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

Choices and Challenges27“¿Qué pasó con los otros?”Sonia answered, her voice expressionless. “¿El gringo? Lo maté yomismo.”I relayed to Marc and Keith that she claimed that she had killedTommy J herself, and that she would kill us, too. I didn’t know whetherto believe her or not.Again, with a chill that we all found disturbing, she said, “Yo lemataré también.”We couldn’t be sure that Sonia wasn’t simply posturing in front ofher troops. We also thought she might be falsely adopting the machoattitude typical of Colombian men. It didn’t matter. Her telling us thatshe was going to kill us was enough to make us pause to consider againthe possible outcome that had been on all our minds since the crash.We didn’t have long to share our opinions with one another. A FARCguerrilla stepped into the tight circle we’d formed around Sonia. Hehad Marc’s survival vest in his hand, and we could tell he was agitated.One by one, he pulled the items out of the vest and held them up—binoculars, night-vision goggles, our handheld camera—before tossingthem to the ground.At the sight of all this gear, Sonia became seriously agitated. Shestarted saying that we better explain what it all was. When they got toour locator beacon, a bright yellow bit of gear that we could have usedto signal our location, we all looked at one another. If the guerrilla hadmessed with it and turned it on, our exact location was being trackedby folks back home. Even if it wasn’t on, if the FARC thought that we’dbeen transmitting emergency signals, they might execute us then andthere. Fortunately, a guard named Farid had disabled the device byremoving the batteries. We had a similar reaction when they got to oursurvival radio and what we called a PRC, which is a combination of acomputing device and a transmitter.If the FARC thought that we had chip implants and we were allbeing tracked, then this was ample evidence that their suspicions were