title: Ransom: The Untold Story of International Kidnapping
author:  Ann Hagedorn 
description: <i>Ransom</i> opens with the story of five men taken hostage in 1995 in Kashmir, the hotly disputed paradise that lies between India and Pakistan. The men--two Britons, an American, a German, and a Norwegian--were tourists hiking their way through the breathtakingly beautiful part of the Himalayan mountains that crosses through Kashmir, when men with weapons appeared and snatched the five hostages from their wives, girlfriends, and fellow tourists. Interweaving the story of the Kashmir abduction with accounts of other kidnappings and interviews with antikidnapping "risk" experts, Ann Hagedorn Auerbach weaves a mesmerizing tale of kidnapping on a massive scale: as many as 20,000 to 30,000 incidents occur annually, she claims, up from about 6,000 per year during the 1980s.
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  The Ransom of Red Chief  
    
  
  
  This page copyright © 2001 Blackmask Online.
  
  
  
  
  
  http://www.blackmask.com
  
  
  # The Ransom of Red Chief
  
  
  ### O. HENRY
  
  
  
  
  
  This page copyright © 2001 Blackmask Online.
  
  
  
  
  
  http://www.blackmask.com  
    
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  It looked like a good thing: but wait till I tell you. We were down South, in
  Alabama—Bill Driscoll and myself-when this kidnapping idea struck us. It was,
  as Bill afterward expressed it, "during a moment of temporary mental
  apparition"; but we didn't find that out till later.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  There was a town down there, as flat as a flannel-cake, and called Summit, of
  course. It contained inhabitants of as undeleterious and self-satisfied a
  class of peasantry as ever clustered around a Maypole.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Bill and me had a joint capital of about six hundred dollars, and we needed
  just two thousand dollars more to pull off a fraudulent town-lot scheme in
  Western Illinois with. We talked it over on the fro