Belmokhtar opened the discussion, Omar One interpreting. He said that the backpacks and accompanying letters were from our families, delivered through an intermediary working on behalf of the President of Mali. We were dumbstruck. First the cartons from Blaise Compaoré only nine days before, then the emotional turmoil of the telephone calls four days previously, and now tangible things from those we loved: the very stuff Mary had mentioned during our phone call, and via President Touré as she had said.
Jack encouraged us to open our “presents.” I would very much have preferred to do this in private but they obviously wanted to see what was within. I suspect that they also wanted to gauge our reactions to each item as they sought to determine whether a locator device had been secreted into anything. I had the impression, as per the cartons from President Compaoré, that all these things had been well vetted prior to delivery to us but not necessarily by Jack’s katiba. Thus the shipment might have been in AQIM hands for some time. The backpacks bore bits of tape on which were scribbled “Louis” and “Robert,” so, like kids opening Christmas stockings in front of their parents, we unzipped them and began to haul out marvellous things.
There was clothing, medicine, books, and sundry other bits and pieces. Some of it seemed out of place, like the new black nylon knee-length dress socks and rather elegant summer-weight formal slacks with knife-edge creases and prominent, sand-collecting cuffs in the precise sizes we had been when we were thirty pounds heavier, but no belt. There was an extremely welcome safari-type long-sleeved shirt, and each of us received a fetching short-sleeved Lacoste golf shirt (but, dammit, Louis got the nicer colour!). Then there was the underwear. Someone had known, no doubt from the lists we presented so persistently to our jailers, that we really needed underwear. But that person was obviously not a family member; the embassy in Bamako, or perhaps psychiatric profilers in Ottawa, clearly had been forced to grapple with the existential dilemma of whether we were boxer or jockey guys. In best bureaucratic fashion, we had each been sent both.
We received an interesting selection of four paperback books, two in English (Ursula, Under, by Ingrid Hill, and The Shelters of Stone, by Jean Auel) and two in French (Nicole Fyfe-Martel’s Hélène de Champlain and L’homme-ouragan, by Lucie Dufresne). Not necessarily how we would have made our own desert-island selection, but we were grateful nonetheless. Les frères scrutinized each of the books with great care, riffling through the pages and closely examining the front and back covers and spines. After he had studied them, Omar One disdainfully threw them back on our blankets and asked, “Are there no male authors in Canada?” If there were, he wanted to know, why had all four books been written by women?
At the conclusion of the show-and-tell they took away the books. They were returned some days later with the promotional photos of the authors methodically defaced (no depictions of women were permitted). The entire cover of Nicole Fyfe-Martel’s book, bearing the familiar “courtesy of the Canadian Embassy in Mali” sticker inside, had been ripped off as it had displayed an artist’s depiction of Samuel de Champlain’s twelve-year-old wife, Hélène, in a not-particularly-immodest décolleté dress. Even reading with one eye through Omar’s unreturned glasses, I was happy to discover that our censors had not delved sufficiently far into the book to discover the shenanigans of the randy Mme de Champlain.
There was a store of pills from Mary. On my previous trip to Niger in September, I had contracted the most lethal form of malaria, Plasmodium falciparum, the same cerebral malaria strain that had come very close to killing me forty-four years previously in the Congo. Unlike Plasmodium vivax, which I’d had a number of times, if P. falciparum is not properly and promptly treated, the prognosis is terrible. The Canadian peacekeeping contingent in the Congo in 1960, utterly ignorant of tropical medicine, had put four sick soldiers on a ship bound for the UK and all died long before they arrived. Mary seemed to be worried that this would be my fate during captivity for she had sent me a huge supply of Malarone, used for both preventing and treating malaria. While floodwaters occasionally course through the wadis for a few days after a heavy rain, there is no standing water, so there are no mosquitoes and, thus, no malaria in the Sahara.
