Please, God, please help me. Please help me out of here. Please help my family and my friends back home. Let them know, if you can, that I’m okay. They are suffering more than me, and it’s not fair to them. Please help them get through this. They’re suffering a lot, I know, and they need you. More than I do. Please, give them some comfort and tell them I will be all right.
Please, please, please. Help me, God. Help me.
I put the pen down and noticed that one of the “p”s of “please” had smudged. A teardrop had fallen out of my eye and onto the page. I wiped my eyes with my dirt-stained hands. I had refused to allow myself to break down, but in the simple act of writing a desperate prayer to God, I had let down all of my defences.
I put the notebook down, turned off the lamp, and allowed the sobs to rock me to sleep.
Dearest M,
It’s just after noon and I’m trying to picture where you are and what you’re doing. And I just can’t. Have you been able to wash your hair, do you even have a brush, are you looking after yourself, what are you wearing? Do you remember that we were supposed to be heading for Dubai this afternoon? We’ll get there, M.
xx
Khalid was agitated. He had woken early and turned on his cell phone, which rang almost immediately. Two quick conversations followed, the second one more urgent sounding than the first. I didn’t understand any of it, but he seemed to be asking lots of questions. After the calls, he was silent for a while, then sighed deeply several times.
He got up and went to relieve himself in the plastic bottle. When he sat back down, he buried his face in his hands. I asked him what was wrong, but he wouldn’t tell me. The phone rang again. He answered, listened to the speaker on the other end, and then hung up. I picked up the cigarettes and lit one, blowing smoke in a little stream.
“No smoke!” he hushed me, putting his fingers to his lips and grabbing the cigarette out of my mouth.
“What’s wrong with you?” I asked, annoyed.
“No talking,” he ordered.
I glared at him for a second, then turned my back to him, flipping open my notebook. I reread the prayer I had written the night before. Amen, I thought. Please help me get out of this godforsaken place. He was on the phone again, speaking in staccato tones. Questions were asked and presumably answered. He dialed another number. Maybe the negotiations were bearing fruit, and freedom was imminent. It had been four days since Abdulrahman asked the proof-of-life questions and surely by now the AKE people had the answers and were satisfied that I was indeed alive.
It actually wasn’t until that moment that it occurred to me that my friends and family feared I might be dead. Because I was alive and living every second of this nightmare, I assumed that everyone else knew that as well. My friends almost always knew where I was and what I was doing. Now, the only thing they knew for certain was that I had been taken by some Afghans, and the worst-case scenario for them would certainly be that my kidnappers had killed me.
But now they had proof of life. Answers to several questions only I would know. I hoped that would set their minds at ease for a little while. I’m alive! I wanted to yell. I’m okay, don’t worry about me, I’ll be home soon! I just wished there was some way I could tell everyone I was okay. I wondered if Khalid’s father had sent the phone video that Abdulrahman had taken on my second day in captivity. On the one hand, I hoped they had, so that everyone at home could see that I was alive. But on the other, I worried that it would scare them even more to see a grainy image of me at some undisclosed location, kind of like the way we’re used to seeing videos of hostages on TV, flanked by masked men and reading a prepared statement they hadn’t written. I was running out of pages in my notebook, but I defiantly flipped to an empty page and began to write.
Dear P,
Another day, and another day of hoping and praying that I’ll see you soon. Every day, my kidnappers tell me that it will only be two or three more days, and then the day passes and nothing happens. I hope you know that I’m okay, darling.
The most frustrating thing is that I can’t tell you. I know you’re probably sick with worry, as is everyone else back home, and that upsets me more than anything.
I know we were supposed to be in Dubai now, but I promise you we’ll get there. I’m not sure where you are, maybe at KAF or maybe you’re up here in Kabul. Please just wait for me. I’m coming back, and I can’t wait to see you.
