After an extended silence in the course of our long sprint to freedom, Chaffi turned to me and, giving me an uncertain look, asked, “Would you like to know how they would have done it?”
“Done what?” I replied.
“How they would have killed your friend,” gesturing with his thumb back toward where Louis sat on his tires in the back of the truck, “and then, perhaps, you?” I was not at all sure that I wanted to hear this, but he was clearly anxious to tell me, so I nodded.
To sharpen his focus during those long hours of negotiation, they told him that they had decided they would kill Louis first, in order to get the attention of Canada and the United Nations, before they decided whether I should get the same treatment. They explained that they would have stuffed our mouths with cotton wool and then put tape over our lips to prevent unpleasant sounds being heard on the video and to ensure that there would be no unseemly eruptions of blood from the mouth when the sword was drawn—some practitioners insist that it be done slowly—across our throats. It’s a story that tends to stick in the mind.
Throughout that epic nine-hundred-kilometre run south to Gao on Wednesday, 22 April, Louis refused to cede his position in the back. Shortly after our pre-dawn departure, we left whatever track we had been on the night before and set off cross-country. Baba was a genius at the wheel. He eschewed use of a GPS, navigating in this featureless moonscape by memory and feel and with confidence and aplomb. But neither he nor Chaffi was relaxed and, as we smashed southward into the morning, the truck with the two women kept falling behind, to the evident annoyance of Baba. On the third occasion we had to stop and wait for them to catch up, I went back with Baba to see how they were doing. The answer was: not well.
Marianne was again by the window and in addition to her other injuries and problems, the bouncing about had opened up a gash in her scalp, which was bleeding down her small, skeletal face. Gabriella explained that Marianne could not hold herself down with only one hand (well did I remember that problem), particularly as she strove to protect the damage caused by the scorpion sting on her other arm. Gabriella could not simultaneously protect herself and Marianne from the extreme buffeting. Baba immediately grabbed some rope and despite feeble protests from Marianne proceeded to lash her into her seat. It was unpleasant but it worked, and at the next stop she allowed it was a distinct improvement.
Clearly Baba and Chaffi believed we still faced considerable risks. They noted that were we to take longer rest stops in an effort to ease the strain on the women—particularly Marianne—the risks to all of us would rise exponentially. In addition, sitting in a truck at fifty degrees would only further sap her strength and there were no oases around. They explained that they believed there was a real possibility that Abou Zeid might change his mind and come after us, particularly as he had never really decided to let the women go the previous afternoon when Belmokhtar had ordered us to leave. All the other denizens of the Sahara shadow world made our negotiators nervous too: the gun and drug runners, people movers, and classic smugglers, to say nothing of Ibrahim Ag Bahanga’s Tuareg renegades, all of whom would be vividly interested in us.
So we bulled our way through similar obstacles to those we had endured on the way north 130 days earlier: through vast fields of high, treacherous dunes (getting stuck only once) and across baking stretches of hardpan desert and everything in between. But this time, at least, we were not tied and despite renewed damage to my back, we were free and going home. Nothing could make that anything but wonderful. We drove for twelve hours due south, again furiously, infused with the palpable fear and concern of our negotiators.
It was not until we had passed some unremarked point perhaps a dozen hours into our journey out of the desert and much closer to Gao, that Baba turned to me and, with some formality, said, “Now, you are probably safe.” Drunk with the glory of our freedom, I had not fully comprehended the extent to which our rescuers believed until that moment how significantly unsafe we had been.
About a hundred kilometres north of Gao, we surged out of the desert onto a rough dirt track that allowed us to pick up our speed a little, which only increased the strain on my damaged lower vertebrae and coccyx. Marianne Petzold was probably suffering worse punishment in the second truck. As we approached Gao—perhaps twenty kilometres out—in the gathering dusk, we saw a truck parked by the side of the road with a few men milling about alongside. Without hesitation, Baba veered off the road, accelerating into the desert and giving the scene a wide berth. I’ve no idea whether it was a genuinely threatening situation but clearly he was taking no chances.
When we rejoined the road five or six kilometres later, the second truck was no longer behind us, but Baba blasted forward as he tried to raise its driver on his cellphone. He kept losing the connection, however, and on the outskirts of the town he moved very reluctantly to the side of the road and waited for them to catch up. After twenty minutes, he could stand it no longer. Nor could the long-suffering and sandblasted Louis, who was still refusing to cede his place in the back. Both of us were tortured by the thought that all this screwing around would again cause freedom to elude us.
Recalling we had passed a fork in the road a few hundred metres back, we retraced our route, took the other fork and still could not find them. Finally we got a clean cell connection and the Malian lieutenant directed us to a tiny two-man police post some distance along the road we were now on. It was a relief to see their truck beside a waiting police officer who seemed to be about sixteen. Baba roughly demanded that the other truck follow him and, this time, keep up. Just before he hit the gas, however, policeboy demanded to see his papers.
