The Price of Life

by Nigel Brennan

  The whole thing is over in a matter of minutes; we are then given our Muslim names. Mine is Mohammad and Amanda’s is Mary. Our Muslim brothers embrace us, and, feeling like I have just entered a cult, I shake the hand of each of the boys. I can’t believe it’s that easy to convert.

  Now we are Muslim we get to see Ali’s face. The first thing I notice is a mouth full of jagged teeth. He seems older than the other guys, maybe late twenties or early thirties, but his eyes are just as intense as when his face was covered. He says to us that he will soon be leaving the house and going to another group. I can’t say I’ll miss him.

  Our religious education starts. It is a steep learning curve and I know we can’t stuff this up. From here on in we will have to pray five times daily, and perform the fasting rules of Ramadan and the rituals of ablution.

  Just before midday prayer we are brought out of our room to join the group. Jamal teaches me how to do ablution properly: first washing the hands then the face while snorting water up the nostrils, next the forearms and then the feet, finishing by running water over the top of the head.

  Amanda is only able to watch all of this. She’s not allowed to pray with us as there is not enough space on the small verandah. I pray with all the boys for the first time. Standing toe to toe between two of them, I am uncomfortable. I feel like a fraud; I am a fraud.

  Being male is a clear advantage here. Amanda is isolated. She’s completely surrounded by men, unable to participate in the same rituals, certainly not seen as an equal. I’m grateful we are being held in the same room, as I think this will stop any sexual advances. A voice at the back of my mind tells me this is a false sense of security: they really have carte blanche.

  Sunday, 7 September

  A few days after our conversion Ahmed introduces us to two more players in the group; they are brought in under the guise of being our religious teachers. Both speak fluent English and appear to be well educated. Mohammad – ‘Old Mohammad’ as we call him – sweats profusely and is plump for a Somali, which suggests he’s wealthy. Abdullah – our second one – is no older than twenty-five, a runt really, with scrappy facial hair. He distances himself from the group from the get-go, explaining he has nothing to do with the kidnapping. When the others are not around, he whispers to us that the gang is extremely dangerous.

  These two act as middlemen, pretending to be interested in our religious education, asking if we need anything but generally trying to squeeze more information from us. We ask if we can change our Muslim names, as I keep forgetting to answer to ‘Mohammad’ whenever anyone tries to get my attention. Having been called ‘Nigel’ for the last thirty-six years, I am now going to need something that at least partway resembles it. They concede the point: my new Muslim name is ‘Noah’ and Amanda’s is ‘Amina’.

  That evening I ask Ahmed how long they intend to hold us. He has said they’ll release us if the government doesn’t cough up so I’m sure they have some sort of plan in place. He says that it will be ‘finished’ within six weeks. I ask him to promise this, knowing that it states in the Qur’an that a Muslim must keep their word. He seems happy to give me this reassurance. Whether he is just blowing smoke up my arse or telling the truth I have no idea, but it gives me something to hold on to and a date to work towards.

  Over the next little while our discussions with the younger guys go some way to distracting me. We slowly get to know each of them. One day Abdullah our guard comes in with Ismail, who up to this point has had little to do with us, most likely because he speaks no English. His features are very feminine and he is incredibly shy. Abdullah does the talking.

  It’s all pleasant enough to begin with. Noticing the massive scar on Ismail’s leg, I ask him how he got it. Through Abdullah he explains it is a war wound – a result of a close call with a mortar. Abdullah starts up on his favourite subject, killing infidels, and the conversation suddenly goes downhill. He begins taunting us.

  ‘I think you will be here for one or two years.’

  I lose my temper – standing up and walking to the door, I bang on it furiously to get the attention of one of the older guys.

  Abdullah gets up and pushes me, asking me what I am doing. I keep banging on the door. He brushes past me, leaving with Ismail, but turns back to face me from the hallway. He’s a smiling assassin, letting me know I’ve overstepped the mark.

