A Long Walk Home: One Woman's Story of Kidnap, Hostage, Loss - and Survival (4 page)

My mind screamed:
God, no, if they get me on that boat and take me away, where will we go? Who’s ever going to find me?

One of my kidnappers clambered aboard, the other forced me up against the boat’s side – under my hands its texture was rough, like painted fibreglass. Then I was shoved upwards from behind and pulled in from above and I keeled forwards into the boat, tumbling and banging my temple. It was a small vessel, maybe six feet wide, ten to twelve feet long. The men gestured irately at me. I gathered that I was being ordered to sit myself on one of a number of big yellow plastic containers that littered the boat’s floor. So I sat, and they flanked me at either side. The Navigator swung the boat around – and we sat for some moments, me breathless, scared, wondering what they were waiting for. Then two figures came splashing through the water towards us from the shore. One hurriedly lifted himself aboard, the other first took hold of the side of the boat and shoved it forwards before hauling himself in and taking a seat at the prow – as if he were the ship’s captain, the leader of this particular gang. He was a tall, stocky man wearing a padded and hooded khaki jacket. I knew these two latecomers could only have come from Banda Zero. They must have left David behind – knocked him unconscious? – so that they could make their getaway.

The mood among the five African men was urgent, determined. In desperation I looked back, raking the beach with my eyes. Had no one on Kiwayu heard us? Wouldn’t someone come
and stop this? But the resort looked as good as deserted. The Leader barked something at his Navigator, who yanked the
outboard
motor’s cord. The engine came to life with a high-pitched whine. Then the skiff lurched off and away, seemingly straight out to sea and the blackness of night.

It felt as though I were being catapulted, fired out of a gun – and I was almost too stunned by the violence that had been visited on me to apprehend my own terror fully. In the sky to my right the moon was huge and luminous, and it cast a wide ribbon of silver across the sea’s surface – an image of romance, turned here into horror. I looked back and watched, helpless, as the shoreline – my lifeline – raced away from me.

If the skiff had looked weathered and old, its engine had to be new – certainly powerful – for it soon got up to a breakneck, hell-for-leather speed, faster than anything I’d ever known. It skimmed and bounced over the tops of the waves, but when it slammed into a swell then bucketloads of water were flung on board. In my hopelessly inadequate vest and pyjama bottoms I was soon soaked, and shaking with cold as well as fear. A small blanket was thrust upon me and I pulled it round my shoulders, but it barely sat there, and quickly it became sodden and useless.

The rate of knots at which we travelled was also serving to bash me up and down where I sat, precariously, half afraid I would be tipped overboard. Although my legs were wedged painfully between these yellow containers, I listed from side to side. One of the men grabbed the back of my vest top so as to steady me, and I got a grip on one heavy container’s handle. But each time the boat smacked into a sloshing wave the impact was excruciating. Pain shot up my spine, and I couldn’t stop myself crying out.

The five men, in their shorts and hooded jackets, were oblivious to my distress and these conditions – they looked hell bent on the fastest escape from Kiwayu. My initial entreaties to them had died in my throat. I kept looking behind me, scouring to see any sign of movement from the resort – but all I saw was the shoreline growing smaller, until it had disappeared from sight.

Stuck in a fast boat on the Indian Ocean with five edgy, aggressive criminals, I saw nothing I could do other than to try to keep my head amid the crisis. If this was a kidnap then I had
to assume we were headed for some kind of bolt-hole or safe house, maybe further up the coast, where I would be held for money. I told myself that David wouldn’t allow this outrage to go on for long. He would come to find me. He would strain every sinew, do whatever had to be done to get me freed.

Suddenly I could hear a spluttering noise emanating from the engine, which hitherto had seemed so super-charged, and then abruptly it cut out, and the boat was doing nothing more than bobbing, adrift, on the water. The gang exchanged some short, sharp words. One of them hastened to his feet – one of the two who had abducted me from the
banda
. He rummaged out a piece of tubing, unscrewed the cap of a yellow canister and appeared to suck some of its contents up into his mouth. Then he transferred the pipe into the engine, got his lips round it again, and I realised he was attempting the old trick of petrol-siphoning.

As this went on, the Navigator sitting behind me came to my shoulder. ‘Would you like trousers?’ he said.

For a muddled instant all that I could think was
He speaks English!
I peered more closely at him in the dark. He was tall, maybe six foot four, rail thin and gaunt, with a goatee beard.

‘Yes, thank you,’ I replied. And he produced a pair of tracksuit bottoms, navy with white stripes – dry to the touch, so from where they’d come I knew not, but I pulled them on over my pyjama trousers, grateful not only for the courtesy but for this discovery that here was somebody with whom I could communicate – with whom
David
could communicate, whenever this gang let it be known what they wanted in return for me.

