Eventually, Louis and I were dragged out of the cab. A couple of slightly older, stern Arab faces had appeared and started issuing orders. Angry comments seemed to be directed at the fact that we were unbound, and suddenly hands were all over us as the packing tape was again wrapped around our wrists (individually, inside wrist to inside wrist, in front), and for the first time, our ankles. We were then dragged a short distance to a blanket on the ground. I asked for help to lie down, and many hands, including Soumana’s, rather gently assisted in this excruciating process. But I was down, bound hand and foot, exhausted and freezing cold, staring up into a glorious mass of stars. Louis, Soumana, and I lay rigidly, side by side on the thin single blanket. After some time, maybe twenty minutes, someone knelt at our feet and, without explanation, sliced the tape binding Louis’ and my ankles. I don’t believe Soumana was bound.
We were being closely watched. There was quiet bustle all around us. Figures and voices would emerge, then fade into the stygian darkness. People cruised by for a look, their faces starless black patches against the night sky. Discussions ensued about a possible, then an expected air strike. Was this to scare us or was it genuine? I think the latter but don’t really know. I didn’t even know if I wanted an air strike.
There seemed to be many people, certainly a couple of dozen, milling about us in the pitch darkness—thus the name we subsequently gave to this camp: Central Station. The moon had yet to rise. Snippets of conversation registered in my semi-conscious mind, one in particular. As the hubbub settled down and I drifted further toward sleep, I heard what I took to be a young, female, Parisian-accented voice, close at hand, say matter-of-factly, “But surely we did not get into this just to murder old men?” I might, I suppose, have already been dreaming, but I don’t think so. I did not hear that memorable voice again.
CHAPTER 3
THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS
I look’d to Heaven, and tried to pray;
But or ever a prayer had gusht,
A wicked whisper came, and made
My heart as dry as dust.
Tuesday, 16 December, Day 3, started early. Sounds of stirring all around us brought me slowly awake, as confused memories of our parlous situation flooded into my mind. It was still pitch dark. We were ordered to our feet but I could not move. Louis asked Soumana and some others to lift me into a standing position as I strove to keep my back straight during the process. The cold had not helped. We’d had perhaps two or three hours of rest.
As they hustled us toward a couple of trucks there seemed to be fewer, if still a significant number, of people about. Some must have slipped away before we woke. Louis and I were assigned to separate vehicles and each of us bleakly considered the possibility that we would never see each other again.
Louis was put in the middle position in Omar’s truck, with Ibrahim by the passenger window. I was envious. I had spent time with them and thought I understood what they would and would not do. They were very much the devils I knew, and now I would have to start all over again with another crew.
Once Louis was settled, Hassan and a couple of additional frères we had not seen before climbed onto the haphazardly loaded supplies in Omar’s truck bed, and off they went, roaring adroitly down a steep, ragged, boulder-strewn slope that was slowly emerging from the dawn mists.
I was then thrust beside the driver of another vehicle, someone who was introduced as Ahmed, a shifty-looking individual in his late twenties with a face deeply scarred by smallpox. Despite an ever-present grin (we quickly assigned him the name “Smiley Face”), he had the coldest eyes imaginable and exhibited an unrelentingly hostile attitude toward us. His hate for us and all we stood for was palpable.
Ahmed and I were joined by a rather nattily clad, stolid, taciturn, turbaned figure in a knee-length maroon tunic and matching trousers. He did not introduce himself and hardly acknowledged my presence, which was tough to pull off when he was sharing a bucket seat with me. As he swung aboard, he wedged his AK-47 between his body and the door, further adding to our intimacy and to his distress at rubbing shoulders and hips with an infidel. The others called him Abdul Rahman and we subsequently, and unimaginatively, dubbed him “AR.” All deferred to his authority.
AR appeared to be in his mid-thirties and often wore a stern, hard, and impenetrable expression. He sported a long, dense, black beard and not much of his closely turbaned face was visible. AR was among the most deeply committed and ardently faithful mujahideen we encountered, tirelessly assiduous in his duties. His answer to my unwanted proximity was to try—without great success—to ignore it.
