In the Presence of My Enemies (23 page)

A few days later, after the buzz in the camp had settled down, we went to Solaiman. “This seems like a very selfish question for us to raise,” we said, “given all that people in other parts of the world are going through right now. But we must ask: Has this attack changed our situation in any way?”

“Not at all,” he calmly replied. “We already have a deal with Doctora Rose to exchange you guys for $3 million. Our word is our word, and we will not change that.”

So again, we waited in hope.

* * *

The following Wednesday would be Martin’s forty-second birthday. I asked God to please, please get me something I could turn into a present for him—a candy bar, anything.

A few days before his birthday, some guys went out to get the budget and once again were spotted by soldiers. They ducked out of sight, but the soldiers fired a few rounds to scare them away. Right after that, the heavy artillery started up. We all went running down to the river and hid behind one of the banks while shells exploded on all sides.

We ended up mobiling to a place in the mountains where we had been before, spreading out our empty rice sacks to sleep. When I sat up the morning of Martin’s birthday, out from under the rice sack crawled a little brown snake, heading for the woods! I sarcastically said to myself,
Oh, goody, we provided a warm place for him.
Then I told myself,
It’s not worth worrying about. If I let my mind run wild, it WILL!
I pretended it didn’t even matter. But I did wake Martin up and tell him that a snake had shared our sleeping space that night.

That morning our group had nothing to eat. We packed up to mobile again. As we were walking along, the Abu Sayyaf started saying, “Happy birthday, Martin!” Muslims don’t believe in celebrating birthdays and are, in fact, quite proud of that. But they didn’t mind saying happy birthday to Martin.

“How did you know it was my birthday?” he asked, perplexed.

“People have been calling in to Radyo Agong wishing you a happy birthday,” they said. They even gave the names of Bob and Val Petro, our friends from Aritao.

At noon, the only thing to eat was salt from a bottle that was passed around the circle. We kept walking the whole day. As it got closer to evening, we stopped along a trail, and for some reason our group of captors didn’t want us with them. So Janjalani and Solaiman had us moved to another group, which fortunately had some kind of soup. They shared with us, providing a little nourishment on Martin’s birthday after all.

But I was disappointed that the day ended without anything I could give my husband as a present. I told him how badly I felt. He just smiled and said, “You can make it up to me when we get out!”

That evening I remember he had an interesting conversation with a captor named Ustedz Khayr. This man was one of the most embittered fighters, passionate about regaining the Muslim homeland. He said the Abu Sayyaf didn’t want to have to do things like the recent massacre at the jeepney, “but the Christian world has just pushed us too far, and we’re sick of it. When people are oppressed, you can’t hold them back. It’s just going to be this way until we are given what we want.”

Martin kept his cool, as always, and gently probed for specifics. “Let’s see—just what all is included in your homeland?”

“Tawi-Tawi, Sulu, Jolo, Basilan, southern Mindanao . . . ,” he began naming off the islands in dispute.

“So, if you got these—if the government decided, for the sake of peace, to give them to you—would that be the end of your struggle?”

“Oh, no, no,” came the quick reply. “That would be only the beginning. Then we would be obligated to take all of Mindanao; after all, it’s a wealthy island.

“And then once we took Mindanao, we would take all of the Visayas [referring to the midsection of the Philippines, such islands as Cebu, Samar, Leyte, Negros, and Panay].

“Then when we were done with the Visayas, we would go next to Luzon.

“When all of the Philippines belonged to us, we’d move on to Thailand and other countries where there is such oppression. You see, Islam is for the whole world.”

* * *

We pressed on toward the coast, following Doctora Rose’s instruction. We walked day and night for several days, until my feet were totally raw. Every time we walked through a stream, water and sand leaked in through the holes in my blue boots. Before long it felt just like sandpaper rubbing the skin off my feet.

At every rest time, I rinsed out my boots and shook out my socks. But still, my feet began to look awful.

