Read Online You Only Get One Life by Brigitte Nielsen - Free Book Online Page B

see fire lighting up the evening somewhere outside the airport. There was no relief from the heat. It felt like the night was going to be even more humid than the day. The broken windows allowed in thick, humid air heavy with the smell of gun smoke and burning. Tension was beginning to give way to hysteria. A few of the group had diarrhoea. Whether they were ill already or it was just the shock was impossible to say. There was no toilet and the stench mingled with the sweat in the oppressive atmosphere and the sounds of weeping. From outside, gun battles continued as the light faded.
    Would Mum and Dad have heard about the coup? How could I reach them? Nickie and I had curled ourselves up under an office table while almost everyone else was slumped against the far walls. The Englishman stayed near us but the rest kept their distance. In addition to the language barrier there was an increasing sense of a racial barrier between us. No matter how tired and scared and sweaty we looked, we were still the white girls and the stares were suspicious. The red-headed guy had looked atthe others with particular viciousness; you could tell he really hated black people and I think they had us down as more like him. They seemed to be waiting for us to do something. And for my part, as it got darker I could make out little more than the eyes of the other hostages. Their skin colour became harder to make out for my overloaded senses. The noise was constant and the accumulated temperature over the day made the air thick and heavy.
    There was a second door in the room which our English friend became convinced led to the toilet. ‘Please don’t try it,’ I whispered, when he decided to crawl slowly over to open it. ‘When they come in and shoot you, they’ll shoot us too because we’re here.’ He did it anyway. I knew it wouldn’t be a toilet and it wasn’t. It opened onto a much smaller room, almost a cupboard. There was a kind of fax machine in there with its own keyboard. Rather than send a sheet of paper, you typed directly on the machine itself – and each key press was accompanied by a loud beep. We cringed at each sound as the English guy, watched by his anxious daughter and us beyond tried to get a message to the outside world.
    In terror, we waited for the outside door to our prison to fly open and the sound of machine guns. That fucking machine! It chirruped away for what seemed like years. Our friend had a business card from his hotel on the island and he was faxing to say we were captives. We had no way of knowing whether or not the hotel was in the hands of the mercenaries; we might have just told our captors to come and kill us. At last he finished, the message was sent and at least something had been done. We were all so tired, apartfrom anything else. The constant fear, the uncertainty was sapping what little energy we had left. We could talk only in low voices. A new and louder series of beeps from the fax in the other room announced a reply.
    We looked at one another helplessly. There was no way of stopping the machine if anyone outside heard, but fortunately the message was very short. It revealed that the island wasn’t totally under the control of the mercenaries; there were a dozen in all from Holland and we found out later that they’d pretended to be baseball players. The cases for their bats contained guns and when they were discovered at the airport they shot their way out. Their plan was being put into action that morning just as we turned up to buy petrol and saw them in their casual baseball outfits. A rescue force from South Africa had already flown in to retake the territory. They were engaging the mercenaries in battle and said they would rescue us within 12 hours. It was fantastic news but it seemed a long way off. I felt so sick I wasn’t sure I was going to make it much longer.
    When the door was next kicked open the men didn’t come in themselves, but they did throw in a six-pack of Coke. It was