Off we drove in Omar’s wake. Ahmed was no Omar when it came to driving skills, however, and within less than ten minutes we were hung up on a large boulder. There followed a Keystone Kops episode with everyone working at cross-purposes. Big egos and fierce pride got in the way at every turn, and everyone seemed anxious to take offence at any suggestion of a deemed slight or disparaging remark. Some pushed while others pulled. Bits and pieces of metal and random tools that had been strewn about the passenger floor-well rarely accomplished what was required and, when cast aside, all too often simply disappeared into the desert sand. It took us about an hour to get free of that rock, during which time Omar’s crew, having realized we were not following, returned to wait at the foot of the hill, very careful to offer neither advice nor criticism. Nevertheless, by the time we were on our way, Ahmed had lost a great deal of face and was in a foul mood.
As the sun rose and the day wore on, the topography began to change again as we relentlessly pushed northward. The terrain became less hilly, less rocky; the wadis were shallower, and there was ever less vegetation. The horizon seemed to stretch farther and farther before us as the soil became sandier and whiter and harder packed. The temperature, even with the breeze created by our increasing speed over the flattening landscape, climbed high into what I judged to be the forties as we sat crammed together, stewing in the sweltering heat.
By noon we were deep into the Malian desert and the drivers pumped up the pace to well over a hundred kilometres an hour. Soon, exhilarated by the freedom to be reckless and foolish, they raced the two trucks against each other across this flat, featureless white pan. The trucks vied for line and position, sometimes almost touching as the boys in the back screamed insults at each other and encouragement to their respective drivers. The speedometer reached 120, then 130. Everybody was whooping it up and having a whale of a time. Surely, I thought, at these speeds an animal burrow or sizable rock would send a truck and its human cargo cartwheeling over the desert wastes.
After an hour of this craziness, we reached a line of hills lying across our path. The drivers headed, straight as an arrow, for a particular spot and there, under some trees, was an uncamouflaged cache of fuel and water in barrels, one of which proudly wore pale-blue UN livery. Each truck carried a steel drum (forty-five imperial gallons/fifty-four U.S. gallons) of diesel fuel and another of water. After the drums already on board were emptied—the first into the vehicles and the second into individual water bottles, jugs, and canteens—the spent barrels were switched out with the full, with no attempt to disguise or hide the empties left behind. Louis and I had a chance to chat and compare notes. More sardines were on offer, but again I could not stomach the thought, and satisfied myself with the few dry dates I had pocketed the previous day. But at least now I was drinking water, in copious quantities, whenever I could and was finally able to pee a little.
On another occasion, Louis asked Omar if they were not afraid that someone would steal fuel and water from these undisguised caches. He was shocked by the question. First, Omar explained, there is a strictly enforced desert code: nobody, ever, took anybody’s water, tires, or fuel unless it was a question of life or death. Even in such circumstances, only the minimum needed to survive would be taken and then replaced precisely where it was taken as quickly as humanly possible. In the course of our movements we would see many such caches, including stacks of tires,
and our drivers would note as we drove by, “That’s ours” or “That is someone else’s.” We could never see any difference in outward appearance. Further, Omar noted, his usual hubris bubbling to the surface, “Nobody in these parts is willing to incur the wrath of Al Qaeda.”
When Ahmed was ready to leave after taking on water and fuel, he ordered his crew to mount up and we were off, unmindful that Omar’s crew was not at all ready. Ahmed obviously did not like meekly following in old Omar’s wake (Omar’s vast age—forty-seven—was always a magnet for sly, derogatory comments along the lines of “You know, he used to be one of the great drivers, but now his eyesight is failing—such a pity”), and Ahmed relished this opportunity for independence, which Abdul Rahman seemed to encourage. Given the dramatic difference in their driving and navigational skills, however, I was not happy with this development.
