A Season in Hell

by Robert R. Fowler

  After about forty minutes Omar suddenly slowed hard and turned right, off the road to the north, and bumped into the scrub. Within a couple of kilometres we came to a fairly large Tuareg encampment, almost within sight of the road. Omar did some extensive schmoozing and then we seemed to head northwest. For the first time, we followed a very circuitous and seemingly random route. Omar announced that he was looking for a shady place to rest and after a long search we stopped under a stand of acacia trees and were instructed to sit on a blanket in incomplete shade, and offered water from their large, filthy jug.

  The tape binding Louis’ and my wrists together was cut by Hassan’s vicious-looking blade, which could have been from the Rambo property drawer: a cross between a bowie knife and bayonet, with holes cut into the body of the blade and a heavily serrated spine. We were told we could relieve ourselves behind some nearby bushes, but there was nothing in my bladder.

  I was in bad mental and physical shape. As the afternoon wore on under the merciless sun, the temperature rose to a point I had experienced only in southern Darfur, so I knew it was in the high forties. Still I refused to drink what I had determined was water straight from the polluted Niger River. I was hallucinating, drifting in and out of consciousness. I had a headache and felt nauseated. My mouth was so dry I could not swallow. I was short of breath, gasping shallowly through my mouth. My back was excruciating and I could not contemplate lying down, so I was allowed to stay in the cab with the door open and I let my mind drift off to some better place.

  Our captors seemed nervous and vigilant. They made a couple of short calls on their Thuraya satellite-phone, exchanged nervous looks at the slightest sound, and hunkered down on their blanket. Nobody slept, even though Omar must have been exhausted after such a driving tour de force. They explained to us that “the army” was looking for us and that “army patrols” were nearby, but was it the Niger Army or the Malian Army? I think they said it was the second, but don’t really remember. Louis and I could not decide whether this was a happy or unhappy development. Our abductors didn’t give the impression that they would easily be separated from their prey.

  We were offered a can of sardines and a handful of hard and dry dates. The dates were delicious, but, without water, hard to swallow. I was not hungry and left the oily sardines to Louis.

  It was stiflingly hot. I hadn’t slept for thirty-three hours. My brain could not get its survival priorities straight. Louis urged me to drink but I firmly resisted his advice, asking instead for as many of the small glasses of extremely sweet tea he could extract from our kidnappers. I think I managed four or five over the next couple of hours, during which we were clearly waiting for something. I dreaded whatever it was.

  After drifting in and out of sleep, or perhaps consciousness, for an hour or so, in order to escape the still, stifling air of the cab, I finally eased myself from the truck. Slowly, I began, very stiffly at first, to walk around the vehicle and the blankets spread in the shade—one for Louis and me, the other, some distance away, for them.

  At one point, Ibrahim motioned me to approach and offered me more dry dates (he apologized for their quality), which I gratefully accepted, stashing a couple in my pocket. He then began a series of malicious games. First, he contrived to leave his AK-47 within my reach but, while pretending otherwise, watched carefully to see what I would do. Had a round been chambered? Was the magazine empty? Which were the relevant positions of the fire selector lever? Could I possibly get all three of them, who were not grouped together, before these battle-hardened warriors got me? While tempted, I didn’t touch it, but I suspect that my laborious thought processes must have been transparent. Ibrahim, staring intently at me, eventually scooped up his weapon from in front of me and laughed in my face.

  Then he told a series of preposterous tales. As our whole situation was otherworldly, these fables did not seem as outlandish then, even if we knew he was having us on. We were, he insisted, heading to a vast, established, and very well-protected camp. Tuareg leaders will welcome you. There will be a feast in your honour; the chief will offer you his fairest daughter. You will be a hero. Soon you will be released and back in your hotel in Niamey.

  Out of the blue and suddenly seeming serious, Ibrahim switched tacks and asked me whether, if the army attacked and escape were impossible, I would speak on their behalf to prevent them from being executed on the spot. I was certain that this was yet another of his silly games, but he seemed genuinely nervous, even afraid—the only time I ever saw one of our captors in that state. I had no idea if anybody was looking for us or if they were close at hand, but rather pretentiously, I informed him we would do what we could to ensure that, in such a (happy) event, they would be treated no worse than we had been.

