A Season in Hell

by Robert R. Fowler

  CHAPTER 12

  CALLING HOME

  And now ‘twas like all instruments,

  Now like a lonely flute;

  And now it is an angel’s song,

  That makes the Heavens be mute.

  The day after we received Compaoré’s largesse we again hit the road, but it seemed as if this time there was a little more purpose to our movement and direction. The first leg of the journey was yet again northward. We travelled for eight or ten hours, as always extremely fast over hard, relatively flat surfaces, skirting ever-larger and more impressive rocky outcroppings that soon became harsh, black, forbidding mountains. Eventually, as we could feel the troops becoming more excited, we turned into a deep canyon slicing into the cliff face on our right. It was never more than thirty or forty metres wide and we followed it through radical twists and turns into what seemed to be the very heart of the mountains. We stopped only when we could go no farther.

  I was exhausted, but I had the feeling that we were somewhere quite familiar to our captors. They acted as if they were home, but in our entire ordeal I never felt less at home. It was a brutal, ugly place. The surrounding cliffs were composed of crumbling red sandstone, largely encased in an almost burnished, coal-black, thin veneer with vivid red scars across the face of the canyon where the outer black shell had broken away, revealing the sandstone beneath. This was Le Rouge et Le Noir, and it gets the prize for being the most depressing of our camps. One of les frères told us it had been their headquarters for more than two years but that they hadn’t used it for three or four years. He showed us where they had built a bread oven into the cliff face by embedding a forty-five-gallon drum above a deep opening in which a fire could be laid.

  Most relevant to our Salafist captors, however, was that it included a small stand of the fabled arak trees. As we departed the next day, without any order or direction, all the trucks (I think there were four) skidded to a halt in soft sand and everyone leapt out with cutting tools and began hacking at the roots of these small, bushy, willow-like trees. They returned to the vehicles, beatific smiles on their faces, clutching various lengths of twig-like roots, even giving us a couple.

  The next day, after another long drive, we reached Wellhead, a camp located near a productive well dug into the bottom of a wide wadi. We took on water at the well and then moved down the wadi about a kilometre and around a bend to make camp. While the well itself was not visible from where we were camped, we did see, over the banks of the wadi, three or four vehicles heading to the well, and I was surprised that our kidnappers were so relaxed about such an exposed location.

  On our third evening at Wellhead, Omars One and Three approached Louis’ and my exposed position and squatted beside our blanket as the dusk deepened and their faces gradually disappeared into the gloom. They told us that the next day we would be travelling far to a particular location from which we would call our families. We were dumbstruck. However, as the Omars soon made clear, this was no sympathy gesture. They explained that the message we must transmit to our families was the urgent need to reinvigorate the negotiations, which, they darkly added, were essentially at an impasse.

  We were desperate to speak to our wives and children, and as I contemplated what I would say to Mary, I was paying less attention than I ought to what they were telling me about the purpose of the call, or rather, their purpose. I had my own. Omar One must have perceived this inattention for he offered us a few scraps of paper and a well-used ballpoint pen and invited us to “take notes” for the forthcoming calls. This moment would be vital, they said, in determining whether we would or would not emerge from this experience alive.

  Omar One told us that President Compaoré was arranging for our wives and perhaps one child from each family to fly to Burkina Faso and that they would be speaking to us from there. “It is all arranged,” they assured us. Further, after speaking to our wives, we would talk to President Compaoré.

  “You must understand,” chipped in Omar Three, “that the Canadian government has been very duplicitous. They do not want you back. They are doing everything possible to ensure that you do not return. What you must do is get your wives to make a big noise, to engage the journalists and the politicians to bring pressure on the Canadian government, which will do nothing for you if this does not happen.”

  While Louis and I had understood from the beginning that something like this was likely to happen, indeed, that like the proof-of-life messages it seemed to be one of those necessary steps in the kidnapping negotiation process, we were conflicted. I strove to separate their agenda from mine and then to construct one that might reasonably serve both. As it turned out it wasn’t difficult, but that is because the two agendas were not that different and I have a bright, strong, and effective wife.

