In the Presence of My Enemies (16 page)

Later that day, however, I was watching a group of the remaining captors as they horsed around with each other, just having fun. Somebody pushed a pleasant young man named Jaafar, who was probably no more than eighteen years old. In a slightly mocking tone, he retorted, “Oooh, oooh, don’t kill me! I want to see my sons!”

What?
It didn’t make sense, at least in the present setting. But my intuition told me the sickening truth:
That was a quote right out of Guillermo’s mouth.
I couldn’t prove it, but somehow I knew I was right. I told Martin what I had just heard, and even though we hoped it wasn’t so, we couldn’t get the thought out of our minds that those may have been Guillermo’s last words.

In the days to come, we heard that line repeated more than once; in fact, it became kind of an “in” joke among the captors. We gradually admitted to ourselves the awful truth: Guillermo’s decapitated body was lying back there somewhere on a hillside, marked only by his head raised up on a bamboo pole like a trophy.

June 17, Father’s Day

Following a family tradition, the three kids pose for photos that they hope will reach their dad. Paul Burnham intentionally positions them with the Rose Hill house showing in the background, so Martin and Gracia will know where they are.

Sabaya had kept his word. The world had been shown that, indeed, this group was tough.

* * *

A day or so after the murder, word arrived that Tess’s work had been successful, and the money to release her husband, Francis, had come through. Young Kim’s ransom had arrived as well.

This was not, in itself, a source of immediate joy, because the hazardous process of transfer was yet to be arranged. The Abu Sayyaf wanted to make sure the hostages did not fall into AFP hands. They kept working to find civilians they felt they could trust to spirit them across the seventeen-mile strait of water to Zamboanga, where they could make public statements.

Meanwhile, we hostages who remained wrote up a list of supplies for Francis to send back to us if he could: some more
malong
s, deodorant, toothpaste, chocolates, etc.

“Tell the people out there they really need to work to get us out of here,” we added.

“Oh, yes, we’ll get you out,” he replied. “Filipino businessmen will give money; we can come up with the ransom for you, too.”

Several days before, I had found an optician’s discount card in the bag of abandoned IDs we had retrieved back on the boat and had penned a quick note to our children on the back of it. I had kept it upbeat, not wanting to upset them any more than they probably already were.

Hey Kids,

June 18

President Arroyo comes to Zamboanga City, meets with the hostages’ relatives at a military base, and vows that no ransom will be paid.

Wanted to say hello and let you know that we are fine. The Lord has given us special strength to hang in here when the going gets tough! We’ll tell you all about it one day. Until then, we love you 3 w/ all our hearts. We have the best family!!

Love, Mom & Dad

Francis took this note, too, and it made it to our kids. Jeff had it laminated and still carries it in his wallet.

We hiked several hours until we reached another farmhouse. Here, Francis and Kim were turned over to couriers, again with detailed instructions of what to say. Francis was to stop at Radyo Agong and repeat the familiar grievances: “We want our homeland back. We will keep causing trouble for the government until they agree to negotiate. More and more hostages will be taken.”

Francis did as instructed; his words were heard on the radio the very next day.

Meanwhile, the Abu Sayyaf decided to split us into two groups. Ediborah, Sheila, Angie, and Fe were in one group. Our group included Chito, Joel, Reina, young Lalaine, Martin, and me. No reason was given for this split; perhaps it was just to complicate the AFP’s task and not risk losing us all at once.

We didn’t see each other for perhaps three weeks. During that time, we stayed by a really nice river, almost like a park. We rested and got a bath almost every day. We rigged up a
tolda,
a piece of multistriped plastic awning thrown over a rope between two trees and tied off at the corners to nearby bushes for shade.

Some logging was going on in that area, and we managed to scavenge some boards to lay down on the ground under our
tolda,
making a small platform for the five of us to sleep on and keep us out of the mud when it rained. (Joel had talked one of the Abu Sayyaf into giving him a hammock, which he strung nearby.)