Moments later, another unexpected consideration: the man who had been siphoning fuel was now pressing his bulky black waterproof jacket on me. I put it on without hesitation, yanking the zipper right up to my chin to combat my shivers.

The Leader was trying to restart the boat by yanking the cord but he tried and failed, once, twice, thrice. I had a sense the gang was feeling confounded, nerves fraying a bit as their efforts proved fruitless. They kept changing places, hastily, and the motion of the boat unsettled me. Now bundled up in the heavy jacket and trousers, I took fright at the thought that if all this rocking were to pitch me overboard then I would sink straight to the seabed.

I was emboldened to speak up.

‘Where are you taking me? What do you want?’

The man sitting at my right – who had been last onboard together with the Leader – looked at me and laughed in my face, showing me a protruding over-bite of very white teeth. He seemed very young, nineteen or twenty. Rubbing his index finger and thumb together he chanted, ‘Money, money, money, money …’ The Leader shot him a stern look and he clammed up. But I was satisfied at least to have my assumption confirmed: I had been kidnapped for ransom. So a process would have to follow, and with any luck the end of it would come quickly and painlessly. Until then I would just have to keep calm and focused.

The engine coughed back to life, and the skiff lurched off once more, again at a fair speed if not quite so scarily fast as before. The Leader resumed his place up on high at the prow. Once or twice he glanced my way. I had begun to think he must have been the man with whom I’d seen David struggling, since the other latecomer to the boat, young ‘Money’, was so physically slight by comparison. And among the five members of this gang it was his presence that I found the most unnerving.

On we went, in silence save for the boat’s drone, for quite some time, until I felt the vessel begin to slow and saw a sandy spit of land come into view. Could this be the gang’s bolt-hole? As we neared the shore Money and the Siphoning Man jumped from the boat and waded through knee-high water up onto the sand, then strode up the beach towards the cover of some foliage and disappeared from view. The Leader stared after them but we made no move, just sitting there in the dark gently bobbing up and down on the water. The fifth of my captors, one of the pair who had abducted me from the
banda
, gave off a hostile air if I glanced at him, and so I tried to focus on the English-speaking Navigator. I was desperate to get some idea of our whereabouts, and I suddenly recalled George Moorhead mentioning Lamu as somewhere to which David and I might like to take a boat trip from Kiwayu. I turned to the Navigator.

‘Where are we? Is this Lamu …?’

He shook his head. ‘Somalia …’

That struck me, forcibly; and a horde of phrases leapt into my head, all of them unwelcome: ‘war-torn Somalia …’, ‘ungoverned Somalia …’, ‘the failed state of Somalia …’ I knew nothing of the place other than what I’d seen in news reports, but the news from Somalia was nearly always bleak. I cursed myself for not having cottoned on before now that this would be our destination – away from scenic, civil, tourist-friendly Kenya and towards Somalia, a place where the whole world knew the rule of law didn’t apply.

I had to get a grip on my runaway thoughts or else, I knew, I would start to panic – and panic was an indulgence I couldn’t afford. Again I tried to summon up positive thoughts of David:
He’ll have come round by now – hang on to that. He’ll have gone to get George. They’ll have raised an alarm, got people out to look for me
.
Maybe the British Embassy knows that I’m missing by now. They’ll have a plan, it’ll be put straight into action …

Now the two men were wading back through the water, each lugging a yellow container identical to those already on board. With difficulty, assisted by the Leader, they hefted these items over the boat’s side to land on the floor with a thud. I under stood: we’d stopped here for no purpose other than to take on fuel.

The Leader muttered something over my head in the direction of the Navigator, who tapped my shoulder. ‘You sleep now,’ he said. They produced and unrolled a thin mattress, and lay it on top of the canisters. I was told to lie down – it was wet and ill-smelling – then they threw the sodden blanket over me, and then I felt another heavy layer go on top of that. In the blackness beneath these covers I stretched out. To be unable to see where we were going was a worry. But to be lying down at least relieved the raw pain I felt in my coccyx from having been bashed about all through the high-speed journey. I was physically spent – the fatigue of stress, fear and adrenalin crept over me – and in time I must have slept.

As I regained consciousness I could tell from my recumbent position that we were slowing down again. I sat up, hauled away my covers and faced the new dawn. The engine had been killed and the skiff was drifting toward the crescent-shaped cove of a mangrove swamp. The waters were flat and calm, the boat making the merest ripples that broke against the trunks of the mangroves. Those trees – with their twisted, contorted roots and looming branches that seemed to force their way out of the water – had a forbidding look to them, like some gate set up by nature to guard a lost world.