  Amanda asks if I’m crazy, telling me to calm down. ‘Nige, don’t make enemies with these guys.’ She’s completely right. Now fear wells up as I wonder how I’ll pay for my outburst. Tail between my legs, I apologise to Abdullah the next time he comes into the room. I say I was upset because I want to go to a Mosque to be able to learn my religion, which he seems to accept. I’ll make damn sure that I don’t cross him again.

  One or two years. Not even having passed the one-month mark yet I don’t know if I have the mental strength to do this.

  Nicky

  Moore Park

  Saturday, 6 September

  In the morning we call Mum. She is over in WA for a conference with the crankies (our term of endearment for her beloved Country Women’s Association). Interestingly enough, Stephen Smith, the foreign affairs minister, asks her if she would like to meet his mother, who is also over there. Mum thinks his time would be better suited to getting her son home rather than introducing her to his family members. Mum has her own friends, who scrum around her in support.

  The AFP sends a psych up to Moore Park, and we assume this is for our benefit. At the end of the first week DFAT provided a psychologist and she was brilliant, spending time with each of us, including an entire day with my kids to see how they were coping. She went through how we would likely respond to Nigel’s absence, drawing up a chart with the emotions we would experience if this took a month, six months, a year. We scoffed at that. There’s no way this could go on for that long. But it was very sobering when she discussed how we’d feel if he never came home. Silence fell on the room, broken by Mum. ‘Well, I am completely optimistic. Nigel will come home.’

  This AFP psych, however, is awful. It’s like having a creeping Jesus in the house. She watches us all the time and closes her laptop quickly whenever any of us go downstairs, like a nerdy kid in an exam, preventing the rest of us dunces from cheating. It makes us feel like we are doing something wrong. It turns out she’s primarily here to assess the mental health of the AFP staff but she’s also clinically appraising us as NOK negotiators.

  Since I’d taken the first call from Adam and hadn’t cracked under the pressure, the QPol guys were happy to have me continue in the NOK negotiator role. Mum and Dad suffered pretty badly in the first few days so the two things together appeared to make me better qualified for the role. As I understand it, QPol did a quick assessment when they got in the door and were happy with me taking calls, and so started going over negotiator strategies straightaway.

  The AFP psych completes her critical assessment, and I get the gig officially. We’ve also discussed this among ourselves. Ham’s name was thrown in the ring but we decided against this because he’s a bit of a hot-head. Matt knocked back the role – he felt he wouldn’t be able to answer the questions quickly enough as he is a write-things-down-and-ponder kind of person. Over time Mum probably could have done it, but she was too upset at first and thought she would likely abuse the captors. Dad couldn’t do it; he’s just a basket case at the moment.

  Time becomes very fluid. There is one week that feels like three but then whole passages of time will disappear quick as a wink. The AFP negotiators are on a fortnightly rotation. I ring an AFP contact high up the chain to ask if certain negs could be rotated back after they have had a spell away from us. I’ve had to tell so many newbies about our family tree, repeating the same information over and over, and it takes at least a week for the freshly arrived negotiator to assess my ability. By now I know what I’m capable of and it shits me that every two weeks I have to prove myself all over again.

  The officious woman on the o
ther end of the line says that this would be very difficult because they don’t have a ‘negotiators division’; the negotiators come from all different areas of the force. They have other workplace commitments so can’t be moved up here on my request. As well as that, they have families and lives. Yeah, well, so did I, once upon a time.

  The woman tells me my concerns have been duly noted, and says that if they can rotate previous negotiators back on the job, they will.

  Around this time it is decided that Adam’s name is actually ‘Adan’s. Someone higher up must have figured this out, and the negs pass it on to me. This is what I’m to call him from now on. ‘Adam’ is not a Somali name, so I must have misheard him.

