The Tightening Dark

by Sam Farran

  They chatted about the phones for a few minutes. It might have looked suspicious, but I wasn’t worried. Two of the phones had Yemeni numbers, and I knew the NSB likely had already monitored them. The third was the phone I used in America, just to call family.

  They took some money from the suitcase too, about 75,000 Yemeni riyals. That equated to about $350 in US money. The two men called this out and probably marked it down too: professionals.

  Then, all of a sudden, they said, “That’s it.”

  I knew they had the safe, the computers, even the house closed-circuit TV systems somewhere. They didn’t bother inventorying those things.

  Worse, the sum of money they attributed the briefcase was way, way off.

  From the little room where I sat, half naked and still bagged and bound, I yelled out, “No, there’s more money in the wallet. Eight or nine hundred dollars of American money. And another wallet has other foreign currency. Also in the briefcase there is five thousand dollars I just picked up as salary from Universal.”

  This money was gone. I knew it. But I couldn’t help myself from protesting it. They’d gotten their hands on it, either these two or their bosses, and they’d just made it disappear. The briefcase had been down in my bedroom in the basement of the villa, and I’d already argued about that because when they brought it up, it had been opened and emptied. I tried to make them inventory it back then, in the villa, and I tried again now, but they pretended they hadn’t found anything in the briefcase other than pens and phones and pads of paper. It was bullshit.

  They’d found and inventoried my gun earlier at the villa, then denied knowing about it. I brought the gun up again, with the money, and wondered whether I was doing a good thing forcing the issue or making things worse for myself—with the gun and the cell phones and the wads of cash perhaps all adding up to paint me in a bad light, even though those were pretty normal things for a contractor to have.

  I’d worked up some courage because of the inventory. It might indicate that they’d merely meant to conduct an inspection and had turned it, by mistake or out of enthusiasm, into a shakedown. I knew it had gotten more serious, but I was clinging to any reason for hope I could find. Perhaps they were preparing to release me. Perhaps they just wanted to ask me a few questions and then give me most, if not all, of my stuff back. I tried to imagine myself walking out of that building later in the evening, wearing my shoes again, wearing my pants, with my gun holstered and my briefcase (albeit a little lighter) under my arm.

  One of the other men in the little room with me got up then and took fewer than two steps before stopping. Without saying a word, he fumbled with his clothes a bit, and then I heard a stream of urine hit a metal surface, a small toilet or pan. Calmly, again wordlessly, the man redid his clothing and came back to sit on the floor only a few feet away from me. I knew, then, that I was in a jail cell; I heard the sounds of the guards through the doors, the grates, and the grills of our detention. The men around me remained silent out of caution and unfamiliarity. The sound of our cell door, when it opened a moment later, took on a whole new, ominous undertone, as I could now hear its solid, impregnable construction: steel, concrete, tile underfoot, more concrete, and only the wheezing draft of a few small ventilation holes.

  The door opened.

  The CTU guards took me by the arms again, lifting me and dragging me down the hallway to another small room.

  They sat me on the floor and stood over me.

  “Sign this,” they said, shoving a paper and pen on my lap and unfastening my cuffs.

  I flexed my wrists, letting blood flow again, but said, “I’m not signing anything.”

  The hood remained cinched over my head. I couldn’t see what they’d written, and even if it was an accurate and professional account of what they had listed, they’d definitely left off most of the money, the gun, probably other things too.

  “I’m not signing until I see the whole inventory,” I said again. “I’m not signing until you bring me my money and I see all my money and see everything that was taken from me. Until then I ain’t signing a damn thing.”

  The guys who were doing the inventory left then, and the three NSB officers replaced them after only a minute.

  “Well, you are here now,” the first one said.

  “There’s nobody asking about you,” the second added.

  The third, coming closer to me, said, “The American Embassy is gone. All your friends in high places took off like dogs, like cowards, and you’re all alone, and you belong to us. You can make it easy on yourself or hard. We can be here for one day, one week, a month, a year, ten years, or we can just finish you off and nobody will know about it.”

