Read A Rope and a Prayer for Free Online Page A

grows angry, orders me to stop crying, and tells me I will see my wife again. But he denies our requests to call Abu Tayyeb or a Taliban spokesman Tahir knows. He says he controls our fate now.
    He hands me back my notebook and pen and orders me to start writing. American soldiers routinely disgrace Afghan women and men, he says. They force women to stand before them without their burqas, the head-to-toe veils that conservative Pashtun villagers believe protect a woman’s honor. They search homes without permission and force Afghan men to lie on the ground, placing boots on their heads and pushing their faces into the dirt. He views the United States as a malevolent occupier.
    Atiqullah produces one of our cell phones and announces that he wants to call the Times bureau in Kabul. I give him the number and he briefly speaks with one of the newspaper’s Afghan reporters. He hands me the phone. One of my colleagues from the paper’s Kabul bureau is on the line. I say that we have been taken prisoner by the Taliban.
    “What can we do?” my colleague asks. “What can we do?”
    Atiqullah demands the phone back before I can answer. My colleague—one of the bravest reporters I know—sounds unnerved.
    Atiqullah turns off the phone, removes the battery, and announces that we will move that night for security reasons. My heart sinks. I hoped that we would somehow be allowed to contact Abu Tayyeb, the commander we had arranged to interview, and be freed before nightfall. Now, as we wait in the house, I know that my colleague will be calling my family and editors at any minute to inform them that I have been kidnapped.
    After praying, our captors serve us a traditional Afghan dinner of rice and flatbread. After sunset, they blindfold us, load us into cars, and drive us into the darkness.
    Atiqullah is at the wheel. A man who has been introduced to us as “Akhundzada,” Atiqullah’s “intelligence chief,” sits in the passenger seat with a scarf over his face as well. I am seated in the backseat between Tahir and Asad. Roughly thirty minutes into a jarring drive down dirt roads, Atiqullah allows me to take off my blindfold. We traverse a barren, moonlit desert landscape of dust-covered plains and treeless hills. I recognize nothing. We could be anywhere in Afghanistan.
    With Tahir again translating, I ask for permission to speak and offer to answer any questions Atiqullah might have. He assails Israel and accuses the United States of being a greedy colonial power bent on stealing the Muslim world’s resources. He is doctrinaire, but we are not being beaten or abused.
    After a roughly two-hour drive, we arrive in a remote village where Atiqullah says we will spend the night with his guards. He is leaving and will return the following day. His men lead us into a small, one-room dirt house. A half dozen of us—three guards and three prisoners—lie down on the floor under musty-smelling blankets. I think of my wife and family. By now, they must know.

“FUN FEARLESS FEMALE”
    Kristen, November 10-11, 2008
    I am sitting atop Times Square. From the thirty-eighth floor, I can see all way to the mouth of the Hudson River. I have just assigned a photographer to shoot a portrait to accompany a first-person magazine account titled “My Bra Saved My Life.” We will photograph the once injured hiker who hung her bra out as a beacon to alert passersby. Nothing attracts attention like a bright red sports bra with size D cups, apparently. In a pinch, it’s a real lifesaver. I smile to myself. This is a far cry from my husband’s line of work.
    I am about two weeks into my new job as photography director at Cosmopolitan magazine. My train of thought—the combination of humor, absurdity, and mass-market appeal my new job straddles—is interrupted. It’s 4:30 P.M. I wonder why I have not yet heard from David, even though I know that power outages are common in Pakistan, as are travel delays. Perhaps he has not yet figured out how to