Editorials Opinion and Analysis
The Risk Premium
by Mimi Swartz
(Page 6 of 6)
Spell wasn’t the kind to sue, however. He had always been a company man—he liked to joke that he nearly had a “W” tattooed on his backside—and when he had arrived home, Willbros seemed to want to do everything possible to help, starting with sending his family in a limo to the airport to pick him up. The CEO of the company, Mike Curran, presented Spell with a $10,000 check and a note card urging him to get in touch when he was ready to go back to work, so they could try to find something for him. He wasn’t really thinking about the future; he was just happy to be home with his wife and kids. Spell was also relieved to know that when he got back on his feet, he would have work. It was Spell’s understanding from two company executives that he should polish up his résumé; they’d find something for him in Houston. In the meantime, Spell started seeing doctors for a torn rotator cuff and three crushed vertebrae.
But as spring began to hint at summer, Spell began to feel lost. He often wandered around the house at loose ends. Sometimes he spent hours in front of the big-screen TV in the living room, waiting for his kids to come home from school. They walked on eggshells around him, as if he were someone they hardly knew. “Dad?” Kaitlin asked him one day. “Are you okay? You’re just sittin’ around starin’ into closets.”
The dreams and flashbacks had started on his first night at home. Thinking he was back at camp, Spell planned an escape in the event of a government attack. Or he imagined that he had to pick the guard who wouldn’t beat him when he asked to leave the house to urinate. In the dark he would see the gleam of a rifle in the moonlight and hear the breathing of the other hostages sleeping beside him. Then he would awaken to see the chrome of his bathroom shower and Regina next to him in bed. Willbros offered to provide therapy, and he did get some medications, but Spell declined most of the help. He thought he would be fine if he could just get back to work. He craved order—someone to tell him what to do. And he was worried about money; a $10,000 bonus only went so far.
It was around that time—about two months after his release—that some Willbros managers invited Regina and him to lunch. Afterward, they asked the Spells back to the office and, in a conference room, told Russell they wanted him back. Spell understood he was being offered work in Houston, but he didn’t sign a formal contract. After two weeks, Willbros called him in and offered him a different job—in Nigeria. At least the job wasn’t offshore. They just wanted him to keep track of inventory on a project for Exxon. Spell would be living in a secure Willbros compound and working in a secure facility nearby. The job would last only a few months. Willbros would raise his pay from $80,000 a year to $108,000 and fly him business class. And besides, that was all the company had.
On May 22, 2006, just before he left for Africa, Willbros executives asked Spell to sign an employment contract. It required him to release them from responsibility for any kidnapping, to promise not to file suit, and to agree to arbitration in England should any future problems arise. He was encouraged to get supplementary insurance. Desperate to get back to work, Spell signed.
On the flight over, Spell started to sweat. He couldn’t tell whether he was hot or cold, awake or asleep, alive or dead. The antianxiety medication he had begun taking wasn’t doing any good. By the time Spell landed in Germany, his clothes were soaked through, and he raced to an airport lounge to shower. He had to do the same thing several hours later, after he landed in Nigeria. It was as if his body knew better than to stop being afraid, no matter what he tried to tell himself.
Everything in Nigeria looked the same, but it was, for him, completely different. Each day, he was driven from the Willbros compound to the job site, a distance of about a mile and a half. He had never been frightened before, but now he was hypervigilant. One day, Spell rode back to the compound for lunch and then could not will himself to go back to work. Another day, he got wind of a security alert. He sped back to the compound and started packing his bags. “Man, you are ready to run this time, aren’t you?” one of his co-workers said.
His friend Tim Browne invited Spell to move into his three-bedroom house in the hope it might calm his fears. Instead, Spell woke him with his nightmares, and Browne noticed that the friend who had always been quick to laugh and cut up now kept his distance from just about everyone. When his father became gravely ill, Spell remembered the Ijaw curse. At the funeral back in Silsbee, his family begged him to stay, but he felt he couldn’t afford to risk his job. After two weeks at home, helping his mother iron out her affairs, Spell got back on a plane to Africa.