Looking about me in the light of daybreak I could finally make out with clarity the faces of my motley crew of captors. Immediately on seeing the man who had loaned me his jacket, I thought,
My god, he’s the image of Marvin Gaye
… The likeness was so incongruous and striking, I knew in an instant that this was a man I could easily pick out in a line-up.

But other than the Navigator – who smiled at me – my captors paid me no mind, looking remote and focused as before. Throughout the journey they had barely exchanged a word with one another. Now was no different. The division of labour between them, though, seemed very clear and spoke volumes. The Navigator worked the boat’s rudder; Money took hold of mangrove branches so as to pull the boat deeper into the swamp; ‘Marvin’ beckoned me to stand up and get out into the shallow water, where spiky protruding mangrove stumps scratched my feet, so he pulled off his big leather sandals and pressed them on me. Then the boat was tied up and ‘the Fifth Man’ took charge of unloading it. The Leader, who had been first off the vessel, stood by and watched, his face inscrutable. There was no friction within this gang: the Leader ran the show, the others followed his command.

The Navigator led me to a large shrub, where he took a machete and slashed away at its lower branches then told me to ‘get inside’ – by which I gathered I would have to manoeuvre myself under the hacked-out portion. This was a knotty task, as my borrowed jacket kept getting snared on thorns, and I had to watch where my hands went too. I gestured that I’d like to remove the jacket, at least doff its hood, since keeping warm was no longer a factor. But the Navigator was adamant: ‘Your head, you must cover.’ And I could see he would not tolerate dissent. Under this shrub the mangrove swamp was now at my back and
I was staring at arid countryside before me. The thorns and branches dictated that the only way for me to sit was in a crouch with my knees to my chin – intensely uncomfortable, as every bone in my body was aching. And yet just to be on dry land was preferable to me to being on that boat.

I watched the gang confer together in a circle, glancing occasionally at me. For a while I had been wringing my hands, a nervous habit of mine, and in doing so now I realised I was still wearing two diamond rings – one of them my mother-in-law’s engagement ring. Suddenly their value in the eyes of these bandits became crystal clear to me, and I twisted the rings so the stones were palm side. I was gripped by the need to secrete them safely away. But I had no pockets, no obvious hiding place. Thinking fast, I beckoned the Navigator to the shrub and told him that I needed to go to the toilet. He relayed this to the Leader, who nodded agreement, and I was allowed to pick a spot at a distance but within sight, behind another smaller shrub. There I crouched and worked as fast as I could, ‘worrying’ the rings off my swollen fingers until they came free. Then I tied the rings onto the cord of my pyjama bottoms and tucked the cord away next to my skin – now sure that the prized possessions were safe from discovery, and pleased by my own quick thinking.

As I stood up I noticed a definite footpath in front of where the boat was moored, winding steeply through some undergrowth and overhanging trees, a path clearly well trodden. I was curious. But now I was being beckoned back to my cage.

We remained in the mangroves for the day, in blistering heat. But for a few shards of shade from the shrub I was exposed to the direct sunlight, and I sat there, roasting, sweaty, itching from
insect bites all over me. Hours passed, though I had lost any accurate sense of time. Marvin and the Navigator sat opposite me, the Leader and Money to one side. They lazed about, talked to each other, their urgency seemingly spent. At intervals a couple of them would head up the path in front of the boat, and return after a little while.

Perhaps because of all else that I’d had to contend with, hunger and thirst had been crowded out of my mind – until the Navigator came over and proffered me a beaker crudely fashioned from a plastic Evian bottle with its top cut off. In this was some cloudy-brown water. I took a wary sip, but I knew this was all wrong and had to make them see.

‘If I drink this I will get sick. You know that? If I get sick you will have to take me to hospital. I have to drink bottled water.’

He nodded, took my point. ‘OK. You get fresh water, tomorrow.’

Though I had made myself understood, that ‘tomorrow’ nonetheless made my heart sink. Everything in me hoped for the fastest possible resolution to my predicament. I was badly dismayed to think that their plans for me might be more complex.

Above all I was yearning for David – to see his face, hear his calm and caring voice, be held by him. Back in the UK it was Sunday. Ollie wouldn’t be working. I imagined that by now David must have contacted him with the bad news, and also the wider family – his brother Paul, and on my side most likely my sister Carol, who could be trusted to relay it. I dreaded, though, to think how my ninety-year-old mother would react to this seismic shock.

With one violent stroke, the shared holiday that had been bringing David and me such happiness had been turned into the grimmest of nightmares, one from which I was desperate to
awake. I longed for home. Wishful scenarios were running through my head of how David and I would speak of this ordeal in the future – rarely, for sure, in hushed tones, thanking our lucky stars. ‘That time you were taken,’ David would say. ‘Thank god it was only days, not months, years,’ I’d reply. And I had to believe that would be the case – that if I wasn’t to be rescued today then it would have to be tomorrow.