Finally, without a word, Omar removed the second battery from his truck, shouldered aside the boys gathered around Ahmed’s engine compartment, swapped it for one of the dead ones, hooked it up and we were off again. On and on we pressed through the night, over every kind of terrain, across every obstacle. Our tight cones of light slicing through the darkness ahead were mesmerizing. It seemed as if we were enclosed in a tunnel and I had the impression we were heading steadily down a long, sloping hill. Clearly, Abdul Rahman was bored, so he jacked up the volume of some sort of MP3 feature on his cellphone so that we might all enjoy loud, inspirational speeches by Osama Bin Laden, Abou Musab Al Zarqawi, and other Al Qaeda luminaries. I imagined they were about the imperative of tearing out the eyes of the infidels, and AR punctuated these tirades by a braying throat clearing every few seconds, which drove me to distraction.
Many hours later, we reached an extremely difficult passage—almost like descending a dry waterfall—and saw furtive lights far in the distance below. The crew in the back became jubilant. It must have been well past midnight when we rounded a rocky promontory and the vehicles were suddenly surrounded by shouting, leaping, AK-waving mujahideen. Ibrahim began to scream “Allahu Akbar!” again and again as he stood in the back of Omar’s truck, his Kalash held in a Ché stance, at the end of a straight right arm above his head. A mass of brothers pressed around our vehicles to greet our three original abductors as conquering heroes. Louis and I were much scrutinized at the outset, faces again staring fixedly at us from twenty centimetres away, but soon we were forgotten in the celebration of the victorious warriors. We left our trucks and stood together at the side of the mêlée, each taking some comfort in the simple presence of the other after a long, impossibly tiring, and angst-ridden day. We were largely ignored for a time as the celebration seethed around us. New, mostly young faces of every hue appeared and stared. Others hung back, afraid, as if we might contaminate them with our godlessness. My disorientation seemed about as complete as I thought it could get.
Eventually, we were escorted to yet another blanket on the ground in the lee of a truck, as a fierce, sand-laden wind was getting up and beginning to howl.
Louis and I were too tired, cold, and numb to speak, but soon we were joined by two new faces. None of those we already knew was present. The central figure was an older beturbaned Arab of about sixty, clad in a Saudi-style brown, gold-edged, semi-transparent garment like an academic gown, worn over a spotless white tunic and light trousers reaching to mid-calf, and he wore sandals. He had dark, piercing eyes set fairly close together and a long, straggly, grey, henna-streaked beard. He sat cross-legged before us, accompanied by a portly, short-haired, round-faced acolyte who seemed to be in his early thirties, wearing dark, more operational clothing and round, steel-rimmed glasses.
The older man, whom we saw by the flickering light of a nearby fire, was positively courtly in his manners and gestures. He spoke excellent French and after observing my crabbed position on the blanket (the only one my damaged back would accommodate), asked if there were anything they could do to make me more comfortable. I replied that there was not. He then turned his attention to Louis and immediately expressed surprise and evident anger when he saw the gash across his eyebrow and the blood on his shirt, issuing a stream of invective in Arabic to someone behind him. He asked Louis how he had received the wound but Louis, to avoid exacerbating relations with the sullen Hassan, refused to be drawn and simply allowed that the injury was not serious.
Tea in those little glasses was served and I was asked who I was and what—precisely—I had been doing in Africa before I was taken. I repeated the whole story, essentially reciting my letter of appointment from UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, which had explained that I was to serve as his Special Envoy with a view to arriving at a negotiated settlement of the Second Tuareg Rebellion by bringing the government of Niger and the MNJ to the negotiating table. I said that my initial task had been to explore opportunities for dialogue with both sides and to lay the groundwork for them to enter into concrete talks. To that end, I had been instructed to approach the MNJ rebels to secure their commitment to a peaceful resolution of the crisis, and I acknowledged that this had already been achieved. I explained that my mission, at least during the initial stages, was to be carried out discreetly, with no public announcement, in order to avoid embarrassing the government of Niger. Our AQIM inquisitors did not seem much interested in the specifics once they had satisfied themselves that I was indeed the UN wallah they had intended to grab.