We walked through several Muslim villages that were totally deserted. Some of them were quite nice; they even had paved streets. But the civilians had fled, knowing that wherever the Abu Sayyaf came, bloodshed followed. In fact, this pattern became so established that the military had begun using it as a clue: abandoned villages meant the Abu Sayyaf must be nearby. The terrorist leaders had even resorted to bribery at times, sending messengers to say to the village leaders, “Please don’t leave. We’ll pay you to stay in your area, and we promise not to harm you. But please don’t give the
sundalo
a signal that we’re here.”

About this time Reina announced that she was pregnant. She told Janjalani, “If you want this baby to be healthy, I’ve got to be getting better food than I’m getting here.” That was enough to get her released.

We got to a place where the Abu Sayyaf had stayed before. We could tell by the trash left behind: old, sun-bleached candy wrappers, fire pits, general garbage. Solaiman was on the phone, as usual, and also getting text messages, which is a big thing in the Philippines.

“Hey, let me read this one to you,” he said to us. “See if you think you can guess who it’s from.” He then read: “ ‘Do you think I could come and spend some time at your place? Everyone is terribly upset with me right now, and I really could use a friend.’ ”

I looked at Martin and had no idea. He didn’t, either.

“We don’t know,” he said. “Who is it?”

Solaiman read the message again, and then gave the sender’s name. “It’s from Osama bin Laden.”

Could it have been true? Was the al-Qaeda mastermind feeling the heat in these days right after September 11 and looking for an obscure refuge somewhere? (I later learned that this same text message had been sent as a joke to millions of cell-phone users in the aftermath of September 11, but at the time we had no way of knowing that.)

* * *

That same day, we found out that Janjalani, Solaiman, Fatima, Bro—almost all the leaders—were leaving for “important business” on the outside.

I told Solaiman in tears, “You guys are going to leave us here and we’ll have no leadership and no communication!”

“No, no, no—this is a good thing,” he reasoned. “I’m going out to arrange for everything with Doctora Rose. The speedboat will come and get you. You’ll be out of here in no time.”

“Well,” I said, “it’s just really hard for me to stay in this camp of enemies. You are an enemy, but at least you have been an enemy we could connect with. You told us some of what was going on outside. Now you’re leaving, and we’re going to have nobody.”

The look on his face said that he was completely amazed that I called him an enemy. In his mind, he was just a wonderful fellow.

Soon they trekked off on their “important business,” which I thought was probably no more than finding a grocery store. They took two of the three sat-phones plus Janjalani’s stash of money, which funded our food supply. We were left to the tender mercies of Musab, Omar, and Sabaya.

There was one silver lining, however. Janjalani gave us his hammock as he left. After three and a half months on the ground, we could finally be a little more comfortable at night—although two people trying to sleep in the same hammock is not exactly luxurious. We found out that fitting two sets of shoulders at the same end was next to impossible. So we had to put our heads at opposite ends in order to get any rest.

Only on extremely cold nights did I start out with my back against Martin’s chest, just to help us both stop shivering. Then before long, I needed to pivot the other way. A few nights I even retreated back to the ground in order not to be so cramped.

We stayed a few days there on that hill right beside the water. Looking across the valley, we could see a finger of ocean coming in toward a river. Across on the other bluff, we noticed AFP troops moving in and setting up. Meanwhile, all was now silent from Doctora Rose.

Could it be that the military had been using her to lure us to the coast so they could flush us out?

In fact, that is exactly what seemed to be the case. I personally don’t think there ever was any $3 million, or that she ever intended to ransom us. The whole thing was a ploy to get us to a vulnerable place where the army could move in.

14

Wedding Time

(October–Mid-November 2001)

It was about this time that my ever alert husband, being mechanically inclined, discovered that his handcuffs didn’t stay shut anymore. Something had rusted through.

October 5

Abu Sayyaf defectors lead AFP troops to the remains of Guillermo Sobero.

We didn’t tell the Abu Sayyaf, obviously. We let them think they were locking him up securely every night. But in Martin’s mind, he knew he was free.

