In the Presence of My Enemies (3 page)

Although he was flattered by the offer, Martin really didn’t want the position. “I just want to be what I’ve always been: a line pilot,” he told me. Martin was never happier than when he was flying the mission’s little red-and-white Cessna into jungle airstrips, bringing groceries and medicine to our missionary colleagues, or helping ferry tribal people out to medical appointments.

Nevertheless, Martin’s extraordinary piloting and ability to work with people kept moving him higher and higher up the organization’s chain of management. In fact, he had turned down this promotion several times because our three kids were still young and he didn’t want to do all the required traveling.

I kept telling him, “You know, I don’t want to move back to the States any more than you do. But the truth is, you’re the right man for this position. You really are!” I loved the Philippines, but to be honest, I didn’t care where we were or what we were doing, as long as we were together. Martin would just smile and shake his head at me.

About May 10, Martin left for a two-week trip to the United States so he could meet with the senior New Tribes leadership team. While he was away, the mission pilot on the western island of Palawan was called home due to a death in the family, leaving the island unmanned. Through e-mail, Martin and I concluded that as soon as he returned, Martin should go to Palawan to fill in; after all, the missionaries in the tribes needed flight service. Plus, a translator was already scheduled to come and do some tribal work on those particular days. He’d need a pilot.

As I went over Martin’s schedule in my mind, I knew he would be returning to the Philippines tired and jet-lagged—and would immediately take off for a week’s duty on Palawan. I also knew that he would put in long days on the island and that he’d have to cook for himself. It didn’t seem right. I knew he needed help.

My schedule was packed as well, with visitors coming through—but then, oddly enough, a couple of things canceled.
I can go along with him and help him out,
I thought. Plus, with our wedding anniversary coming up on the twenty-eighth, if I went along I could at least be with him on that day.
Maybe we can even do something special while we’re there.
We’ve never had time to really enjoy the sights of Palawan.

I called one of our coworkers on the island and asked her, “Where’s a good place for Martin and me to celebrate our anniversary? He’ll just be back from the States.”

“Oooh, you should go to Dos Palmas,” my friend said. “It’s a wonderful resort on an island all its own; you can only get there by boat. The food is terrific, and they have two kinds of rooms—garden cottages on land and cottages on stilts over the water.”

“What would you recommend?”

In the background I heard her husband call out, “Over the water! Those are the nice ones.”

“Okay, why don’t you go ahead and book one for us for Saturday night the twenty-sixth?” I said. After that, I arranged for our neighbors, Bob and Val Petro, to take care of the kids. I began cooking ahead and freezing some meals for them to eat while we were away.

When the Dos Palmas reservation came through, I looked at the price—10,000 pesos for the two of us ($200)—and got cold feet. Yes, it covered lodging, activities, and all meals, but still . . . that was an awful lot of money for our budget. Would Martin be upset with this extravagance? What would our donors think if they knew?
Maybe I should just call my friend back and ask if there’s a nice place in town instead,
I thought.

If only I had. . . .

* * *

I looked around and counted: there were seventeen hostages in all packed onto the floor of the speedboat. Up on the deck, ahead of the pilot wheel, a group of our captors stood, while a few others stood back by the motors. Conversation flowed, in both English and one or more other languages I didn’t recognize.

The whole loading process had taken maybe twenty-five minutes—all the hostages had been taken from the cabins over the water, none from the garden cabins. At the last minute, somebody said, “Wait! We need a cook.” Quickly, one of the kidnappers jumped out of the boat and ran up to the top of the hill to abduct the resort’s cook; his name was Sonny. Two security guards were nabbed as well. Obviously, they were no match for the raiders.

With Sonny and the guards, our hostage count rose to twenty.

The engines powered up, we pulled away from the pier—and suddenly one mystery was solved. The entire group of fifteen or so captors began to pump their fists in the air as they chorused in unison,
“Allah
akbar!
Allah
akbar!
[Allah is the greatest! Allah is the greatest!]” Instantly, we knew who we were dealing with: the dreaded Abu Sayyaf. They were the only ones with the audacity to do something like this.

