Kidnapped and a Daring Escape

by Gian Bordin

  They have a rest in a large meadow above the river. Ahead, the valley opens up on the true right of the river, while a sizable plateau some fifty meters above the river dominates the left. About a kilometer away the river emerges from behind a cliff that forms part of the edge of the plateau. He searches for the track. As they walk along the river, he discovers the telltale signs of switchbacks up the steep slope prior to the cliff. The last turn brings the track above the cliff proper before it disappears over the edge of the plateau. A ledge rounds the cliff two thirds up. It draws his attention. A few trees and bushes are clinging to it. Getting closer, he inspects it carefully. The part he can see is no more two meters wide. There seems to be no way of reaching it from the top without a long rope, but he thinks that an experienced climber like him should be able to negotiate a way down to the river from there even without equipment. He figures that the ledge should be visible from the top few meters of the track. Then he makes another auspicious observation. A pair of hawks is soaring along the cliff, using its thermals to gain height rapidly.

  His decision is made. In his early twenties he did a bit of cliff jumping. Its main thrills are the first few seconds of free fall, where the jumper uses his torso and outstretched arms to glide away from the cliff wall prior to opening the parachute. He is confident that he should be able to manage gliding the fifteen to twenty meters down from the path and across to the ledge for a hard landing in the small trees. But he could end up with broken bones if he crashes into the cliff side rather than the springy young trees and bushes. He is even prepared to get a few bumps and scratches. For his captors he simply went crazy, jumped and vanished in thin air. He doubts that the guy walking behind him could get his AK47 ready in time to fire. They have lowered their vigilance and carry the weapons on the shoulder. Believing him dead, they are unlikely to search for him.

  He burns any distinguishing features at the top of the track into his mind — bushes, rocks, slips near where he judges is the best location to jump. With eyes closed he tries to recreate the image, and then verifies its accuracy, repeating this several times.

  As they ascend the switchbacks, he prepares himself mentally and physically for the jump. He begins to breathe deeply and regularly and rolls his shoulders to loosen them up. He opens the rain jacket, so that he can stretch it out like wings. That will create more resistance and cushion his descent. He knows the jump is not without risks. In cliff jumping there is always the safety net of the parachute. Released too early, the worst that can happen is to end up getting snagged in trees half way down the jump. This time, he has to rely exclusively on his gliding skills, nor will he have the leisure to judge the leap before he jumps. He will only have a second or so to assess distance and angle. The added risk, the increased challenge and the always underlying fear combine into a heady mixture, like he has not experiences for ages.

  Maybe he should do something to give himself a bit more time, divert the attention of ‘le second’ walking behind him. But what? Like a light being switched on in his mind, he remembers that in the restaurant he stuffed the change, two twenty thousand peso notes — worth twenty US dollar — into the little coin pocket below his belt. They are still there. If he drops them at the right moment, the guy is bound to pick them up. That will add a couple of seconds more time.

  They pass the small slip fifty meters from the top. There is the bush. It is much larger from close up. The slight bend where the path veers away from the cliff must be coming up. That’s the place he figured the ledge should be visible some ten meters to the right and a bit farther down. He walks closer to the outside edge of the track. The ledge should become visible. It is not. After three more steps, it appears. He quickly assesses the best angle of the leap, drops the peso notes one at time, and turns halfway around a step later, searching the ground. ‘Le second’ spots the notes too. André’s moment has arrived. When he sees the guy bend down to pick them up, he firmly grabs the front bottom of his jacket, while bursting forward three steps along the cliff edge, takes a deep breath, and launches himself horizontally to the right toward the ledge, his outstretched arms opening the jacket like the sail of a hang glider.

  4

  A scream of terror snaps Bianca from her drug-induced nightmare. For a moment she is disoriented, does not know where she is, what is going on, except that the scream makes her skin crawl. She is standing on a height that overlooks peaceful river flats, flanked on her side by treacherous slopes, while on the other side forested hills and bare mountaintops extend as far as the eye can see. Two men in army camouflage are shouting and gesticulating at the edge of what looks like a cliff. She goes closer and asks in Italian: "What happened?"

