Impossible Odds

avoiding the media, he also determined to keep it secret in their home region and avoid discussing anything in the presence of his Somali staff. The strength of the fabled gossip lines in that country was not to be doubted, and even the most innocent-sounding information about Jessica might fan the flames in unpredictable ways.
    Unfortunately his efforts didn’t do much to slow down the flow of information. Within hours, a number of his colleagues from the local population began stopping by to express their concern over Jess’s disappearance. He was touched by their show of sympathy,but it was a jolt to see how efforts to restrict information did nothing. He smiled and thanked them on auto-pilot, eager to regain his privacy.
    A new fear hit—the telephone. Had he already managed to make things worse for Jess simply by using the phone? For all he knew, the kidnappers might have tapped his line to track the family’s strategy and siphon the same information he’d been pulling down from the internet. When desperation is everywhere, great profits can be made by eavesdropping. In Somalia, freelance spying is a cash-and-carry business.
    He had to wonder—how much of a bribe would you have to pay somebody at their phone carrier’s office to pull that off? Maybe twelve hundred dollars? Two years’ wages. After all, how many people who work at a phone company in a developed country would refuse to grant unauthorized access to a single phone line in return for two years’ wages?
    Just take a break for a coffee and let us put a tap on this line, then forget you ever saw us.
    If they’d already hacked his phone, then he had been helping them just by talking to their families or the FBI. He resolved to make it a point to deal with the authorities in person whenever it involved sensitive information.
    So he was left with the long wait for a ransom call and the knowledge that if Jessica was carried too far south of the Green Line, she was unlikely to return alive. In spite of the fact that nobody could see the Green Line and it held no official status, it was one of the most important borders on the African Horn. With the economy of that region broken, desperation lurked amid civil chaos. The kidnapping itself was a crime of opportunity. Erik’s and Jessica’s good intentions had somehow exposed her vulnerability and desperate people had seized upon that.
    Paranoia became the order of the day.

CHAPTER THREE
    O CTOBER 1993
    Jessica Buchanan was fourteen years old and living in rural Ohio in October of 1993 when the “Blackhawk Down” ambush of two American Special Forces choppers took place in Mogadishu, Somalia. The helicopter crews had thought themselves protected because they were in the country to guarantee aid shipments to the people. Instead, Delta Team Master Sergeant Randy Shughart was pinned down there and used up his ammo to provide as much covering fire as he could for team members who were too badly wounded to defend themselves. Shughart died without knowing he would be awarded the Medal of Honor.
    In the following days, the Western world blanched at the searing images of dead American soldiers dragged through the streets, bodies violated by screaming mobs of young Somali men. It’s natural to imagine the emotional effect on the American people because the dead men were their own, but as it happened, there were other places around the world where private citizens were also appalled and greatly concerned.
    One of those places was in Sweden, in the household of JohanLandemalm and his wife, Lena, their young daughter, Linnea, and their seventeen-year-old son, Erik. The household took sharp note of that story because Erik was already considering a life in international aid work. Thus Somalia’s surprise failure of money-and-food diplomacy was of special concern to him.
    Erik had the same view shared by many people of the region, namely a personal appreciation for negotiated positions, instead of the confront-and-conquer mentality. He loved the image of well-negotiated agreements forming paper bridges to carry opposing sides away from the sort of warlike contests that get sponsored by whichever hothead is in charge.
    His concern was a natural product of his upbringing. Erik’s parents were not only vocal supporters of beleaguered people throughout their own country, they also held sympathies that extended to any group of nonwarlike people. They amplified Erik’s concern by observing that the tragedy went