Out of Captivity : Surviving 1,967 Days in the Colombian Jungle

128 OUT OF CAPTIVITYheard that we were being released. The look on Smiley’s face changed,and his expression turned panicky.“They’ll kill me. They’ll kill me,” he said as he shook his head.We were hoping he’d let us know what Colombian radio station he’dheard the news on, but his response was the next best thing. We nowhad two bits of evidence to prop up our hopes of being released. To addto that, a day or so later, the Frenchman came to Tom all businesslikeand told him that he needed all our civilian clothing sizes: shirts, pants,socks, shoes. We were thrilled by this, thinking that if we were gettingcivilian clothes, it could only mean one thing—release. For the nextcouple of days, Tom had a real spring in his mud-clomping step, Marcwas the cat who ate the canary, and I was already mentally ordering myfirst meal at my favorite barbecue shack in South Georgia.To confirm our suspicions, we’d been hearing a whole lot of aircraftactivity for a few days and the frequency of the flyovers only increased.The suspense was killing us, and three or four days after Smiley’s revelation,the Frenchman came into our camp. On our behalf, Tom wasall over him asking questions about what the FARC’s plans were forus. Normally the Frenchman would take those questions head-on andfling a bunch of bullshit at us. This time he was really evasive and notpromising anything. He said that maybe we would be there for years.I didn’t put too much stock in what he said. The Frenchman probablynever knew when he was telling a lie or telling the truth. A few dayslater, Pollo opened our hooches so we could get breakfast. Usually Marcwas out of his hooch pretty quickly and I was the one lagging behind.But on this morning, I didn’t see him and got a whiff of something inthe air. Even though we weren’t supposed to, Tom and I walked intoMarc’s hooch.He was sitting on the bed, staring absently at the ground. We couldtell immediately that the floor had dropped out from underneath him.We sat down on either side of him and put our arms around him andasked him what was going on. He couldn’t even lift his chin up. Then