  Both men shoot around, one pointing an AK47 at her, shouting: "Stay where you are." Their faces leave little doubt that they are upset and very angry.

  She freezes, frightened. Slowly her mind reclaims memories. She came to Colombia with a University study tour group. Franco, her fiancé is their leader. She flew to Pitalito with two fellow students and another man she only met the evening before. What’s his name again? — ah, yes, André. He joined her visiting the archaeological site of San Agustin. A sudden shiver passes down her spine and fright swamps her like a crashing wave. They were kidnapped and then driven around for hours. André said that the ransom could be four million euros. But where is he?

  One of the two men continues looking down the precipice, as if he were searching for something, while the other watches her.

  She plucks up all her courage and asks in Spanish: "Where is the man who was with me?"

  The fellow watching her does not respond. The other turns and shouts: "He jumped off the cliff, and took Rinaldo with him, the fucking bastard."

  She does not catch every word, but gets the gist of it. André jumped off that cliff? He took his own life? Somehow he hadn’t struck her as that kind of person. What made him do it? "But why?"

  "How would I know what goes on in the mind of a stupid gringo? And you, señorita, don’t get any silly ideas now. I’m in no mood for more idiocies." His eyes are blazing.

  She lowers her gaze, trying to make herself inconspicuous, afraid to ask anything else, such as where they are taking her. Did André really snap over? Was it an act of desperation? Did he kill himself because he knew that his relatives would never be able to raise the ransom? Could that be it? But didn’t he admonish her not to lose courage, to concentrate on what will keep her sane? And now he abandoned her, left her alone in the hands of these brutes. She feels betrayed. How foolish of her to warm to him when he gave her comfort during their first few hours of captivity. She had been right, there in San Agustin, to accuse him of worthless promises.

  Only half listening to the two men, she hears one of them say: "I’ll go down and see if either is still alive."

  "Don’t be stupid too," barks the other. "Nobody survives that fall. Just look at Rinaldo’s twisted body. Both are dead."

  "Then I should go and bury Rinaldo. We owe that to him."

  "Not now. We don’t have time. I want to get to La Punta before nightfall. You can take Juan down tomorrow and bring him back up for a proper burial. Let’s not waste any more time now."

  "You’re the boss. I still can’t understand how that guy could simply jump off the cliff. He was drugged like her."

  "Maybe I didn’t give him enough, but I didn’t want him to collapse on us like happened last time." He turns to her. "Señorita, the rules are still the same. You follow me and obey or else I’ll make you to drink another cup of drugs." The last is said with a large dose of sarcasm.

  "Please señor, talk more slowly. I did not understand all."

  "Just do as you’re told, understood?"

  She nods. He marches off along the track across the plateau. She follows obediently. Did she hear correctly that both of them were given drugs? Was this the reason André jumped? Has she just come out of a drug-induced state now? She tries to remember what happened after they got out of the second vehicl
e. Wasn’t it in the middle of the night? She has no recollection. She doesn’t even know how long ago that was. Was it one day? Two days? Where there should be memories, there are only blanks. Her thoughts turn to Franco, suddenly her only hope. What is he doing? The night before the flight, hadn’t he expressed his misgivings about her going? He must have been deeply worried when she didn’t return from the trip. But does he even know that she was taken hostage? The driver of their Jeep might have informed Paolo and Giuglio, unless the kidnappers killed him. She is confident that Franco cancelled the remainder of the tour, while he waits in Popayàn for news. He will do everything in his power to help her get released. He will already have asked the Italian Embassy to intervene with the Colombian Government on her behalf. He will reason with her father that it is crucial to pay the ransom promptly, to have her freed as quickly as possible. Maybe this episode, the shared distress and suffering will restore and deepen their relationship once she is back with him. It is something to cling to.