  “I don’t understand why I’m here. I don’t know what I did wrong. What did I do that I’m here?”

  “Mr. Sam, you know exactly why you’re here. You know why you’re here. We know why you’re here. If you want to make it easy on yourself, just cooperate, and we’ll let you go. If you don’t play ball, then we’re not going to be very nice to you.”

  “What is it that you’re talking about? I came here to clear my people out from British American Tobacco, to do a security assessment in order to better shut down their work, and to get my stuff. To clear my stuff. My loose ends. And to leave. I have no business here other than that.”

  I mean, I was there to do a security assessment, but only for BAT. They knew that. I didn’t need to hide it. Perhaps they’d gotten their wires crossed. Perhaps they thought it was something it wasn’t.

  “Mr. Sam, we know exactly what you’re doing here. We’ve been following you for the past week since you’ve been back, and you’ve been going around and getting locations for the coalition to strike.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me!” I said “You think the Saudis are waiting on me to give them locations where to hit? You think the Emiratis are taking orders from me?”

  One of the guys said, “Let me tell you something, Mr. Sam, I know you. I’ve been holding your file since you’ve been back as a civilian. But I’ve known you for fourteen years since you first came as a defense attaché, and I know what you have done, and what you’ve been doing, and by the way I want to thank you, because no one has done for Yemen what you have done.”

  This he said with a silky tone in his voice. It was an obvious transition into the old “good cop / bad cop” routine—except that with three of them in the room, they took on good-cop, bad-cop, and whisperer-of-questions roles. The third guy rarely spoke to me, but I think he was in charge. The other two took turns being brutal and pretending to offer me olive branches.

  The good cop continued with his schtick. “I know you’ve been here for many years and have done things for us. I know you were part of creating NSB. And I know you helped bring a lot of military aid to the country. I know everything about you. All of your file. I have all of it since you’ve come back. I’ve been the one keeping an eye on you.”

  “Alright then, you already know,” I said. “You know I’m clean. And I’m an ally. Why are you doing this?”

  “I know ninety-five percent,” he said. “It’s that five percent that you’re keeping, you’re hiding from us.”

  “If you already know all of this, then what is that five percent that you’re talking about?”

  “You know exactly what I’m talking about. Just confess and say it, and we’ll call it a night and see what we can do for you.”

  I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t.

  Their theory, that I was somehow helping the Saudi coalition pick out targets for bombing, had no truth to it whatsoever. What was I supposed to say?

  As I sat there, not really looking at them because of the hood, but listening and trying to control my breathing, the bad cop started in again, not by saying anything but by throwing something at me. I don’t know what. It whizzed past me. He worked himself into a mild frenzy and began screaming and yelling in my ear. Then, without warning, since I couldn’t see him, he struck me with
both hands flat over my ears, causing my eardrums to pop and a crazy disorienting dizziness to set in. He did this twice. Two strikes to the head, equal blows simultaneously to each ear so that the pressure of the blows had nowhere to go except into the eardrum. My head felt like it was about to explode. I slumped sideways from my seated position to the ground.

  I laid that way for a minute, maybe two, before the good cop started speaking again.

  This went back and forth, back and forth. The same question or questions, over and over, phrased differently, approached from different angles. But always: I know what you’ve been doing. I know, you know, just tell us, you know I know. Over and over for perhaps an hour and a half. Every ten or fifteen minutes, when the good cop grew tired or didn’t like my responses, the bad cop would start in again, yelling, screaming, throwing things, punching me in the chest once, smacking me on the ears again, until they thought I might have softened.

  “You’re doing this to yourself,” the good cop said. “We’re not responsible for any of this. Get it right, cooperate, and you never know, we could release you tomorrow.”

  The beating and interrogation didn’t go much further than that, not during that first session. The bad cop’s last two blows knocked me out completely.

