A Season in Hell

by Robert R. Fowler

  On Day 102 we travelled to Grande Allée—so called because we all camped in fairly close proximity along the bed of a shallow, narrow wadi with a few trees to one side. To get anywhere, our kidnappers had to just about step over us. We bedded down on a calm, quiet evening but within a short while the wind began to rise. Soon a stiff gale was blowing at, I guessed, well over eighty kilometres per hour. And of course the wind was thick with sand.

  It was impossible to open my eyes, because even the thinnest of slits admitted quantities of sand. In any case, there was nothing to see. The night was pitch-black and opaque, and the rushing, howling wind seemed apocalyptic. I felt Louis stirring nearby and he signalled that he was managing. I wrapped my light scarf tightly around my nose and mouth, tied my longer grey, cotton turban cloth Tuareg-like around my head and face, and pulled my blanket over my head, tucking it under me on all sides as the wind threatened to tear it loose. Within a short time I could feel the sand drifting around our bodies and regularly shook and squirmed to stay above the dune building on top of us.

  At dawn on Day 103, I shook myself out of a semi-stupor, barely able to move. Some time during the night I had scrunched into a fetal position while I made a tent of the blanket over my head and shoulders, using my forearm as a tent pole as the wind screamed at us from every direction. Literally, I had to dig my lower body out of the dune. As I looked about in the yellowish light of a day still dark and heavy with suspended sand particles all but obscuring the sun, everything looked changed as it does after a major snowstorm. The contours of the surrounding features had shifted, softened, and become rounder and smoother. And it was very quiet as people about us struggled to their feet. They seemed as surprised as we were that it was over and we were all alive.

  Three nights later there was another sandstorm, dramatic but not as intense as the first one. This time, though, our captors posted a sentry to sit within a metre of us, mostly, I suspect, to ensure we survived and didn’t wander off, never to be seen again. On various occasions throughout that last night at Grande Allée I remember looking out through one of the holes blasted through the blanket held firmly over my head to see that sentry, within arm’s reach yet only barely perceptible as he sat immobile, lashed by the sand swirling around him, his turban wound tightly around his face and head, and his arms around his Kalash, which was jammed between his raised knees. I never learned who it was.

  We were not sad to leave Grande Allée, but just before we did we met two new mujahideen whom, it appeared, Jack had brought in to replace the children. These were obviously experienced, steady, thirty-something, sergeant types, Abou Mujahid and Abou Isaac. We had little to do with them; they were all business and seemed to have no interest in us.

  The next camp was no treat either. After a long day on the move, our captors had looked for a suitable spot for over an hour and this was the least bad place they managed to find. There was little cover and soon it began to rain. We were able to unroll our tarp relatively quickly and were therefore only a little clammy. Our kidnappers, though, were drenched. A number of them, glowering and muttering at us, clearly resented the fact that we had the tarp. We called the camp Air Compressor because the tires had taken a terrible beating over the previous few days and the air compressor ran—loudly—all night as they levered tires off rims, patched, sealed, and sought to restore them and the many spares to a semblance of operational readiness.

  That night a huge argument burst forth among three of them within a dozen metres of where we lay. This had never happened before and it was all too clear that they were really furious as well as being fully armed. I have no idea what it was about, but it was the beginning of a series of similar confrontations that seemed only to get worse. The cause seemed to be a combination of accumulated stress, little sleep, terrible weather, and some kind of disagreement about us, which we could only begin to decipher.

  The next one-night stop was Vesuvio. It was named after the tall, volcano-shaped mountain that reared above the camp. Here there was little shade but more rain and this time, when shouting again broke out after dark, Omar One subsequently explained that there had been “a slight disagreement” about our being allowed the tarp while Moussa got soaked. I told him to take the damned tarp. Happily, he refused, allowing that we were more decrepit even than Moussa and as we were the weakest people present, they had an Islamic duty to offer it to us. I did not press the point but we knew there was more to these angry outbursts.

  The next morning was hot and bright. As we loaded up, Julabib, who had joined the group the previous evening along with Jack and his staff, said to me just a little ironically as he pointed across the flat plain below to an impressive ridge of mountains on the far southern horizon, “That is our Tora Bora.”

  We left Vesuvio shortly afterward and within half an hour we reached a high pass that funnelled sharply down toward a long, open-ended U-shaped valley criss-crossed from edge to edge with enormous dunes disappearing into the distance. All three trucks stopped at the lip and the drivers met to consider their best route through this endless array of serious obstacles in precisely the same manner as my canoeing pals back in Canada would climb the banks of a raging northern river to scout and ponder how to negotiate a particularly challenging stretch of white water. To my untrained eye the problem was insurmountable. The dunes were simply too steep, with insufficient space between them to allow enough of a run from one to breach the crest of the next.

