an AQIM spotter that morning, and we had in fact been under observation from the morning of the day we were grabbed.

  Waking up at Camp Nowhere was a pretty bleak experience, but there was just enough time for our daily walk before we were given the order to mount up. We drove well into the heat of the day before stopping in a group of scrubby, thin trees. The heat was crushing and we were left alone to wilt under another designated tree. As we expected, after lunch the group prepared to split up. Belmokhtar and his staff, along with New Guy and a crew, would be going one way, while we would be taking some other direction.

  The council members were sitting in a circle about fifteen metres west of the trucks while all the others save the sentries were clustered into a sliver of shade in the lee of the trucks. Louis and I were about thirty metres to the south of the truck park. Someone was pulling at the load on one of the trucks when there was a great whoosh, followed, a few seconds later, by a mighty, flat BANG! I was convinced we were under attack.

  I looked toward the trucks, which were wreathed in white smoke, as Sideburns staggered out, his hands clapped to his ears. New Guy was sitting on the ground on the other side of the truck slowly shaking his head back and forth, and the officers were all standing staring into the desert to the west, where a plume of smoke was rising in the still air, and then back to the trucks. Nobody was racking rounds or aiming weapons or preparing to repel an attack. Jack strode over to Sideburns, pulled his hands from his ears and examined each one, then walked back to the trucks and checked out the shocked group under the nearby tree. New Guy was still sitting shaking his head on the other side.

  Half an hour later Omar Two approached us and said in his best deadpan, “Here’s your blanket,” thrusting it into our hands and walking away. It was still smoking, having been holed and burned in a number of places. Apparently, a rocket-propelled grenade had just been fired through it. The warhead had passed about twenty centimetres over the head of New Guy, who had been bending over to fill his canteen on the far side of the truck, at the business end of the RPG launcher. The round had flown straight over the group of officers and exploded at its self-destruct range, about a kilometre out in the flat desert. The back blast had washed over the group sitting beneath the trees.

  Nobody had been hurt, although a few were shaken up and suffered some hearing loss for a few days. Apparently one of them, Sideburns I believe, had wanted something from the tied-down load in the back of one of the trucks. He had been pulling at our blanket, which was wrapped around the RPG launcher, and somehow the motion had dislodged the safety and fired the weapon (or the safety had not been set properly). There seemed to be no recriminations. Allah had decided that nobody was to die that day.

  Soon after that, the seven trucks split into two groups and were on their separate ways. In four trucks we drove late into the evening, and when our captors were unable to raise anybody on their short-range walkie-talkies at the camp to which we were headed, we stopped just outside, again in the open desert (Camp Anywhere), rather than surging forward in the gathering darkness and risking being shot up by sentries.

  The next morning they were able to make contact with the camp a few kilometres away and we entered a deep, wide wadi, which we called Camp Cut Finger, so named because the surly young AR2 sliced the length of an index finger as he was helping in the kitchen. There was a lot of blood but no great concern. We sent him a packet of cookies, a gesture again welcomed by some and resented by others. AR2 didn’t know what to think—but he ate the cookies. Louis and I worked much of the next day to improve our position at Cut Finger, removing the thorns and stones from the place where we had slept badly the night before, and just as we were about to settle in for our second night, we were told we would be leaving in five minutes.

  I had been suffering through another long bout of constipation and, despite the order to prepare to leave, I suddenly felt what Louis termed “signals.” I had not used the pills, as we had been constantly on the move, spending ten or twelve hours at a stretch in those trucks on the trek to and from the telephone dune. The trouble with the pills was that when you had to go, you had to go. Trying to manage that as we sprinted across the open desert would have been at best problematic.

  I was determined to seize the moment. When I received the nod from the sentry permitting me to go loin (by now we were no longer accompanied), I was off. I found the right kind of suitably discreet spot and to my considerable relief everything happened as it ought. When I got back to our position, Louis’ arms were again full of our baggage and he was heading toward the trucks. As I approached, he asked the distressingly routine, “How did it go?”

  Rather than responding with the habitual “nothing!” I replied, with a smile, “Actually, rather well,” and he burst into tears of fragile relief. I had not appreciated the extent to which my health issues were also his, that he was suffering the same deep concern about my serious gut problems. It was a touching moment occasioned by the most pedestrian of circumstances.

  As we boarded
our assigned trucks, I saw Jack talking earnestly to Hassan, his arm around his shoulders, walking him back and forth nearby, and instinctively I knew that the emir was about to send Hassan away. Less than a week later he was gone, at least for a while, and our relief was immense.