June 22

Gracia’s sister-in-law, Beth Jones, and her boys come from Kansas City to visit the kids in Rose Hill. They go to the zoo and then the park; pictures taken on this day make it to their parents in the jungle.

A couple of the captors decided to hang their hammocks on the trees supporting our
tolda,
which perched them directly overhead, so low that we couldn’t even sit up during the night. Talk about togetherness! But to the average Filipino, this wasn’t unusual at all.

One day, Sabaya called each of us to meet with him for a reading from the Koran. Martin and I went together.

“I want to explain to you the meaning of my name, ‘booty of war,’ ” he began. “You guys are our booty. We can make you slaves—but for now you’re just our war booty. The Koran says we are allowed to do this. Here, you can read it for yourself.” He handed an English translation to Martin.

My husband read the following passage: “So when you meet in battle those who disbelieve . . . when you have overcome them, then make prisoners, and afterwards either set them free as a favor or let them ransom [themselves].”

Other passages Sabaya showed us said, “Those who repent before you, have them in your power” and “Say to the infidels: If they desist, what is now past shall be forgiven them; but if they return, they have already before them the doom of the ancients. Fight then against them till strife be at an end, and the religion be all of it Allah’s.”

Sabaya then explained his interpretation, as outlined by various Muslim scholars: “There are four options that can be pursued with people who are the booty of war: (1) kill them; (2) make them our slaves; (3) have them convert to Islam and live with us in peace; or (4) collect taxes from them while they continue to practice their religion in secret.

“All over the world, these are the four choices,” Sabaya continued. “This applies to you, too.”

We sat there wondering why he was telling us this. We waited for some big announcement, but there was none. We were then dismissed.

A little while later, Reina was brought over for the same speech. Perhaps twenty or twenty-one years old, she was pretty and spunky. We watched her reading the same passages and listening to the same discourse.

But when she came back, she was visibly troubled. The speech had ended a little differently in her case. “He told me I have to be
sabaya
ed to one of these guys,” she said, her voice shaking. “I have to live with him and sleep with him and everything.”

“Oh, Reina!” we cried. “That’s terrible!” We already knew she had a boyfriend back home in Lamitan.

“I know. I told him I’d rather be dead. But he said I had no option. So then I said, ‘What’s next?’

“ ‘Well, you get to choose which one you’re going to go with,’ he said.”

What a predicament. We sat there staring into space, trying to figure out what she should do next. Was there any way to avoid this atrocity? We racked our brains and came up with nothing.

I finally said, “Well, Reina, what about Daud [David]? He seems noticeably kinder than the rest.” Daud had lost his wife in childbirth several years before. He was new to the group and had a softer demeanor, not like some of the tougher types.

Reina just shook her head in disbelief at the whole predicament.

That evening, if it hadn’t been so sad, it would have been comical to watch all of the Abu Sayyaf come “courting” Reina’s interests. They brought cookies and candy and coffee; it turned into a regular party. They introduced themselves and wanted her to know as much about them as possible.

The next day, Reina was called again to talk with Sabaya. But when she returned, the deal had changed. “I don’t get to choose after all,” she reported to us with a heavy voice. “I’ve been given to Janjalani.” No amount of protest would change the matter.

“He’s the head guy,” Sabaya had said, trying to make her feel better. “He’s educated, and you’ll be treated better with him than anyone else.”

So in the end, that is what transpired. Reina dejectedly picked up her stuff and moved over the hill to Janjalani’s hammock.

10

Surrounded

(Early July 2001)

With every passing night we spent in the open, my bones seemed to hurt more. I was becoming an old lady at a rapid pace. I awoke in pain every hour or so and had to sit up, sometimes even stand. This disturbed Martin’s sleep, of course, since we were routinely handcuffed together (now that Guillermo was gone), and the handcuff was then chained to a tree.

I thought to myself at one point,
Has there been even one night’s sleep in captivity that I could honestly term “good”? Not really.

One night just about dusk, some of the captors who had been out to get food came running back to our camp to report, “Soldiers! We’ve been ‘confirmed.’ They’re going to raid us in the morning.”

