Impossible Odds

out the window. I can feel reality being twisted through some kind of terrible grinder. We’re up against schoolyard bullies carrying the weapons of mass murderers. I haven’t realized until this moment, when I see Poul’s tough-guy routine fail, that I’ve been hoping it would actually work.
    Still no word on what their intentions may be. We don’t know who these people are and we can’t tell where they are taking us. The horror show proceeds to that point and pauses, as far as any information about what is actually going on here. After that, things happen but nothing changes. Time drips, while the sickly awareness of how toxic and deadly the situation is builds up in my blood.
    Hours move along at a slow crawl, and still nothing gives awaytheir intentions. All Poul and I can do is exchange troubled glances. After a while I stop looking. It only makes things worse.
    We stop several times and are forced to change into different vehicles. Somewhere during our ride in the third one, the sound of a certain voice inside the car finally registers on me. It’s so high and thin it could be female. I turn around to see instead a young boy who appears to be about eight or nine years old. He’s dressed like the others, in a billowing shirt over those loose trousers that are the alternative to saronglike macawiis. This child copies the older men’s fashion of wearing his traditional shawl around his head like a turban. The obvious joke about him being a miniature kidnapper doesn’t work at all. The sight of him is twisted and wrong.
    I wonder, Is he the son of one of these men? My God, is this kid here to learn a trade ? The strangeness of this amps me up tighter. My muscles feel as if they’re about to start snapping my bones. The feeling doesn’t wear off.
    The afternoon bleeds into evening while we go through a process of making a series of stops, one impoverished-looking location after another. The kidnappers go through elaborate changes in personnel and vehicles for reasons that I can’t fathom, and that Poul and I aren’t allowed to discuss. Whatever is happening, there are certainly a lot of people involved in this operation.
    I have to wonder. All this for us?
    Every time we change cars or drivers, armed enforcers hop in carrying huge chains of ammunition around their shoulders. I can only guess that these personnel changes have something to do with various clan members guaranteeing safe passage from one contested territory to the next. Here again, this implies a large amount of preorganization. It demonstrates complex maneuvering on somebody’s part.
    But these guys behave like morons. They must be acting out a plan controlled by somebody smarter. Needless to say, my attempt torationalize this as a simple carjacking and robbery hasn’t survived the evening. This isn’t just some local gang.
    I’ve worked in the region long enough to understand our kidnapping presents dangers far beyond whatever intentions drive these men. A greater risk is that if we are spotted by a larger group, we could be kidnapped a second time—maybe by unorganized opportunists and thugs, or perhaps by people convinced they represent the will of their God. If that occurs—and it suddenly feels like it easily could—this lunatic game will become even more deadly.
    But by this point in the night I’ve been convinced the scope of the operation makes it clear—at least to me, since I can’t discuss it with anybody—that either we are in the hands of the same people who control the Somali pirates at sea and who have moved their ransom schemes onto land, or this is an Al-Shabaab operation.
    I remember breakfast this morning. It was normal.
    In this fashion, “likely to die” meets “certain to die” and finds us trapped between them. We continue late into the night, rattling along over roads of inconsistent quality. I’m feeling all the little places where the bruising is beginning set in. Eventually the kidnappers seem to get some invisible clue among themselves and pull our latest vehicle to a stop.
    This time it’s different. There’s nothing here. And now Ali demands that we both get out. Until that moment, sleepy boredom was just beginning to fill me. Now it instantly gives way to a cold rush of fear. It’s a bad one, like freezing and boiling at the same time.
    “Walk!” Ali shouts, pointing out into the open scrub land. Then, just in case we haven’t heard, he shouts again, “Walk!”
    With that, he stomps