  As the heat began finally to relent, perhaps around five in the afternoon, Omar ordered us to mount up. Louis and I were bundled aboard, but our wrists were not retaped, and we resumed what seemed to be even more random movements across the top of a long ridge. First, we drove two or three kilometres through hilly country, fairly well grassed and with large clumps of dense bushes and trees in the valleys below. Then, after a short wait and a brief satellite-phone call, we headed a similar distance in something like the opposite direction. We repeated this procedure a number of times, keeping to the high ground.

  Finally, as the dusk was deepening, we stopped yet again. Omar was about fifteen metres from the vehicle off the driver’s side, his door left open. Louis and I had been told to remain in our shared bucket seat. All three of our kidnappers were scanning the countryside around the vehicle, Omar with the phone to his ear and Ibrahim and Hassan standing in the truck bed. Through the small open back window I could see them from thighs to upper chests. Then I remembered that glimpse of what might have been a partially covered pistol butt in the glove compartment thirty centimetres in front of Louis.

  My pulse started to race. While I was pretty familiar with rifles and shotguns, I had fired a pistol only once in my life, a U.S. Army–issue Colt. 45 over forty years earlier, and I had not been very handy with that weapon. I didn’t know what make the gun in the glove compartment might be, if in fact it was even a pistol. I wasn’t sure I would be able to operate it, let alone in time and effectively. I assumed it to be of Soviet manufacture like the rest of their weapons—a 9 mm Makarov seemed likely—but I didn’t know where the safety would be, and without my glasses I knew it would be impossible to see any markings on the gun. Thus, I would simply have to haul it out of the glove compartment (assuming it was still unlocked), taking care to shield the manoeuvre as best I could with my body and not make noise or spill other junk as I removed it. Then I would have to check that at least there was a magazine in the butt (I knew I’d never have time to extract the magazine to ensure it was full), work the slide—which would make a very distinctive and alarming noise to any of our captors who heard it—hope that the safety was off, and determine where it was so that, if the gun would not fire, I’d be able to move the safety lever and try again.

  I thought I could probably twist in my seat and shoot through the back window into the trunks of both Hassan and Ibrahim before they could react—if, of course, I could make the pistol work before they realized what I was up to. As I couldn’t see their heads, they weren’t likely to see me fiddling around with it until I fired. As they were both between two and three metres away, I thought that even I could hit such a target. I’d fire upward into the centre-of-body mass, but should I attempt to fire one shot into each of them or try the supposedly classic double-tap? That would be more likely to put one down permanently but it would give the second one more time to react, probably by diving over the side of the vehicle. Indeed, I thought it likely that any shot hitting them from such a range would knock them out of the truck and thus out of my very limited field of fire. Therefore, there was a possibility they would be down but not out, and conceivably still in possession of their AKs.

  Then there was the question of what Omar would be doing w
hile this was occurring. What was the likelihood of hitting Soumana, whom I couldn’t see but thought was still sitting in the truck bed? The immediate threat was clearly the two guys with AKs, and both would have to be put out of action. By the time they were down—and if we had not already been sprayed with automatic fire—Omar would be on the move. He was, as far as I knew, unarmed, but he would be approaching the scrub. I knew I’d be useless with a pistol at fifteen metres in the gathering gloom.

  I was confident that either Soumana (if he were in any shape to function effectively) or Louis could operate the four-by-four, but I had no idea where we would head other than south or, indeed, in which direction lay the road we had travelled earlier in the afternoon, but I knew it was not far. I expected that the area was alive with our abductors’ Al Qaeda colleagues, the approach to whom, I supposed, was what all the manoeuvres over the past hour had been about. It seemed likely that any shots would be heard and the headlights of our vehicle might be seen as we tried to escape, but travelling in such country without at least intermittent use of lights would be folly. Finally, though, I was not at all sure that their colleagues would rush toward the sound of gunfire.