  Not long after this happens, the AFP guys move from Bundaberg to the Villas, the local holiday accommodation units at the northern end of Moore Park, about a kilometre from Mum and Dad’s place. Initially, we had two negotiators and two intelligence officers here in the house. After the Creeping Jesus leaves us, the intel guys are rostered down to the Major Incident Room (MIR) at Brisbane. It seems they don’t need to be up here at the house, and that we really shouldn’t have been getting wind of the intelligence coming in anyway.

  The two negs remain our conduit to the action, but our calls from the HTs are less frequent than Lorinda’s. They are now coming in between five days and a week apart. The contact is painfully sporadic, and one of the negs suggests I call Adan to speed things up.

  ‘What? No! I can’t do that!’ I am so terrified at the thought my gag reflex starts going. Bile fills my mouth. My skin feels prickly all over. Oh no, I’m going to vomit all over Mum’s kitchen bench in front of a federal cop.

  I know it makes no sense to be this terrified at the mere thought of phoning Adan, but the calls are shit-scary. It’s not so much what’s said, more that it’s so alien to me that I’m dealing with someone like Adan in the first place. For some reason, calling him is one step more frightening. I just don’t want to make a decisions for fear it is the wrong one.

  In the end I don’t have to make that call because Adan rings me.

  Every call follows a structure: I try to obtain a proof of life, then I establish if Nige and Amanda are still being held together, and follow this up with a question about their welfare. Finally, I defer all money discussions to Nairobi, telling Adan, ‘You need to talk to Mark; he is organising the money for both our families.’

  As time goes on my strategy document gets longer. It’s a case of having a response ready for anything Adan says to me. I have moved on to ‘active-listening techniques’, adding to the negotiation 101 course that the Feds ran me through.

  As well as this, I need to ask questions to gain intel – probing but not too probing. I need to ‘attend’: avoiding jumps from one topic to another or interrupting makes Adan believe I am listening to him. This apparently contributes to trust, and allows the negs to collect information about Adan. I have to ‘hear’ what Adan is saying, recognise what has been said and commit it to memory. This is no easy feat as he talks fast and is quite often completely incomprehensible.

  Ideally I should summarise the conversation and repeat the main points back to Adan at the end of the call. This is almost impossible as there is quite a lot I haven’t understood, and there’s often no warning that the call is ending. As soon as the conversation is over for him, he just hangs up.

  There’s so much to keep in my head during these conversations. But the loudest thought of all is, What if I fuck up and say something wrong and Nige ends up dead for it?

  Wednesday, 17 September

  Ham rings early in the morning. ‘Alley cat, check out your Google alert. There’s a video of Nige.’

  ‘Video?’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, video.’

  ‘What, like news footage?’ I’m a bit slow as I’m still waking up. Ham’s been getting up early for work and has got in the habit of checking out the Google alerts while he’s having his morning coffee.

  ‘Nah, there’s a video of him and Amanda. She’s in a hijab and there’s armed gunmen all around them.’

  Shit! Now I am hearing him. My mouth turns dry. Horrific images, ones that can never be blotted out, of Daniel Pearl’s execution and scenes from Black Hawk Down flash to mind. I bolt to the office and switch on Mum’s computer. The noise rouses Mum and she comes into the room.

  Josh and Ian, our latest negs, can tell something is up and hit Google too. All information the negs pass on to us must first be approved by someone higher up, but our family moves much faster than bureaucratic machinations.

  Josh is cluey enough to have picked this up. He’s on the phone to Canberra immediately. He’s no magic eight ball but is preparing himself for the twenty questions he knows he’s going to get from us. Josh is very young and very buff. My kids love him and Jacinta’s friends – who are all of thirteen – flirt outrageously with him. Ian is an old-school policeman. He would have been a fantastic small-town cop; he’s compassionate and picks up nuances quickly. He’s one of the few negs to have worked on an international kidnapping case before this one (in Africa, but unfortunately not in Somalia).

  We avidly watch the video. It becomes almost a game to pick out something that no one else has noticed.

  ‘Does anyone recognise the clothes?’ Josh asks.

