“They’re not going to kill us?”
“No idea, Boom. Apparently not right now. But I reckon I wouldn’t be donning my party hat. We’re forty meters off the ground with our hands tied behind us and blindfolded to boot. Best be careful or we’ll do the job for them.”
Talking it over, we wondered if they might have left some kind of booby trap behind. We decided to lie down again, with our feet braced against the tank rim, so we didn’t tumble off blindly. The steel footholds stood high enough to make for painful bedding. Goos had to lie on his other side, which meant he’d landed another couple of feet away from me. I knew he was hurting and I told him to remain still, while I began inching toward him, keeping my feet against the rim as I scooted his way. The footholds cut into my gut as I moved over them, but in time I felt his shoe against mine.
I took a couple of tries at getting my mask off along the edge of a foothold, but that only seemed to be another way to knock out a couple more teeth.
“Can you bend toward me?” I asked Goos.
“Slowly,” he answered.
“All the time in the world,” I said.
I eased back and Goos doubled over, then I carefully rolled to my other side, a frightening business since I had to remove one foot from the tank rim and really had no idea of exactly where I was heading. But when I’d finished the turn, my hands were facing Goos. I eased back toward him, until I felt him there, then I lifted one leg to the next foothold above and pushed myself up until my fingers behind me grazed Goos’s face. I grabbed the mask and climbed up to the next foothold, then one more.
“Can see,” he grunted. We worked the mask up a little farther to be sure it didn’t slip over his eyes again. Then he slowly straightened up and guided me inch by inch as I made my way back to the safe footing of the tank rim. Once I was there, I bent slowly toward Goos until he had the back of my mask in his teeth. I tried skootching away to help him pull. He got it up as far as the back of my skull, but it seemed stuck there. Finally, he managed to get all the gathered material in his mouth. I had found one of the steel footholds with my hands, which meant I had more support, and after a three count, I jerked my head down. My chin rammed against another foothold, but the mask was up to my crown and then off. I filled my lungs. The air was sweet, but my front teeth hurt a lot.
We both lay there. It was a beautiful night, with a clear country sky, a bright moon, and away from that light, a spill of stars. Life, I thought, life. Out of nowhere, I was reminded of being in Esma’s bed, thrilled by my own vitality.
22.
Why—June 3–4
Talking things through on the top of the tank, Goos and I agreed that the best idea would be to get down the ladder and run like hell. But there was a reason that jailers around the world used zip ties. After sawing them against the rough edges of the footholds for at least thirty minutes, we’d accomplished nothing besides cutting our wrists. The rope that had been around our necks had been left behind and I crawled over to it—Goos was much too sore to move much. We figured if we could somehow secure one end up here, and then fasten it around us, we could make the climb down, but the line proved far too short to reach the ground. Without that, descending the ladder with our hands bound behind our backs was pretty much suicidal. However, after more than an hour of working back to back, we had gotten surprisingly adept and managed to loop the yellow strand over a rung of the ladder. We then threaded the ends through the belt loops on our trousers, making the rope a kind of safety harness. This allowed me to explore the top of the dome a bit, although I failed to discover anything that could razor through the ties. We pondered using the hinge of the door on top, the place where we were supposed to die, like a wire cutter, but we decided we were more likely either to cut off part of a hand or fall in. Ultimately, we settled down on either side of the ladder to wait for daylight, in the hope that the workers who were sure to arrive would not shoot us as intruders.
With rest, the adrenal rush was subsiding, making each of us more aware of our discomfort. Goos was much worse off than I was. My mouth hadn’t seemed to stop bleeding, and my shoulders were aching from using my hands so much with my arms tied behind my back. Other places hurt, too, but not enough to warrant a lot of attention. Overall, we were both exhausted. Goos lay down to try to sleep and actually dozed for a while.
As our kidnapping was progressing, I had thought only in spurts about why this was happening, and even now I couldn’t fully piece things together. I still had no clue what kind of enterprise Ferko held status in. There had always been a mob in Bosnia—they’d been fierce fighters during the war and were the first to commit atrocities against the Serbians—but I couldn’t imagine what stake organized crime would have in promoting the story of a massacre at Barupra. Perhaps the mobsters had been the killers, and Ferko was covering for them by blaming ‘Chetniks’?
Not long after sunup, two fellows in white jumpsuits drove into the graveled area below in a truck with the logo of the salt mine on the side panel. They parked about a block up, near what I could now see was a small wooden office. I started screaming at them, and Goos woke up and joined me in Serbo-Croatian. They heard us relatively quickly, but couldn’t place where the voices were coming from, even as Goos repeatedly shouted “Ovamo,” meaning, ‘Up here.’
When one finally caught sight of us, he immediately demanded we come down. It took a few minutes to persuade him that we were tied up. Instead of rescuing us, the two went off to call somebody else, but the man they summoned, named Walter, sussed things out quickly and was up the ladder with a wire cutter in a matter of minutes. He ordered the two men on the ground to bring up security belts, and once they were fixed on us, we headed down the ladder, latching and unlatching the carabiner clips on each rung. I was a lot weaker than I would have guessed and was glad to be attached.
Walter was a sincere, decent guy, and as soon as he heard our story, he wanted to call the police. Goos and I responded politely that that was not a good idea, which Walter was quick to accept. Instead, he allowed us to use the office phone, from which I dialed Attila.
“Fuck, I must have called both of you six times,” she said, as soon as I said hello. She’d wanted to be sure we didn’t need more workers. I told her in outline what had happened last night.
“Joke, right?” she said first. She promised to come immediately.