I think something is going on, and maybe you know more than I do, because Khalid seems agitated this morning and he’s been on the phone non-stop. It makes me wonder if the negotiations are nearing an end. I know you’re in contact with them, because he told me that they keep calling your number. By now, I’m sure the AKE people have made you surrender your phone. It’s better off, P. I wouldn’t want you to have to deal with the stress of talking to these losers.
I hope you’re okay. And wherever you are this morning, please know that I’m thinking about you and wishing that we’d just come back from running the flight line to a cappuccino at the Green Bean. I miss you so much. Soon, P, soon.
xox
I had mastered the art of balancing the hand-held lamp on my knees, with the bulb turned down toward my notepad, so that I could see what I was writing.
“Off the light,” Khalid suddenly ordered.
“Why?” I asked. “I’m still writing. And I like having the light on.” Even though it was artificial light, I needed to have it on during the day; in some way, it helped me to deal with the slow passage of time in this place.
“Off the light.”
“Tell me why and I’ll turn it off.” I held the lamp between my legs, and the fluorescent beam bounced off the wall behind his head.
“Off it. I tell you.”
I sighed and turned it off. “Okay,” I said in the darkness. “What is happening?”
“Taliban are all around” came the answer out of the darkness.
“What do you mean?”
“Taliban. They looking for us.” I wasn’t sure whether to believe him or not—part of me thought that their saying the Taliban wanted to “buy” me was a ploy to keep me from calling out whenever I heard people overhead.
“They know we have you.”
I decided to play devil’s advocate. “So why don’t you just take their money and give me to them?” No answer. I pressed him. The darkness somehow made it easier to challenge him. “It’s the same money, so why don’t you just take it and give me to them? Then you don’t have to wait.”
“It is my father. He talk to them,” he replied. Khalid’s phone rang and he jumped. I could see the silhouette of his bearded chin against the bright light of the phone.
“As-Salaam Alaikum,” he said softly. The conversation didn’t last long. He was back to me in a matter of seconds.
“Tsiragh,” he said. I handed him the lamp. He turned it on and promptly lit a cigarette. I surmised that if there were Taliban looking for us, they were gone. Shafirgullah or someone else must have called to let him know. They were probably watching the area from afar. I reached for a cigarette as well.
“What if it’s not the Taliban?” I asked. “What if it’s the police?”
“No police,” Khalid replied. I was pretty sure he was right. There was no way the police would be able to find me. And the Afghan National Police were a sorry lot. I had done a story about them the summer before, when I was out at the forward operating base (FOB) at Ma’sum Ghar and attached to Major Dave Quick’s battle group unit. It was a Sunday afternoon and the unit had received a call. My cameraman, Sat, and I were in the media tent, chain-smoking, waiting for something to happen, when Quick came in and told us to be ready in five minutes.
“What’s happening?” we asked.
“ANP extraction.” The Afghan National Police had been caught in a shootout with Taliban insurgents. Three of their officers were dead, and they needed the Canadians to help them extract the bodies from the scene. Initial reports from the ANP indicated there we
re about three hundred Taliban in the area. Sat and I hopped into an RG-31 Nyala, a more heavily protected armoured vehicle, with a crew of five. There were about ten vehicles in our convoy as we drove out from the base—a few RGs, some LAVs (light armoured vehicles), and a Bison, an eight-wheeled armoured vehicle.
We moved slowly down the dirt road. Children played in a wadi just a few metres from the base. They barely looked up, so familiar were they with these big foreign convoys rumbling through their living space. Nearby, women were hanging laundry outside their mud homes. Life seemed strangely normal in rural Afghanistan as I watched it from an armoured personnel carrier. We made a pit stop at FOB Wilson, where we picked up a few ANP officers, whose job would be to guide us into the checkpoint where their colleagues had been killed.