  This seemed to be the best opportunity we had had and perhaps would ever have, but it would be loud, messy, and very risky. I asked Louis to press himself back against the seat and against his door. “Why?” he asked suspiciously. I briefly outlined my plan. Louis stared at me aghast.

  “As soon as you open that glove compartment—if, indeed, you can open it, and whether or not there’s a gun inside—we stand a strong risk of being killed. It is,” he insisted, “simply not worth that risk.”

  “Move!” I ordered.

  “No!” he growled, moving his body closer to the glove compartment and seeking to stare me down.

  We were still glaring at each other when Omar slid back behind the wheel. He must have started to return to the truck just as I asked Louis to give me access to the glove compartment. Looking back, I doubt that even if everything had worked as I hoped it might, I would have had the time to pull it off. But I’ll never know. There is no doubt that Louis was right: it would have been a high-risk ploy. I never learned whether, in fact, there had been a handgun in that glove compartment.

  Once we were again underway, Omar executed a few more of his travel-ten-minutes-and-wait-five operations, clearly designed to ensure that as we approached their base we were not being followed. After my breathing had settled and some of the adrenalin had leached out of my system following the aborted glove compartment gambit, I was depressed and dejected. I had still had nothing more than some thimbles of tea to drink since our harrowing misadventure began twenty-four hours earlier, and there is no doubt I was severely dehydrated.

  In full darkness, during one of these waiting periods and after considerable internal wrestling with the pros and cons of doing so, I croaked out a question to Omar, “Is it your intention to execute us?”

  Omar replied with what I took to be gratifying vehemence. “That would make no sense at all,” he shot back. “My mission was to capture you and bring you back to my emir, where you could not be found.” He then continued with some pride, “If my mission had been to assassinate you, you would now be dead.” His unassailable logic was comforting, at least superficially.

  He then launched into the first of many sessions of colourful, if not necessarily consistent, coherent, or accurate religious instruction. “We are good, faithful, and dedicated slaves of Allah,” he continued a little primly. “The Qur’an contains a specific prohibition against murder, so we could not do that even if we wanted to.” This did not seem entirely in keeping with what I knew of Al Qaeda. I was much less familiar with the norms and behaviour of the North African franchise but all too aware of the predations of its predecessors, the Groupe Islamique Armée (GIA, or Armed Islamic Group)—which I did not recall as being particularly squeamish about killing vast numbers of innocents—and the Groupe Salafiste pour la Prédication et le Combat (GSPC, or Salafist Group for Call and Combat). Nevertheless, I was happy with his answer and forcefully suspended any lurking disbelief as I clung to whatever straws he was prepared to offer.

  While I was glad to hear assurances that we were not to be immediately executed, it was almost as satisfying to hear his crystal-clear rejection of any possibility that our kidnapping might have been simply a case of our being in the wrong place at the wrong time. We now knew for certain that the UN Special Envoy had not fallen into the hands of Al Qaeda simply as a result of an unhappy coincidence.

  Of course, I already knew that any such hypothesis was close to absurd. Clearly they had known precisely where we would be, but even then our capture had been an extremely risky venture. We had been grabbed in a region deemed safe by all, and it would be along that road that the entire government would travel in a few days to celebrate Niger’s fiftieth birthday in Tillabéri. In fact, the area from which we had been taken, about thirty-five kilometres from Niamey, was but a couple of kilometres from the large Koutoukaté prison (in which former Prime Minister Hama Amadou, President Tandja’s principal rival, was being held), and it was close to a major military base. We took bizarre comfort in the fact that our abduction was not the result of appallingly bad luck.

  A little later Omar must have felt we needed more reassurance for, without prompting, he informed us that it was all about ransom; about, that is, raising money for the cause, for jihad. It was simple, he proclaimed. They would make demands, the United Nations and/or Canada would negotiate a suitable number, and we would be freed. “It might take a few days, but,” he explained, “you could be back in Niamey by the weekend.” Indeed, if a deal could be expeditiously concluded, he confidently proclaimed, he would drive us back himself, “right to your hotel.”

