Unthinkable_ Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why - Amanda Ripley [47]
Already, there was a problem. Soldiers had occupied the National University across the street to quell a disturbance. That meant that armed men would respond immediately to the siege, which was not part of the plan. Pabón and his comrades had counted on having at least fifteen minutes to subdue the crowd without serious opposition. “The situation was difficult from the very first moment,” he says. And so the terrorists had few illusions about their chances. “There was nothing other than death awaiting us there. We knew it. We knew it would be very hard to get out alive.”
It’s easy to forget that the victims are not the only tremulous people at a crime scene. Fear transforms everyone, from the police officer to the bank robber. Many of the terrorists who took over the embassy that day were later killed in other conflicts. But Pabón is still alive to tell his version of the takeover. In the kind of comeback story that could only happen in a society that is exceedingly generous with its former insurgents, Pabón now works as a midlevel functionary for the Colombian government. He occupies a large, wood-paneled office in a dingy building in downtown Bogotá. In November of 2006, from behind a polished wooden desk, under a crucifix and a portrait of the Colombian president, he recounted his memories of the siege. He wore a dark, pinstriped suit, just as he had the day of the takeover. This time, he was well accessorized—with a red-and-white-striped shirt and a yellow tie. He spoke matter-of-factly, revealing only an occasional glint of pride in the role he had played in an international hostage incident.
Walking from the corner to the embassy, Pabón remembered, he had slipped into the same kind of time warp he was about to impose upon his victims. “I felt like those fifteen meters from the corner to the door were interminable,” he says, using the very same adjective Asencio used to describe his impressions of that morning. “They stretched on and on and on.” He followed the other couple, but they seemed to be going very slowly. He felt like he was walking in place. “The movie of my life came to me. With every step I took I remembered my childhood, my adolescence, everything—like it was a farewell. It was like having the eyes of a fly with a thousand lenses, and in each lens, there was a different image. That’s what I felt.”
When he got to the front door, a man asked him for his invitation. Pabón took out his gun. With that, the fog lifted. “I felt as if I was back in reality.” But as he walked through the front door, he was stunned to see a man to his left with a gun. He felt a new surge of fear, this time tinged with betrayal. He had been promised that once they entered the embassy, none of the diplomats would be armed. So who was this man in a suit gripping a pistol? Pabón dropped to the floor instinctively. So did the other man. Pabón opened fire; so did the other man. “I lifted my head, and he lifted his head. I fired again, and so did he,” Pabón says. The man was unstoppable.
Then one of his comrades stopped him; Pabón was firing at a mirror, scared of his own shadow. Fear short-circuited his higher-level brain functioning, just as it did for the hostages and the soldiers who tried to rescue them. Telling the story now, Pabón laughs gently at himself. “I had good reflexes, but I was very nervous. I didn’t recognize myself. I just saw a gun and started shooting.”
As the gunfire and the screaming rose to an unsustainable climax, a sudden vision of the next day’s newspaper flashed across Pabón’s mind. He saw a head shot of himself and another picture of the people in the embassy on the floor, all of them dead. The images popped into his head, and then vanished, just as quickly. Pabón’s brain was contemplating the possible outcomes of his actions, just as Asencio imagined what it would be like to face his family and colleagues if he exhibited inadequate courage under fire.
When the shots finally began