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

272 OUT OF CAPTIVITYKeith shrugged. “I don’t know everything there is to know aboutimmigration, but if you were to help us get free, all kinds of doorswould open for you.”The offer was legitimate as far as we knew and a lot of the guerrillastalked about it.We were feeling pretty good about the Plumber’s willingness untilwe heard his plan. “We would have to kill everyone else in the camp.That’s the only way. If any of them survive, we would be tracked downand I would be killed.”Tom, Keith, and I exchanged glances. Keith’s face said it all. Theguy didn’t really have a “plan” or a strategy. We didn’t have a problemwith that morally, but we did have a problem with it strategically. ThePlumber had one AK-47. There were nineteen other FARC guerrillaswith us. Earlier in our captivity, we had learned from our more friendlyguerrillas that if we tried to escape and no FARC got hurt, they wereunder direct orders to track us down and return us, but not to kill us.However, if we tried to escape, killed a guard in the process, and thengot taken again, we’d be executed.Fortunately, once the Plumber admitted that he was willing toescape, we could use this information to our advantage. The Plumberalso told us which guards we could trust and which ones we couldn’t.We weren’t going to waste our time or energy trying to manage theones we couldn’t trust.Milton was a guy we could always trust not to do the right thing. Afterone of the more serious Fantasma attacks—the helos came in duringdaylight and fired more aggressively and with more planes than everbefore—we got out of the ravine. Milton was freaking out. He’d beenwounded in an air assault once before, so he was especially frightenedby airplanes. He had us all just run deeper into the jungle. We took nosupplies; later, Milton sent some of his guerrillas back to our camp toretrieve things.Two weeks after this, Milton ordered us back to the site of the Exer-