Scot held prisoner 20 months as rebels demand a ransom

 BY KARL PENHAUL
 Boston Globe

 MOUNTAINS OF EASTERN COLOMBIA -- Every night, oil engineer Alistair Taylor curls up underneath a mosquito net he calls his ``cocoon'' and dreams of freedom.

 For the last 20 months, he has been held hostage by Colombia's National Liberation Army, or ELN, a Marxist guerrilla group that is demanding a $3 million ransom from his employer, Texas-based oil field services firm Weatherford International.

 With more than 3,700 reported kidnappings last year alone (only a handful of them involving Americans or Europeans), Colombia is the kidnap capital of the world. The guerrillas holding Taylor, and the larger Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, are blamed for the majority of abductions and use hefty ransom payments to bankroll their 37-year-old uprising against the government.

 Taylor, 47, a soft-spoken Scot, understood little of that war before he was seized in August 1999 during his daily drive to work in the oil town of Yopal in Colombia's eastern plains.

 CAMP VISIT

 He described his kidnapping in an interview with a reporter allowed to visit the rebel camp.

 Two yellow taxis screeched in front of his pickup truck just 500 yards from his work site. Another blocked him from behind as he tried to slam his vehicle into reverse.

 Hauled out at gunpoint by four men waving semi-automatic pistols, Taylor was spread-eagled on the road before being bundled into one of the taxis and driven off at high speed.

 ``It was the most frightening experience anybody could go through. I was down on the ground with a gun at my head, and I thought, this is it, I'm going to die,'' said Taylor.

 He spoke in the faint glow of a candle in the wooden shack where he is being held, somewhere in the foothills of the eastern Andes Mountains.

 AGONIZING MARCH

 In almost two years of captivity, he has been moved through several rebel camps high in the eastern cordillera of the Andes, where near-freezing temperatures and rain penetrate his thermal jacket and three blankets. Each move means an agonizing march of several days, constantly on the lookout for poisonous snakes, deadly spiders, and scorpions.

 Sometimes he is kept in abandoned farm huts. But most of the time he must sleep under a plastic sheet stretched between four stakes.

 The first march, which began right after the kidnapping, took seven days. He stumbled over rugged terrain, and in the dark of night he was forced to swing on a metal cable across a deep gorge, able only to hear the thunder of whitewater rapids below.

 ``Basically I just take it day by day,'' Taylor said of his ordeal. ``I'm not going to let this beat me. I'm not going to crack. I get up and tell myself that someday I'm going to walk out of here to freedom.

 ``On the days I'm not happy, I go to bed and pull down the fly sheet over the mosquito net and I'm in a cocoon. When I'm asleep I'm free,'' he said.

 Few reporters have been allowed to visit guerrilla camps. And it was the first time he had talked to an outsider since last August, when he bade goodbye to American helicopter technician Matt Burtchell, who had been held with him for the previous year. Burtchell, abducted in May 1999, was freed in return for an undisclosed ransom thought to have been paid by his employer, Louisiana-based US Aviation Air Logistics.

 Both had been carrying out contract work for oil giant BP Amoco, which operates Colombia's largest oil field.

 Taylor is in reasonably good health and said his captors have not tortured him or bound him. But he was obviously under stress from the ordeal that has lasted 633 days, with no end in sight. There are days when Taylor drops into depression.

 ``This is like waiting at the airport departure lounge and the sign reads: `Wait in lounge.' You're never going to get to the departure gate. It's a never-ending story,'' he said.

 Most days, Taylor rises an hour before dawn, pours a cup of coffee from a Thermos flask his captors have given him, and smokes the first cigarette of his 20-a-day ration.

 Washing means ice-cold water piped via a rubber tube from a nearby brook. Toilet facilities consist of a two wooden boards straddling a hole in the ground.

 Meals are unremarkable events. Two or three times a day, an unappetizing mush of potatoes and pasta with an odd lump of chicken or meat is served up in a beat-up aluminum mess tin.

                                    © 2001