Where Are My Children? The True Story of a Mother Who Risked Her Life to Rescue Her Kidnapped Children

by Cassie Kimbrough

  Bob parked the Jeep a couple of hundred feet down the road from one of the two border crossings in town.

  "I'll go in by myself first and sniff out the situation. If it doesn't seem like they've heard anything, I'll try to get entry visas for all five of us and permission to drive the Jeep across to Peru."

  "Okay," Lloyd said. "But if something doesn't seem right, don't mention the kids at all."

  After Bob left, I asked, "If we don't get their passports stamped, then how are we going to get Jane and Michael into Peru?"

  "We'll have to smuggle them in somehow." Lloyd glanced into the back of the Jeep and said sharply, "Keep those children covered up."

  I did as he said, although by now the afternoon sun beating through the windows was quite warm. The children slept on. As we waited for Bob, I watched as a lone figure in a leather jacket ambled up the street toward us. He seemed to look inside the Jeep with more than casual interest. Then he headed for the immigration building and disappeared inside.

  After twenty minutes or so Bob came out with a few other men. One of them was the man in the leather jacket. They walked toward the car and then stopped some thirty yards away. After talking with them a few minutes more, Bob shook hands all around and came back to the Jeep.

  "I don't know," he shook his head. "I have a bad feeling about those guys. I didn't show them the kids' passports." He said that the whole time he was inside, one of the men had been watching the Jeep through binoculars. "I hope you kept the kids down," he said, because they were sure looking for something." He told us that the man in the leather jacket was in charge of the post. My heart pounded.

  Now we had reached the most critical part of the journey: getting the children out of Bolivia. Once we were inside Peru, I thought, then we'd be safe. My stomach churned.

  Bob drove along the lake lined with small fishing boats, and he and Lloyd discussed our options. Nearby was the hill where the twelve stations of the Cross were set up for religious pilgrims. Bob stopped the Jeep and he and Lloyd gazed at it. Hundreds of steps led up through the stations of the Cross to the summit. Peru lay on the other side.

  Lloyd asked me, "Do you think you could walk up that hill and over to the other side with the kids? You could wait by the roadside for me and Bob. We could cross over through the regular border crossing and pick you up in the Jeep."

  "I guess so. But what if somebody stopped and questioned me? It would be pretty hard to explain what I was doing there."

  "She's right, Lloyd. And we wouldn't be around to help if something were to happen."

  They discarded that idea. Finally they decided that our best shot would be to cross the border in a crowded van-sized taxi. They were betting that the more passengers it had, the less carefully its occupants and their papers would be scrutinized.

  So after all the weeks of careful planning, it came down to a toss of the dice. And if we lost? My chest seemed to squeeze in on itself, and I couldn't get my breath. I looked at the children. They slept on. I took a few deep breaths to try to calm my wildly beating heart.

  Bob drove to a small plaza where taxis of all sizes were filling with passengers. Bob approached the young driver of a taxi-van, and after some negotiating, he nodded. We all got out of the Jeep. The children had waked up by now and were glad to stretch their legs. Lloyd and Bob piled their luggage into an open area in the back of the van. Quickly I lay Jane across the last seat in the rear of the van. I piled some bundles into the cramped space on the floor between the seats and lay Michael on top of those.

  "Just for a little while longer you have to be very still and quiet. It's very important,” I whispered.

  Wide-eyed and serious, they obeyed without a word. Michael's head was jammed against the side of the van at an uncomfortable angle, but he looked up at me with complete trust in his eyes. With shaking hands I stuffed my purse under his neck as a pillow.

  The van was quickly filling up with other passengers; Lloyd and Bob took their seats among them.

  I turned back to the kids and whispered again, "Just for a little while longer—don't move and don't say anything, even a whisper. Remember, like little rabbits."

  I covered them both with Lloyd's trench coat. With one hand I began to pat Jane's rigid body, and under the corner of the coat Michael clung to my other hand.

