Impossible Odds

took the shine off the thought of getting out of there via ransom and release.
    My turn came to speak my forced spiel for the camera. Oddly enough, Abdi didn’t seem to want us to repeat their announcement that we would lose our heads in a week if the money situation didn’t improve. I was happy to forget that one as well. However, the message he wanted me to give was, essentially, “We know you have more money than this. Get serious.”
    He made a gruff poking gesture at me, his way of calling “Action!” I’d been placed in front of a giant scrub tree, and I knew the masked men with guns were directly behind us on either side. It went off like the world’s weirdest screen test. I went passive on them, forgetting my lines over and over, thinking I was blowing my big moment. But eventually they seemed to get enough to satisfy them. Poul chimed in again to take up the slack.
    With the video done, that was it. Finished for the night. No phone calls, no negotiations. Making the video was all they wanted and all they would allow.
    While they drove us back, Jabreel went off with some of the other guys. It kept his hands away from me for the rest of the night. But I spent the long ride back to their camp with the sinking sensation that this video was about to pop up on the Al Jazeera network and go viral on the internet. What would it look like to outsiders? They had deliberately made it as menacing as possible. I had no doubt our poor families would be convinced we were in the hands of terrorists and doomed.
    As of that day, that night, I’d sunk down from taking one day at a time to taking one little piece of a day at a time—just what I could carry—and those little pieces of the day kept getting smaller.The men drove us for hours, this time. My back ached from bouncing over the terrain, my neck was on fire with muscle tension, and deep inside my body I was getting all sorts of little signals that things were not holding up well.
    They had my medicine in their possession but kept finding excuses to “punish” me by withholding it. There was no discernible logic to any of it. They allowed me to keep my thyroid medication but withheld medicine for the infections that plagued me in that filthy camp. I could feel my state of general weakness growing each day.
    The journey back to their camp was so long they stopped for the night in the middle of the dirt track, and in spite of our attempt to cooperate with the surprise video shoot, they took away our sleeping mattresses and pillows as “punishment” for the insulting amounts of money our people had been offering so far. It didn’t seem to matter that they were responsible for the fact that there had been no fresh communication that night and no chance to improve things. It was punishment time, and they seemed convinced we needed it.
    We lay still and managed to sleep a little bit, there in the roadway. Fortunately it was already late when we stopped, and sunrise seemed to come early. I awoke ready to rise and shine and get the hell out of there. Funny, but spending the night on the road—literally on the road—made going back to the wilderness camp seem like an improvement. While we climbed back into the cars, Poul got close enough to whisper, “This is going to take months.”
    No despair allowed. I didn’t say what I couldn’t help thinking: Except Abdi just told us we only have a week.
    •  •  •
    Abdi’s way of dealing with the one-week deadline was to ignore it when the week passed. I tried to be thankful for the reprieve,but it felt dangerous to assume we were out of the woods. When Thanksgiving approached, it was nearly a month since we were taken. At some recent point I suppose Abdi was either persuaded by Jabreel or had come to his own realization that if he killed us, all promise of money vanished. It was much better for him, he now realized and frequently assured us, to get far more money than this measly ransom offer by going to Al-Shabaab. They would pay well for us, and at least these poor guys could turn some measure of profit from all their hard work.
    “I sell you Al-Shabaab! Five million!” He strutted around the camp glaring at us as if we had personally stolen his fortune. Abdi no longer believed our spokesman Mohammed was telling him the truth. And while he couldn’t quite figure out how the “conspiracy” worked, he was committed to the suspicion that Mohammed was playing him off with the small offers because he