Impossible Odds

(satellite cell phones). He and his cohort wave their gun barrels in our faces as if there’s a chance we haven’t noticed who’s in charge.
    The fact that they immediately rob us actually calms me, a bit. Maybe they’re just going to carjack us. Maybe they’ll push us out, take the vehicles, the cash, and drive away! A rash of carjackings has recently occurred in nearby Kenya where victims were simply driven to distant locations and pushed out, but left otherwise unharmed and allowed to walk back home. So if we’re simply being robbed and carjacked, then walking home suddenly sounds like a great way to finish off the day.
    And in that fashion my name is changed to “Alice” and I am plunged through the looking glass. Here inside the mirror world, the notion of a gunpoint robbery passes for positive thinking.
    The vehicle plunges out into the wilderness, slamming over rough roads. There is no way to avoid wondering whether an impact with a pothole will cause one of these slaughter weapons to go off. I still have no idea who has attacked us, but the way they’re bouncing us around, it might not matter. All we need is for one hard bump to meet one careless trigger finger, and there we are: dead or maimed in the middle of this horror show. For all I know the only upshot to that would be Mr. Crazy Eyes giggling over our corpses and exclaiming the Somali equivalent of “oops . . .”
    As soon as Ali takes our phones, he decides Poul should sit in the back next to me while he climbs into the passenger seat—just Ali and the driver with Poul and me behind them, plus one creepy-looking little guy who jumps into the very back and starts going through our belongings.
    For a moment, I lock eyes with Poul and silently mouth the words, “What’s happening?”
    He answers in a soft, grim voice, “We’re being kidnapped.” The words are so quiet I can barely hear them, but they feel like they were shot out of a nail gun.
    The men scream at Poul to shut up and force him to turn around. We don’t need to speak their language to understand their commands for silence. They keep whipping out cell phones to call distant cohorts, shouting at the top of their voices.
    Still, even here in these first few moments, it seems apparent to me that their level of hysteria far exceeds the need. After all, they pulled off their first phase without a hitch. They have us in a clean capture and they escaped without a struggle. No one is in pursuit, as far as I can tell. But from their behavior, you’d think the guns were being held to their heads, not ours.
    This hysteria is surely fueled by their khat use, amplifying their emotions. But they have us, and that’s the truth of it. The result is that every skill and ability I possess has been pulled away. Nothing else I know is of any use, in this moment. Nothing I can do in my working life is relevant here. The person I am to my loved ones, my husband, my friends, doesn’t mean anything. My colleague and I are objects of pursuit, nothing more.
    The glaring difference between Poul’s situation and my own is both simple and deadly. Poul is a sixty-year-old Danish male and I’m a thirty-two-year-old American female. The proverbial elephant is not only in the middle of the room, it’s high on khat leaves and waving automatic weapons. Homophobia is dominant there, so Poul has little reason to fear gang rape. But I do. And while the news media here did carry that story of mobs protesting outside the Danish Embassy after the uproar over cartoon images of the Prophet Mohammed, in most neighborhoods there is generally not the same danger in being Danish as in being American.
    As the only female here, my local experience curses me with the knowledge of what has happened to many other women, Somali or otherwise, taken by these roving gangs of criminals. The horrible irony of my recent attempts to get pregnant with Erik is not lost on me.
    All that remains of me as I know myself, in this moment, is this little voice chanting this is really bad this is really bad. The thought is just too awful, that I might die with my joking text message to Erik about getting “kidnapped” now playing out in earnest. Regardless of what I think I can accept, the attackers continue screaming orders and arguments back and forth, always seeming to be in conflict over something or other.
    “Money!” Ali now bellows, waving at us to give him ours. For some odd reason, Poul responds to their demand by