As I neared the end of my response, the political commissar type with the steel-rimmed spectacles demanded—in near-perfect English—to know what had become of my documents. When I again explained that I had been on a day’s outing and had left all my identity papers in my hotel room in Niamey, he delivered a harsh lecture on the irresponsibility of this kind of behaviour. Documents, he insisted, had to be carried at all times. Indeed, it was “illegal” to do otherwise. But the senior man soon tired of this tirade and waved his aide into silence with the back of his hand.
I then asked for their names, and with a small, fleeting smile, henna-beard said that while we might get to such things at some point in the future, now was not that time. Clearly, he noted, we needed rest, and without further ceremony he rose and left, trailing the others in his wake.
That was the first and last we ever saw of either of those two. My impression was that they were high-placed AQIM figures—perhaps the older one was some kind of mullah, or spiritual leader, high up in the food chain, perhaps a member of the Council of Worthies, or Notables—but of course I do not know. I assumed that they had been sent to put eyes on their big catch in order to better inform future decisions, but I have no idea what they got out of our meeting. In any case, Louis and I decided that these were senior players in AQIM and therefore named that camp Board of Directors.
I slept fitfully, flat on my back, incapable of moving much except for my involuntary, violent shivering from the cold, and was beset by horrible dreams for what remained of that night. The essence of this series of semi-waking nightmarish vignettes was a catalogue of horrors that had or would be faced by me and various members of my family: accidents, illnesses, failures, embarrassment, ruination. Whenever I struggled, short of breath, into wakefulness, I contemplated my circumstances and judged the dreams preferable. I desperately wanted to escape my current reality and sought eagerly to return to any dreamland that would have me.
CHAPTER 4
TV CAMP
O Wedding-Guest! this soul hath been
Alone on a wide, wide sea:
So lonely ‘twas, that God Himself
Scarce seemèd there to be.
Our fourth day of captivity began well before dawn. And again, while many people—perhaps twenty—had been around when we arrived the previous evening, the only ones present when we woke were the crews of the two trucks that had carried us from Central Station. After a glass of tea and a rather tasty piece of fresh-baked bread we were on our way again. The wind, which had built throughout the night, now was a moderate gale, our first sandstorm. Visibility was down to ten or fifteen metres and, at least at first, our drivers proceeded with some caution.
The two trucks left in convoy, Louis and I again assigned to separate vehicles. But after a couple of hours, Ahmed could no longer stand to follow Omar, so he set off on his own and quickly got lost. We made more light-circles atop a rise, and eventually Omar found us. Fed up with screwing up in front of the prisoners and, I think, because he’d had enough hip rubbing with this weak and damaged infidel, AR had me transferred into Omar’s truck while Louis went with him and the ill-disciplined Ahmed, and we again set off at a reduced pace into the howling wind and hazy dawn.
After a few hours of bumping across undulating and relatively soft sand, we crested a small rise and there before us in a wide desert valley, through the rust-hued gloom, was a magically bizarre sight: a vast and widespread herd of thousands of camels p
lodding slowly across our path through the veil of wind-blown sand. The animals were led by a trio of Tuaregs swathed in blue, sitting atop their majestic light-coloured beasts and seemingly oblivious to, or at least unmindful of, our intrusion into this timeless tableau.
By mid-morning the wind had begun to abate and visibility had improved, but it was still cold, windy, and overcast. We were driven to the base of a small yet fairly steep, rounded hill and found it was already occupied. A couple of trucks, just like the ones we were in, were stationed at its base, heavy machine guns mounted and manned. Without a word, our vehicles took up positions so that the small hill was boxed with armed vehicles protecting each of its quadrants. We were instructed to leave the cab, mount the slope and, halfway up, to sit on yet another blanket thrown on the drifting sand.