  The van was now full, mostly with cholitas with babies on their backs and bundles in their arms. We lurched to a start and I began a desperate prayer. In moments we were at the border crossing. Two black-jacketed border guards approached. The taxi driver produced the passports of his passengers—except Jane's and Michael's, which he didn't have. He knew they were in his van. He had watched them board. He said nothing.

  I recognized one of the guards; he had been at the first border crossing. When he saw Bob he raised his eyebrows questioningly.

  Bob shrugged and shouted amiably, "We decided not to take the Jeep across after all." The guard continued to look through the passengers' documents.

  Meanwhile the other guard strolled around to the back of the van. He shouted to his partner in Spanish, "Maybe these people are the ones with the two kids."

  My blood seemed to freeze. Had I heard right? Bob glanced at me over his shoulder. Had he heard it too?

  The guard flung open the back doors of the van and surveyed it slowly. I tried to look nonchalant, unconcerned, even as my heart seemed to be bursting out of my chest. He began patting the luggage. Directly under his nose, Jane's shoe was peeking out from under Lloyd's coat. The guard didn't look down. He didn't touch Lloyd's coat. The children didn't stir. He gave one long last look, slammed the doors shut and waved us through. The van started up.

  Elation and disbelief swept through me. Lloyd looked back and nodded almost imperceptibly. Bob winked.

  I leaned over Jane's and Michael's still bodies. "You're brave little soldiers!" I whispered. "Now it'll be just a little while longer!"

  It wasn't over yet. Now we were crossing a no-man's land between the borders of Peru and Bolivia, a rocky dirt road that made the children bounce up and down on the hard seats.

  After a while Michael said in a small voice, "Mommy, my neck hurts. I can't stand it much longer."

  "Just a little bit longer, just a little bit," I kept saying. Almost six hours had passed since we'd left the school that morning. Jane and Michael were tired, cramped, and hungry, yet they hadn't complained or questioned anything I'd asked them to do. It was miraculous—Michael was never still for longer than five minutes, unless he was asleep, and Jane was not one to suffer discomfort in silence. Yet they had borne up with amazing courage and fortitude. They must have sensed the urgency of the situation.

  We still had to get through the border crossing on the Peruvian side. There we would have to get the children's passports stamped in order for them to enter Peru legally. If we didn't, we'd run into problems when we tried to leave the country.

  Please, I prayed, just let us get inside Peru. Then we'll be safe. After all, Peru was Bob's stomping grounds. He'd assured us that he could handle just about anything there. He had lived in Peru off and on for years and still owned a house in the city of Trujillo.

  Finally we jolted to a halt at the Peruvian border station. A guard sauntered to the van and stood looking through the window directly across from me. By now Jane and Michael were squirming visibly under the coat. I stared back at him helplessly. For what seemed like the hundredth time that day I thought, "This is it. The game's up." But Bob had already sized up the situation. He bounced out of the van and began a stream of chatter with the guard. Then he casually glanced at the wriggling coat and said, "Ah, veo que los ninos han despertado. Oh, I see the children have waked up," then kept on talking. The guard showed no more interest and walked away.

  This time Bob took all five passports into the station. Minutes ticked by. I felt like throwing up. If they didn't approve of our documents, they'd notify Bolivia and send us right back. After another eternity, Bob emerged, jubilant, waving the pa
ssports.

  "I can't believe our luck! The chief of this station is an old friend of mine." Bob had worked with him in the past on what he called "other projects," in northern Peru. We were in the southeastern part of Peru, hundreds of miles from where they'd last seen each other.

  "I put all the passports on the desk and then I laid a five dollar bill on top of each one," Bob explained. "My amigo was tickled pink—said he hadn't seen that much money in months! He stamped the passports without looking at the names. He didn't even register us in the logbook."

  That meant there would be no record that Jane and Michael had ever left Bolivia or entered Peru.

  I watched out the back of the van until the border post became a speck in the distance. Then Bob turned and shouted, "Let those kids up!" I looked questioningly at Lloyd and he smiled and nodded. I threw off the trench coat covering Jane and Michael. They sat up, rubbing their eyes in the sunlight, and looked around.

  "Where are we?"