  To my dismay, Omar One, to whom I had been assigned, launched forward with great bravado and almost immediately became ensablé before fully entering the maze. With some digging and pushing he was able to reverse, turn, and scoot back up the pass. The three trucks then scouted along the overlooking ridge at the back of the “U” and eventually found a practicable ramp down that skirted the left-hand wall of the valley, but the going was very hard. Soon we turned left into a canyon in the valley wall and, after more challenging driving, came to a stop at the point we could go no farther. Yet again we were led to a poor, thin tree, and left alone.

  Before long, however, we heard the dreaded sound of steel poles being hammered into hard sand and knew there was to be another tent event. Sure enough, about an hour later, Omar One, looking very sombre, arrived to tell us that there would be a third video. Canada and the United Nations, he said ominously, needed to be encouraged to work harder for our release, needed to know the extent to which AQIM was deadly serious. It sounded horribly like a death sentence had been pronounced on one or both of us, and I was sorely afraid.

  This time, he explained, we would have no speaking role. We would sit blindfolded, with our hands behind our backs. They would then read a statement in Arabic that explained the gravity of our situation and demanded an immediate response.

  At best I thought they were about to issue an ultimatum, but I saw no point in discussing that with Louis. We were taken to the tent and told where to sit. Their black flag was pinned to the wall behind us and the side we were facing was open. Then we were blindfolded. I cannot recall whether the classic backdrop of turbaned, armed mujahideen was in place when we arrived, but at one point there was a lot of shuffling behind us, then a terrifying silence. Eventually, a rather soft, singsong voice (I think it was Jaffer’s) started expostulating on and on, with plenty of forceful references to jihad, mujahideen, Allah of course, and the Qur’an. I don’t really remember if I heard Shari’a but it ended with a lot of Allahu Akbars. Clearly it was either well rehearsed or he was reading from a script.

  When he stopped there were noises behind us and I wondered if this was it, but they soon began to fade as everybody left the tent. Finally Omar undid our blindfolds and, almost without speaking, led us back to our tree. We saw nobody throughout the afternoon and heard almost no noise. It was unpleasantly still and surreal.

  As evening fell, we prepared a sleeping position and were about to turn in when Omar One appeared to say that we would be given something to eat shortly and then would be moving out. Within thir
ty minutes we were on our way through those dunes in the dark, which did not make our passage easier.

  We travelled far into the night. At one point the satellite-phone on the dashboard rang and Omar, incongruously, appeared to give an interview. In a pleasant and modulated voice he seemed to be answering a series of questions in Arabic, smiling and nodding into the phone held in his left hand, steering with his right as he drove into the night at speed, without lights, his AK held in the crook of his left elbow and pointing out the window. From time to time he would glance a little furtively in my direction. The interview lasted at least twenty minutes, but when it was over he said nothing. Much later, we stopped because the drivers were exhausted, but there was no kind of cover and a little rain.

  As the sun came up we were given a cup of powdered milk and everyone congregated around the three tightly grouped trucks when I heard, very distinctly, a snippet of what was clearly the BBC International Service (thus, BBC Camp). It took me a moment to appreciate that it was in English. I assumed, therefore, that it must have been from a radio belonging to the Nigerian from Kano, Obeida. Before it was turned off, I realized it was about us and heard something about a threat to our lives having been issued.

  Again I was riding with Omar One and once underway I asked him about what I had just heard. He did not lie well and insisted gruffly and without looking at me that I must have misheard. But he was shifty, uncomfortable, and uncharacteristically taciturn. We drove almost completely in silence through the morning and, around noon, arrived at a spot where, as at Thornhill, we were widely separated from them by a flat, open space. We were directed to a treeline perhaps 150 metres away, and Omar warned us that the thorn trees under which we would be sitting were poisonous; if pricked, the small wound would inevitably fester. Thus on Day 109 we stayed at Camp Poison.

  Once we were settled, Omar set off back to his truck, which we could just glimpse through a break in the trees, with a sense of grim purpose and self-importance, and we realized that his crew had not unpacked and were still aboard. He immediately swung behind the wheel and was off, we knew not where, but he seemed to be in a hurry.

  While it offered almost perfect shade on an excruciatingly hot day, we didn’t like the thought of those poisonous thorns dangling above our heads so we boldly set out in search of a better campsite. We found one a fair distance away on the other side of the same treeline, where the long, sharp thorns looked more familiar. In fact the whole thing looked familiar and at first we wondered if we might have been here before. Soon, though, we determined that while we had not, somebody else had. Someone had made camp much as we would, clearing a patch of ground of thorns and stones, and setting up a small windbreak with rocks, twigs, and grasses. Staring at these archeological remains we wondered which other hostages could have languished here and what had been their fate.

  CHAPTER 15

  SOMEONE WOULD DIE

  There passed a weary time. Each throat

  Was parch’d, and glazed each eye.

  A weary time! a weary time!

  Louis and I speculated throughout the remainder of that day, 1 April, what Omar might have gone off to do with such determination, and convinced ourselves that it had to be concerned with the negotiations. His language skills and knowledge of the wider world, however flawed, might be required to put the finishing touches on whatever deal was, we hoped, brewing. We really had no idea what, if anything, was going on or whether we were about to enter some kind of end game. Nevertheless, when early the next day we moved to another camp, we called it Great Expectations.