  I wanted to speak to Mary at just about any cost. There had been no real goodbyes as I stepped into a December snowstorm in Ottawa three months before. We’d had no kind of closure. I did not really think that I would emerge from this alive and there were things I wanted to say—that I desperately needed to say—to my wife of nearly thirty years and through her to our cherished daughters. I needed to put my emotional affairs in order.

  Also, Louis and I believed that our kidnappers regularly fed us disinformation but perhaps less than might have been expected. Talk of being conflicted! They took to heart the Islamic prohibition against lying, and while the Prophet, they told us, had specifically allowed the use of certain ruses de guerre (actions taken to fool the enemy), that did not offer open season to liars. Even so, we had no reason to believe any of the precious little they said about the negotiating process was accurate or whether the people holding us in these camps had any real knowledge of its progress. We therefore had no reason to believe that we ought to forcefully encourage our wives to pre-empt whatever the government was doing to get us out. I did, however, want to ensure—be absolutely certain—that Mary knew she had my full support should she ever decide to exercise such an option, whatever the consequences.

  We knew that we had to avoid inserting ourselves directly into the negotiating process if only because it was unlikely to produce a useful result. Yet we were well aware that this was precisely what our abductors were urging us to do and we could not reject out of hand the possibility that they were right. Maybe the government was not prepared to do whatever was necessary to get us out of the mess we were in. Certainly we had seen no sign of a concerted strategy, but was it reasonable to expect that we would?

  Finally, it was evident that the price I would have to pay to speak to my family, and to have any hope of being able to do so again, was to appear to follow the scenario our captors had outlined. In fact, much of the thrust of their message was quite congenial to me.

  The timing of and trigger for such an initiative was the essential difference between the AQIM agenda and my own. They meant right now, while I would try to say if and when Mary judged necessary. I wanted to impress upon her that any decision to make an end run around government action or inaction would have to be her call, and that she could not necessarily trust the government to take all decisions in her (and my) best interests. I wanted her to know that if she believed public pressure should be mounted in an effort to save my life, that without it the government was not going to do whatever was necessary, then she should take such a risk. One cannot spend forty years in the public service and blindly rely on governments to do the “right thing” when thorny issues of political principle are involved. I wanted her to know that I would fully accept the risk she would be taking, so I dutifully set about writing my notes, without, of course being able to see what I was writing.

  Early the next morning on Day 87, as we prepared to set out on the remainder of our telephone odyssey, somebody told us to mount up and assigned Louis and me to our respective vehicles. I was getting into mine when I heard a ruckus: the anomaly of loud voices raised in anger, one of them Louis’. I went to investigate and found Louis with his arms full of his share of our
baggage standing by a truck looking dumbfounded, with Hassan screaming threats in his face. Hassan had his young posse about him and it looked ugly. Jack was nearby, however, and he quickly strode in and gave everybody a time out.

  Jack asked what had happened and Louis explained that he had been about to board his designated truck when Hassan started screaming that Louis was never to approach the trucks without permission, that Louis already knew those rules, and were he to do it again, Hassan had promised, he would “receive great pain.” Omar One was there too and told Jack that Louis had been instructed to board. Jack was clearly annoyed and ordered everybody to mount up, and we were off.

  It was one of the hottest days we had known, difficult even to draw breath. After about four hours we stopped in an unprepossessing spot to wait out the midday heat. We were assigned a skimpy, ant-ridden tree about a hundred metres from their trucks, and soon the entertainment was the sighting-in of a new sniper rifle. After some time, we were approached by a delegation headed by Jack and including Omar One and Jaffer, who had been named the camp emir the day before, replacing the visibly exhausted Abdul Rahman. Both Louis and I were certain that, at best, we were about to get a lecture.

