ENCORE: Rock Climbers Abducted | Hostage Situation | 2
Against The Odds
Wondery
4.7 • 7.2K Ratings
🗓️ 11 March 2025
⏱️ 52 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
After being kidnapped by rebel militants in a remote region of Kyrgyzstan, four American rock climbers are forced at gunpoint toward the Uzbekistan border. But their captors are being trailed by the Kygyz army. Soon, the unwitting climbers find themselves in the middle of a firefight of epic proportions and they have to hide to stay alive. As night falls, the climbers are forced on the move again and they begin to realize if they want to survive they must escape on their own.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to Against the Odds early and ad-free right now. |
| 0:05.6 | Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. |
| 0:20.0 | John Dickie raises his arms in surrender as a man with a machine gun shouts at him to line up next to his rock climbing partners. |
| 0:29.6 | Just a few hours ago, John and his crew, Jason Singer-Smith, Tommy Caldwell, and Beth Rodden were camped out peacefully, sleeping high up on a rock face |
| 0:39.9 | in the Pamir Ali Mountain Range in Kyrgyzstan. John doesn't know yet why the man is pointing |
| 0:46.7 | a gun in his face, but he's still hoping that there's been some kind of misunderstanding. |
| 0:52.6 | He just came on this trip to photograph his friends, |
| 0:55.6 | the semi-pro climbers. But this morning, they were woken up by gunshots and a rogue three-man |
| 1:02.1 | militia demanded that they descend the wall. John even volunteered to go down first and try and clear |
| 1:08.3 | it all up. But the men forced everyone to climb down. Now he's |
| 1:14.4 | standing in the middle of his trashed campsite at the wrong end of an automatic weapon. |
| 1:20.4 | John replays his conversation with the men in his head. Is there something he could have said |
| 1:25.3 | differently when he first descended the cliff face? |
| 1:28.3 | Some magic combination of words that would have caused all of this to go away? |
| 1:34.0 | One of the men said his name was Abdul. |
| 1:36.9 | He introduced the other shorter men as Obid and Sue. |
| 1:40.7 | Abdul seems to be the one in charge. |
| 1:43.0 | He's barking orders to the other men as they search through John's bags. |
| 1:48.1 | The only thing John thinks he and his friends might have going for them |
| 1:51.9 | is that the men forced them to take their passports as they packed up the campsite. |
| 1:57.1 | If they were just going to kill them, would they really need their identification? |
| 2:01.7 | Plus, the men have taken another man captive too. |
... |
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