A Season in Hell

by Robert R. Fowler

  On Sunday, 19 April, Day 127, we travelled three or four hours to Still Not Yet as the tension vis-à-vis our captors became all but intolerable. On arrival, as we began to pace out our walking track, Omar intervened to say there would be no “sport” until further notice. He instructed us to move around discreetly and talk quietly. It was unbearably hot and his admonition was easy to follow. At night, though, it was cold. Beyond Omar’s instructions we had no contact with our kidnappers. Adding to our worry, a phone rang in camp half a dozen times on Monday, 20 April, as everybody held their breath in the blistering heat and waited, and waited.

  We knew next to nothing about the identity of our negotiators. We had been told at Great Expectations on 16 April that they were on their way into the desert, and I feared they would be unable to sustain themselves for very long in the hostile Saharan environment. It was hard to escape the conclusion that were they, for whatever reason, to leave without us in tow, it would be a long time before we could catch such a train again. As of 18 April, it was also clear that at least one ticket to that train would not be reissued.

  CHAPTER 16

  LIBERATION AND THE FLIGHT TO FREEDOM

  With sloping masts and dipping prow,

  As who pursued with yell and blow

  Still treads the shadow of his foe,

  And forward bends his head,

  The ship drove fast, loud roar’d the blast,

  And southward aye we fled.

  I awoke serene on Tuesday, 21 April, Day 129. When our breakfast milk was delivered we were told we could resume walking. Even before this news I was sure that everything would be all right. I don’t know what made me so confident other than that the change in the mood within the camp was palpable. I felt as light as air and completely tranquil. As we walked, there was a growing bustle around us and just as we completed our last kilometre, Omar approached, smiling, to say, “Now, you will be liberated. So many of the mujahideen have gathered. You will not believe it.”

  Omar was calm and assured. It was as if the tension and turmoil of the last dreadful days and the pronouncement of a death sentence against Louis had not occurred. There seemed to be no nervousness, no guile in his attitude, no conditionality, no uncertainty. We loaded up, Louis and me in the same truck with Omar, and there were no blindfolds. At one point, as we nestled into a tight ravine awaiting instructions to make our final approach to where all those mujahideen were supposedly gathered, Omar left the cab to make a sat-phone call. I squeezed Louis’ hand and whispered, “I think this really is it.”

  Then there were lots of short stops as we zigzagged toward what was obviously not a distant destination. There was a final flurry of very brief sat-phone exchanges. Then, only about an hour after our departure from Still Not Yet, as we headed toward a far distant line of greenery across a flat expanse, the walkie-talkie on the cluttered dashboard crackled into life and there were joyously excited answers to Omar’s “Arak, Arak” call sign, as, I assume, he told them that we were incoming.

  Soon we saw a number of trucks parked at random among the approaching vast clump of acacias and bushes and, amazingly, lots of people were milling about as we drove toward the thickest concentration. There were a few cries of “Allahu Akbar!” as we approached, but they were not triumphalist—not like those that greeted us as we drove into Board of Directors 126 days previously.

  Omar jumped from behind the wheel, the boys in the back having leapt into the crowd long before our vehicle came to a halt. Omar threw his arms around a series of identically armed and dressed, black-bearded clones of our AQIM abductors, people we had never seen before. There was lots of smiling and laughing and what seemed to be the pretty classic back-thumping, how-the-hell-have-you-been greetings common to long-lost comrades in arms, happy to find each other still alive.

  Louis and I remained in the cab of Omar’s truck for perhaps ten minutes. We knew in our gut that all this probably spelled excellent news but were nevertheless a little surprised that we had been forgotten. I suppose we had become used to being the centre of attention, no matter how malevolent that attention had been.

  Eventually, Omar returned to the truck and, gesturing around, remarked, “Didn’t I tell you that there would be lots of mujahideen?” He backed his truck out of the mass of assembled AQIM warriors and drove around to the back of the oasis, where he found a stand of a few closely grouped acacias and pushed his truck among them. Our blankets were thrown to the ground and we were told to sit. Shortly thereafter Omar pointed to another group of trees, about fifty metres distant, and instructed us to take our backpacks and change into our Western clothes.

