Impossible Odds

him. Who ever gets good news at that hour?
    But this time the dreaded words didn’t come. “She’s free, Erik. We got her.”
    “What? Matt, we—we what?” He automatically gave himself a reality check. Was he dreaming? Was this real?
    “We got her, Erik. Both of them. Unharmed.”
    “Matt! Matt, I . . . Are you sure ?”
    “I can tell you at this moment, Jess and Poul are at our base in Djibouti for debriefing and medical care. Jess is sick but hercondition’s been stabilized. The main thing is, you don’t need to be worried anymore, Erik. She made it. You both made it.”
    The news smashed Erik open like a piñata. He screamed for joy at the top of his lungs, dancing around the room half naked, crying, shouting “Yes! Yes!” If anybody had video of that moment, it would have convinced them he was crazy, and of course he wouldn’t have cared.
    Jess was coming home. She would be back here in their home with him before too much longer. They might somehow have a chance at a future together, after all—if she still wanted him after the treatment she had endured.
    It took him awhile to reach John Buchanan, who happened to be in Washington, D.C., with Jess’s sister for a meeting with the FBI and Jess’s organization. Erik kept trying until he got a decent connection. He thought he would be breaking this incredible news that she was out and safe. But when he finally got through, he heard a joyful and highly relieved father on the other end of the line, who already knew the whole escape story. Somebody had gotten to John ahead of Erik and stolen his thunder on delivering the big news.
    At 10:32 p.m. in Washington, D.C., President Obama had called Jess’s father to break the news himself. So John got the chance to personally convey his deep gratitude to the president for taking the political risk to send in SEAL Team Six after his daughter, in spite of the countless hazards.
    Finally, Erik thought, it was a good day to be John Buchanan.
    •  •  •
    Jessica:
    It took us about thirty minutes to get to a drop point on the northern side of the Green Line. Throughout the flight, I kepttrying to fight off the shock and clear my head, but my thoughts were slow and thick. I could barely understand the questions being put to me. I realized the soldiers were trying to be kind, and I certainly didn’t feel threatened anymore, but only about half my brain power was working at the moment, and there didn’t seem to be much I could do to speed it up. All I was certain about was my deep gratitude for this rescue, this second chance at life. I thanked the men and kept thanking them, over and over. They must have thought there was something wrong with me, and I suppose there was. But my mind was clear enough to know how much I had to be grateful for. It was either a bona fide miracle or something very close to one.
    “Can we call my husband? I have to call my husband and let him know!”
    “Not yet,” one soldier shouted over the noise of the rotors. “But you can call him from the base.”
    On a more earthly level, I soon noticed that my need to urinate was strong and quickly growing worse, but there was no toilet on the helicopter. They asked if I could wait a few more minutes, and I told them there didn’t seem to be much choice.
    The men were heartbreakingly polite. They made special efforts to be kind, these athletic hunter-killers who had just taken out a camp full of armed men. They tried to engage me in conversation to determine how well I was processing my thoughts. The simple truth is that I was not thinking clearly at all, but they were kind enough not to mention it. Instead they just directed friendly one-liners to me, sort of open-ended in nature, the kind of thing you can either reply to or let pass by. They brought me up to speed on the Super Bowl game between the Giants and the Patriots, only eleven days away. They groused about the NBA strike.
    I nodded from time to time to let them know I was taking it in, but I couldn’t get much of a response to come out. A young medic who looked just like one of the muscular athletic departmentstudents I used to see around back in college knelt by me to take my vitals. With that, I experienced what may have been the very first blush of a reawakening of my identity as a person in the civilized world: a flash of embarrassment over my condition. I had been tall and thin back when this began; now I was just emaciated.
    In terms of my self-image, the