BURIED ALIVE

Thomas Nelson

Contents

Introduction by Dan O'Shea..................................xi1 Kidnapped!................................................12 Shoot-out at the Compound.................................93 Captive...................................................134 The Family Is Notified....................................195 The Mosque................................................256 Prayers...................................................317 Breakfast and Beatings....................................358 The Kidnapping Business...................................439 Allah Akbar!..............................................4910 Meanwhile, Back at the Mosque ...........................5311 The Critter Shack and Fields of Rock.....................6112 Exercise Bike............................................7113 Underground..............................................8114 Rules of the House.......................................8915 January..................................................9916 Video Release............................................10517 The Family Takes Action..................................11118 America's Funniest Home Videos...........................11719 Carrie's Diary...........................................12320 The Romanians............................................12921 No Smoking...............................................13722 Air-Conditioning.........................................14323 Munaf....................................................15124 Another Ransom Paid......................................15525 Reward for Information...................................16126 Buried Alive.............................................17327 Road Trip................................................17928 Camp Snoopy..............................................18729 The Perfect Storm........................................19330 Rescued..................................................20131 Barbecue, Whiskey, and Cigars............................21132 Family Reunion...........................................21933 Iraqi Justice............................................23134 American Flag............................................237Acknowledgments.............................................243Notes.......................................................245About the Author............................................249

Chapter One

The traitor's name was Majid. He was one of several men armed with AK-47s whose job it was to protect my coworkers and me at the Saudi Arabian Trading and Construction Company in the upscale Mansour district of Baghdad during the height of the war in Iraq.

The other guards were grateful that warm November evening when Majid offered to stand watch alone at the gateway to our compound, an office building and a private home directly behind it that was surrounded on all sides by a concrete wall. It was the holy month of Ramadan, when Muslims fast from dawn to dusk, and as the sun was setting, it meant that the guards could escape the dust-filled air and head into the office's kitchen to prepare their first meal of the day. I was attending a dinner party given by the company owner, Malek Antabi, who was hosting the affair at the private home next to the office building.

In hindsight, I really wish I had learned to speak Arabic. I spent a great deal of time in the Middle East after I retired as a Naval commander with twenty years of service; I learned a lot about Arab culture and the religion of Islam, but I just didn't have an ear for the language. At the dinner party, all of the guests were speaking in their native language as we ate dates and drank small cups of Arabic coffee. I didn't know what in the world the men were talking about.

As dinner was a long way off, I told my colleague Zein Hussami that I was going to the office to work on some contracts. I asked him to come over and get me when the food was ready, and I headed to work. The rooftop route was the quickest way to go back and forth between the buildings-upstairs to the house's second floor, down a hallway, and through a door that led to a large rooftop patio used for social occasions. A metal bridge connected the house and office building, with about one foot of space separating the buildings; four steps up the bridge, across a short plank, and four steps down, and I was on the other rooftop patio. Crossing it, I opened the door that led to the second floor, where my office was located.

It may sound like a strange path to take, but in addition to being a shortcut, it was much safer than traveling the streets outside of the guarded compound walls. By taking the rooftop route, I avoided the courtyard in front of the office, where vehicles would enter the compound after being cleared by security through a metal gate. The gate that Majid was supposedly guarding.

As I crossed the rooftop, I didn't see anyone. I didn't hear anything, other than my stomach, which was rumbling as I settled into the chair in front of my desk to catch up on some e-mail and go over food contracts we were negotiating with the American Army. I kept an eye on my office doorway, hoping Zein would appear soon and announce that dinner was finally ready.

But the masked gunmen got to me first-four of them, armed with AK-47s, a silenced Sterling machine pistol, and a Tariq 9mm, the standard-issue pistol for the Iraqi Army. The men rushed into my office with their weapons drawn. A knowledge of Arabic wasn't necessary. "Come with us or we will kill you," one of the men said in clear English.

My instinct was to grab the 9mm pistol within arm's reach on my desk. It had one round in the chamber, ready to fire, and fifteen rounds in the magazine. An MP5 machine gun was in a file cabinet behind me; it was not within arm's reach.

Shoot it out-that's the training I received. If you are ever in a kidnapping situation, shoot it out, don't get caught, and don't get taken alive. Good advice, I suppose. I could have easily killed one of the men but not all of them, and they would have gunned me down within moments.

It was a split-second decision. I decided to live.

I signaled my decision by standing up slowly and allowing the kidnappers to walk me through the door and into the hallway.

I didn't know who these Arab men were or why they were after me. There were several possibilities to consider. Perhaps they were just one of the Mafia-like criminal gangs roaming the war-torn country and kidnapping wealthy Iraqis for ransom. A (much worse) possibility I didn't want to consider was that these men were part of the insurgent terrorist cell led by the ferocious Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. A notorious terrorist known to have links with Al-Qaeda, Zarqawi and his thugs were abducting and beheading their hostages in 2004, then releasing scenes of their gruesome murders on videotapes that were aired on the Internet and Al Jazeera television, an Arab-language news network. My best hope was that these armed-and-masked thugs, who looked to be in their twenties and thirties, were Iraqi "businessmen" who kidnapped for a living.