As we launched across another vast desert plain on the other side of the ridge, there was great debate between Ahmed and AR over the right course, each of them vigorously pointing in directions about thirty degrees apart. The ensuing decisions seemed to me arbitrary in the extreme, except that we continued to head more or less north. Finally, AR concluded that Ahmed had no idea where he was and ordered him to find and link up with Omar. Ahmed, with ill grace, tried to convince AR that with the bright new GPS he brought from beneath his tunic, all would be well. They fired it up, fiddled with it for a few minutes, held it upside down, and punched buttons at random, regularly smacking it against the dashboard to encourage better performance. When that produced no useful results, Ahmed was ordered up a small mesa and once on the flat upper surface, he switched on his lights and proceeded to turn in a tight, slow circle. At the completion of 360 degrees, he stopped and scanned the horizon to the south, southeast, and southwest for about ten minutes, and then repeated the whole procedure.
On the third or fourth try, we all spotted a barely perceptible flash of light on the far horizon. Ahmed pointed the truck in that direction. He then flashed his lights every few minutes and would receive an answering flash from the approaching Omar. I couldn’t help thinking that we had wasted an hour exclusively because one driver wanted to avoid having to follow the other.
Together again, probably around two in the afternoon, the two vehicles set off over a final stretch of flatness that gradually gave way to rougher, bumpier terrain: more scrub, deeper wadis, more rocks, and more back torture. After another hour or so we mounted the fairly steep slope of a ravine and at the top we were waved to a stop by the other vehicle.
There was an excited conference, some very serious expressions, and macho posturing. None of which boded well—or perhaps it did? Eventually, Louis came over and said that Ibrahim had told him that it seemed we were being followed by three trucks in the far distance. They were apparently generating a large dust plume, as no doubt we had been as well. I could not see them, but he assured me they were there. But who were they? Why were they following us? And what were their intentions?
The boys prepared for war, strapping on ammunition vests holding ten AK magazines each, in addition to those already mounted on their rifles. They quickly set up a DShK 12.7 mm heavy machine gun on a rapidly assembled mount in the back of Ahmed’s truck, and loaded what looked like a twenty-five-round belt of the heavycalibre ammunition. In addition, two 7.62 mm general-purpose machine guns were unlimbered as our captors prepared to take on whoever seemed to be in pursuit.
The speculation was that these were the forces of Ibrahim Ag Bahanga, a rogue Tuareg rebel leader in Mali’s eastern desert area. We had, of course, studied the who’s who of distantly related Tuareg insurgencies in Mali and Niger and knew that Bahanga had refused to participate in any of the many Algerian-brokered peace deals between the government of Mali and its various Tuareg rebel groupings. He was known to be fiercely jealous of his territory, attacking anybody who dared enter his desert domain without prior permission, very much including the Malian army and police. And while I hardly knew our captors at this point, I did not think that they were likely to ask anybody’s permission to do anything.
Bahanga was also the sometime ally of the Niger rebel leader Aghali Alambo, the Tuareg head of the Mouvement des Nigériens pour la justice (which held sway just across the nearby border to the east), the very guys we had been trying to get the government of President Tandja to talk to about a peace deal in Niger. Louis and I briefly discussed whether our fortunes would be improved were we to fall into the hands of Bahanga’s gang, but such speculation was clearly moot as our AQIM kidnappers had no intention of letting that happen.
The first plan was to leave Ahmed’s truck and most of the mujahideen and fire power to block Bahanga’s advance while Omar’s truck escaped northward with Louis and me aboard. But for reasons that were not explained, they then decided to try to outrun them and fight only if the pursuers got close. Thus, kitted out for battle, and with Louis and me once again in the forward truck with Omar at the wheel and Soumana and our two original captors in the back, we set off—very fast. It was all too evident from the outset that nobody was going to worry about the comfort of the hostages. At least this time I had two free hands to mitigate the damage.
