Impossible Odds

claiming not to have any. I wonder what he intends to say if they search us and find it. Fortunately, they let it go for the moment. Ali gestures to our few pieces of jewelry and shouts something in Somali that we can tell is a command to part with our bling. I start to remove my chunky necklace of costume jewelry, but he sneers and shakes his head. They only want the good stuff. My rattling hippie junk is of no interest.
    I’m worried about losing my wedding band and a diamond of my mom’s that was given to me after her passing. I am somehow able to make my shaking hand still enough to palm the diamond down into my bag, and then offer Ali a less precious ring.
    At first it seems to work. But my heart sinks when he confiscates my bag and keeps it at his side. He’ll obviously go through it at some point and catch on to my ruse, leaving me in the same dangerous position Poul just assumed. I can only hope when he finds the diamond it might make him happy enough to forget about my attempt to deceive him.
    Beyond that I can’t move. All I can do is struggle to recall anything useful from our pitifully brief hostage training session,which was taken from a larger program called HEIST, for Hostile Environment Individual Safety Training. I rack my brains for every scrap of information given to us, wishing I had memorized it all.
    The HEIST instructors impressed on us the importance of hiding our anger and avoiding any unnecessary conflict. They stressed that attackers will likely be in such an excitable state, they may be provoked into killing even if they don’t plan to. The trainers urged everyone to memorize a reliable phone number of someone who would be the right person to receive a “proof of life” phone call. Their reasoning was grimly practical—the only way to aid your own survival in a kidnapping is to have a line to a potential ransom source. Your chance for life is your captor’s hope for money.
    Coming up with a phone contact is the easy part. There’s no chance I’d forget Erik’s number. But I also can’t help but recall the instructor’s warning that a “proof of life” call only matters if a kidnapping is done for money.
    If we are being taken by ideologues who are out to make a political or religious statement, then there is nothing to be done for us. In that case, our only purpose here will be to endure a gruesome public execution.
    Ideological attackers in this region will almost certainly be forces of Al-Shabaab. I try not to obsess over how they would use our torture and death to spread their message, but I’ve seen the same internet videos of doomed hostages as everyone else. The kindest end brought to those victims was the cessation of pain and terror with a single gunshot. If this is a death squad, that’s the best we can hope for, here in this twisted mirror world where oblivion translates as mercy. I think any American adult living abroad knows of journalist Daniel Pearl, snatched from the streets and butchered alive in horrifying close-up video. Too many other horror shows have taken place since then, and so far there’s nothing to indicate this isn’t going to be another one.
    Meanwhile the car slams its way along the primitive roadways.My head and shoulders keep colliding with the door frame. I silently push myself, Think! Think! I recall the main point of HEIST is to focus on surviving the first twenty-four hours. After that, survival percentages surge upward. If we can get through the first day, we might have a shot at entering that small golden ratio of people who actually come out of these things alive.
    Some do come out alive, I silently tell myself. The numbers are small, but they do exist. Of course at this point we aren’t through the first hour yet, let alone the first day, so the twenty-four-hour tip is of no immediate help.
    Ali wants everything Poul is carrying. He even demands the ballpoint pen in Poul’s front pocket. For some reason Poul refuses. I wonder, What is he doing? Is it a male thing? He’s an old hand at the humanitarian expat life, and in his world you stand up to the man. Squawk back to authority.
    I try to ignore their little spat so it won’t seem as if we’re acting in concert by refusing to cooperate, but out of the corner of my eye I see Ali rip the pen out of Poul’s pocket. He makes it a point to stare back at Poul as if daring him to do anything about it while he carefully dismantles the pen into its various pieces, then tosses them