  We drove deep into the night, across some of the roughest terrain we had yet encountered. We barged our way through huge dunes, twenty times the height of the vehicles, over mountain trails and stretches of flat desert strewn with huge boulders. Some of the assaults on the dunes were terrifying, made worse by the darkness. I was driving with Omar One and it seemed as if his nerves were taking a beating. Each of the trucks became ensablé a number of times, but finally we emerged at the top of a long, steep slope—a ramp, really—winding down sharply from the high ridge on which we were perched toward the seemingly limitless desert floor stretching beneath us, bathed in cold, bright moonlight.

  We camped on that steeply sloping ramp—Camp Moonbeam. It was a breathtaking sight yet daunting, for arrayed before us was an endless procession of formidable dunes in great lateral wrinkles across the desert below. Soon I knew we would try to bash our way through them all. I hated those dunes, fearing constantly that there would come a time when the trucks could not be extracted and we would die stranded in place. It was cold, and to cheer ourselves up Louis and I drank a litre of President Compaoré’s mango juice before crawling, exhausted, beneath our newly ventilated blanket.

  CHAPTER 13

  SOUMANA DISAPPEARS—CONVERSION—AND LETTERS FROM HOME

  O happy living things! no tongue

  Their beauty might declare:

  A spring of love gush’d from my heart,

  And I blessed them, unaware …

  As we left Moonbeam at dawn, the view was even more dramatic. I was assigned to a truck driven by Omar Three, and Soumana sat by the window. This was the first occasion since our capture that I had been able to spend with him. He was dejected, tentative, and seemingly afraid. Before we left, the brash, swaggering AR2 stuck his head in the passenger-side window and sternly warned Soumana and me yet again against talking to each other. Ahmed reinforced that message a few minutes later but I had the impression that the warnings were directed more at Soumana than at me.

  Omar Three, unique among our kidnappers, was usually solicitous of our well-being and morale. He would regularly wave a cautious good morning and seek tiny, subtle ways to offer hope. We were particularly sensitive to any possible signals coming from him as we had the strong impression that he was the closest to Belmokhtar, or at least to his way of thinking. Others, like Ahmed and Ibrahim, Abdul Rahman and Jaffer, shared Jack’s warrior camaraderie—a type of relationship the portly Omar Three did not enjoy—but from an intellectual or strategic planning perspective, Omar Three seemed to have a privileged relationship with the commander.

  A few days earlier, pointing to my much-repaired shoes during a midday stop, he had said with a smile, “They will make an interesting souvenir of all this when you get back to Canada.” This vigilant observer had seemed genuinely anxious to indicate that everything would work out all right.

  During the day-long drive from Camp Moonbeam on Day 91, Omar Three, ignoring the various orders we had received prior to departure, chatted as best he could with Soumana and me in his rudimentary French. I forget precisely how it began but soon all three of us were talking about our children, how many, and the extent to which we had or hadn’t seen them recently. Omar and Soumana were appropriately dismayed yet delicate about my shameful failure to produce a male heir, and with tolerant, knowing smiles they listened to my insistence that I was more than satisfied with daughters. Soumana and I were asked about the ages of our children and they were a little shocked to learn that my eldest daughter would be forty in early July.

  Then, after a longish silence in the middle of this gentle, social chatter, Soumana, who was not supposed to be talking at all, defiantly and with vehemence interjected, “You will be celebrating that birthday with her, I am sure.” Omar Three, to my even greater surprise, rather than summarily shutting up Soumana, murmured something to suggest he thought Soumana was absolutely right. The whole exchange was so bizarre that the three of us were stunned into silence, nobody daring to explore the subject any further but all of us glad that we’d had the moment.

  Late in the afternoon, as we approached what seemed to be the next camp, Omar Three declared, “You will recognize it.” And it seemed to me that we were passing through an area that closely resembled the environs of Thornhill, which we had left only a week before. Just as I was thinking that perhaps we would be able to get some new footwear from the buried cache, Soumana suddenly pointed to the lead truck and said, “The left rear tire is about to go.” Insofar as I could see, there was nothing wrong with it, but twenty seconds later the truck lurched to the left and shuddered to a stop. It was a soft, quiet afternoon with a slight breeze chasing away the heat of the day. Changing the blown tire would be difficult as Omar One had not been able to get to hard ground before he had to stop.