  This too we had anticipated, but not quite what was to follow. I decided in favour of the full monty and donned the torn and weathered ball cap that I had not worn for months. Louis opted for the more practical turban, to which we had both become accustomed. We were swimming in the clothes from the backpack delivery almost six weeks earlier, destined as they were for people forty pounds heavier. I returned to the vehicle a little self-consciously clad in my iron-creased and cuffed dress pants, snappy safari shirt, and preposterous desert boots.

  Omar summoned us to the sunny side of his truck, where our blankets had been relocated. The black AQIM flag had been attached haphazardly across the side of the truck. We were told to sit with our backs to the truck. Four metres away, squatting in the sand facing us, was Julabib, his camcorder strapped to his right hand and at the ready. Omar explained we would be making a final video message but was quick to allay our pretty obvious fears. There was no armed backdrop, no fearsome tent, just the two of us sitting in the sun in front of that damned black flag.

  “What’s it about this time?” I asked Omar.

  Very relaxed, he said, “Just say how pleased you are to be going home; how glad you are to be freed despite your government’s desire that you remain with us; how you were not mistreated and how happy you are that some people rose to your defence.” This was not a script that would be difficult to follow.

  I don’t recall precisely what I said in this fourth and final video recording, in such a relatively unthreatening environment, but since no coercion would be evident to any viewer, I decided to deploy my emergency code word, which Mary and I had long agreed I should use if ever I wished to surreptitiously indicate that I was not speaking freely. Given the heavily armed tableaux arrayed behind us in each of the three video messages we had recorded previously (Days 5, 52, and 108) there had been no need to spell out that I had been speaking under duress, but this time it was less clear, and also evidently less threatening.

  The word Mary and I had settled upon was “golf.” As I’m not a golfer, we thought it unlikely that the word would slip inadvertently into a statement. So I managed to say something along the lines of, “Our lives over the past nineteen weeks have not been easy. We have not been visiting some golf club.” I said that it appeared we were finally headed home and allowed how marvellous that was, adding that I was pleased to learn from our captors that some non-Canadian friends had made our liberation possible. In conclusion, I noted that I would be eternally grateful to those people, whoever they were. Louis was quite happy not to speak.

  Afterward, we moved back to the shady side of the truck and soon a crowd of teenagers gathered to gawk and giggle until there were over a dozen of them. Their jostling and snickering soon became too much for Omar and he shooed them away. As Omar moved between us and the main throng a couple of hundred metres distant, our guard was the quiet and gentle Ali, who, with sign language, asked if he might clean his machine gun on our blanket. Happy for yet another sign that things were really changing, we indicated he could proceed and he methodically and wordlessly field-stripped his weapon a hand’s breadth away from me, cleaning each bit with a carefully protected oily rag.

  Omar had returned and was snoozing behind the wheel when Hassan, whom we had not seen since Ant Hill, thirty-four days previously, swaggered toward us, barking at us to empty our backpacks and pockets so t
hat he might inspect the contents to ensure we would not be taking out with us anything that might have intelligence value. Before he got very far, Omar emerged from his truck and, with a growl, sent him packing too. That was the last we saw of Hassan.

  As our meagre possessions now lay in a heap, I asked Omar if we might keep our RPG-holed blanket and stainless steel cup, and he said, “Yes, you will need them on the long way back.” It did not look like a helicopter option was in play.

  After a couple of hours, a runner approached Omar with a message, and one last time he gave us the order to mount up. We drove to the edge of the gathering clans and were stationed beneath yet another acacia. Here too we attracted the curious, but this time they were the senior cadres of other groups. Each was introduced to us proprietarily by Omar using some nom de guerre or other for the newcomers, none of which I remember. All of them performed some kind of da’wa to get that ticket punched and then strove to engage us in conversation, sometimes in fractured French or English, and once in what Louis averred was reasonably fluent Spanish.