  ‘I don’t know, Mum, are they Nigel’s clothes?’ The hijab isn’t nearly stylish enough to be Amanda’s own. Her body and feet are covered but we can see Nigel’s feet. They’re clean; he’s either recently had a wash or isn’t anywhere with bare earth. He’s got his sleeves rolled up and we can see his wrists. We can’t spot any ligature marks so he’s not been cuffed or cable tied.

  Then we pause the video to look at a still of his face. Okay, his head isn’t shaved and he’s grown a beard – no shock there. He came back from Ethiopia a couple of years ago looking way scruffier than that.

  ‘Can you see his teeth? What’s his mouth look like?’ asks Mum. Nige has a great smile and has always been vain about his teeth. We all had buckteeth as kids and were subjected to years of orthodontic torture in the form of braces – and not the cute little stick-on coloured ones with attachable diamantes, but the great grey all-encompassing ones that made you look like Jaws from the James Bond movies.

  Nige’s face looks clear, a bit pale – he hasn’t had much sun by the looks – but no split lips, no swelling, and he looks well nourished enough. So does Amanda. Nige actually looks more pissed off than scared; he’s picking up small pebbles and flicking them off to one side.

  The courtyard looks clean of shrapnel and there are pot plants all around them. Surely this means they are somewhere relatively stable? Who’s going to the trouble of looking after house plants if there is constant fighting and mortars going off around them? The dudes with the guns next to Nigel are pretty frightening. It’s so hard to watch someone being nonchalant with a gun in their hand.

  Growing up on the farm, we had it drummed into us just how dangerous weapons are; we only ever dealt with 22 or 4.10 rifles relatively genteel ones, with gleaming oiled-timber butts. I wouldn’t even use the .303 because the kickback was enormous and would leave me bruised from shoulderblade to armpit. The guns these kids are holding are big ugly automatic uber-scary weapons.

  The guys with the guns are all tall and lean and have juvenile physiques, so it looks as though the gang is made up of youths. I can’t decide how I feel about them; they look too young to be evil. It’s completely outside my realm of understanding that one group of people can potentially do something torturous and hideous to another. I know it happens – I’m not an idiot – it’s just that where I live, within my community and my country, this is pretty much unknown. I’m so unprepared for this scenario that I can’t condemn the kidnappers.

  We ask Josh about Al Jazeera, who broadcast the video. A family friend of ours, Julie, knows a reporter who works for them.

  Julie looked after us years ago when Mum had to go into hospital during harvest time, and Dad had four kids
under six years of age in the house while he was out working. Julie looked after us for a couple of weeks; she’d only just finished school and we loved her to bits. Mum and Dad have maintained contact even though we have all moved around. The AFP says it’s already been in contact with Julie as Dad had put her partner, Madji, up more than once to assist us with translation – he had negotiated the release of one of his family members in a kidnapping in Jordan. He speaks fluent Arabic.

  We hear nothing back in regard to this from Canberra for another few weeks.

  The video is a mixed blessing. Nigel is alive and neither of them looks any worse for wear. We ask for info about where the video came from and how it was released, but we don’t get it. More than this, though, the video puts it all into perspective: Nige is in deep, deep shit.

  Nigel

  The Filthy House

  around Friday, 12 September

  Within a week of converting, we get another visit from Old Mohammad and the older Abdullah. It’s not to give us religious instruction – they inform us we’re going to make a video. Memories surface of Daniel Pearl and Douglas Wood begging for their lives surrounded by armed men. My heart is in my mouth, but I try not to betray any fear.

  Amanda asks why they want to do a video. According to Abdullah, it’s to document our conversion; in it we will have to answer five questions. They plan to put the video on the internet, as has occurred when other people have converted to Islam. We’re taken out into the courtyard, where they have set up a single-seat lounge chair under the tree. Then they dress us up as if we are their dolls. I am in a long-sleeved shirt, with jeans rolled up to my shins and the Muslim headscarf draped over my head. Amanda is in a hijab and abaya.