I didn’t know a lot about the Abu Sayyaf, other than that they were terrorists. Throughout the southern Philippines, people were afraid of them. We learned later the meaning of their name, which set the tone accurately:
Abu
(“father of”)
Sayyaf
(“the swordsman”).

This was the same group that had taken Jeffrey Schilling, an African-American Muslim who had come to the Philippines to marry a Muslim girl the year before. Upon hearing about the Abu Sayyaf, he thought he could go to them, as a fellow Muslim, and explain that their tactics violated the Koran. His attempts at reeducation backfired immediately; they said he was a CIA agent, turned him into a hostage, and demanded one million dollars in ransom. Jeffrey was held for seven and a half months. We had heard he finally escaped by slipping out of his handcuffs, made possible by his weight loss.

I turned to Martin with a heaviness starting to press down upon my shoulders. “We are in big trouble,” I said.

“Yeah, we are,” he quietly agreed.

I watched as the white cabins of Dos Palmas grew tiny on the receding horizon, and soon I couldn’t see any land at all. We roared out into the Sulu Sea, heading who knew where? The ride across the open water grew rough, and we found ourselves bouncing into the air and slamming down onto the floor again and again. The boat was seriously overloaded with thirty-five bodies aboard. We bumped ahead regardless.

I wasn’t crying or shaky yet; all that would come later. I was steeling myself to stay calm, trying to stay focused as each event unfolded. I was also working to recall a class I had taken back in the late 1980s, when New Tribes Mission had sent their contingency planner, Guy Sier, to prepare the missionary team for hostage situations.

“The first few moments, when everyone is being rounded up,” he had said, “is when the captors are the most trigger-happy. So do what you’re told. But soon after that, begin to make eye contact with your kidnappers. Start to become a real person to them, not just an item. Go ahead and let them know what your needs are. That helps establish your individuality in their minds.”

What else had he said? I hadn’t really been paying full attention that day, and neither had Martin. Kidnapping was something that happened to other people, not to us.

I decided to put into practice the part I remembered. When the driver throttled back just a bit, I caught Solaiman’s eye and announced with a firm voice, “We need a CR [the Philippine abbreviation for ‘comfort room,’ or bathroom].” After all, we’d all been pulled out of our beds and hustled straight onto the boat. “Where can we go?”

“Yeah, yeah,” the other hostages agreed, nodding.

“There’s no CR here,” Solaiman declared.

That wasn’t good enough for me. “Well, we need to go to the bathroom, so we’re gonna go,” I retorted. I got up and headed for the stern of the boat.

One of the other hostages volunteered to hold up a
malong
(the big Philippine wraparound skirt made of batik material) to give us women a bit of privacy as we squatted, one after another, right on the floor. When this process was complete, the engines powered up again, and we were off.

As we sped through the sea, the spray of salt water came flying over us from time to time, leaving us drenched and chilled. An older man began to visibly shake with cold, and someone passed him a shirt to wear.

A young woman sitting near me was scared out of her wits. I began talking with her and learned that her name was Divine. She looked at me with terror in her eyes and said, “Our family has no money for ransom! We don’t have anything!”

I put my hand on her shoulder and said, “You know, it doesn’t matter if you have money or not. Money won’t do any good right now anyway. The Lord’s the only one we can trust. Try to calm down, and let’s just think about getting through today.”

She clung to my hand and seemed to settle down a little.

About an hour into the trip, one of the older Abu Sayyaf leaders, Mang Ben, a bearded man in his thirties, leaned over toward Martin. Looking down at Martin’s hand, he announced with a stately air, “I want that ring!”

Martin could do nothing but hand it over.

I looked at my husband and whispered, “What did I tell you?” I couldn’t help remembering the day when I had bought that simple gold band. I’d paid fifty dollars for it at Service Merchandise in Raytown, Missouri, outside Kansas City. Now it had been stolen in broad daylight. I tried to remind myself that we could get another ring.
It’s just a gold ring,
I told myself.
A ring can be replaced.
I gripped Martin’s hand even more tightly.