My impression was that we were travelling significantly faster than we had before and Omar was doing everything he could to elude our pursuers. Aside from hoping that they would not be prepared to assume the same risks such speed entailed, Omar looked for tracks that he could follow and then suddenly, when some topographical feature obscured us for a moment from our pursuers, veer off over a nearby rise, ideally over a hard-baked surface, in such a manner that Bahanga’s trucks might not realize we had left the more evident track. For three hours we tried a variety of these ploys and eventually, at a high point, the truck behind signalled a halt and after a meticulous scan of the area to the south, we were deemed safe. Whether we had lost our pursuers or they had simply given up or, indeed, we had left their territory was never clear.
Late in the afternoon we had another brief rest stop, a glass of tea, a long drink of water, and a couple more dates. I was then reassigned back to the Ahmed/AR vehicle and we were off again, or such was the plan. When we were all loaded up and set to leave, Ahmed’s truck would not start, would not even turn over. However, the surface was hard and four of the mujahideen simply pushed the vehicle a short distance, Ahmed popped the clutch, and we were on our way. But the generator needle would not register. Nobody seemed the least concerned that we were setting out across one of the most inhospitable regions in the world in a vehicle with a failed electrical system.
This was my introduction to the extreme fatalism of these jihadi warriors, where everything comes down to Insha’ Allah (God willing, or If it is God’s will) which flows from the Qur’anic admonition that Allah decides everything: all that occurs is exclusively according to God’s will.
The trucks now regularly changed lead so the machismo would not get out of hand. Meanwhile, AR was intent on understanding the new GPS gizmo. After he learned to hold it the right way up and stopped beating it up when it did not do what he wanted, he began to get the hang of it. He had Ahmed veer significantly off course, around hills, and take different lines from Omar’s straight-ahead celestial navigation approach so that AR could let the GPS lead him back to Omar’s course. AR was clearly fascinated by that marvellous instrument. (Omar never touched a GPS receiver, and, as far as I know, never got lost.) Each time we veered away from Omar and Louis, however, I would recall that the vehicle batteries (that model has two) were not charging. If we got stuck in sand we were going nowhere and would be incapable of performing even that high-ground, light-circle, come-and-get-me manoeuvre to attract Omar’s help.
Sure enough, as dusk deepened and the two vehicles were more or less travelling in tandem, Ahmed again sought the lead. He swung out of the track, or piste, to pass Omar and drove straight into a patch of soft sand, where, revving the engine, he dug the truck deep and stalled. When he turned the key, absolutely nothing happened, n
ot even a click. Just as when the day began some fourteen hours ago, there was a total muddle about what to do. Louis and I stood to the side and watched. At first, following what I came to understand was their strict code of self-help, Omar’s crew also stood aside to let Ahmed’s crew solve the problem and extract the vehicle. Indeed, on later occasions when four or five trucks were crossing a particularly challenging passage of dunes, if one became ensablé (stuck in the sand) the others would generally charge ahead, leaving the crew of the stuck vehicle to free themselves. I assume this strategy was designed to avoid endangering the whole group in the event of ambush or attack in circumstances in which they would all be particularly vulnerable.
Ahmed’s crew dug sand from beneath the wheels, placed long strips of perforated steel matting underneath them, cut from the sheets used to create remote runways, and pushed, pulled, and shoved. Finally they asked Omar if he would offer them a tow, but the thin rope available quickly snapped. As all this was going on I was again, desperately, contemplating escape. I thought I had seen lights flashing on the horizon to the west, and began to convince myself that there was some kind of road nearby. If anything I was in worse physical shape than the day before but was at least putting the dehydration to rest and drinking whenever I could. I was significantly broken physically, however, and my mental state was not much better.
Ibrahim passed by and I asked him about those lights. “Oh,” he said, barely suppressing a malicious grin, “that’s a main road,” and he slunk off into the dark, no doubt to watch what I would do. Knowing full well I was being set up, I still had difficulty preventing myself from simply wandering off westward across the desert. After all, I mused, how much worse could it be? I didn’t fall for it in the end and as I stared further at the western horizon I realized that the winking lights were merely the effect of stars setting below.
A Season in Hell Page 5