  Time drifted on into the afternoon. There was a call to prayer and according to what I am convinced was all part of the plan—for they tended not to improvise much—they lined up in one long north–south line, facing east, some twenty metres in front of us. This allowed me to methodically count them from one end to the other, no doubt so I could report that there were an awful lot of them. In fact, there were ninety-six in that line. In addition, there were two sentry trucks with heavy machine guns mounted on small flanking hills on either side. Assuming a minimum of three in each to man the guns and vehicles while the others prayed, that meant at least 102 present in nineteen armed trucks. All I could think was that the gathering represented an extremely high-value target and we were at its epicentre. I knew that if Algerian helicopter gunships popped out of the sun behind us, their 30 mm cannons would not worry about Louis’ and my whereabouts.

  Finally, the mujahideen were chivvied forward and lined up perpendicular to their prayer line in front of the line of armed trucks. A very self-important, forty-something, short and stocky mujahid pulled up in a shiny white four-door Toyota pick-up, a few metres away from where we were sitting. He ignored us, but we were told he was Abdelhamid Abou Zeid—who, along with Belmokhtar, ran AQIM operations in the vast southern Sahara region. Eventually he drove off to the far end of the line of vehicles to our right. Suddenly, there was a loud and sustained feu de joie as everybody fired weapons of all kinds into the air, and a couple of new pick-up trucks appeared and then immediately disappeared behind some trees to the left.

  Then Omar ushered us forward where, after just a few paces, we were joined by a brace of PK machine gunners on each side and rather ceremoniously escorted, as if in review, down the line of AQIM mujahideen arrayed in front of their trucks. At the far end Abou Zeid’s four-door was waiting. I had my backpack over one shoulder and was carrying our most valuable possession, our plastic water container. Louis was carrying a large plastic bag containing the blanket and other bits and pieces.

  As we proceeded down that line, we kept hoping that this was really it and not some cruel joke. If it was, it was an elaborate and expensive—not to say risky—prank, and I didn’t think that AQIM was into that sort of thing. Then, out of the corner of my eye, rather far away, I saw Julabib with his small video camera filming the whole thing. I never imagined there might come a day when I would see that recording of our liberation ceremony, but it is now readily available on the Internet.

  Once we were loaded into the back seat of Abou Zeid’s spanking new Toyota, we were driven a full two hundred metres to a clump of trees to the left, toward which the two pick-up trucks had been heading. A few rugs were spread on the sand, and standing on them in front of their vehicles were three men we had not seen before.

  As we exited Abou Zeid’s truck and were directed toward the rugs, the eldest and smallest of the three stepped forward and said, turning to each of us, “Mr. Fowler, Mr. Guay, welcome. Has anybody told you that you are free?”

  “No, not lately,” I replied warily, to which he responded quite formally, seeking and getting eye contact, “Well, then, let me do so. You are free.” It sounded pretty good.

  I asked him for his name and he quickly and softly said we would discuss all that a little later. Recognizing his voice from the phone call, I replied, “As you wish, Mr. Chaffi.”

  He laughed, extending a hand and saying—very quietly—”Mustapha Chaffi. I represent President Compaoré.” Chaffi was a slight, fairly light-skinned gentleman with closely cropped hair who seemed to be in his forties. He was extremely well spoken, with naturally gracious, almost courtly, manners. Despite his efforts to disguise the fact, he was nervous and seemed to be out of place in the tableau in which he found himself.

  Baba Ould Cheik, whom Chaffi introduced as the representative of Mali’s President Touré, was entirely different, clearly an operator. He was a big-boned, fit-looking, no-nonsense Arab who was perhaps in his early thirties. He spoke little French and was clearly focused on getting it done and getting out of there as expeditiously as possible. That was encouraging.

  I felt a little dizzy and was still not entirely sure all this was as it appeared. All kinds of people armed to the teeth were moving about and talking among themselves and, from time to time, with those claiming to be our liberators. I couldn’t tell the good guys from the bad. Among them were most of the council of Jack’s katiba but also two or three times that number of equivalent-looking and -ranking fighters from, we assumed, other groups or katibas. Baba disappeared as soon as we had been introduced. The third of our liberators was a tall, thin, weathered African who was not young; he was presented to me by Chaffi as a lieutenant in the Malian Special Forces and was the driver of Chaffi and Baba’s second truck.