It was now bitterly cold. As we left the vehicles we grabbed a couple of old coverings in which the now-deployed heavy weapons had been wrapped, in order to protect ourselves against the biting wind. One was a light, plastic fibre-filled yellow bedspread decorated with blue roses and numerous burn holes, and the other was a dirty, crusty orange-and-green blanket of synthetic material.
When we reached the designated spot, wearing our newly purloined shawls, I walked in circles around the blanket because I continued to have trouble maintaining any kind of sitting position. Not much was said until we were approached by a figure clothed entirely in black from turban (wrapped Tuareg-like, with only a very narrow slit open around the eyes), through long, tunic-like jelabiyah, to pants and high-top running shoes.
This was Mokhtar Belmokhtar, and given the authority with which he moved and the deference everyone paid him, he was clearly the man—their revered leader. He exuded a palpably commanding presence and, we were to learn, seemed to exercise his leadership with skill and subtlety.
He sat down opposite Louis, loosened his turban to reveal more of his face, and motioned to me to join them on the blanket. I knelt instead, seeking to keep my back straight. Omar and Ibrahim sat beside us in their status-enhancing role as hostage takers and interpreters. In response to a quiet question from the man in black, I had the impression that Omar had explained my back problem.
Despite the voluminous black robes and turban, he was relatively slight, with a heavily weathered and deeply lined face and curly black hair. He looked older than what we were told were his thirty-seven years. His eyes were dark and deep set below prominent brows. He had thin lips set in a straight line, and his mouth twisted from time to time into a ghost of a cold, almost wry smile. He wore the mandatory beard and moustache, which—unlike most of the others—seemed to be lightly trimmed. His most distinguishing feature was a deep almost vertical scar that began above the middle of his right eyebrow, crossed his right eyelid, and continued across his right cheek, disappearing into his moustache. He was alleged to have a glass eye, but all I could discern was that the deep scar had distorted his right eyelid and somewhat closed that eye.
His troops called him Khaled. Of course we named him “Jack”—as in one-eyed jacks—which suited him so well that later, during an intense discussion about our fate, I waved a finger at him and burst out, “Come on, Jack!” which confused the interpreter (Omar, at the time) and stopped the conversation cold because nobody knew whom I was talking to or about.
At this, our first encounter, Jack passively and not particularly aggressively scrutinized us for a while in silence. After a time Ibrahim rather excitedly asked me, “Do you recognize anyone here?” While there were a few new faces about, he clearly wanted to know if I recognized Jack.
Truthfully, I replied, “No,” to nobody’s surprise but perhaps a little disappointment.
Jack was all business and chose to speak through Ibrahim rather than Omar (he was careful to spread his favours about), asking for our names. Then he wanted to know what we had been doing in Niger, and he too focused on my lack of identification papers. The interrogation was superficial, even cursory. Twenty minutes later we were bundled back into the trucks. The weapons were dismounted and we drove for another hour or so to a dry desert valley scattered with some sparse tufts of sharp grass and a few dense bushes and low acacia thorn trees.
These, we soon learned, were the essential attributes of a camp. The vehicles were nestled into the vegetation in a rather casual attempt at camouflage, and everybody rested as the temperature rose at the approach of midday. Louis and I were assigned a position that was, in effect, our designated prison or living space. It was situated between the high bushes and the large left front wheel of Omar’s truck, which together offered a fair amount of shade. There seemed to be a lot of coming and going around us but only a few people settled in our immediate vicinity. Omar was nowhere in sight but both Ibrahim and Hassan very much were. We were their captives. To some degree they viewed us as their trophies and they reacted jealously when any other brother, for whatever reason, sought our attention.
As the afternoon came and went, Louis and I considered attempting to play pétanque (boules, or bocce) with the small, hard desert melons growing nearby, if only to get our minds off our predicament for a moment. But in the end we couldn’t summon either the energy or the will. There is no doubt that I was approaching a state of severe depression, very fragile and afraid. As an experienced geopolitical analyst it was well nigh impossible not to conclude that we were in deep shit. There was no obvious solution to our predicament and none of the usual options seemed likely to pertain.
