Free A Rope and a Prayer by David Rohde, Kristen Mulvihill Page A

it, and announces he wants to shoot his way out.
    We urge Asad to wait. He will kill one or two guards, we tell him, and then be killed by others who hear the gunfire. Asad says he does not care, then reluctantly relents and places the rifle back on the floor.
    We agree that Asad should try to escape that night after the guards fall asleep. If he makes it to Kabul, Asad can give the newspaper our location. Tahir and I are happy to stay behind if it allows Asad to return home.
    We all know that in post-9/11 Afghanistan and Pakistan all lives are not created equal. If our captors are going to kill one of us, Asad will be the first. Tahir will follow, and I will likely be last, given their view of me as the hostage who can produce the most ransom or publicity.
    Our calculus is based on the 2007 kidnapping of Italian journalist Daniele Mastrogiacomo. Two weeks after their abduction in Helmand, the Taliban beheaded the group’s driver, Sayed Agha, and threatened to kill Mastrogiacomo and the Afghan journalist working with him, Ajmal Naqshbandi.
    After Italian officials pressured Karzai, he released five senior Taliban prisoners in exchange for Mastrogiacomo. The Taliban then demanded another Taliban prisoner in exchange for Naqshbandi. When the Afghan government refused, the Taliban decapitated the soft-spoken twenty-four-year-old Afghan. Tahir and hundreds of Afghans attended Naqshbandi’s funeral in Kabul. They bitterly accused the Karzai government of caring more about the life of a foreigner than the life of an Afghan.
    While many foreigners are shuttled around Afghanistan in armored cars, Afghan civilians are forced to negotiate Taliban checkpoints largely on their own. The Taliban stop cars, trucks, and buses and arrest or execute Afghans who work with foreigners or the Afghan government. A month before our abduction, the Taliban had killed twenty-seven bus passengers who they believed were Afghan army soldiers in civilian clothes, decapitating six of them. The Afghan government, in fact, does not allow soldiers to travel by civilian bus. The Taliban-executed passengers were innocent men journeying to Iran for work.
    That night, Atiqullah arrives with no warning and scuttles Asad’s escape plans. “We’re going to move you to a place where David can have bottled water,” he says. “A place to walk. There will be doctors.”
    Guards load us into what looks like the same four-door Toyota station wagon. They put blankets in the hatchback and tell me to lie on top of them. Just before we depart, the Taliban doctor returns and gives me a final needle injection for my stomach.
    In the car, Atiqullah tells me to cover my face with a scarf whenever we pass through a village or town. Arab militants and hard-line Taliban will try to kidnap and kill me, he says, if they recognize me as an American. He is probably lying, but I feel I have no choice but to obey him.
    The four-door Toyota sedan we drove to our ill-fated interview follows behind our station wagon. At times, Asad is ordered to drive it so guards can rest. Qari rides a motorcycle to scout the way ahead. For four to five hours at a time, he rides through billowing dust clouds. He seems inhuman. Altogether we are a small group—two cars and a motorcycle—a modest, seemingly innocuous convoy moving across the Afghan countryside. Tracking us is next to impossible.
    For the next three days, we live in the car and endure a bewildering and grueling journey. We traverse mountains and vast stretches of open desert where no roads exist. We cut across paved roads but never drive down them. And we pass through villages where local children bring the Taliban bread and tea. I don’t know if they do so out of support or fear. I spend twelve hours a day lying in the back of the station wagon, forbidden from looking out the windows. Meals consist of pieces of flatbread handed to me by guards and sips from bottles of water. Bathroom breaks every few hours occur on deserted stretches