I didn’t see the sedan until it was too late. I was already halfway across the street, and turning back would have meant getting hit by a minibus instead. The sedan hit me, my knee buckled, and I spun around and smacked into the car’s side before I went tumbling to the ground.
For a moment, it all went silent. I couldn’t hear any of the sounds you would expect from a bustling capital city like Yerevan, Armenia, at night. I saw my hat and my camera case skidding along the pavement away from me, but in that instant it was all silent.
What had just happened? Had I hit my head? Was anything broken? Before I could figure that out, someone started yelling at me, but I couldn’t understand a word of it. Whoever he was, he pulled me off the pavement, stuffed me into the back seat of the sedan, dropped my camera case on the floor, tossed my hat onto my lap, and shut the door.
Fifteen seconds earlier, I had been crossing the street en route to a dinner meeting and now I was in the back seat of a black sedan with tinted windows that was weaving through small side streets.
There were two men sitting in the front: The driver looked to be about my age (mid-20s), with slick hair, a leather jacket, a large waistline and a bulge resembling a gun tucked in near his hip. For months before coming to Armenia, I had read a series of articles and op-eds on organized crime and governmental corruption in the country, and according to those articles, this was the Platonic ideal of an Armenian mob enforcer.
The passenger, a skinny and severe-looking man, wore a crisp cap the same shade of gray as his jacket, which had distinctive shoulder straps. I had recognized that the uniform meant that he worked for the government, and was probably an officer in the tax department.
The driver was still yelling at me in Armenian, and so I tried explaining that I was an American, that I knew very little Armenian, and I asked him if he spoke either German or English.
“No English,” he said. “Hospital. Hospital.”
Life in Armenia’s capital city is fairly comfortable. The center of the city is probably as cosmopolitan and luxurious as the capital of any post-Soviet country but once you get out of the capital, Armenia is a nation full of people struggling to survive on limited means and with little modern infrastructure.
So when my abductor took me out of the center of the city, past the outer outer rim, and then kept driving, I knew I wasn’t being taken to a hospital. Something was very wrong. He was on the phone, but I couldn’t make out any of what he was saying. Worried, I called my translator.
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- Rick Barry