As we wandered about examining those melons, which we were told were poisonous, we were careful to remain well within the sight and easy reach of our jailers, and we continued walking long after the pétanque idea had been abandoned. The walking felt great. It eased the pain in my back and seemed to work off some of the built-up anxiety. Further, it struck us as likely to contribute to a less fitful sleep, so we started to do laps or circuits at a steady pace, not fast but purposeful, more than a stroll.
By the time we returned to our blankets near the truck, a major discussion group had formed around Jack, thirty or forty metres away. About twenty people had gathered in a semicircle in front of him, most of whom we had not seen previously. The discussion seemed very intense. We knew that we had to be the subject, and I began (not for the last time) to fear the worst. Were we being tried in some kind of desert kangaroo court? How would the verdict be carried out? Soon we started walking again.
In the evening we were brought a single bowl of rice containing a few bits of mutton and, at our insistence, we were each given a spoon. Our captors ate out of a common pot using only their right hands, so the spoon was a concession to Western fastidiousness, and clearly our request had not surprised them. We were also given a four-litre plastic jug that had recently contained motor oil and was now filled with what I considered to be pretty iffy water, but by then I was drinking anything.
We were told that while water in the desert was always scarce and needed to be rationed and managed responsibly, we would not be deprived of water to drink. We should, Omar said, approach any of les frères with our four-litre container to seek a refill when we needed more.
After our brief and first more or less full meal since our capture, it had already begun to grow dark and we started to prepare for sleep, using the coverings from our morning meeting with Jack to make a bed beside the left front wheel of Omar’s truck. Just as we were about to doze off, we heard a great commotion around the front of the truck, a metre from our heads. The hood was opened and three large, heavy tires were thrown into a pile. By the time we had sat up to figure out what was going on, somebody had placed a laptop computer on the stack of spares and was plugging it into the cigarette lighter socket in the engine compartment.
We were at a loss but feared this had something to do with the big palaver that had gone on throughout the afternoon. Had a judgment been rendered? Were we about to star in a new YouTube horror?
With some ceremony, a DVD was produced and inserted into the laptop drive and we were chivvied around to hav
e pride of place in front of the screen. The others pressed about us, the younger ones in front. Three or four prepubescent boys among them, their screen-lit faces rapt with anticipation, excitedly tried to watch us and the laptop simultaneously.
Soon we heard a loudly pulsing, urgent, musical beat and the screen was filled with a black flag, the lower half of which was covered with white Arabic script; in the upper portion was a globe surmounted by an AK-47 assault rifle—the Al Qaeda banner. Using the traditional and mandatory Islamic opening, a voice intoned in Arabic, “In the name of Allah the most merciful,” and the centre of the screen began to fill with vignettes of all kinds of horrors: those aircraft slamming into the twin towers, U.S. and allied vehicles being destroyed in Iraq and Afghanistan by IEDs, video cameras slaved to the sights of Dragunov sniper rifles blasting the heads off GIs and then murdering those who came to their assistance, suicide bombers driving explosive-laden trucks through fences and into buildings or crowds, immediately followed by massive explosions. Some scenes carried subtitles giving the date and location of the horror. Others showed the happy, excited suicide bomber explaining his joy at the prospect of martyring himself for such a noble purpose.
There were also clips of their now happily defunct “great emir,” Bin Laden, uttering in his quiet and reasonable-sounding voice his latest threats to tear the heart out of the degenerate West. A stocky, heavily bearded, white-robed and turbaned American, whom we were told was Adam Gadahn, a Jewish Californian convert to Islam and Al Qaeda, made his first of many appearances. Gadahn was ridiculing the American president—in English with Arabic subtitles—and issuing dire warnings aimed at U.S. audiences of the disasters that would befall America if the United States and its allies did not quit “Muslim lands.”
A Season in Hell Page 6