  Next thing I knew, I was still handcuffed and bagged, but two guys picked me up and dragged me. I wasn’t sure if they were the same two CTU soldiers. I wasn’t sure if they were taking me back to the same room. I wasn’t sure if I had just passed out or been dragged out to a car and carted around the city again. I just didn’t know, not in that delirium.

  Barely conscious, I heard them open a cell door. I heard the metal screech as they unlocked it.

  They threw me inside and said, “Put him to sleep.”

  Onto my body they tossed some fabric, which I’d later discover to be a set of strange Bermuda shorts and a shirt. One of the guards said, “That’s for him to get dressed.”

  They took the bag off my head then.

  I still couldn’t see where I was. I was 90 percent out of it. Bleary-eyed. Hardly conscious. Everything I knew, I sensed through gut instinct, almost like premonition. I did not have mastery over, or memory of, sight, sound, or smell. I didn’t know what the hell was going on.

  CHAPTER 12

  CELL MATES

  I WOKE TO the rumbling of a cart across tile floors.

  I did not know the sound. I did not recognize it.

  I had that feeling of having been asleep forever, which sometimes can be pleasant and luxurious but other times terrifying. This time it started pleasantly enough, but even as I stretched, I felt soreness everywhere—from lying on a hard floor, from my bruises, and from the cold of that cell.

  I shivered.

  The cart approached. Clankity-clank, down the hall, nearer, stopping, starting again. The scrape and tumbler clamor of guarded little windows opening, of pots being lifted somewhat carelessly and shamelessly and handed inward to the waiting grasp of hungry prisoners. The cart stopped four times. Four times I heard the unmistakable sound of metal windows opening and shutting. Four times the cart started moving again before reaching our cell.

  I saw a man rise from the floor beside me and go to the opening in our door. The steel window was drawn back from the outside. Through it my cell mate received a pot, a single moderate-sized bowl. The steel hatch slammed shut again after him. Through the blinking darkness he approached the center of the room, where I lay on my side, and he squatted in front of me.

  Two other prisoners rose from the floor and joined him. All of them circled around my prostrate form.

  One of the men shook me to wake me. They didn’t yet know my name.

  “Friend,” he said, “breakfast has come.”

  One of the others added, “We have a tradition that the new person must eat first, when it is his first meal.”

  These men were hungry, but by the rules of their own prison etiquette, they were being immensely polite. The new member was required to break bread with them. Only problem for me, I couldn’t get up. I was too sore, too broken.

  “I will eat,” I said, not wanting to lose this first possibility of obtaining an ally. I knew they hadn’t actually decided if they liked me; they were just obeying their code.

  No utensils had come with the food. None ever would. Nothing to scrape the slick concrete walls with. Nothing to hone into a weapon. Even fingernail clippers, when needed, were handed in for no more than five minutes, then promptly returned and inspected to make sure all the blades and metal parts came back. The only items they allowed in our cell were the clothes we wore, our sponge-like sleeping mats, a single pair of slippers to share when using the open-pit, Eastern-style toilet, a blanket each, a prayer rug, and a single copy of the Quran for use in our prayers.

  I motioned to the bowl with one finger.

  “I can’t reach it,” I said. “Will you feed me?”

  My stomach felt queasy. I could taste bile in my mouth. But when one of them scooped three fingers together and used them to ladle into my mouth a bit of ful mudummis, the traditional Arab breakfast, I accepted it, chewed it, and swallowed it. Then I motioned for them to finish the rest of the bowl, which they eagerly undertook in only a few moments. I weighed about 190 pounds then, carrying a little extra on my frame ever since I officially retired from the Marines. So I could afford to skip a meal. With the beans came several hard little loaves of army bread, called qudum, little round things like scones but drier and plainer. The bowl of beans came in, plus the bread, three or four per person, about a cup of beans for each if shared equally. The food was warm, but not hot, not after making its way down that long hallway on the cart.