“What would people think,” he worried, “if they knew I could have escaped any time from here on, and I didn’t? Would they think I’m a coward?”

I just smiled and said, “They would know you were staying with your wife until the opportunity presented itself for both of us. And they’d respect you for that.”

Now in hindsight, I suppose there was one night when we maybe could have gotten away if we had really been on our toes. They put us in a farmer’s little shelter on the very edge of the camp. Right beside us was a big hill that went straight down to the ocean.

Could we have slipped out in the middle of the night, gotten down the hill without being noticed, and somehow fled to a town or army camp? It’s hard to say. Anyway, we were exhausted that night and went to bed as usual. We woke up the next morning and hadn’t given it a thought.

We always asked the Lord, “If there is an opportunity and you want us to try to escape, please make it clear to both of us, and give us the courage to act.” That time never came. We never sensed it was what we were supposed to do.

I do remember one conversation about the fact that I wasn’t guarded nearly as closely as Martin. “Maybe I should just go off for a walk and not come back,” I hypothesized. “You could follow me whenever you got the chance.” I wasn’t entirely serious about this, but it was something to mull over.

Not long after that, I stood up to go to the bathroom out in the woods. I ended up staying there for a while just to cry. It must have been half an hour before I returned.

Martin’s face was as white as a sheet. “I thought you were gone!” he exclaimed under his breath. And then he confessed, “In fact, I believed it so much . . . that I ate your share of the rice!”

We broke up laughing. But in that moment, I saw how afraid for me he was, and how we both needed to be careful not to do anything foolhardy.

Meanwhile, the daily dangers continued. The AFP was clearly on to our scent. One day the firepower jumped to a whole new level, beyond automatic rifles and artillery shells. Helicopter gunships with big machine guns blazing out the sides swarmed over our heads. What an ominous sound they made as they swooped down. Every pass seemed like it would mean our last breath.

And as if that wasn’t enough—a group of A-10 Warthog attack planes then came screaming across the sky dropping real bombs. How in the world we avoided getting hit I will never know. Out of this whole battle, the Abu Sayyaf suffered no deaths and only one injury.

It rained that night, and there were no trees to which we could rope our
tolda
s. So we just dragged the plastic over us for a little protection. We awoke the next morning totally soaked.

We walked much of that day, then returned to the same place to sleep the next night. The following morning, we were walking down toward a riverbed when, all of a sudden at the front of the line, shouts rang out, followed by new gunfire. We all hit the ground. The Abu Sayyaf were not intimidated in the least; they plunged ahead to see what was up. Soon we heard a scream. In time we learned that they had encountered three men at the river and managed to behead one of them, a
CAFGU.
The other two had run away. Just another normal day of jihad, apparently.

Whenever there was going to be a battle, in fact, Musab took out a little piece of cloth to make a headdress. He wanted to be sure he looked like a warrior. No matter what we were doing or how much we were running, he’d take time to arrange his headdress so he’d look cool if he died.

We just kept going and came to a farm where a young boy was working. I couldn’t help thinking he was about the age of Jeff, our son. We all rushed for the ripe bananas that lay on the ground—all except Martin, that is, who was roped to a guard. I stuffed about four or five bananas into my pocket.

Meanwhile, they tied this poor kid up with his hands around a tree. I could see he was absolutely petrified. A little bit later, one of the nicer guys ordered that he be loosed. But they couldn’t afford to let him go, now that he knew who we were. So—we had ourselves a new hostage. I felt so sorry for him.

* * *

We walked all that night and the next day. Once when we sat down to rest, Sheila came and sat down beside me. This was a bit unusual; she normally sat with Ediborah, both of them being Muslim now.

“I have a really big problem,” she began.

“What is it?”

“Omar is
sabaya
ing me.” Her face dropped.

I said, “Sheila, you’re already married! How can they do that to somebody who is already married?” My heart really sank, because if this came to pass, it meant that none of the rules applied.