  "We're in Peru!" If I'd said "the promised land" the words couldn't have been sweeter. I hugged them until their ribs creaked. After their long enforced silence, within minutes they were chattering like magpies. Lloyd looked back at us with a benign smile on his face. Bob grinned.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Roads in Peru were paved and in a much better condition than the ones in Bolivia, so it wasn't long before we were deposited on the sleepy main square of Yunguyo, a small market town. We unloaded ourselves and our luggage onto the dusty sidewalk. It was 2:30 P.M. Bob and I hugged.

  "Didn't I tell you we'd do it?" he chuckled.

  Lloyd wiped his mouth on his sleeve, took me by the shoulders, and planted a kiss on my face.

  The men stayed at the plaza to wait for the next form of transportation—be it taxi, bus, or vegetable truck—that could take us to the town of Puno, where there was an airport with flights to Lima.

  In the meantime Jane, Michael, and I walked to a little store down the street. We were hungry and thirsty—we hadn't eaten since early that morning. A tiny girl no bigger than Jane waited on us. Three men drinking beer at a corner table watched us with bleary eyes. We sat on the curb outside the store with our cookies and Cokes. Jane gave some of her cookies to a street urchin standing nearby. Lloyd strolled over.

  "You and the children better stay inside where nobody can see you. It might take a while for us to get out of here. We could've been followed."

  We retreated to the dim interior of the store. I sat at a small oilcloth-covered table and felt my body go limp as all the tension built up from the past few hours drained away. Jane and Michael, illuminated by a shaft of sunlight slanting in the door, laughed and jumped at moths in the swirling dust motes. Every few minutes they hugged each other. I was bursting with joy and pride, and with the knowledge of having been unbelievably lucky. No, it was more than luck. As I sat there watching my children, I had the sense that I had been the recipient of some kind of unearthly grace, that for some reason I had been granted an immense and undeserved favor. By all odds, events should not have happened as they did.

  It took about an hour for transportation to arrive, this time a tour van headed for Puno. Once in the van, Bob told me to relax and take off my wig for a while, and I did, to the delight of Jane and Michael. A little girl stared at me across her mother's shoulder. Bob befriended the driver and his brother and offered them thirty dollars extra if they'd take us to Juliaca, a somewhat larger city a few miles beyond Puno, and one, presumably, where we'd have a better chance of getting a flight to Lima. They agreed immediately—thirty dollars was probably a week's earnings to them.

  On the way Jane and Michael played and bounced around on the empty seats. Jane made a bed for her new Skipper doll out of a sheet of newspaper. Lloyd held Michael in his lap. We were all in high spirits.

  We arrived in Juliaca at 6 P.M. At the Aero Peru office Bob was informed that all flights to Lima were booked until Monday. We'd have to stay overnight in Juliaca. Our helpful drivers located for us the only available hotel room in town.

  We checked in and were led upstairs to our room. Our footsteps echoed on the wooden floors. Lloyd set his huge duffle bag down and surveyed the room. There were two single beds, a small nightstand, a sink in the corner (no towels or soap), a wooden chair, and an old-fashioned wooden wardrobe. Bathrooms were down the hall. The two lumpy beds looked wonderful. I fell across one and the children snuggled against me.

  "Okay, this is what we're going to do," Lloyd said, sitting in the chair with a weary sigh. "You can have one of the beds and the children can sleep in the other—"

  "No," Michael said, "I wanna sleep with Mommy!"

  "Me too!" echoed Jane.

  Bob said to Lloyd, "We could sleep on the sofa in the lobby."

  "Nope. We're gonna sleep on the floor right here. I don't want them out of my sight."

  Bob looked dubiously at the hardwood floors but said gamely, "The floor'll be fine."

  We were all hungry. Next door to the hotel was an open-air cafe. The menu was simple: chicken and French fries and the local soda pop. Lloyd was uneasy.

  "We need to keep moving. I feel like we're sitting ducks. Let's see if we can get train tickets out of here."

  From where we sat we could see the train station, just across the main plaza from the cafe. People were queued up the length of a block to buy tickets for the night train, even though the ticket office had not yet opened.

