Impossible Odds

spare no effort to secure the safety of our citizens and to bring their captors to justice.”
    Back in Somalia, at the ruined campsite outside “The International City of Adado,” there was no room for doubt about the truth of the president’s statement for the ones hauling away the bodies of the felled captors. The folly of attracting military attention by kidnapping innocent civilians will undoubtedly be discussed in the lairs of future kidnappers. One of them will undoubtedly be Jabreel himself.
    Dan Hardy showed Erik a text message he sent to Jabreel’s phone after the rescue. Though Jabreel was lucky enough to have been absent from the camp that night, he surely felt less fortunate when the message arrived. Nobody on the case was forgetting how Jabreel had toyed with them over long months of negotiations. Nor were they forgetting about his personal torments ofJessica throughout that time, which now were known by everyone involved. The message contained only three simple words, sent for him to consider while he looked back on the experience, as he would surely do.
    “You’re next, motherf**ker.”
    Jabreel’s cell phone account immediately went dead.
    The statement was hardly mere bravado, as Jabreel and the surviving kidnappers now know from experience. Matt Espenshade confirmed that in spite of the deaths of so many of the kidnappers, many more are still at large, including their leaders. Those men might hope to be forgotten; they are not. The FBI has continued its investigative interest in those involved with the kidnapping. The leaders, especially, are of prime interest to the Bureau. And now the considerable unseen assets in that region are steadily feeding back information on these targeted individuals to learn their operational methods and their locations and hunt them down.
    The surviving kidnappers and their colleagues are welcome to sneer at the danger. It may help them pass the time, just as it did for Bin Laden’s henchmen to chuckle at the idea of payback. If the men nobody sees coming are dispatched to capture or kill them, the surviving kidnappers will find themselves dealing with a force of air, sea, and land fighters so obsessed with the work they do that they have trained themselves into the physical and mental toughness of world-class athletes. They will carry the latest in weapons, armor, visual systems, and communication devices. Whether they are Navy SEAL fighters, DEVGRU warriors, Army Delta Force soldiers, Green Berets, or any of the elite soldiers under United States Special Operations Command (SOCOM), they will share the elite warriors’ determination to achieve success in their mission assignment.
    The news that they are coming for you is the worst you could receive. But nobody gets advance warning from these men. They consider themselves born for this. They have fought like panthersto be part of their team. For most of them, there is a strong sense of pride in succeeding at missions nobody else can get done; in lethal challenges. They actually prefer levels of difficulty so high it seems only a sucker would seek them, the sorts of situations seen more and more often these days. Impossible odds.

Afterword
    Erik:
    I was especially moved by prayer groups that steadfastly remained active on behalf of Jess and her colleague, Poul Thisted, because they did this without inquiring whether Jess or Poul held their beliefs. In today’s divisive climate, how often is such acceptance shown?
    Before anyone gets caught up in useless debates about religion, there is the simple question of whether one feels a sense of spirituality in the experience of being alive. Either we do or we don’t. All dogma aside, it seems to me that the perception of a benevolent source of order to our existence is all that’s necessary to truthfully claim a spiritual life.
    And I can say no matter what forces kept Jess alive and protected from murder or rape by ideologues or by thugs, those forces worked magnificently well and beyond any practical explanation. She was somehow protected from the worst, in a time and place where the worst was very likely to occur.
    Our family’s love was the primary source of our endurance. It steadied me when the terrible time came to make sure the entirecommand chain knew when the three requirements were met for ordering an armed attack, but it also helped me stand firm against taking violent action if there was any chance at all for a peaceful resolution. They helped me