  As I looked about me, my eyes adjusting to the unlit room, I found that these cell mates had dressed me in the Bermuda shorts and shirt and covered me, as best they could, with a blanket. The shorts and shirt were probably taken from the villa; they were not my clothes but looked like they belonged to a guy who was a manager from British American Tobacco. Fortunately the clothes fit, at least when I first wore them.

  The bed that I slept on was a one-inch-thick sponge mattress, two meters by ninety centimeters in its other dimensions. Each of us had the exact same mattress, thrown down on the concrete/tile floor, the exact same blanket. This, fortunately, during the cold nights was thick enough, not unlike one you might buy in any market, a throw with a pattern of regular but unattractive design, probably the cheapest thing they could find. The walls, the tiled floor, and the bare ceiling were all white, giving the place a feeling like a pharmacy or a madhouse. We slept two mats down each side, which is how I know the width of the cell was 180 centimeters: adjacent mattresses fit perfectly next to each other. The length of the cell was five meters exactly, also measured by the fit of our mattresses longways. The room slept four people, with a semiprivate bathroom in the corner, about one meter by one meter, shielded by a half wall about one meter high. The ceiling was pretty high, about ten feet up. One light above the door, tucked into a crevice that we couldn’t access (for fear, again, that we’d somehow make weapons), shed some meager illumination. No lights were in the ceiling, no wiring anywhere. Two ventilation cells, or holes, one above the door (which had that light in it) and then one that was just a hole in the wall, three or four inches in diameter through the outside-facing wall’s thick ten- or twelve-inch casing, without cover or anything to keep the elements out, high above us. In case anyone misbehaved, the guards could turn the light out from the outside. We could not see out the ventilation holes or the food hatch. My cell mates used to climb on each other’s backs sometimes to try to see, but the ventilation hole was like a deep well into the concrete, right up against the ceiling, so even trying to look through it, you could barely see anything below or to the left or the right. The light we did get was orangish and dim, not the harsh light of single-bulb interrogation rooms like you see in the movies.

  There was no way to dig through the concrete, not even starting with the ventilation hole
, since our guards so carefully kept all utensils from us. We only had our fingernails, and those were useless on concrete.

  By counting the stops of the food cart and the clanking of the opening and shutting food windows, I guessed a total of twelve to fourteen such cells lined our hallway. The cell next to mine, to the right when facing the cell door, served as the inventory room. Every time our captors checked a person in or out of the prison, they’d put his stuff in there and repeat the routine of calling out and documenting the list of that poor soul’s possessions.

  This prison—which wasn’t just some remodeled house or store or government building, not with all these purpose-built, methodical, well-thought-out features, like the food windows and the way the ventilation and light shafts were situated so as not to allow us to exploit them, not to mention that thick, reinforced concrete—I later learned was built and paid for by the US government for the Yemenis to confine al-Qaeda operatives captured on the battlefield in Yemen. I also found out later that this prison was indeed located, as I had suspected, on the same base where our Special Forces trained the Yemeni Counterterrorism Unit (CTU). Not only had we funded the construction of this prison, but we—the US government—had planned, funded, and developed the whole base, as well as leading and funding most of the important elements of training conducted there.

  Imagine the irony: I had been kidnapped by members of the Yemeni National Security Bureau (NSB), which I helped create, being present even at that first formative meeting between Francis Townsend, then the national security advisor to President George W. Bush, and President Ali Abdullah Saleh. I was then escorted and beat up by team members of the Yemeni CTU for whom I’d conducted liaison duties to establish their first official training preparatory to combatting al-Qaeda, during that critical time when our US Special Forces had yet to rebuild their presence in Yemen post-Saddam. I was then loaded into an American-gifted Humvee and taken to an American-built jail on an American-funded base built to combat al-Qaeda. To top it all off, as I was soon to find out, at least one of my cell mates was an al-Qaeda member.