Occasionally, another boat would come into view on the horizon. Whenever this happened, the captors herded us together so they could cover us with a tarpaulin in order not to be noticed. During one of these times, we heard the engines throttle back, and another boat came alongside. A conversation ensued in a language I couldn’t understand. Apparently it had to do with getting food, because the other crew tossed the Abu Sayyaf some kind of packet.

Once the boat left, the food was passed under the tarp to us. It was cassava, something I’d never eaten before, although I knew it was grown by some Philippine farmers. I later learned that cassava is poisonous if eaten raw, but it can be peeled, boiled, and then drained for eating. Or it can be pounded, mixed with water, and put into banana leaves for steaming. It comes out like a hard paste.

My first bite was very vinegary. “Is this okay to eat?” I asked.

“Oh, yes,” one of the other hostages replied. “In fact, once it’s fixed like this, it can last for days and days.”

I hadn’t realized how hungry and thirsty I was until we began to share the cassava. The couple who had brought the big water jug passed it around so the rest of us could have a drink. That helped a little—but I couldn’t help but think about the delicious peanut M&M’s I’d left in the room, and I mourned the loss.

As the day progressed, the sun grew hot and the tarp was rigged up to provide some shade. The captors said nothing about where we were headed. We studied them, trying to figure out their names and who were the bosses. One of the men quickly stood out for his colorful personality and ability to turn a phrase. Sabaya was short and stocky. While everyone else wore army fatigues or baggy pants, Sabaya wore tight red stretch pants, looking oddly out of place.

We found out later that his name, and most of the others’, were not their given ones but rather their “jihad names,” chosen to evoke their new personas for battle. Sabaya, for example, meant “booty of war.” Other names had equally vivid meanings, of which they were very proud.

Around two or three in the afternoon, Solaiman came to the group of hostages with a Big Chief pad of yellow paper to start interviewing us. He began by saying, “We’re the Abu Sayyaf. Some people call us terrorists. We want you to know, we’re not terrorists. We are simply people whom the Philippine government has robbed of our homeland, and we just want it back. No one in the government will listen to us, and so we have to do things like this to gain notice.”

He asked us our names and what our jobs were. One by one, he wrote down the information:

• Francis, an older gentleman and banker, and his wife, Tess

• Chito, a sales representative with a cell-phone company, and his coworker Janice

• Reggie, who was well connected to the power circles of Manila, and his girlfriend, Rizza. This was the couple who had brought the suitcases and the water jug.

• Buddy, a publisher of a travel-guide magazine (for which he had been scouting an article on Dos Palmas), his wife, Divine, and their eight-year-old son, R. J.

• Angie, Divine’s sister, a young woman who appeared to be in her early thirties

• Guillermo Sobero, an American contractor, and Fe, his young fiancée

• Letty, a Chinese businesswoman, and her daughter, Kim, who was perhaps thirteen or fourteen, plus Letty’s niece, Lalaine, also a young teenager. Lalaine had been staying in the garden cottages with her own family but had gone down to the water to spend Saturday night with her aunt and cousin.

• Sonny, the Dos Palmas cook

• Eldren and Armando, the two Dos Palmas guards

• Martin and me

Except for Guillermo, Martin, and me, all were Philippine citizens and well-off enough to afford a place like Dos Palmas.

When Solaiman got to us, Martin replied, “We’re American missionaries with a group called New Tribes Mission. We try to help the tribal people. We live up on Luzon.”

A cloud of disappointment came across Solaiman’s face. He had hoped that we would be European—or at least American—business types, whose company would readily pay to get us back. Mission groups, on the other hand, were
(a)
poor and
(b)
on record with standing policies against ever paying ransom.

May 27

2:00 A.M., Rose Hill, Kansas: The phone rings in Martin’s parents’ bedroom with news that their son and daughter-in-law have been kidnapped.