Hostage Nation Read Online Free

bag to hand over to the prosecutor’s office so that they could have the evidence gathered at the scene.” Because the downing of the aircraft and the subsequent murder and kidnapping of civilians had not happened during military combat, the investigation of the crash would not be conducted by the Colombian army, but by the Colombian prosecutor’s office. “The bodies remained on-site because we could not touch the bodies,” said Avendaño. “All we could do is protect the scene.”
    During their first few hours of captivity, the guerrillas continued pushing Gonsalves, Howes, and Stansell away from the crash site. When they felt sufficiently safe from the immediate threat of the Colombian military, the guerrillas ordered the Americans to strip down to their underwear. Stansell was struck by the appearance of their captors. He’d been working on antidrug missions in Colombia for two years and had been briefed over and over on Colombian insurgent groups. He’d been told the FARC was an enormous and well-equipped army of narco-terrorists, but what he encountered hardly fit the image of a cohesive terrorist force. Most were no more than teenagers. Their uniforms were shabby. Each wore a different type of hat in a differentway, and to Stansell, they all seemed incredibly ignorant—no more than bullies with anti-American attitudes and Russian guns. The guerrillas confiscated all of their belongings, including wallets and family photos. After a strip search, which, the guerrillas said, they conducted to look for possible transmitting microchips planted on the Americans’ bodies, the men were given back their clothes and told to move out.
    Several hours later, the group heard helicopters approaching in the distance. In a panic, the guerrillas ordered Stansell, Howes, and Gonsalves to cross a rough clearing and head toward a house on the other side. “The Colombian military couldn’t open fire on our position because they would have killed us,” wrote Howes in
Out of Captivity
. “The FARC didn’t try to shoot the helo down because the gunner would have returned fire on them. So we were all standing there looking up at them, and they were looking down at us as they hovered overhead.” The guerrillas shoved the men to the ground and forced them to crawl on their bellies under the tree cover until the helicopters lost sight of them and left the area.
    The guerrillas regrouped and continued their march toward the mountains. As the initial shock of their crash and capture began to subside, the men’s thoughts turned to their families and colleagues. How would their loved ones react to the news of the crash? What had happened to Tommy Janis and Sergeant Cruz? “The gringos asked about the other two guys that were in the plane,” the young guerrilla Jaison recalls, “but the comrade did not answer them. They asked the same question several times, until the comrade broke the silence and told them not to worry about the situation of their friends, because they were dead.” La Pilosa delivered the line to Tom Howes with a chill in her voice, almost proudly. As the only one of the three who could speak Spanish, Howes turned to Stansell and Gonsalves. “She says she killed Tommy J. herself, and she would kill us, too.”
    Without the capability to conduct a nighttime search, Colonel Avendaño airlifted his troops from the area at sunset. Throughout the day, Colonel Keen worked with a team at the U.S. Embassy in Bogotá. “We set up an operations center made up of officers from the MILGROUP, members of the country team [U.S. government personnel working out of the embassy], to monitor the situation,” says Keen.“We worked with the Colombians to focus on the situation. We had briefings to keep SOUTHCOM [Southern Command—a joint command of the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard that is in charge of military