Hope is not a sound strategy, but it was all I had.

The man holding the Tariq pistol raised it to my head and ordered me to follow him downstairs. We passed by the closed office door of another American employee; then we turned right and went down about a dozen steps in the stairwell. When we got to the first floor, I was pushed into the hallway on my right and ordered to lie facedown on the floor.

Once downstairs, I saw that more than twenty masked and armed men had overrun the office. Majid was with them. He wasn't wearing a mask and was not even trying to hide from view. In fact, he was very busy helping some of the gang members as they looted the main office and ripped through file cabinets.

Majid was a traitor, all right. He had unlocked the iron security gate and quietly led the gang into our building. They walked right through the main door and into the front office without a fight.

Some of the gang members started to carry computers outside. A few of the men went back upstairs to my office, but for some reason, they didn't take my computer.

With Majid's inside help, the gang had caught our security men off guard while they were cooking their dinner in the kitchen at the rear of the building. From the hall, I could see the guards were also lying facedown on the floor underneath the dining table. Their arms were pinned behind their backs, and their wrists were bound with nylon handcuffs that looked something like large strap twist ties. I noticed they were similar to the ones carried on commercial airplanes to detain drunken passengers or would-be hijackers.

The guards had not made any noise, as the gang quickly took control of the first floor of the office building. I wondered why the guards had done nothing to protect us; why they didn't warn us we were under attack. If the guards had fired their weapons at the intruders, signaling an attack, I would have had time to grab my machine gun. My American colleague, Alex Loggins, was in his office right next door to mine, and he was also armed. Together, firing from the top of the stairwell, we might have been able to defend ourselves against these hoodlums.

That's when I realized that Alex wasn't downstairs with me; he was probably still back upstairs in his office, hiding behind a closed and presumably locked door. I guess the kidnappers had only taken me because my door was open; they had ignored the closed door that concealed Alex, probably thinking it led to a closet.

And now I was downstairs, unarmed and unaided, surrounded by armed men who were either dressed in traditional Arab robes or wearing dark, cotton jogging suits. All of them wore masks-except the traitor.

The man with the Tariq pistol who had shoved me to the floor suddenly yanked my arms behind my back and strapped my hands together with the nylon tie cuffs. He asked me if I spoke Arabic.

"No," I replied honestly. "I only speak English."

"Is there anyone else upstairs?" the gunman asked.

"No," I lied. "I was the only one."

He seemed satisfied by my answer and helped me to my feet; then he and the armed men began moving their hostages out of the office building. Altogether there were six captives: myself; three Iraqis, whom I would never see again; a Filipino man named Robert Tarongoy, who would remain quietly by my side throughout most of my ordeal; and our "tea boy," who was from Nepal. (He was the employee who served us hot tea every day, but to his misfortune, he was not serving at the dinner party that night.)

We were shoved into the kitchen, past the stove, where the guards' food was still cooking, outside through a secondary doorway, and onto the front patio, where the iron gate gave access to the street. All I have to do is stay alive, I told myself. The longer I can, the better it will be for my family.

I was sure I would be killed; if I lived even until the end of the week, I was certain that would be a miracle. But a week would be good for my family, I thought. At least that would give them time to find out what had happened to me; to adjust to the fact of my kidnapping; to mentally prepare for my eventual death.

But first, they would have to come to terms with a little misconception on my part-I never told them that I had been transferred from Saudi Arabia to Baghdad. I didn't want my family and friends to worry about me working in a war zone, so I simply did not tell them. For all they knew, I was still working in Saudi Arabia, where the company's headquarters was located.

Although my wife, Susan, and I had divorced the previous year after thirty years of marriage, we remained good friends. She was living in California, where she had just bought a new house, and I was still making payments to her under the divorce settlement, which helped her pay the mortgage. My oldest daughter, Carrie, and her husband, Rob, also lived in California, where Carrie worked as a family therapist and was helping children with autism. My youngest daughter, Amanda, was back in my hometown of Memphis with her little girl, my beautiful granddaughter, Sabrina, who was just eight years old.

I was, and still am, extremely loyal to my family. However, as I thought about them over the weeks and months ahead, I also had occasion to be grateful that I didn't have any pictures or letters from my family in my office, and that the black gym bag there, which contained every piece of information regarding who I was and where I came from, was dismissed as worthless and left behind by my kidnappers. All of my identification-driver's license, passport, and my retired military ID-was in that bag, folded inside a tan, walletlike pack that was on a long, cloth strap, so I could wear it around my neck when traveling to the U.S. Embassy and military bases throughout Baghdad. Ironically, the identification pack had a small American flag embroidered just beneath a zipper that held my cash, and beside the flag, stitched in dark brown, were the words Iraqi Freedom. The front of the pack showed my United States Defense Department uniformed service card, which identified me as a contractor-a Geneva Convention card for civilians accompanying the armed forces. Next to it was my Baghdad embassy identification card. When the pack was opened, it showed my Saudi Arabia Trading Company contractor card, as well as my weapons permit.

