Impossible Odds

sign they might know about night vision, or that someone had alerted them about it. But I never saw any indication of that, and the pattern of marching us out into the open for sleeping was repeated every night. Whatever their purpose, they were consistent.
    Jabreel dialed the phone this time. He handed it to me once the connection went through. I heard a woman’s voice on the other end, but didn’t recognize her. She sounded British or possibly South African when she spoke my name. She claimed to know me, or know about me anyway. I asked who I was speaking to, but she only replied that she worked for something called “Mine Action.”
    The name didn’t sound familiar to me. I felt a strange mix ofhope and skepticism. She went on to assure me “everyone” was working around the clock to secure our release. I had no idea what that actually meant.
    And I wasn’t sure I heard the next part right at all—she asked what I would want to have in a care package if they were to put one together for me. She meant it as a gesture of consolation, but all I heard was, “Get ready to spend serious time in captivity.” The idea of a care package was even more upsetting than being provided with replacement clothing; they both implied a much longer stay. I was already counting the minutes before my sanity broke.
    Jabreel put Poul on the line and had him give a rehearsed speech about how the military must not try to stage an attack on us. Poul also had a few other locations he had been instructed to pass along as “no attack” zones, if we were to ever be returned alive. With that Poul lost patience with the idea of speaking to yet another stranger instead of any of our known people. He told her to get off the line and keep it clear for our people to reach us.
    But that was it. No more calls, no explanation for the “disconnected” numbers of Erik and my family. They packed us into the SUV again and drove us back to the Banda place. The loss of the optimism I felt when this trip began was as abrupt and hard as a belly flop.
    Jabreel told us of the men’s concern about surveillance satellites and high-flying planes with tracking capability. They seemed to think we also had these things at our disposal. At least that would justify the constant paranoia about keeping us under cover in the daylight, even if it failed to explain why they didn’t fear night vision when they made us sleep out in the open.
    I tried to play it as casual as I could and rolled my eyes at the idea of anyone coming for us. “We’re just aid workers,” I assured them. “Nobody would use such things to look for us. Our government doesn’t know we exist.”
    After nightfall, a caravan of four SUVs pulled into the camp.Poul and I were loaded into the back of one with a guard on each side of us. There were three men in the front seat and four more in the rear, along with a stack of supplies. My anxiety began to spike, partly because I couldn’t see Jabreel anywhere in the caravan but mostly out of intuition. Whatever was happening with these men, they were plainly jumpy and paranoid over something or other, and I had a sick feeling it had to do with us. More specifically, I feared it might have to do specifically with me—not as a woman, the way I initially feared, but as an American.
    Maybe they hadn’t bargained for an American captive after all. The men kept jabbering to one another and glancing over in my direction. I couldn’t understand them, but once again I could make out the word “Amer-ee-cahn.” Either they were coming around to deciding my presence was a mistake or talking about how to raise the ransom fee because of it.
    We moved out and kept moving. I could sense the ride moving steadily south. We drove for hours, again with no explanation and without Jabreel anywhere in sight. All I could think about was, to the south lay the highly dangerous Al-Shabaab territory. Given the arguments over how much money we were worth, it began to look more and more as if the Chairman had decided to sell us off to them for a price closer to his liking, and let them use us either for ransom money or for torture toys. I knew rape would be the least of my worries in their hands.
    Loud Somali pop music blared from the car stereos, driving the hyper mood higher among all the men with green slime running out of the corners of their mouths. They regarded us the way people look at cows in a 4-H Club competition. I knew about panic attacks from personal