About a kilometre from the checkpoint, everyone got out of the vehicles, and we continued the trek on foot. The air felt thick and hot; the temperature was near fifty degrees Celsius. The soldiers were tiring under the weight of their backpacks and weapons. Several went down from heat exhaustion. Sat stopped to offer one his CamelBak, which was filled with cool water. Suddenly, rapid gunfire shattered the stillness. The ANP were trying to scare off the Taliban so we could make our way through the trenches, the wadis, and the marijuana fields that made up the landscape of Zhari district.
Once we got to the checkpoint, the Canadians secured the perimeter, assessed the situation, and called for air cover. The ANP officers gathered up the bodies of their fallen colleagues, put them in the body bags the Canadians had provided, and drove off in their rundown version of a police cruiser, a beat-up pickup truck, leaving India Company stranded at the checkpoint, since there was no one checking the road out to make sure it hadn’t been lined with fresh bombs during the time the Canadians were helping the ANP with the dead.
Quick consulted with headquarters before deciding that we would head back to Ma’sum Ghar, rather than staying overnight. It was just getting dark, and the soldiers were tired, hungry, and hot. A few of them gave me cold bottled water from the vehicles that had driven into the checkpoint, along with a ration they fixed for me of hot macaroni and cheese, made by pouring water into the bag that contained the freeze-dried noodles and powdered cheese.
Once we got going, the convoy had barely made it out of the checkpoint when it came to a complete stop. The road had given way and one of the vehicles had nearly flipped over. Everyone had to dismount, and the soldiers took up defensive positions. It was an extremely vulnerable position to be in—stuck at night in the middle of Taliban territory, and basically immobile. I sat down next to the gunner in our RG-31, who was keeping watch around us with his night-vision lenses. He pointed out two, three, four, at least five Taliban watching us from their vantage points atop the grape huts, the mud-brick buildings used for drying grapes. The soldiers were nervous and waited for the inevitable strike, but apart from sporadic gunfire, it never came.
Six hours later, after another vehicle got stuck in the mud, the convoy finally made it around the destroyed road and back to the forward operating base, and when I had a chance to talk to Major Quick the next morning, his frustration with the ANP came through.
“The biggest challenge,” he told me, “was trying to figure out what happened before we left. We had conflicting reports that upward of 300 Taliban were in the area. Then it went to 150. It’s extremely hard to determine what is the truth. And that was a good example of how difficult it is to work with the ANP.”
I knew that Khalid was right. The ANP would never find me here. They had enough problems of their own, and investigative detective work was just not a skill they would learn overnight. But then maybe, just maybe, the Canadians were looking for me. I didn’t like the thought of them diverting resources from the war to go on a wild goose chase for a kidnapped journalist, but it gave me some comfort to think that someone like Dave Quick might be on the case. In the little time I’d spent with our troops, my respect for the work they did and their motives for going to Afghanistan had multiplied tenfold. Every soldier I met told me the same thing. They were there because they believed that they could make life better for ordinary Afghans, that they could contribute, even in a small way, to improving society there, and that they knew they were putting their own lives in danger to try to make a difference.
The debate back in Canada over whether our soldiers should be in Afghanistan had always bothered me. The fact was, they were here, risking their lives to take on an almost impossible task in one of the most inhospitable and dangerous places on earth. I believed that even if you didn’t support the mission, you needed to support these young men and women. They were eager, smart, and resourceful.
“Police bad,” Khalid said, interjecting himself into my train of thought.
I nodded. “Yes, police bad.” I was thinking of the ANP. “Taliban bad too,” I added. “So who is good?”
Khalid scratched his head. He didn’t seem to have an answer to that. “Mullah Omar good. Bin Laden good.” As expected. Shafirgullah had said the same thing the week before.
“Why are they good if they kill people?” I challenged.
“They Muslim. They kill people no Muslim. Good.”
I’ve been in this hole too long, I thought. I was starting to have the same conversation over and over again with my captors—and myself, for that matter.