In September 2006 Spell returned home for what he thought would be a normal break between assignments. When no one contacted him about going back to work, he started pressing his managers. When would he be called back? No one seemed to know. They’d have something soon, he was told. Just be patient.
The answer finally came in the form of a letter telling Spell that he was being cut back to half-pay until further notice. After 42 years in Nigeria, the company was pulling out. Beset by lawsuits, government investigations, and security threats, management had decided that staying in Nigeria wasn’t worth the risks. Spell called HR to ask what would happen to him, growing increasingly frantic as their answers became increasingly vague. He knew he couldn’t support his family, much less afford his spiraling medical costs, without a job and health insurance.
Making due with painkillers, Spell had scheduled surgeries for his rotator cuff and neck injuries for 2007, when he assumed he would have a job in Houston, but no job was forthcoming. Finally, Spell decided Willbros had left him no choice. Almost against his will, and certainly against his nature, he hired a lawyer. Soon after, in January 2007, Spell was at home alone when the phone rang. It was an HR representative from Willbros. Haltingly, she told him she didn’t want him to be blindsided by the news, but he would soon receive a memo telling him he was going to be laid off permanently. There wasn’t going to be a job in Houston; in fact, there wasn’t going to be a job at all.
Regina took up secretarial work to pay the bills. “By the time we needed Willbros,” she said, “they were gone.”
Spell had hired the East Texas firm of Provost Umphrey, the legal juggernaut famous for winning large judgments in workers’ compensation cases. Legally speaking, Spell was fortunate that he had been abducted at sea rather than on land. Changes in tort law would have made it difficult for him to recover damages in a personal-injury suit, but he could sue under the Jones Act, which gave him some advantages as a maritime employee. His attorney, David Wilson, has sued both Willbros and Shell, charging “the cause of the accident was negligence attributable to the Defendants, in failing to provide a safe workplace to their personnel.” Still, because of the employment contract Spell had signed with Willbros, a favorable outcome is in no way ensured for him.
And so Spell, who was officially diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder in December 2006, was on edge this spring as he faced the second anniversary of his release from captivity. He knew that the memories would come back with horrifying clarity. He went to counseling alone and with Regina; he worried about the effect his behavior was having on his kids. Once, he’d broken down when, on the way to a dance recital for Kaitlin, he’d passed an auditorium where the marquee announced a convention of Ijaw leaders. (Houston has one of the country’s largest populations of Nigerian expatriates.) His captors had kept in touch: In April 2007 he had gotten an e-mail from the man who had cooked the hostages’ meals and also been under orders to shoot if any of them caused any trouble: “Happy to know that your family is doing fine,” it began. “I really longs to hear from you often. Lest I forget are you still in ur country or ur company had taken you to other destination?” Spell took his words as a reminder, and a threat.
There was one moment of relief. John Hudspith was passing through Texas on a business trip in March, and Spell drove up to DFW Airport to see him. The two men embraced, had a couple beers, and told some stories, like buddies back from the war. Only it hadn’t been a war, exactly, just business as usual in the continuing global struggle for control of the world’s remaining oil and gas reserves. The fight continues for Spell too. As he wrote in an e-mail to me in April, “I prepared to die too many times with the execution threats and fire fights. It is like something inside me died and will never come back. I just can’t get that part back, I am afraid at times that that is the part that held most of the good in me. I am not complete anymore, it seems there is now only off and on, no middle ground, no peace, no sanctuary. I feel as if my soul is still hostage in the Niger Delta. I am struggling to reclaim it, but close is the best I can manage, and those times are fleeting.”
As Russell Spell struggled to put his life back together, halfway around the globe in Nigeria, MEND blew up two pipelines and called upon Jimmy Carter to negotiate their disputes with the government. They were “freedom fighters,” not terrorists, they said. And the price of oil climbed higher and higher, to the once unimaginable level of $120 a barrel, and there was no relief from the risk premium in sight.
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Source: Texas Monthly