  Before saying anything, Omar offered us each a filthy, hard, thin, flat slab of goat cheese. It was delicious. After some inconsequential remarks, Jack explained that their cause was just but while it was God’s work, unfortunately it was performed by men, and men were flawed. Some, he said, warming to his theme, were simply rotten: they “had no honour.” Such a man, he allowed, was Hassan. He apologized for Hassan’s behaviour and assured us that such an incident would not recur.

  After the long midday rest we set off again and this time I was placed in Jack’s truck with Omar One. The group emir may have had only one eye but he was a fluid and intelligent driver, anticipating each challenge—and in that environment there were many. No one else came close to exhibiting his driving skills and there were some very good drivers in that katiba. But he did not talk much and the usually voluble Omar seemed a little restrained in the presence of the boss. As darkness fell, breaking a long silence Jack snarled—and Omar interpreted in the same tone—”The British and French are mounting a raid to save you,” and then added, darkly, “I assure you, they will not succeed.”

  I found his announcement passing strange, but not AQIM’s claim to have such intelligence. (One of their constant refrains was “We have our people everywhere,” and they did seem to have some good operational intelligence. After all, that’s how they got us.) It was more because I could not understand why the French would involve themselves in such a mission. The Brits, yes, because of the Briton captured on 22 January, but why the French? And of course I also wondered, why not the Canadians?

  Obviously there was a reason I had been assigned to Belmokhtar’s truck, the only time that happened. He wanted an uninterrupted opportunity to reinforce the message of the two Omars the previous evening about the importance of using the call we were apparently about to make to get our wives to bring pressure on the Canadian government to get us out.

  It must have been close to seven in the evening when we saw a light flashing to the east through the gathering dusk, surprisingly high above what I had got used to as the desert horizon. They had clearly been expecting such a signal. Belmokhtar immediately swung off the rudimentary piste we had been following and drove toward it, the three trucks behind following in our wake. After a few hundred metres, we skirted a huge, ill-perceived mass on the left and parked beside the two trucks of the advance guard. There was the usual hustle and bustle as everybody stretched after the gruelling drive and gathered weapons and equipment. A lot of sentries were posted, and Louis and I were told to follow Belmokhtar, Omar One, and Ahmed up the razor-backed crest of an enormous sand dune. It was hard going up that steep, soft sand bank. With each step, we slid back about half the distance gained.

  At the top of the huge dune were steep slopes in both directions, and being somewhat subject to vertigo, I was glad it was dark. We stood in a line along the crest, one foot on each slope, and they outlined how it was going to go down. We were up there so we could catch the Algerian cell net, the border being some forty kilometres distant. To make such calls from their satellite-phones would be to invite an Algerian air strike, they said matter-of-factly. They were in the main very careful about where and how they used their satellite-phones. So they oriented me toward some distant, invisible tower to the east, explaining that I could not move or twist or I would lose the signal.

  Then they announced that I would go first, to be followed by Louis, and eventually by Soumana, who, they said, was somewhere down at the bottom of the dune. Holding the phone, the nasty Ahmed asked me for my phone number. “Where?” I replied. “Isn’t she in Ouagadougou?”

  “No, no,” they replied, waving that off as if it had never been the plan. “In Canada. They are expecting your call in Canada.”

  “Wait a minute,” I exclaimed, panicking slightly, as I came to terms with the fact that I had never considered these calls might be made in the dark. “I need to be able to see my notes,” and a very bright LED flashlight was produced. When I directed its beam toward my scrap of paper, I could see nothing beyond blurry brilliant whiteness.

  “Here, try these,” said Omar One, and handed me a pair of drugstore magnification glasses. To my amazement, one lens worked well; the other made things worse. The flashlight was so bright, however, that it was difficult to read—but of course, I didn’t really need to. I was just terribly nervous and the piece of paper was my security blanket. I knew that an awful lot was riding on this call.

  “So, what is the number?” asked Ahmed, again. And I didn’t know. I could not remember my home phone number. I froze.