  * * *

  André experiences the same adrenalin rush of old, as he recaptures the feeling of floating, senses the air rushing past his face. His outstretched jacket catches the updraft, cushioning his descend. Changing the angle of his arms and legs, he veers closer to the cliff wall. At that point, a desperate scream tears through the air. From the edge of his vision he sees a figure tumble down the cliff. For a split second he fears that Bianca has imitated him, but then realizes that the scream comes from a male. This fleeting inattention almost makes him lose control. He is descending too fast and risks being carried past the spot he was aiming for. He must have misjudged the leap. The momentum takes him beyond the bend in the cliff. Putting all his skills into play, he once more adjusts his limbs and is driven back toward the cliff face where the updraft seems stronger. Fortunately, the ledge slopes down steeply for a considerable length and even doubles in width before breaking off. The scream stops as abruptly as it started. A fraction of a second before he crashes into tall bushes, he covers his face with both arms. The force of the impact bends and breaks several branches, and then the bushes dump him to the ground. The whole jump lasted barely four seconds, but felt like an eternity. He remains motionless, his heart beat slowing, the adrenalin rush fading.

  Loud shouts and swearing reach him from above. Its echoes return two second later from across the valley. He glances up to the cliff top, but the spot from where he jumped off is too far around the bend. This means that he is not visible from there either. Nevertheless, he decides to hide under a portion of denser canopy a few meters farther down. Only then does he become aware of a sore spot on his chest. Any deep breath and pain shoot into his right side. Did I break a rib? he wonders. Gingerly, he touches the spot. There is a small rip in his rain jacket. He reaches under his shirt. It feels sore, but the hand comes out dry. No blood. If a sprained rib is all the damage I suffered, I got away lightly, he muses to himself.

  After resting for five minutes, he crawls to the edge of the ledge. Some twenty meters below him and a bit to the left, he spots two oddly bent legs and part of a twisted torso stick out from between rocks near the river. He recognizes the color of the pants. It is ‘le second’. The man must have lost his footing when he tried to stop me from jumping, he reckons. He tries to push away the feeling of guilt for having caused this death. It hadn’t been part of his plan. It was an accident. If the guy hadn’t foolishly tried to intervene, he would still be alive. He reminds himself that, if ordered, this man would have killed him without even blinking twice. But this does not soothe his conscience.

  Will ‘le vilain’ send the other guy down to check on their comrade? Although he doubts this, he remains watching the scene below for what he guesses is about half an hour, the time he judges it would take someone to get from the top of the switchbacks down to the river. At the same time he carefully studies the cliff for a route down. Just below him, the wall is pretty vertical, offering no hand and footholds. There may be better places elsewhere. When he figures that nobody is coming down, he goes to the lower end of the ledge. He almost cries out in joy when he sees scant remains of where the ledge must have broken off. The remnants are slanting almost down to the river. From there he should be able to lower himself to the rocks at the river’s edge.

  He takes it carefully and slowly. It would be silly to have an accident, now that he successfully escaped. There are some tricky bits where the ledge has sheered off completely. But he makes it down safely. Ten minutes later, he is standing next to the twisted body of ‘le second’. The man lost his backpack and weapon in the fall. André scans to rocks higher up, but cannot spot them. He doubts though that they fell into the river. It would be useful, if not essential for his survival in this harsh environment, to have at least the pack. Before searching higher up, he quickly rifles through the pockets of the man’s badly torn clothes and finds a number of handy items: a crushed box of matches, an imitation Swiss army knife, a comb, a thin wallet containing a few low denomination peso notes and tattered identity papers in the name of Rinaldo Garcìa that even to his inexperienced eye look forged. He stuffs the wallet back into the man’s vest. The last item he finds, and what a surprise, are the two twenty-thousand peso notes he used to distract him.