At least with Khalid there was a little more conversation, perhaps a little more trust—but after almost two weeks, even we were running out of things to talk about. There were only so many times I could ask him about his plans to get married, what Shogufa was like (“very pretty”), whether her parents approved of their relationship (“they like me”), and what their plans were for the future (“suicide bombing”).
Khalid was still worried, though. He was unsure whose footsteps we’d heard earlier in the day, and I could see that on his face. He made several more phone calls in the afternoon, taking his SIM card in and out of the Nokia phone. Then I recognized some of the names on the display screen. Paul, Shokoor, Toronto, Sameem. It was my SIM card he was using to make the calls.
“Let me see,” I said, holding out my hand. “That’s my phone, Khalid.” He handed it over, warning me not to try to dial. I scrolled through my phone and the SMS messages still contained in it. There was the one from Paul: What can you tell me? That was the message he had sent after Shokoor told him about my kidnapping. One from Shokoor: We are late, sorry, Mellissa—sent the morning he and his brother were coming to get me at the hotel in Kabul, to take me to the refugee camp. Then another from Paul: Miss you, M, hurry back.
I put the phone down as my eyes welled up. I’m hurrying, P. I’m hurrying, and I miss you too. More than you know.
Khalid took the phone back. “Do not cry, Mellissa,” he said, taking my hand. “I no like you cry. I want you happy.”
“How can I be happy when I’m stuck here? When you’ve taken me away from everything? How can I be happy here?”
My captor sighed. “I am sorry for you, Mellissa,” he said. “I am sorry.”
“If you are really sorry, you’ll let me go, Khalid. You’ll take me back to Kabul on your motorcycle and take me back to my hotel.”
“It is not my choice,” he said. “My father…”
“Your father will understand. Please, Khalid. I am sick, and I’m going to get sicker. I will be of no use to you if I die here. You must let me go home to Canada, where I can see a doctor.” I knew he was worried about my health: he had been asking me practically every hour on the hour how I was feeling and if I had any dard. I did have pain, but it was in my head. I thought the weather must be changing outside because that’s when I get the worst migraines. It’s been that way since I was in high school. I could predict a thunderstorm by the strength of my headaches, and I was usually right. Doctors prescribed me every migraine drug they could, but unless I took it before the symptoms hit, I was reduced to lying in a dark room in a fetal position, waiting for it all to pass. I could feel a migraine
coming on now, and I didn’t have any Maxalt or Imitrex, but I did have Tylenol, which I never went anywhere without. I dug down deep in my knapsack and pulled out the bottle with the red cap, then popped three pills in my mouth, washing them down with a gulp of apple juice.
“What you eat?” Khalid asked. He had been watching me.
“It’s my medication,” I said, rattling the bottle. There were only a few left. “I’m running out. It’s for my pain. That’s why I need to go home, Khalid. I need to see my doctor.” He took the bottle of Tylenol from me and opened it. He poured a few out into his big palm and studied them for a while before putting them back in the bottle.
“We find doctor,” he told me.
“You can’t. I need my doctor at home in Canada. She’s the only one who knows because she knows about my operation, and she’s the only one who can prescribe me my medication,” I said earnestly.
“We find doctor here,” he insisted.
“No, it won’t work,” I argued. “I could get sicker if I see the wrong doctor. It’s dangerous.” Khalid sighed and put his head in his hands again.
Sensing that he might perhaps consider what I was saying, I pressed on. “You have to call your father and tell him I am sick, and that he needs to finish my case soon. I won’t be any good to you if I die in here, Khalid. You wouldn’t want that.”
I was interrupted by a loud bang. And then another one. Mortars. And then the sound of an aircraft flying overhead. Gunfire followed. The noise went on for a long time, maybe a couple hours. It had to be NATO forces engaging the insurgents in the area. Khalid leaned back on his pillow and cracked the knuckles on his hands, then on his feet. He seemed resigned to the fact that he was staying another night. There was no way the others would come and dig him out as long as there was this much activity above.
Under an Afghan Sky Page 19