The next morning the prisoners were trucked to another makeshift jail in the town of Ghazni, 80 miles from Kabul. Within moments the daily round of airstrikes began–bombs exploding, guns firing, the walls of the jail shaking from the blasts. From the window the hostages saw Taliban soldiers fleeing the town. Then, an eerie silence. Thirty long minutes passed and suddenly there came a violent rattling at the door. “We thought it was the Taliban coming back, and it was the end of the road,” said Mercer, who had been captured, along with the other rest of her group, in early August, before the U.S. conflict in Afghanistan began. Suddenly a soldier burst through the door screaming words too beautiful to believe: “You’re free! The city is free!” The prisoners ran into the streets where singing women were casting off their burqas and men were playing music and firing Uzis into the air in celebration.
After three and a half months in captivity, accused of preaching Christianity in the Muslim world’s strictest state, Dayna Curry, 30, of Nashville, Tenn., and Heather Mercer, 24, of Vienna, Va., and their six co-workers were free. While Afghan women in Ghazni washed the Westerners’ clothes and fed them, a local commander who had turned on the Taliban called International Red Cross workers. Get word to their counterparts in Islamabad, he told them; he had “rescued” the hostages. The Red Cross phoned the U.S., German and Australian embassies, and all sides agreed that the Americans would be the ones to bring the hostages to safety. The commander was to escort them, just before dawn on Thursday, to a field outside of town where U.S. helicopters would arrive to evacuate them.
The wait for the choppers was agonizing. Afraid the pilots could not see them in the dark, the women set fire to their burqas to start a bonfire. The U.S. soldiers swept them up and whisked them off to Pakistan where tearful family and friends were waiting–Mercer’s father in jeans and a red, white and blue jacket. “The men who rescued us did a fabulous job,” says Mercer. “I don’t think Hollywood could have done it better.”
In the weeks before their rescue, the hostages often felt as though they were trapped inside a terrifying special-effects action movie. The American bombs came so close to the Taliban hideouts where they were imprisoned that their bones rattled. Unwittingly under siege, they prayed and kept faith. “We knew the Americans knew where we were and they were very accurate in their hits,” said Georg Taubmann, the Afghanistan head of Shelter Now International, the German group that sponsored the workers. “Sometimes the building was shaking, but we really trusted that they would not come near enough [to hit us].”
In many ways the American women were apt adversaries for their captors. Curry and Mercer were steeled for death at the hands of the Taliban by a relentless faith. The two women, both graduates of the conservative Baylor University, were members of a 1,000-member evangelical congregation in Waco, Texas, called Antioch Community Church. The group sponsored regular junkets to foreign countries to “introduce people to God and see them ‘discipled’ as followers of Christ,” says Jeff Abshire, an Antioch pastor. At night, huddled under a blanket with a flashlight, Mercer and Curry wrote letters to their church. “When I am afraid, I remember that Dad hears the cries of his children and answers them,” wrote Mercer, substituting the word “Dad” for “God” so her Taliban censors would pass the letters to her lawyer, who would give them to her parents, who would then e-mail them to the States.
The two women deny the Taliban’s charges that they were teaching Christianity to children, a crime punishable by death. Shelter Now also denies the charges. “What we did was give street children food and clothing,” says Taubmann. Curry admits to a bit more. She says she gave a boy a book about Jesus, and that she and Mercer showed a family part of a film on Jesus’ life. But, said Curry, talking about religion “was natural in the country where religion is the foremost thing.”
Though the women were committed to their work, they often longed for the comforts of home. Curry, a trained social worker, is a “real girl,” says former roommate Juleigh Beckham. “She likes to wear cute clothes and fix her hair.” In one e-mail, Curry asked a friend to send her a Barbie doll to give to a little Afghan girl. The child, she told the friend, sewed Barbie clothes to make money, but had never actually seen the doll. Mercer confessed to her friends in an e-mail back to Texas that she “might die for a large platter of chicken quesadillas with sour cream and guacamole from Ninfa’s,” her favorite Mexican joint in Waco.
Friends and relatives from around the country are waiting to spoil the freed women when they return to the States this week. Mercer’s cousin Kristen Bosley was in the middle of a class on preschool education at George Mason University in Virginia when she heard Heather had been freed. “My whole class started cheering,” said Bosley, who is just three weeks older than Mercer. Loved ones will also offer support for their cause. To celebrate Curry’s birthday on Nov. 4, Jackie Covington, her aunt in Denham Springs, La., threw a “blanket bash,” which drew nearly 300 people. Instead of gifts, guests donated money to buy blankets for Afghan children. “Now it looks like she’ll be able to have some input into [making sure they get them],” says Covington.
If Mercer and Curry have their way, they will bask blissfully for a time in all the affection, and then they will get back to work. Both women want to return to Afghanistan to continue the job they started. They say they don’t bear any ill will toward the Taliban for holding them captive. “Our hearts are in Afghanistan,” said a triumphant-sounding Mercer last week. “Because our hearts are there, our homes are there. We want to continue to love and serve the Afghan people.” With impassioned pleas (and bribes of chicken quesadillas), friends and family will try to keep them in their American homes until the United States can ensure the Taliban won’t be waiting for them in Afghanistan when they go back.