There was a satisfying variety of antibiotic pills for everything from the intestinal bug giardia (a real threat) to bronchial infections. They were great to have, offering considerable comfort even though some carried stern warnings that sunlight had to be completely avoided. Indeed, the items that caused the greatest worry and attracted particular scrutiny on the part of our kidnappers were the sheaves of photocopied literature that accompanied each prescription drug. They seemed to think that all this English-language technical data must contain some sort of secret message, so they took it all and returned it about a week later with evident frustration. I doubt very much if they were ever able to follow all that pharmacological jargon and legalese. It’s challenging enough for native English speakers.
Mary had sent me many of the elements of a fairly complete medical kit (without the sharp edges). There were nail clippers, lip balm, vitamins, and a very welcome industrial-sized container of heavy-duty sun block. We received toothbrushes and toothpaste, soap, antibiotic cream, eye drops, huge wraparound sunglasses that made little sense after weeks in the harsh Sahara light, but, alas, no prescription glasses for me.
Also, we each received a pack of playing cards, which looked to our captors suspiciously like fun, but they grudgingly let us keep them. So began the Great Sahara Cribbage Tournament. We played most days, usually in the late afternoon as the temperature became more bearable and the wind often died down. We were not entirely sure of some of the more arcane rules and, of course, I regularly accused Louis of creative accounting, but those games gave our minds a rest from the endless worry that had been our lot up to the delivery of the backpacks.
Finally, still surrounded by the council, Louis and I set aside our stashes and, with great care, our letters, for subsequent private scrutiny and further caressing. Belmokhtar—no doubt picking up on the disruption caused by the endless would they or wouldn’t they convert speculation on the part of his troops—chose this moment to lance that boil in an attempt, I suppose, to restore a little order and tranquility to his katiba.
After the final TV Night at Camp Canada—one in which Adam Gadahn, “our American brother, who we love more than our own sons,” had been particularly prominent—Omar Two had suggested that with my much-admired grey beard and venerable bearing I could become “the Bin Laden of America.” I gently suggested that I thought it wouldn’t work out that way.
The pressure on us to become slaves of Allah had been intense from the outset, particularly from the two Omars, but soon almost everybody was into the recruiting business. Each of the children, if passing us on the way to and from sentry duty, would ask, “Have you decided yet to become our brothers?” and our kidnappers were assiduously ambiguous about the acceptability of such an act taking place sous le sabre (under the sword).
We suspected that each time Jack visited, he was given reports on our health and state of mind as well as on our religious education. Probably with breathless tediousness he would be advised of our impending conversion. While I have no way of verifying this, I imagine that his own very strict interpretation of what was permissible in such circumstances combined with a wholly understandable desire to put an end to this annoying and distracting undercurrent of our imprisonment. In any case, Jack chose the moment of the delivery of our backpacks on Day 91 to inform us—in the hearing of all the senior members of the group—of the circumstances of a legitimate conversion.
He began by reiterating that he and all the brothers would be happy to welcome us into the Muslim fold, the ummah, but, he very carefully added, “We cannot and will not attempt to force such a decision upon you.” He then explained to us (and everybody around him) the import of the Qur’an’s “no compulsion” verse, something that had been lacking in our religious instruction to date.
Jack u
nderlined that such a grave decision could only be the result of a pact between an individual and Allah. Nobody and nothing of this world could force such an undertaking. He hoped that our hearts would open to Allah but, looking attentively at each of his officers assembled around our blankets on that starlit night, he stressed that conversion could occur only if God willed it. It could not be imposed by men, no matter how well intentioned. Further, he reiterated the fundamental principle of the da’wa, whereby it was every believer’s duty to expose the unbeliever to the word of God, but like horses led to water the infidels could not be made to see the light.
I offered a judicious reply, noting that the brothers had been generous in taking the time and making the effort to inform us of the teachings of Islam. I said we would consider the matter thoroughly and, when we reached home, would closely study the relevant texts and consult Muslim friends and imams—and then it would indeed depend on whether Allah entered our hearts. He stared at me a while and eventually gave a quick nod for all to see and got up and left, followed immediately by his entire crew.