  The heavily laden truck frame was resting on the sand by the blown tire. Immediately, Omar One’s crew freed a spare from the maze of ropes, baggage, fuel, water, and weaponry in his truck bed. Omar rummaged endlessly in the passenger floor-wells, which served as tool boxes in all the trucks, and eventually came up with three hydraulic jacks but only one jack handle. Someone else began to dig around the tire, quickly to be shouldered aside by Omar One, who grumpily insisted on looking after his own truck. Louis and I met up and moved off a way and shared a cookie and some water, each of us still beset with the emotional turmoil of the telephone calls and the epic trek back.

  Soumana sat alone fifty metres away on the other side of the tightly grouped vehicles looking miserable. He seemed again to be cradling his right forearm, which had been hurt in the initial grab ninety-one days previously. I knew that we still had some of the arthritis pills sent in the shipment from President Compaoré, which we had twice before tried to get to Soumana through intermediaries. We knew we hadn’t asked for them and we wondered if they might have been sent in response to some complaint of his, in much the same way we had put in our own, largely unfilled, orders. So I sorted through one of the tattered plastic bags that served as our luggage and, finding the pills, began to approach Soumana. At that point the young AR2 (whom we now called “Cut Finger”) intercepted us at a run, screaming, “No speaking, no speaking,” and aggressively gestured that I was to return to where we had been. I sought to give him the pills, indicating with hand signals that he pass them to Soumana. But he would have none of it.

  I set off to find someone who might straighten all this out. The first candidate, Omar Two, was not the one I would have preferred but I didn’t have much choice. I asked him to give the pills to Soumana but instead he said, with his usual sardonic smile, that he would take me to Soumana so I could give them to him myself. Seeing the two of us approaching, Soumana looked truly distressed. I handed him the pills, saying that I believed they must have been intended for him and in any case they would, I thought, probably ease what I assumed was his joint and muscle pain. In some confusion but with force Soumana refused to take the pills, saying over and over, “You keep them.” Omar Two displayed his sinister smile, but this time for Soumana’s benefit, and led me away.

  Perhaps half an hour later, the difficult tire change had been accomplished with lots of digging and multiple jacking. Al Zarqawi, whose aggressive attitude toward us had begun to thaw just perceptibly, had cadged the last strawberry and coconut cookie. He remained irreverent and cocky but less calculatingly nasty. He no longer strode over our blankets, whether or not we were beneath them.

  We were loaded back into the vehicles for what was billed as a short drive to the next camp. Louis was instructed to join me in the cab of Omar Three’s vehicle and Soumana was directed elsewhere.

  That was the last time either of us set eyes on Soumana.

  At dusk, about an hour later, the trucks p
ulled in among some trees and bushes. While it looked somewhat like Thornhill, it wasn’t, though that place may well have been only a few hundred metres—or a few hundred kilometres—distant. Thus it seemed we would get no shoes. Night was falling and we were directed to a spot without any kind of cover, close to the trucks. We were exhausted after a long, rough, and hot drive, so we made up our bed and prepared to crash, not knowing and not caring if there would be anything to eat.

  Soon, out of the dark emerged a very jacked-up AR2, who started yelling well before he reached us. In this fourteen-year-old’s rudimentary French, delivered with too much hate and not enough grammar, we were once again being given hell because we had spoken to Soumana. I was tired and had had enough of screaming teenagers, so I went off toward the trucks in search of an adult. First up again was Omar Two. In fact, he was so readily available I wondered if he had put the lad up to the whole thing. Undaunted, I explained that I’d had it with AR2; if someone wished to upbraid us, could it be someone in some authority and someone we could understand? Further, Cut Finger seemed to be exercised about my talking to Soumana, when the last time I had done so had been in Omar Two’s presence an hour before, so what the hell was the fuss about?

  Omar Two could not have been less sympathetic. AR2, he barked, had all the authority he needed to say anything to us he wished. He was right to have reminded us to stay away from Soumana. We needed to remember that we were prisoners of war and we had no rights whatsoever. In effect, get out of my face. Not a fruitful encounter.

  Twenty minutes later, the entire council emerged out of the dark—all the senior members of the group. They were led by Jack, who must have just arrived for he had not been travelling with us over the last couple of days. At first I assumed it to be an escalation of the AR2 incident. Then I noticed that someone had plunked down two well-stuffed, medium-sized, black nylon backpacks in the middle of our blankets. They all sat cross-legged around the edge of those blankets, though not actually touching them.