  Louis then quietly offered me his always appropriate and timely advice at times like these. “Breathe!” he said, “Breathe!”

  And I did, calmed down, and remembered the number. In it went and the phone was handed to me. A last-minute correction was made to my orientation and I heard the familiar ring of an Ottawa phone, again and again, until my own voice told me that neither Mary nor I were there so would I please leave a message. So I did: “Hi, Sweetie, I’m calling from atop a huge sand dune somewhere in the Sahara. I am not, repeat not, free but I need to speak with you. I’ll call back.”

  “Call her cell,” one of our captors kibitzed, so I did that too. Again it rang and rang until I got her voice mail and left a similar message. Throughout this I pictured her desperately rummaging through her purse (which our family, taking a cue from our eldest daughter, calls her “pit of despair”) as she tried and failed to locate the phone before it switched over to voice mail. My blood pressure and frustration levels were by now pretty high, but I’d had my shot and, reluctantly, I surrendered the phone to Louis.

  Louis called Mai (it was just after 1:00 p.m. back home) and got her voice mail. He called her cellphone and left another voice message and, with a devastated look on his face, he passed the phone to Soumana, who had just been escorted to the top of the dune. Soumana got straight through to his wife in Niamey and seemed to have a good chat, but as it was in Zarma I understood not a word (though Omar One did). Soumana was deeply moved by the experience and I was shamelessly jealous. I knew we could not perch atop this dune all night.

  “OK, Mr. Robert, you try again,” said Ahmed. I opted to try our home in Ottawa again, and again struck out. As I took the phone from my ear and damn nearly hurled it into the void, Julabib, who had joined the lengthening and ever less attentive line along the crest of the dune, said, “Send her an SMS.”

  “A what?” I exclaimed.

  “An SMS,” he repeated. I had only recently learned how to do that, so a little uncertainly I said, “OK, but let me include a callback number. What is it?” They did not know, or so they said.

  “Anyway,” Julabib said, “the number will show up on her cellphone screen.” Now that I could read (with one eye), I pecked out, “Darling call me at t
his number asap great love bob.”

  As I handed the phone back, Ahmed noticed that the battery was all but dead. So he stumbled down to the base of the dune, hooked it up to a charger in one of the trucks, and soon we heard the familiar “vrooom, vrooom” as they tried to force a charge into the phone.

  At this point Belmokhtar decided it was time to call President Compaoré in Ouagadougou. They must have made some kind of telephone appointment as they assured me that at nine o’clock in the evening, the President would be in his office in the Burkinabé capital, awaiting our call. So watches were checked, and after a slight delay the phone was given to Omar to make the connection. I am not entirely sure but I think that, for reasons I cannot fathom (beyond the proven unreliability of the cellphone), we used their satellite-phone. I began to hear faint strains from the “Ride of the Valkyries” and in my mind’s eye saw attack helicopters surging over the far horizon out of the northeast.

  Omar One spoke for a few minutes with Compaoré’s close adviser, Mustapha Chaffi, and then passed the phone to me. Blaise Compaoré has a rich, deep, and quite distinctive voice and I would have recognized it anywhere. Our conversation was brief but to the point. I thanked him for his marvellous cartons, which he shrugged off insisting it was the least he could do. He urged us to keep up our courage and our hope, and twice growled with force, anger, and what sounded very much like a personal commitment: “On va vous sortir de là” (We’ll get you out of there). I can’t think of any words I would rather have heard.

  To my great surprise, President Compaoré said that along with Chaffi he was accompanied by the Canadian Ambassador to Burkina Faso, Jules Savaria, an old friend of ours, and asked if we would like to speak to him. Jules was deeply moved by the drama of the moment. He is a decent, intelligent, and sensitive diplomat, one of the Canadian government’s more experienced West African hands. Jules assured us that President Compaoré was utterly committed to extracting us from Al Qaeda’s clutches and that the President had told him he would remain personally involved until we were safe, as, Jules assured us, would he.