Impossible Odds

course. When it does, he might not have a way to charge it, but he knows how to get another one. Pandora’s box has been opened. Every viral eyeful of the world’s temptations amplifies his frustration. With time comes the attitude: Why not snatch one of those rich bastards? Grab them! Make them get money from their rich bastard friends and rich bastard relatives. What, you make thirty thousand USD a year ? Pay up, rich bastard.
    You can become a kidnapper and play the long odds, or you can bend over and take it from the whole world. Three choices greet you: Scrape out a life in a legal way, chew khat and wait for the deliverance of death, or take a desperate gamble.
    The warships successfully protected merchant shipping in the region by beating down most of the piracy, for a while. The world’s ship commanders and company chairmen and concerned stockholders all breathed a bit easier every time another group ofdesperados went down in a firefight or were captured and sentenced to long prison terms.
    However, on land in Somalia the desperation didn’t change at all, simply because pirates were sometimes gunned off the water. The desperation simply reversed and ran back toward the shore. Its progress was invisible, and the people on land were unaware of its danger.
    Thus the men who once fired away at giant steel tankers from tiny boats out on the high seas now prowled Somalia’s inland regions. They crossed into neighboring countries carrying the same hungers that first put them out to sea.
    Terrible forces were in play, as dangerous and random in their violence as lightning strikes. For anyone in range of this storm, victimhood was a matter of timing and location.

CHAPTER NINE
    Jessica:
    Our executions were about to proceed, and there was nothing we could do. We were forced onto our knees somewhere in the wilderness of the Somali scrub desert region, and the terror of those moments was made more awful by the waiting. I remembered it, then, not with my thoughts but with my body itself—the old feeling of being rendered helpless in some game of childhood cruelties. The memory was in the survival instinct’s sharp sting: that feel of wrongness over being held captive.
    I discovered a special form of living hell in that combination of helplessness and terror to be endured while waiting for execution. No doubt the horror of this moment is known to all condemned people. They would surely recognize that sensation of sharp nausea, the loss of fine motor control, the difficulty with balance when smaller support muscles spasm and misfire.
    Any victim taken by force is subjected to a complicated group of insults to his or her humanity. Your freedom, well-being, mental state, physical state—they all suddenly mean next to nothing.
    I knew so little in those dripping minutes, but it was more than enough to leave me stranded in the compliance mode, legstrembling. I knew these men despised female emotion. It’s a common trait in the culture. A woman’s emotional plea is regarded as an unfair and dishonest attempt to manipulate circumstances in the female’s favor. It is looked at as being done without regard to consequences for the male. The emotions themselves are therefore an affront to him: a honeyed attack. So short of jamming my fist in my mouth, I did everything to tamp down my rocketing emotions. I could see nothing there in the darkness, down on my knees, facing the ground. I could sense nearby men surrounding me, some of them standing still, some pacing the ground, all with guns. But I couldn’t see any details at all.
    When the human body moves beyond the “fight or flight” response, the best thing our ancient instincts can do is prepare for grievous injury; pull the blood supply away from extremities and toward the major organs, and throw out one last grab for survival. I felt the massive adrenaline surge contract my muscles so hard they began to seize up.
    In most cases these symptoms would immediately be lost to permanent silence with the coming of the end. But the moment hung suspended. Nothing happened. More nothing happened. Enough time went by for stabbing knee pains to set in, throbbing with my pulse.
    My back muscles started to twitch. I tried to pray for help and found that my fear was so intense it dissolved my thoughts into a formless plea for strength. So I focused on controlling my breathing: Stop gasping , take deliberate breaths.
    And then one of the men yelled out, “Sleep!” They pushed