From that point on the zeal of our instructors, older and younger, diminished significantly. Whether or not they had studied the “no compulsion” verse before, it had now been decreed that we could not be bullied, tricked, threatened, or bribed into making this pact with Allah. As a result, even the most zealous among them reluctantly abandoned the view that even if our hearts seemed not about to be immediately engaged, as clearly they were destined to become, such a happy and certain eventuality surely had to allow for a somewhat more flexible interpretation of that verse.
It was a moment that changed our relationship with our captors. It became more arm’s length, less threateningly intimate, more menacingly clinical—less religious, more political. It was increasingly “just business.”
As the council departed, it was, at last, time for the letters. Louis opened his family’s unsealed envelope and began to read by the light of a dying LED flashlight left by one of our guards for use during our dinner in the dark, tears pouring down his face. I reached over and squeezed his shoulder, but we both knew that there was nothing to be said—it had all been said over, and over, and over again. When he had finished reading I asked him if everybody was well and, staring into the night, he nodded. He asked if I wanted him to read his letter to me but I replied, “No, not now.”
I had Mary’s letter clutched in my hand and it stayed there all night. Unlike Louis, I didn’t have the courage to open it, let alone read it. In fact, I didn’t read it for nearly twenty-four hours. I carried it around with me waiting for the right moment, by which time Louis had re-read his letter (like mine, a compilation from his wife and children) many more times and was coming to terms with the emotions it generated. I had yet to begin that same journey.
Finally, the next afternoon, using the right lens of Omar One’s glasses, which seemed to be on extended loan, I read the words Mary and each of our girls had crafted. It was hard going—and lovely. Eventually I found a kind of imperfect calm. In my darker moments, I had worried that the shock of all this would make Mary ill or kill her and that, if I got out, she might not be there. But her letter demonstrated that she was so evidently alive, active, and vigorously managing the family, keeping it whole, connected, and focused on the positive.
I could tell also that her words had been carefully drafted and tried to read between the lines, with little success, to learn more about what was going on. The letters inevitably brought into stark relief the enormous distance between Louis and me, on the one hand, and everything we cherished, on the other, and rekindled my incessant, obsessive calculations of what it would take to bridge what seemed like a widening gap. It was all too evident that neither a hundred days of ascetic desert existence nor conversations with and inspirational messages from my family had done much to improve whatever bridge-building skills I possessed, because I still could find no way home.
PART FOUR
End Game
CHAPTER 14
ULTIMATUM
The naked hulk alongside came,
And the twain were casting dice;
“The game is done! I’ve won! I’ve won!”
Quoth she, and whistles thrice.
Ant Hill Camp was an unsettling place, really three quite different camps. The first was where we spent the night in the open, near the trucks, as we received our backpacks and letters from home. For the second night, which christened the location, we were relocated about a hundred metres to a large, seriously ant-infested tree. Their bites were less annoying than their invasion of every part of our bodies. Then, two days later, we were told to gather our stuff and walk about four hundred metres over a couple of smallish dunes to a group of quite healthy trees surrounded by a wide-open space, which was to be our next prison. There were ants there too, so we stayed under the trees during the day but slept in the open behind a windbreak made of the tarp and tent poles. There were snakes but we saw no live ones.
In the afternoon of Day 95, though we couldn’t see our captors, there seemed to be a great deal of commotion on their side of the dune. Then, through a dip in the sand, we saw a heavily loaded truck moving slowly out of the camp. All the children seemed to be aboard. I quickly convinced myself that Jack had decided they were becoming unstable and thus a liability to his kidnapping operation. We were relieved to see them go but, as with just about every event large or small, my paranoia blossomed and I began to develop dark, negative rationales for this expulsion of the youngsters. Were things about to happen that Belmokhtar did not want them to witness? On the other hand, wasn’t that part of their jihadi apprenticeship?