  Getting there was challenging in itself. Allowing that Khaled had been annoyed to learn that Jaffer, AR, and Omar Three had casually risked us a couple of weeks earlier by trundling such valuable commodities perched precariously on the back of the truck, they were apprehensive about having us do it again. They were nevertheless again down to a single, overloaded vehicle, so Louis and I sat high on top of the load in the back, only this time they had rigged a sturdy rope down the middle for us to clap on to. It was a beautiful day and despite a couple of long tire changes in full sun, I could not control the optimism that our speculation about Omar’s possible mission caused to continually bubble to the surface. After only an hour we approached another fringe of vegetation at the edge of the open desert and at the foot of some high rocky outcroppings.

  We were shown to another tree and they established themselves behind a screen of bushes. It was a good tree but at the very edge of the desert, where we were exposed to sun and wind. The noon period of virtually no shade seemed particularly long at this location.

  Omar One had said he would be back on Monday, 6 April, Day 114, but we didn’t put much store in that. By Wednesday, however, we began to worry. So, evidently, did our remaining guards. Omar Two, of whom we had seen little over the preceding couple of weeks, had been deputized as the person in charge of hostage liaison, something that never inspired trust or confidence, but he was preferable to Hassan. Omar Two had largely given up his conversion brief, but he was still curious about what made us tick. He was also preoccupied by the all too evident presence around the camp of a very large hyena, whose fresh paw prints along our walking track each morning were only slightly smaller than my hand with fingers splayed.

  By Thursday (Day 117), the tension in the camp had become so acute as to cause Omar Three and Abdul Rahman to disappear for the day, presumably to make a satellite-phone call or travel directly to wherever the action was taking place—most likely wherever Jack was—to seek information. They returned after dark and joined the others, who were already at dinner behind those bushes, perhaps thirty metres away from us.

  Suddenly, voices were raised in extreme anger in the pitch darkness, first one (which we identified as Omar Two), then in response, another (probably the usually reserved AR). Soon others were joining in and it was pandemonium, much louder and more aggressive than anything we had heard to date. Soon everybody was shouting and there seemed to be some scuffling. Then the space between the shouters seemed to widen as if others were physically drawing the opposing parties apart. Late into the night we continued to hear loud outbursts as the argument flared, died down, and then rekindled.

  It was terrifying for us, less the anger and emotion itself than what we imagined it portended. We felt like little kids listening to raging, battling, parents and we knew we might suffer ugly consequences from this confrontation. I do think, though, that we were able to put together a plausible explanation. We speculated that AR and Omar Three—who along with Jaffer were the most senior people in the group and Jack’s closest collaborators—had brought back news of what was probably the final or nearly final result of the negotiations. It was no great stretch to assume that Omar Two’s initial outburst was a rejection of the terms for our release as reported by Omar Three and AR.

  Omar Two had perhaps insisted that such a deal was inadequate compensation for the costs and risks—not to say unpleasantness—of the seventeen weeks they had spent minding us, and might have gone on to suggest that accepting such terms would demean their cause and cheapen their commitment to jihad. Of course, we did not really know, but this all made sense on the basis of his posturing over the previous four months. I think it perfectly plausible that he might have argued it would be better to kill us and get nothing than have a miserable settlement forced upon them by the apostate oppressors with whom they were at war, indeed, that their honour and the sanctity of their jihad demanded such forthright action. Certainly I can easily imagine Omar Two taking such a line, strongly seconded by Hassan, were he there, but Jack had ensured that would not be the case.

  Believing that we understood what had happened did not make it any easier to absorb. The next morning, Good Friday, Day 118, AR and O3 again left the camp, presumably to tell Jack he had a problem in the ranks. They did not return until mid-morning on Saturday, 11 April, followed about an hour later by Omar One and his crew. Shortly after that, Jack and his full headquarters complement rolled
into camp. None of them made any contact with us.

  After everyone had eaten lunch, Jack summoned his full council—nine of them, including Omar Two—to sit beneath a distant tree across the flat open space behind our designated prison, perhaps three hundred metres distant. There they sat talking for five interminable hours. Without a doubt, this time it was indeed the jury that was deciding our fate. Jack obviously felt he needed to get formal buy-in from his senior lieutenants and that was not coming easily.

  While the jury was deliberating, Louis and I discussed the extent to which any of them were really in our corner. There were clearly two schools within the group: one believed that whatever deal was on offer should be rejected, with cataclysmic consequences for us; the other held that it was better than nothing and we should be released. I believe that Omar Two led the first faction, probably supported by Imam Abdallah and Ahmed, while Omar One and Omar Three and possibly Al Jabbar championed the second. The remainder of the in-camp staff, Abdul Rahman, Jaffer, Ali, Obeida, Abou Isaac, and Abou Mujahid, were probably fairly neutral, content to do what they were told and leave the policy decisions to their emir.