All of the ID cards bore various pictures of me; I had just turned fifty-six on June 23, and the photos revealed that my age was beginning to show. My hair was still dark brown, but the gray had mostly taken over my short-cropped beard and moustache. Blue eyes in some of the pictures looked through prescription glasses, which I had worn nearly all of my life.

The identification packed inside the duffel bag was locked away in the cabinet across from my desk, ready in case I ever had to make a hasty exit from Baghdad. Thank God, my kidnappers didn't ask me to get my things, and they didn't take the packed bag. For one thing, it would have meant certain death for me if they had discovered my retired military ID card, proof I had connections to the American military.

I joined the service in 1972 doing mostly logistics and government contracting, but I also had a security clearance and spent the first few years working in intelligence at the Pentagon with the Naval Security Group. After my retirement from the United States Navy, I went to work for the Royal Saudi Naval Forces in Jubail, Saudi Arabia, supporting the Saudi Eastern Fleet on the Persian Gulf, and I started working for the Saudi Arabia Trading Company in March 2004.

It was difficult to leave my family behind in the States, but Navy families get used to long separations. I still had a lot of good years in me, and the job in Iraq was a great opportunity to make a lot of money for my family and a more comfortable retirement for myself once I did finally pack it in and head back home to Memphis. I knew it would be hazardous work, but that was why the pay was so good, as my captors could attest.

Also tucked inside my identification pack was eight thousand dollars in cash. There were no banks operating in Baghdad, so I had to carry the money with me at all times. This was money I had saved for a Thanksgiving vacation back home-a stop in Memphis to see Amanda and my granddaughter, plus a visit with my sister, Barbara. Then I would fly to California to see Carrie and her husband. Maybe I would also stop in and see Susan and check out her new house.

Though the gang who took me captive never did learn anything about my family or me that day, they did take the vacation cash. So much for my vacation-I spent the next 311 days in captivity, virtually buried alive.

Chapter Two

Alex had heard the commotion in my office and the gunmen taking me captive, and had waited behind his locked office door for an opportunity to alert my colleagues at the dinner party about the attack. But as the armed bullies pushed me outside and toward the front gate, where a caravan of Chevy Impalas, Toyota trucks, and Camry sedans had surrounded our compound, I heard gunfire erupt from inside the office building. At first I was afraid that the kidnappers had found Alex and that the shooting signaled his death, but as soon as Alex thought the coast was clear on the second floor, he burst out of his office, with a rain of cover fire from his Glock 9mm pistol, and ran to the doorway leading to the roof. Once there, he leaned over a concrete wall and fired down on the now scattering gang members. One of the kidnappers in the front courtyard, who, as it turned out, was not a skilled marksman, responded with rapid fire from his AK-47. He didn't aim the weapon at the roof; he just fired wildly into the air in all directions.

I was certain that my boss and the other guests at the party heard the shots fired by Alex and the returning fire, but gunshots in Baghdad were not uncommon: it could mean trouble-or signal a wedding or other celebration. Knowing this, Alex ran across the rooftop and bounded over the metal bridge to the other rooftop and down the stairs where the party was being held, so he could tell my boss about the attack.

Almost everyone in Iraq owns guns, and the Iraqi businessmen in attendance were no exception. The only problem was, they'd all left their AK-47s in their cars, which were parked in the front courtyard-where a major gun battle was about to erupt.

Meanwhile, the house across the street from the compound, where I lived with Zein and a British citizen named Mike Page, was loaded with weapons: AK-47s, an MP5, 9mm pistols, 12-gauge shotguns, tons of ammunition, even hand grenades. Earlier that year, Zein and I had checked out of a hotel after terrorists started bombing hotels where foreigners were staying. The last straw for us was after a suicide bomber drove his van into a hotel lobby about four blocks from our hotel, killing several guests. After that attack, we moved into Mike's house. This was a relatively safer part of the city, so we thought we would be more secure. All of the houses and our office in our neighborhood are two stories and are constructed out of concrete blocks with steel bars across the windows. Concrete walls with a steel gate surround the houses, and while many of our colleagues also hired their own personal Iraqi guards for extra security in their homes, we did not. We'd heard far too many stories about guards being bribed by gang members to allow them access into homes so they could kidnap their residents. We didn't trust the private guards and instead armed our home and ourselves heavily. Unfortunately, most of the arms were over there, and I was not.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from BURIED ALIVEby ROY HALLUMS AUDREY HUDSON Copyright © 2009 by Roy Hallums. Excerpted by permission.
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