  "The next train leaves tonight at nine and it arrives in Arequipa at eight in the morning. If we could get to Arequipa we'd have a better chance of flying to Lima. It has a bigger airport and more airlines," Bob said.

  The night train to Arequipa...it sounded familiar. Then I remembered—I'd read about it in one of the travel books in Dan and Jennifer's apartment. Theft was rampant throughout Peru, but the night train to Arequipa was notorious for thievery. The book warned, "Don't close your eyes during the night, or you could wake up to find all your possessions gone. If you travel in a group, take turns keeping watch." Even more disquieting, I remembered the travel advisories posted in the consulate. They had warned that the terrorist group Sendero Luminoso, "Shining Path," was active throughout the Arequipa province.

  Bob said he'd try to get us train tickets as soon as he finished his meal. As we ate, he kept an eye on the people passing by the open front of the cafe. Suddenly he leaped up and exclaimed, "There's the guy I'm looking for!" and was gone.

  Lloyd shook his head. "Count on Bob to see somebody he knows even in a godforsaken place like this. And you know what? I'll bet you anything he gets those damn tickets." I was doubtful. Across the plaza the line at the ticket booth had grown longer.

  I took Jane and Michael to a dirty latrine at the back of the restaurant, grateful that I had a supply of Kleenex with me. I knew there wouldn't be any toilet paper. As we were coming back, wading through a murky liquid covering the floor, the lights went out. We made our way back to our table in the dark. People continued to eat unconcernedly during the twenty minutes or so it took for the lights to come back on.

  Jane and Michael cleaned their plates. As we tried to wipe our fingers on the scraps of tissue paper provided as napkins, Bob returned, grinning and waving five train tickets. He had wangled them from three different people waiting in line, since the ticket seller allowed only two tickets per person.

  We crossed to the plaza, where I bought several wool and alpaca sweaters from sidewalk vendors. I knew that the crossing through the Andes would be bitterly cold. A woman hounded Bob into buying a beautiful alpaca rug from her for $20.

  Back at the hotel, the men tried to arrange their bulky luggage into more manageable bundles. I discarded yet more of my things, bequeathing to that nameless hotel in Juliaca my not-quite-finished Dorothy Sayers novel, a crossword puzzle book, and my blow dryer.

  I was bone tired. I lay on the sunken mattress snuggled between Jane and Michael and was filled with an indescribable contentment.

  All too soon it was time to
go to the train station. I borrowed a scrap of soap from Bob and in the cold water of the basin tried to wash some of the dust of the journey off our faces and hands. We gathered our few belongings and crossed the street, dodging bicycle carts, honking cars, and pedestrians. Inside the dimly lit station we crowded into line. To one side, a group of Australian mountain climbers stood around a huge mound of gear. The rest of our fellow travelers were Peruvians, most of them with bundles on their backs and more at their feet.

  We waited another hour before boarding. On the tracks there was a confusion of trains, and it took some running back and forth on Bob's part to locate the car whose number was stamped on our tickets. Once inside, Lloyd settled into a wide bench seat, and Jane, Michael, and I sat across from him. There was a table between the two facing seats. Bob sat in the next row. I tried to find a spot to rest my feet in the space under the table, but it was crammed with luggage. It was going to be a long night.

  Jane and Michael were excited. It was their first train trip.

  "Mommy, when is the train going to leave?" Michael asked.

  I glanced at my watch. It was 9 P.M. "It should be leaving any minute."

  Minutes passed and nothing happened. Our fellow passengers were already snoozing in their seats, covered up to their noses with blankets and ponchos. A bare bulb dangling from the ceiling pierced the gloom. The children and I watched eagerly out the window at the people hurrying to and fro. Half an hour passed. With a lurch the train finally started.

  The kids pressed their noses against the window. "Yay, we're leaving!"

  The train slowly rolled backward for a few hundred yards. Then it stopped. There it remained for twenty or thirty minutes while more people boarded. Then it started again and proceeded back to the station, where it stopped again.

  "Why does the train keep stopping? When are we going to leave?" Jane and Michael kept asking. Lloyd didn't know. Bob didn't know. I didn't know.