  Louis and I told him that we did not think it would be so simple: that, as far as we knew—and we stressed that neither of us had had any direct experience of such things—neither Canada nor the United Nations would pay a ransom to kidnappers. Omar brushed such observations off as mere posturing on our part. He proudly noted that he had been involved in the negotiations to free the two Austrian tourists who had been taken from their desert camping expedition in southern Tunisia in February 2008 and released in October.

  Not wishing to return to the bleak subject of why Omar’s optimism was ill founded, I asked him how these things were done. Did someone, I wondered, “deliver a sack of cash to some kind of intermediary?”

  “Oh, no!” laughed this desert warrior, who lived comfortably within the confines of a seventh-century belief system. “Things are much more efficient these days. It’s all done with a few computer keystrokes—a simple bank transfer into the account of people in whom we have confidence. It’s finished in thirty seconds.”

  How tidy, I thought, and how unrealistic—at least as far as we were concerned. We knew it wasn’t going to go down like that, but I don’t know what Omar really believed.

  Now in complete darkness, there was a last satellite-phone call and, with a new determination and focus, we headed down into a valley and bulled our way into a particularly dense and extensive area of heavy bush. The boys in the back whooped with excitement as they sought, not always successfully, to dodge the vicious, thorn-studded branches that swept along the top and sides of our vehicle as we crashed our way through. In a fairly large clearing, we stopped and waited a few minutes with the motor running and the lights on until we heard a vehicle approaching. Omar extinguished his lights. The other vehicle stopped and through the trees flashed its lights twice. Omar replied in like manner, and with lights now blazing the two vehicles approached each other with much screaming of “Allahu Akbar!” (God is great) echoing around the clearing from all sides.

  The other vehicle turned and took off at speed, without lights, through the trees as we followed. There seemed to be several Kalashwaving figures leaping about in the back calling out something to Hassan and Ibrahim, who responded with maniacal excitement. Omar, sporting a happy
grin, concentrated on keeping the other vehicle in sight as it twisted and turned through the bush without benefit of lights and at a breakneck pace. Eventually things settled down somewhat as the lead vehicle lost, searched, and then found its way any number of times, with much backtracking, punctuated by near hysterical laughter. Then, in a more orderly convoy with each truck periodically turning its lights on and off to navigate difficult patches, we proceeded through the bushes and trees in an ever more disciplined fashion.

  Perhaps forty minutes later we saw human shapes ahead and the two trucks stopped among what seemed to be numerous animated, shouting, largely black-faced figures. Hands reached in through the driver’s window to hug Omar or slap him on the back. Louis’ window framed half a dozen curious, gleeful faces seeking a glimpse of the prizes illuminated by a number of randomly directed hand-held flashlights. These were very excited, not very aggressive young men who seemed drunk with success and happiness. As they milled about, Ibrahim, having leapt into the crowd from the back of our truck like a rock star, strutted his stuff in all directions, basking in the glory that his mission had won him.

  He then spotted a tall, thin black figure in the crowd, gave him a long and excited hug, and ushered him toward Louis’ window, proudly introducing him to us as his brother. We understood this to mean his real brother, as opposed to the term they all used to designate each other, frère. Unsure of the appropriate greeting to a new captive, Ibrahim’s brother simply thrust his large, militarystyle metal canteen through the window and offered us water.

  Suddenly—finally—my all too dormant survival instinct snapped into place. I tore the canteen from his grasp and began to drink, water pouring from the sides of my mouth as I gulped it down. The water tasted muddy, gritty, warm, and delicious. Suddenly, I knew with certainty that this would not be over soon and that I would die if I were not a lot more careful about looking after myself, the trots clearly being the least of my worries. I emptied the entire canteen—perhaps a litre—and asked for more. Surprised but willing, the brother disappeared and some minutes later returned to offer me another full canteen. This time I let Louis have a little as I paused for breath, but, with Louis’ encouragement, polished off much of it myself.