Impossible Odds

matter how many soldiers you send.”
    “My point exactly, and that’s the same reason I need you to promise you won’t try to go cowboy on us.”
    “I won’t. I promise you, Matt. Just please, if you believe Al-Shabaab holds her or will be in a position to get her, tell me you’ll go after her then. Because if that’s the case, a raid is the only hope we’ve got.”
    “The decision to go has to come from the highest level, Erik. But I can assure you we have the best guys anyone could ever ask for, and if anyone can do it, it will be them.”
    “I just need to know I won’t be sitting here in a week’s time, looking at my computer screen and seeing video of Jess being killed.”
    “Erik, we need to focus on what we can do. And you need to be there for Jess’s family, for your family in Sweden. And when she comes out she’s going to need you more than ever before. This is not the time to let emotions take over.”
    “I know. I know, but you have to understand, I promised her if something happened—”
    “Anything you do that increases her jeopardy—you won’t be doing it for her. You’ll be doing it for you.”
    Erik found that the truth of that was like a gorilla blocking the doorway. There was no way to ignore it.
    “Damn it, Matt.”
    “It’s a rough road. You have to hold steady.”
    “What about an exchange?”
    “Of what?”
    “Prisoners. I’ll go in. They can swap her for me.”
    “No we can’t.”
    “What difference does it make to them? They just want money, yes? If it comes to a point where Jess is sick and we can do an exchange, I want to do it.”
    “We’re not even going to talk about it. Desperation won’t help. Give us a chance to get things working.”
    “It’s been six days.”
    “Right. And these situations never get resolved quickly. They take time.”
    “How much? That could mean anything.”
    “That’s right. And the answer is, nobody knows. But it seldom takes less than a matter of months, Erik. Months .”
    That night, alone in their apartment, Erik felt one of those particularly dark waves of emotion pulling him down. The doubts he had been holding back about his responsibility for Jess’s predicament ran through him like vandals, in spite of the fact that he knew there had been no stopping her from going on that trip once she agreed to go. It was, as she said, the work she had come here to do.
    But this—this ordeal of waiting. It was not improved at all by the cultural experience he’d gained there over the past six years. The hot zone of southern Somalia is a place an entire young male population is confronted with virtually no opportunity. In some parts of that country, crime openly rules the streets. That didn’tmean these criminals knew what they were doing. Successful ransom kidnappings have always been notoriously tricky. A kidnapping that didn’t go wrong was far more rare than the ones that fell apart and got people killed.
    All Erik could do was write his daily letters in hopes she would live to read them. He wondered if some element of magical thinking was involved, as if he might convey some unknown power to her, generated by holding the thought of her as close as possible. He concluded science couldn’t prove any such thing was possible, but neither could it prove that it wasn’t.
    I’ll understand if when you return you feel resentment and even want to never see me again. If so, I will do whatever you feel is right for you, but I will always be there for you. My love for you is without conditions, any rules  . . . I will always be there for you even though I don’t know where you are now and it breaks my heart completely. I don’t know what to do, I just don’t know what to do  . . . I’ve talked with Dan, I’ve talked with [the] FBI, with all kinds of people  . . . everyone says that we should be hopeful and I am, I know you are strong, but I’m just so afraid for everything that can happen.  . . .
    You need to come back here. I can’t live a life without you, I just can’t. There’s nothing the kidnappers can do that can make me stop loving you, there’s nothing they can do that can lessen my love for you.
    He found himself repeating the same things, over and over. As if it was a sacred duty. He wrote as if the idea of stopping the imaginary conversation was a form of giving up.
    •  •  •
    Jessica:
    There was a bad argument going on between Abdi and Jabreel, and while I didn’t understand them word