A Season in Hell by Robert R. Fowler

Author:Robert R. Fowler
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781443402064
Publisher: HarperCollins Canada
Published: 2011-08-09T19:00:00+00:00

On Day 43, 25 January, Omar Two came by to gloat. With ill-disguised glee he boasted, “We’ve taken four more!” I sensed that his furtive side glances probably meant that he was not supposed to be telling us this news, so I pressed him for as many details as quickly as possible before he changed his mind. Bit by bit the story emerged, but I decided that he was telling us what he had gleaned from Radio France Internationale or Al Jazeera rather than passing on information that had come through the AQIM communications network.

He told us that three days before, four European tourists had been captured while leaving the Anderamboukane festival of nomad culture on the border between Mali and Niger, about two hundred kilometres north of where we had been taken: a Swiss couple, a German, and an Englishman. They had, he said, been taken by an AQIM sister katiba in the Sahara and, ominously, he told us for the first of many subsequent times, “You are really fortunate that you were taken by this group because there are many others that would treat you very, very differently, where it would go very hard for you.” And then, with a snarl, “We would really like to be cutting you into little pieces, but Khaled will not let us.”

With that, he stalked away and didn’t come near us for two weeks. Louis and I were convinced that was because he knew he had overstepped the bounds by giving us tactically useful information and he was worried we would reveal his indiscretion to les frères, which, of course, we did not. The information was very precious. It was new, current, and highly relevant to our circumstances. Endlessly we discussed its implications. Was it part of a widespread initiative? Were Westerners being grabbed across North and West Africa?

Clearly our situation had just got a lot more complicated. Now three more Western governments were involved and they had widely differing official stands and track records on the pay or never-pay spectrum. We knew the Brits were, at least officially, among the more inflexible, while it was widely reported that money had been paid to get the German, Austrian, and Swiss tourists out of Groupe Salafiste pour la Prédication et le Combat (the predecessor to AQIM) captivity in 2003. Also, it was alleged that a ransom had been paid to secure the release of the two Austrians, Wolfgang Ebner and Andrea Kloiber, in October 2008. As our situation had become more complex it would probably take longer to resolve, but seven hostages from five different countries (four Western and one African) might bring collective pressure to bear, and collective decision making.

Recalling the horror of our first few days, we had enormous sympathy for the anguish these four people would be suffering, but our minds were immediately, and rather selfishly, flooded with the implications of all this for our predicament. Were the others close by? Would we all be brought together? Was that likely

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