This elicited something that was probably not polite in the local dialect and as the kid’s AK came up, Baba thrust a letter at him signed by the President of Mali demanding that the bearer receive any and all assistance. But the kid couldn’t read. So, grabbing the letter back, Baba shouted that he was off to a rendezvous with half the nation’s security police, who were waiting a short distance away. Then, covering the policeboy in a hail of gravel, our small two-truck convoy was on its way again. The centre of my back felt exceedingly hollow and I considered that being shot by the Malian police would be an odd way to end all this.
Roaring ahead on an increasingly populated road in the gathering darkness, Baba established a good cell connection with a Malian Security Services colonel who talked us into a small clearing a little way off the road. There were half a dozen large black SUVs in a rough open circle and yet again a lot of guys with guns. We were introduced to the colonel, further official proof that we were safe.
Chaffi approached me with a cellphone, as he had promised he would do what seemed to be a lifetime ago, and invited me to call my family. I punched in the number of Mary’s cellphone, and a gruff male voice answered immediately. Confused, I asked for Mary, but first I had to convince the RCMP officer looking after her that I was who I said by answering another skill-testing question, to whit, “What do you eat when you take your granddaughter Alice to get your hair cut in Toronto?” When I answered “sushi,” she was passed the phone and I told my extraordinary wife that I was free, in safe hands in Gao and that, indeed, as she had promised, she had guided me home and we would be able to enjoy all those dreams together.
Our daughter Ruth had come up to Ottawa from New York to be with Mary a couple of days earlier, when she had been told we might actually be freed, so I was also able to have a happy and all too brief chat with her to celebrate my freedom, before passing the phone to Louis.
Once Louis had spoken to Mai, the now quite large convoy made its way to the Governor’s residence in the centre of town. After contacting the Canadian team in Bamako—and downing three tepid Cokes—we were ushered with some formality into a vast guest suite with an equally large bathroom and told, triumphantly, “You may wash.” I am quite convinced that anyone who came near us would have thought that was almost as fine an idea as did we. However, when we turned our first taps in four an
d a half months, there was no water.
At dinner, in a scene straight out of Charlie Wilson’s War, when the Governor asked what I would most wish to drink, I wondered only a little shamefacedly if a beer might be possible in this Islamic and therefore officially dry country. There was an exchange of furtive looks. At a curt nod from the Governor, an extremely gracious and engaging former army colonel, one of his aides scurried into the night and quickly returned bearing a brown paper bag, which he handed me whispering quietly and not a little surprisingly into my ear, “It’s not a [Labatt’s] 50, but I hope you will enjoy it.”
Aside from the beer and many wonderful fruit juices and soft drinks, I did not have the stomach for the very freest range chicken that was on offer. This worried our host. So the Governor leapt to his feet declaring, “I know just what will do the trick,” and disappeared into the kitchen to return a few minutes later with a bowl of … rice and milk. I sat transfixed with horror as Louis explained that this was the staple we had eaten twice a day for 130 days that had been a major contributor to my near-terminal constipation. The Governor immediately understood, sending the bowl back to the kitchen, and allowed that he had assumed (like everybody else) that my stomach problems were quite the opposite and that I was in need of a culinary cork.
While we enjoyed the Governor’s hospitality there were more calls back to the Canadian team at the embassy twelve hundred kilometres away in the capital, Bamako. We also got to speak to our families again—this time enjoying more relaxed and normal conversation without the need to first establish our identities—and we learned that they were already assembling for the flight to Europe, where we would shortly see them.
Startlingly, the team in Bamako proposed that one of us travel with Chaffi the roughly twelve hundred kilometres over a very poor road to Ouagadougou, while the other proceeded over an equally poor road a similar distance to Bamako accompanied by Malian security officers. Apparently, the reasoning was to allow one of us to thank one of our benefactors while the other thanked the remaining one, and in the process take a road trip the equivalent of Toronto–Winnipeg, Detroit–Los Angeles, or Warsaw–Madrid. Eventually, saner heads prevailed and we were informed that a plane would pick us up in Gao around midnight to fly us to the capital. A few hours later we were flown out, but the two Canadians who came on that plane to fetch us, a thousand kilometres from Al Qaeda–land, never set foot outside the aircraft in Gao, a city of sixty thousand and the administrative capital of eastern Mali.
As we left the Governor’s residence for the airport, I went to talk to Marianne, who by this time was covered in blankets and securely strapped to a stretcher atop a wheeled gurney. On seeing me she sobbed, “Bob, you abandoned me,” and it was true—as I made those calls while swilling half a dozen different juices, soft drinks, and that glorious beer, I had in fact lost sight of what might be happening to Marianne. I regretted my thoughtlessness. Gabriella had dined with us, but as she’d had to leave her husband, Werner, behind in the vicious clutches of Abou Zeid and his gang of thugs, her celebration of freedom was a severely muted affair and her being lost in her own thoughts was all too understandable.
I stayed by Marianne’s side, but once we were aboard the aircraft I was caught up in the red tape of my freedom and an onslaught of police debriefings. She and Gabriella were met in Bamako, as were we, by their respective national representatives, and I never saw them again.
AFTERMATH
CHAPTER 17
BAMAKO AND OUAGADOUGOU, GERMANY, AND HOME
He went like one that hath been stunn’d,
And is of sense forlorn:
A sadder and a wiser man
He rose the morrow morn.