We pretended to go to bed that night, then got up again after dark and packed. Walking along the river in the black of night, our group of forty or fifty came within just a few hundred meters of the soldiers’ camp. We moved silently past them and into the darkness.

While mobiling, we each had our own guard who was assigned to watch us and make sure we didn’t try to escape. My guard was Sakaki, a pleasant enough fellow who seemed like he would have been more comfortable in the city than fighting as a tough guerrilla. On this particular trek, I was having a lot of trouble seeing in the dark because of night-vision problems that have plagued me ever since I had laser eye surgery. I couldn’t see where I was going, and we were now walking
through
a river on big rocks. Seeing my struggle to keep up, Hurayra was assigned to help me instead of Sakaki.

For some reason, Hurayra carried a sniper rifle instead of an M16 like everyone else. But he could be kind when he wanted to. All through the jungle are leaves that are fluorescent; they actually glow at night from a mold of some kind. Hurayra picked up a handful of these and hooked them onto his backpack so I could follow him. After he climbed over a rock, he extended his hand to help me up. This was rare; most of the others refused to touch a woman, especially an American woman. (Some, when required to help me, actually wrapped towels around their hands so as to avoid contact.)

Hurayra’s kindness extended to Martin as well; he called him “sir.” At one point he started showing up every morning between eight and nine with “a gift for Mr. Martin”—coffee or cookies or maybe hot milk. He would sit with a little notebook and ask us to help him learn English.

“What do you call such and such?” he would ask, and Martin would answer.

They would work together for at least an hour and sometimes longer. He would ask all about the United States. His real goal, he explained, was to get to Afghanistan and die in holy war so he could go straight to paradise.

One day Hurayra wanted to learn the English word for defecation.

“Well, in our culture we don’t really get that specific,” I replied. “We just say, ‘I have to go to the bathroom,’ or ‘I have to go to the CR.’ It’s considered crude to go into detail about exactly what you’re going to do there.”

He looked at us for a long time and then said, “If you only tell me you’re going to the CR, I have many questions!”

I broke up laughing as I said, “Hurayra, if you see me heading out into the woods with my water jug and a
bolo
knife to dig a hole, you can figure it out, right? But I’m still only going to say, ‘I’m going to the CR.’ ”

“Oh, okay . . . but I still have many questions!”

On another occasion while Martin and I were bathing at a little spring, Hurayra even volunteered to do our laundry for us. He seemed to understand that we were struggling to adjust to hostage life and needed to be helped along. He was just so polite and nice—for a terrorist!

Even though Reina was forced to spend most of her time with Janjalani now, we still tried to talk as often as we could. When we weren’t mobiling, she and I had even more time together. She was understandably depressed about her new lot in life as Janjalani’s mistress. But her natural spunk seemed to shine through, regardless.

Every once in a while, she would rise up and give Janjalani a piece of her mind. It was fun to listen. When he would say, “Look at all the support our movement has,” she would fire back, “Well, sure the civilians support you—you’ve got money! You send them to town with 3,000 pesos [$60], and they bring you back one sack of rice and some dried fish—and they get to keep the rest. Wait till your money runs out.”

Lalaine, on the other hand, seemed to be quite taken with Bro, who had been assigned as her bodyguard. This might have been a case of Stockholm syndrome, a reaction common in kidnapping situations, in which a hostage becomes sympathetic to or even falls in love with his or her captor. In any case, I knew she was in danger. “Lalaine, you need to be careful,” I told the young teenager. “Remember, this guy’s a terrorist.”

“What?” she replied. “They’ve never done anything bad to me. They just want their homeland back.”

“Lalaine, think a minute!” I said, quickly turning into a scolding aunt. “They forcibly took you away from a resort where you were vacationing with your family. Right now your parents are possibly selling their house in order to raise 10 million pesos for your freedom. They’re probably pleading with everyone they know, going into debt to ransom you out of here. And you say these guys have never done anything to you? Lalaine, you’ve got to keep clear in your mind who the bad guys are.”