Captive recalls Nigerian kidnapping nightmare

All Greg Ock saw was a yellow streak, hurtling past where he sat in the back of the white Toyota van. The streak, a man in a yellow t-shirt, lunged toward the passenger window.

Then came the shout, "Die, mopol!"  and the rattle of automatic weapons fire, punctuating the strains of Don Henley's "Sunset Grill" that issued from Ock's iPod.  Ock's guard, Abu -- his "mopol," for military police, in the lingo of expatriates working in Nigeria --was shot dead on the spot.

"Out of the van and into the car, white man! Hands on your head!" barked a voice. Ock obeyed.

Thus began a seven-day ordeal for the 50-year-old mechanical engineer from Bowdon, in far western Georgia. His captors took Ock to an isolated village, stripped him to his boxer shorts, bound him in chains and threatened to shoot him unless his family or employer paid a ransom equivalent to $300,000. Monday, the day after his return home, Ock,  smoked Nigerian cigarettes and shared the details of his captivity and release with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

His wife, Teresa, didn't want him to take the job, working on the commissioning of a new power plant in southern Nigeria for the Marubeni Corp, a Japanese conglomerate. But, Ock, who has also worked in Abu Dhabi, likes adventure, and he thought he would be safe, because most kidnappings in Nigeria happen in other parts of the country.

The kidnappers struck at about 10 a.m. on Jan. 20, a Friday. Ock, who was sick with what he thought was a low-grade case of malaria, he had left Marubeni's fortified camp to go to a clinic.  He was accompanied by a driver, a female Marubeni Corp. colleague and, as always when leaving the camp, an armed guard.

Their van was stuck in traffic in the town of Warri when the kidnappers struck. His captors forced Ock into the back of a car and took off, crashing through makeshift barriers at police checkpoints and exchanging gunfire with authorities as Ock crouched on the floorboard.

"Who’s your boss?" they demanded of him. "Who do you work for?"

He gave them the name and phone number, and they got his boss, Gordon Faulkner, on the phone. "We want 50 million Naira [about $300,000], or you’ll never see your man again," they told Faulkner. Then they let Ock speak briefly to him, to prove that they had him and that he was still alive.

After the call, they told him: "All we want is money for weapons. We won’t kill you. We don’t want your soul. "

They drove for an hour to a remote village. There, they took him into a two-room house and told him to strip down to his underwear. They chained his feet together and told him to sit in a chair in one room, lit by a single bare light bulb. The only other furniture was a mattress leaning against the window.

About six hours after Ock was abducted, Teresa got a call from a woman at Marubeni. "I have something to tell you: Greg was kidnapped," she said.

Later, Teresa got calls from the U.S. consul in Nigeria, and the FBI came to see her. Brace yourself for the long haul, they told her. It could be three or four days before the captors even call, and the negotiations will take awhile. But not hearing is actually good. "Bad news travels faster," they told her.

Nevertheless, she didn't sleep for days. "I was freaking out," she said. "I stayed on top of the phone."

Talking to Greg's employers at Marubeni, she demanded: How committed are you to getting him back. Totally committed, they told her.

In his village prison, Ock was guarded night and day by men with automatic weapons. One of his captors was no more than 15. They all wore jeans and t-shirts -- Ock saw no evidence that they were part of any political group.

Only one would engage him in friendly conversation; they chatted about their families until the other captors beat the man for speaking to him.

One captor, a thin, short man, was especially erratic. Ock called him Jesse James. When he told his captor who Jesse James was, he was delighted.

Jesse James would show Ock two bullets and say: "These are for you. Do you want them?" Then he would say, "right there," pointing to Ock's heart. Other times, he touched his weapon to Ock's legs and said, "I’ll shoot you so you don’t run anywhere."

The rhythm of the days was monotonous. He slept on the dirty linoleum floor. They fed him eggs and apples and made him drink red wine and smoke marijuana to keep him calm. Often they played blaring music. In between, he could hear children and chickens outside the house.

On the third day of his captivity, they took him out for a ride, driving until they found a cell phone signal. Faulkner had demanded proof that he was still alive, so they let the two of them speak briefly.

On the fifth day, he found a knife and tried to hide it. "I was going to stick them if I had to," he said. But they discovered it and took it from him.

On the sixth day, one of the captors told him, "Things should happen tomorrow." But they also continued to threaten him and by that point he was fed up. He dared them to shoot him. "Just do it," he said. But they didn't.

Back in Bowdon, church groups came by to pray with the family. Ock's mother, Cheryl Sterling, held on to the thought that Greg was the captors' product, they needed him in good condition.

For Ock, the seventh day -- last Thursday -- was the worst. He just knew something was going to go wrong. Jesse James was acting especially crazy. He was drinking wine laced with marijuana. He sprayed some of it out of his mouth onto a pendant, then said some sort of prayer or incantation and hung the pendant around his neck. He wrapped a red sash around his waist and said another prayer.

Around noon, some of the captors left. They came back around 4:30, smiling. "You’ll be a free man tomorrow," they told him. He passed the hours thinking about home and the patio he needed to build.

Friday, they woke him up at 3:30 a.m. with music blaring. They put him in a car and began to drive. They left him on a deserted road gave him about $12, along with his clothes, his wallet and his phone. "Catch a scooter [taxi] and go to the police station-- you’re expected there," they said.

They even kidded with him a little, asking if he knew any American authors who would help them write their story -- "The Making of a Militant."

When Greg's phone number popped up on Teresa's phone, she thought it was the captors calling to hassle her about the money.

Instead, she heard his voice saying, "Hey, baby." She told him that she loved him and to get himself home.

When he arrived on Sunday morning, the long dirt driveway was lined with yellow ribbons and 200 to 300 well-wishers.

He has no idea, he says, how his release was arranged or what money was paid. He hasn't stopped smiling since he got back. He can laugh about the ordeal now, but he admits that, all the way through, he was "really, really scared."