Impossible Odds by Jessica Buchanan

Author:Jessica Buchanan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria Books

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Now that the Crisis Management Team had a line to the kidnappers, one of the essential challenges was to handle the delicate negotiations in such a way that the kidnappers wouldn’t give up and sell their “property” rather than continue talking. The kidnappers’ spokesman, Jabreel, repeatedly cried out, “Pirates crazy!” and warned them the crazy pirates were threatening to sell Jessica and her colleague to the Al-Shabaab network because the drawn-out negotiations were costing them too much. It was a tiresome threat, repeatedly raised, but the prospect remained too real to ignore.

Erik had always carried a certain sense of pride in his ability to show patience when necessary. Many times in his work, the ability served him well while he threaded legal needles in delicate negotiations. From the day of Jessica’s capture he began learning about levels of patience unknown to him. Until then, patience had been the capacity to hold his tongue when somebody got hot under the collar in a negotiating situation and went overboard on the tough talk and the threats. But the cost of that sort of patience was nothing, truly nothing, compared to the cost of silence now.

This torture only began with the idiots on the other end of the kidnappers’ phone connection. The worst of it for Erik was self-inflicted when he agonized over being helpless to take some sort of bold and sweeping action, and force all of this to a conclusion. Take the old-fashioned caveman approach, hunt down those men and fight them to the death.

Even if he had all the information in the world, there was nothing to be done with it. He was already connected to a huge network ranging from top politicians to guys on the ground in Somalia, as well as former Special Forces people from different countries, all of whom had offered their help. What kept him from accepting it was his pledge to do only what was in Jessica’s best interest. At this point he knew a private attack wasn’t an option, and even if an armed rescue plan went forward, the real professionals needed to do it. That didn’t mean the temptation wasn’t severe.

It gave him no pleasure to recognize this in himself. This is what he experienced as the power of raw frustration mixed with mortal fear for a loved one. By this time in the waiting period he had already witnessed, in John Buchanan, how it was possible to remain essentially calm and steadfast even amid such terrible anguish. He just wasn’t quite that way himself. He would have loved to have taken it all like some star in an action movie, one of those guys who always knows exactly how far to push things in order to save the day. But the world of movies had nothing to tell him.

What did he actually know? (1) They had a Crisis Management Team (CMT), made up of professional hostage negotiators and selected members of Jessica’s NGO. This team was linked to the families’

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