  The partially torn backpack is wedged between two large boulders a few meters above the body. Locating the AK47 takes longer. It was thrown more then twenty meters to the side. Its shaft is buried partially in a soft patch of earth.

  Withdrawing behind the shelter of the cliff bend, he first inspects the AK47 and cleans its muzzle. He has seen its kind before and is familiar with its use. It seems undamaged, but he will only be able to tell for sure after trying it out, and that is out of the question for now. It may alert his captors. The backpack has a bad rip on its side. It contains a raft of useful things, dry food, including a large unopened bar of Colombian chocolate and a bag of dried figs, a small cooking pot that suffered in the fall, a hunting knife, binoculars, a fishing line and a hook, a water bottle, a change of clothing, dirty and smelly and much too small for him, a big plastic sheet — handy to remain dry at night — woolen gloves, several meters of rope, a small first-aid box, part of a toilet roll, and three full magazines for the AK47. In its outside pocket, he discovers a bar of soap, a little plastic bag with dried leaves and a small box containing a gray powder. Coca leaves and lye powder — the stimulant used by the native Indians, he reckons. He read that adding a bit of the powder to the leaves, letting the mixture soak in the mouth with saliva and then chewing the softened leaves has been used to relieve altitude sickness, as well as hunger and fatigue. That might come in handy. He puts it back into the pocket. His inspection completed, he uses a bit of the fishing line to fix the ripped side of the pack. He is ready to go after their captors.

  At the bottom of the switchbacks, he searches for footprints. He can distinguish five different sets. Three almost identical from heavy boots, a small set with a very distinctive pattern — Bianca’s — and his own. For the second time, he climbs up the switchbacks, the gun ready in his hands. Although he carries a pack and gun, it seems to require less effort. Amazing how a change in circumstances can result in such a change of perception, he muses, a smile on his face. He again feels in control of his life.

  Before reaching the edge of the plateau, he puts down the pack and crawls to the top. The track crosses the gradually rising area in a straight line and then disappears in a break of the ridge bordering the plateau. The forested hills beyond rise like waves to the cloud covered mountains in the distance. Nothing moves. He retrieves his pack and hurries across the open area. Rather than enter the break in the ridge immediately, he first checks out the terrain ahead from the ridge itself and makes sure the next stretch is clear. This becomes the pattern for the rest of the day. The river they have followed more or less since the start is no longer in sight. He encounters only one fork in the track. The faint boot prints on a sandy patch a few meters into the left branch point him in the right direc
tion.

  Late afternoon, he comes to a clearing. Scouting it out from underneath the dark shaded forest canopy, he catches movement on the mountainside about half a kilometer ahead and three or four hundred meters higher up. Three people. He recognizes the light colored clothing as Bianca’s. So they are at most an hour ahead of him. He wonders where they intend to stop for the night. He doesn’t want to stumble inadvertently into their camp, but neither does he want to let them gain too much of a lead on him.

  He waits until he judges that they have lost direct sight of the clearing, in case any one of them looks back, and then attacks the climb up the mountainside. About an hour later he recognizes the place where he spotted them. He again becomes more cautious. Shortly afterward, the track levels out. The forest becomes more open. Clouds or fog are hanging on the slopes ahead. Dusk is creeping up the slopes. Again, he ponders what to do. Should he continue or find a hiding place for the night, not too far off the track? He judges the latter option as safer. Not only is tracking at night without a flashlight impossible, nor would he dare using it even if he had one, but he also needs to eat and rest.

  The track crosses a small river. He decides to look for a suitable resting place upstream. The flat little valley narrows a stones-throw farther on, gradually entering a canyon. Remaining on this side leaves him open for easy discovery. He ventures into the canyon. After barely twenty meters, it opens into another grassy clearing, cluttered here and there with big boulders. It is protected on all sides by steep slopes. Just ideal. He will even be able to light a small fire. Besides, the river may offer not only water, but even something more delectable than hot corn mash.