Suddenly Hassan, whom we had last seen at Cut Finger and who we had not realized had rejoined the group, ran toward us demanding “my books” (finally proving that, as we had suspected, the Belgian high school history texts were indeed his). Louis, handing them to him, had the temerity to ask, “What about my BlackBerry?” but Hassan was already running back toward the fully loaded truck.
He stopped, just before jumping aboard, turned and shouted, “Well, that depends, Louis, which you would prefer, your telephone or your head.”
After their departure, an eerie quiet descended on the camp. Other than the ubiquitous sentry overlooking our small valley there seemed to be nobody around. Then Ali came over the hill. Aside from the few words we had exchanged from time to time when he was delivering food, mostly as a result of his extremely rudimentary French we had very little to do with him. With a few words and sign language he asked if he might sit. I invited him to do so and without preamble he proceeded to perform an all-but-incomprehensible da’wa. By now we understood that he was ticking off that box, but why had he chosen that moment?
Early the next day we were directed to gather up our belongings and cross the dune toward their camp. Surprisingly, there seemed to be only one vehicle, and we were told that for the first time we were to ride on the back as Moussa had to travel in the cab. We concurred that a couple of two-handed ancients were probably safer up there than a lone one-handed blind bomb maker.
We clambered on top of the mass of baggage, to be joined by AR and Ali. Jaffer was driving with Omar Three and Moussa inside. AR carefully pointed out where the best handholds were and seemed rather nervous as we set out in a single truck for the first time since our descent into hell immediately following the grab. I was worried about what this would do to my back, but as the stretch of desert we travelled across was relatively featureless, it turned out to be no worse than travelling inside.
We travelled like that for four or five hours and I had to take care not to doze off, for fear I would lose my grip. It was a change and almost any change was welcome. Eventually we slowed as we entered another wadi, encountering a few, sparse trees. There were a number of tire tracks converging in the direction we were going. As we worked our way deeper into the trees and brush, our abductors in the back were staring at us expectantly, but it was not until we came to a stop that I realized we w
ere back in Camp Canada.
Little had changed in the thirty-three days since we had last been there. Over that period we had made camp in ten different locations. We were directed back to the tree that had sheltered us for fifty-seven days and our small complement of four jailers plus the blind Moussa occupied the place that had been theirs. It was very much a corporal’s guard and I thought that it would be a fine night for the cavalry to come over the hill.
We asked about Soumana, who was so obviously not around, and were told, somehow unconvincingly, that given his undefined illness, he had been sent to another camp where there was a doctor. This did not seem to ring true and we speculated—and hoped—that he might have been or was going to be freed.
Both Louis and I felt an odd sense of nostalgia being back there but it was hard to pin down why. Perhaps it was simply that it was a familiar place. We stayed there for four uneventful days, during which we reestablished our walking track and dared to make it significantly larger. After a couple of days, two more vehicles arrived bearing reinforcements to ease the strain on the exhausted crew who had brought us.
We left on Day 100 (my grandson Henry’s birthday) and then, after a dramatic passage through some difficult dunes, spent two days at a desolate camp we called Somewhere, at the edge of a vast plain strewn with large, clinker-type black rocks and sharp, black lava ledges.
On the second day at Somewhere we were presented with a plastic garbage bag containing a couple of pairs of very basic shoes. We were surprised, as we had not noticed the arrival of the truck that must have delivered them. Previously, on any number of occasions, we had provided them with our shoe sizes, so we knew who was to get what. Mine were of the shapeless and supportless desert boot variety, essentially fake-leather bags with a thin, rather rigid sole; a short lace threaded through only two holes a side kept them on. Louis’ were large, black and white versions of a flashy, thick-soled running shoe, made exclusively of synthetic materials. Within ten days his new shoes began to come apart. Mine, to our surprise, held up better, but they were never comfortable or good walking shoes. I had failed to understand why they were called desert boots when I was a teenager and now, in the depths of the Sahara, it made even less sense.
A Season in Hell Page 24
