“Don’t do it,” warned the Moroccan.
I asked Theo what he thought and he said I should knock, so with the majority ruling I began to pound on the door in short intervals, loudly enough to be heard upstairs. After my first round was ignored I started up again—and this time got a response in Arabic.
“What’d he say?” I asked the Moroccan.
He told me someone had said he was coming, so I ran back to my bed and assumed the position. After a few minutes the door opened and Abu Ali entered.
“Who knocked on the door?” he asked.
“He did!” cried Theo, pointing at me before I could say a word.
I couldn’t believe it. He’d encouraged me to knock hoping I would be punished, making this the second time my fellow American had tried to get me beaten by the guards.
“Food, please,” I said in Arabic, still facing the wall.
Abu Ali answered my request with a long monologue that I didn’t understand, but it didn’t sound angry or threatening. When he left, the Moroccan explained that Abu Ali had said we were his guests, and that if we were ever hungry, all we had to do was knock. Not too long after that, three pieces of bread were delivered to us, along with a hot dish of eggs and tomatoes.
At the warehouse I’d had weights and plenty of room to distance myself from these two, but now I couldn’t get more than a few feet away from them. I would have thought we’d be at each other’s throats, but it wasn’t so bad, mostly because Abu Ali supplied us with everything we asked for: pens and paper, a two-thousand-page Koran in English, soap, detergent, a laundry bucket, toothbrush, and even a book to teach Theo how to write in Arabic. He may have been a jihadi, but he was a good man, and a good Muslim. In the early days we’d often hear him say the same thing as he entered the cell, in a heaved sigh:
“God, what are we doing?”
This didn’t mean Theo couldn’t piss him off. Once, Abu Ali came in to drop off our food, and after the usual greeting while we all faced the wall, he suddenly started flipping out on Theo for what seemed like no reason. After he left I looked over to the Moroccan for an explanation. It was Theo’s ass crack—it had been staring Abu Ali in the face, which was haram.
“What are you, a little kid?” the Moroccan asked him. “We have to tell you to pull up your pants?”
I just shook my head.
We didn’t know what the argument was about or who’d started it, only that it quickly spiraled out of control.
“We don’t care!” yelled a jihadi somewhere upstairs. “We’re here to die!”
The Moroccan stood by the door with his ear to the gap, translating as Theo and I listened, not missing a syllable. Whoever was flipping out up there was definitely not a member of the group holding us—nor was he alone or intimidated in any way.
“They’re Egyptians,” said the Moroccan. “They’re speaking straight Arabic, like me.”
After a few more minutes of arguing the yelling stopped, and the Moroccan returned to his bed. Five minutes after that, all hell broke loose. There was no short spray from an AK-47 setting it off, just a huge coordinated concentration of firepower at the rear of the building—where we were. Seconds later the gunshots doubled as our holders began to return fire.
Boom! Boom!
“Shit!” I yelled. “They’re tossing grenades!”
The second blast sounded like it hadn’t fallen far from our windows.
“Let’s go in the bathroom,” I said, standing.
The Moroccan immediately got up as well, but Theo just sat there.
“No,” he said. “Why?”
I explained that if one of those grenades landed next to the windows it was going to turn whatever was in the grain bags into a hundred thousand little BBs shooting our way, not to mention cost us some of our hearing. A few seconds later the three of us were all crammed into the bathroom as the fighting continued outside. Abdelatif’s face was a mask of fear.
“Allah Akbar!” a jihadi screamed as the fighting died down.
“Someone’s dead,” said the Moroccan.
A few moments later we heard the Adhan, and the most peculiar thing happened: the jihadis all split so they could go and pray. One second they were outside our window killing each other, and the next they were carting off their dead because it was time to kneel.
On the night of July sixteenth, a group of jihadis trooped down the stairs and gathered outside our door. We never received visitors this late, and the tension in the air as we turned to face the wall was almost tangible; something unholy was about to happen.
“There’s a lot of people out there,” the Moroccan whispered, sounding concerned.
“Yeah,” I replied.
The door opened and several men entered the cell. One walked straight up to the Moroccan.
“What’s your name, Sheikh?” the man asked.
“Abdelatif,” the Moroccan answered reluctantly.
They told him to stand and follow them out of the room. As they all left, one of the men locked the door behind them. Alone, Theo and I sat and looked at each other in shock.
As one hour turned into two and two into three, it soon became apparent that the Moroccan was not coming back. It was surreal to finally be rid of this beast of a man after spending almost every second in his company for the past four months. I remembered praying many times for our captors to either let him go or kill him already, just to make my life a little easier. Now he was gone . . . all 230 pounds of him, and once I realized this I looked at Theo and pointed to the grate with the shoddy repair job.
“Do you think you could get out that window?” I asked.
His answer was yes.
In 1995 I was sixteen years