Around midnight we boarded the special flight and a little more than two hours later landed in Bamako. Most members of the Canadian interdepartmental team that had been managing our situation at the African end, along with their Malian counterparts, were at the airport in those wee hours to greet us. What a joy it was to see those people on the tarmac! At this point I had been awake for three days, so I was barely coherent, but I had enough presence of mind to ask for news of Soumana. The Canadian team assured us that he was safe and back with his family in Niamey; indeed, that Soumana—as Louis as I had suspected, but had never been able to nail down—had been freed almost exactly a month earlier, the day after we received our backpacks and letters from home.
We were taken to the Radisson Hotel, which had become Task Force Headquarters, arriving around 3:00 a.m. I still could not sleep, however, so I pottered about my vast hotel room touching normal things, finding all the stuff I had left in my Niamey hotel room 131 days previously, and trying—and failing—to make some sense of it all.
Of all the joys of that hotel, the greatest was the shower, to which I kept returning. It took five magnificent long, steaming sessions before sand ceased to cover the floor of the shower stall. The RCMP insisted on taking a “before” picture in which I am finally clean but wearing what I put on when Omar One directed me to don my Western clothes for the liberation ceremony, deep in the Sahara.
The next day there were gracious, thoughtful, calls from Prime Minister Harper, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, Jean Chrétien, and many others. And then a very pretty young hairdresser was ushered into my room to see if she could make me look presentable for our call on President Amadou Toumani Touré that afternoon.
I decided to keep the beard, at least until the family convened the next day in Germany. So she hacked off most of it, along with much of my wild hair, leaving a reasonably trim white fringe around my tanned, weather-beaten, and stress-lined face. The first look in the hotel mirror had been pretty shocking. For his part, Louis chose to keep his sumptuous patriarchal beard, which his clan promptly voted off ten minutes after our arrival in Ramstein. The Fowler girls, however, had grown up with a bearded dad, as I’d worn a beard from age twenty to forty, so they voted to keep it.
In the afternoon we called on Malian President Touré and his Foreign Minister, my old friend Moctar Ouane. It was such a pleasure to express our deep gratitude to them for bringing us safely home. Indeed, had it not been for the generosity and steadfast affection for Canada on the part of Presidents Touré and Compaoré, their deep personal engagement, their political courage, and the willingness and determination of their brave negotiators, Baba and Chaffi, to assume considerable risks on our behalf, we would not be revelling today in our freedom and in the joy of our reunited families. The Fowlers, and here I can confidently also speak for the Guays, will be ever grateful to such fast friends of Canada and indeed, of ours.
I had met ATT a few times prior to these events and knew Moctar well. He and I had served together at the United Nations. When Mali was elected to the Security Council in 2000, I had already been representing Canada on the Council for a year and had another year to serve. We became friends. He experienced first-hand my passion for Africa, and I hope I was able to ease his entry into that bewildering club, which, unlike Al Qaeda, takes no prisoners. He returned any such courtesy ten-thousandfold.
These two neighbouring presidents, Touré and Compaoré, have had their differences, but in order to extract us from the clutches of Al Qaeda, they set these aside and worked together to make our release possible. I know that Canada could not have done it without them.
Omar One had told us one morning, with a derisive snort, that Radio France Internationale had reported that President Touré had informed the media in Belgium, where he was on an official visit, that Louis and I were in good health. (“How would he know?” Omar spat.) However ATT had come to this conclusion, we thought it might bring some comfort to our families. He was telling our loved ones what, we later understood, Canada would not, and then he effectively told them that we had received their shipment.
In a 3 April 2009 press report that also had ATT commenting on our well-being, Agence France-Presse noted, “Touré said his country was working discreetly to win the release of the hostages, adding: ‘They ca
me to Africa to bring peace. It is unacceptable that their freedom is taken away…. Mali and Canada have become closer because of this hostage taking. We are working together diplomatically to find the best solution.’“
In a long piece in the Globe and Mail on 24 April, infelicitously headlined “Operation Diplomat,” Colin Freeze quoted President Touré as saying, immediately following our release, “Canada never asked us for anything. For once this friend asked us for help. Of course it was Mali’s duty to help.” I think that just about sums it up. Mali and ATT simply were not going to leave Canada in the lurch.
The next morning we flew to Ouagadougou to pay our respects to President Compaoré and to thank him, too, for the essential part he had played in allowing us to keep body and soul, indeed body and head, together and in bringing our ordeal to a happy conclusion. President Compaoré was accompanied by Mustapha Chaffi, who must have driven all night and most of the previous day to be there in time. We had last seen him in Gao, about forty hours and twelve hundred kilometres earlier.
President Compaoré could not have been more gracious and welcoming. There was no press, no fuss, and an hour later we were back at the airport. Then from Burkina Faso it was on to the vast U.S. Air Force base at Ramstein in Germany.
Linton and Justine had come up from Toronto to join Mary and Ruth in Ottawa, and along with members of Louis’ family they all flew to Germany, where they were joined by Antonia from London. All of them were in place at the air base when we arrived from Ouagadougou in the evening of Friday, 24 April.
A Season in Hell Page 29