  After what seemed an hour but was probably twenty minutes, I saw Jack approaching with a thunderous look on his face. Without any interpretation, he asked, “Can I have dysentery pills? Women need.” I had no idea what women he was referring to.

  We had not seen a woman in 129 days, but I said “Sure,” rummaged in my backpack and handed him a container of the pills Mary had got through to me forty days earlier. He set off, almost at a run, toward a distant truck I had not noticed before.

  I turned to Chaffi and with what I suspect was a pretty evident what-the-hell-is-going-on-here look on my face, asked him, “Did you not say we were free?”

  He replied, “Yes, yes, but there’s a problem.”

  Of course there was a goddamned problem—here we go again!

  Chaffi pointed to the truck, perhaps two hundred metres away, and reported that it contained two “European women” who, in his words, were “in abominable shape.” They had been held, he explained, along with two men, by the Abou Zeid group. And he pointed to Abou Zeid, who was sitting about twenty metres from us engaged in intense, agitated conversation with Baba Ould Cheik. So there it was. Chaffi looked frustrated and very nervous.

  Turning to Omar One who, as ever, was hovering close by, I asked, “What’s going on?”

  “The negotiations for the release of the European women, which were to have been completed many days ago, seem not in fact to have been concluded.” Abou Zeid, Omar explained ruefully, was refusing to allow them to leave with us. The last ten days were slowly coming into focus.

  He also told us, though with a little less excitement than I might have expected, that at some point during her captivity the German woman, Marianne Petzold, had converted to Islam. But while we had yet to set eyes on Marianne and Gabriella Burco Greiner, those who had were not crowing over this fine Islamic victory. When I did see them a few hours later, I understood why. A few of the young and foolish among the assembled mujahideen boasted of the conversion victory but those with any sense knew it to be utterly hollow or much worse. Belmokhtar’s troops were aghast. They had spent all that time explaining that Islam did not wage war on women, children, or old people, but here were these two wom
en, both sick. One of them—old, frail, and confused—had clearly been horribly treated even though she had chosen to become their Muslim sister. It was evident in Jack’s face that he found Abou Zeid’s handling of these women unconscionable.

  After some long time—perhaps an hour—Jack quietly gathered a dozen of his senior people around the Baba/Chaffi truck, which Louis and I had been told to board: me in the cab and Louis volunteering, in deference to my damaged back, to ride in the truck bed. The Malian Special Forces lieutenant, at the wheel of Baba’s second vehicle, was told to place his truck immediately behind the one we were in. Then Jack ordered the distant truck containing the two women to be brought up, bumper to bumper, behind our second vehicle. All this took place quickly and with a minimum of fuss.

  Louis got settled as best he could in the bed of the first vehicle, seated again on barrels and blankets but with a lot more room than on the AQIM vehicles. The European women were carried from the third truck to the cab of the second. I again sat in the middle position in the cab, but this time I had Chaffi to my right and Baba, who had left Abou Zeid sitting with a couple of his fighters about twenty metres away only moments before, was now at the wheel. Belmokhtar’s troops, fully armed, pressed around all three vehicles facing outward. As soon as the women were loaded, Belmokhtar, standing beside the driver’s window, ordered Baba with a sweep of his hand, “Leave—immediately!”

  Suddenly Omar One knocked on the passenger window. When Chaffi opened it, Omar, wagging his finger at me, reminded me that on the Day of Judgment I needed to be very clear in my meeting with my maker that he, Omar, had tried valiantly—if unsuccessfully—to guide me to the straight and true path.

  Then to my utter surprise, Omar Two, who had refused even to acknowledge our departure moments before, thrust his hand through the window and grabbed mine, saying “I will give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you will find the true path, so I offer you my hand believing that you will become a brother.”