When Jane Hardy agreed to let her husband take their children on a vacation overseas last year, she didn't think for a minute it might be the last time she would ever see them.

   She was in shock when several days later, her husband telephoned to say he was not coming home.

   "I never expected him to take the kids," says Hardy (not her real name), a Calgary mother who requested anonymity to protect her children's safety.  "I couldn't believe somebody could be that cruel."

   This week Hardy sat in her apartment surrounded by red geraniums and a French impressionist painting of blooming flowers, and talked about her ordeal.

   She spoke quietly about her initial reactions.  Anger.  Shock.  Disbelief.  And for the next week, almost constant crying.

   "I couldn't believe he was so blind as to how much he would be hurting the children.  I felt helpless.  I knew the RCMP and the government could not do a whole lot.  What could they do?"

   She worked the telephone frantically searching for answers and borrowed every book in the library about parental child abduction.  She soon discovered she was not alone.

   After watching Not Without My Daughter, a Hollywood movie starring Sally Field, who plays an American woman whose daughter is abducted by her husband, Hardy stopped crying.  "I became determined to get them back."

   Every year in Canada an estimated 400 children are criminally abducted by a parent.  Police and government officials don't know how many of those are taken out of the country.

   But Barb Snider, eastern Canada case director for Calgary-based Missing Children's Society of Canada, a non-profit organization that helps find children, says the estranged parent who is able to spirit a child across any border is very difficult to catch.

   "Ten years ago we used to think 'international' was a Canadian child taken to the United States," she says.  "Now we're getting more and more cases of children located in foreign countries.

   "Parental child abduction is not on the increase.  However, we're locating children in countries that are further and further away."

   The reasons cited include diverse immigration patterns, an increasing number of inter-cultural marriages, and a growing global economy where people easily find jobs on the other side of the world.

   Circumstances vary.  For instance, in some cultures, if a man to loses his children, he loses social status.  A man comes to North America for a better life and it doesn't materialize.  His marriage sours.  Fearful that the courts might give custody of the children to the mother, the father sometimes feels it's easier to abduct the children, return to his former life and save face.

   A foreign country may grant the child dual citizenship. Legally and culturally, it may favor the rights of the abducting parent -- especially if the state disapproves of the religion of the parent who is left behind.

   No matter.  Abduction is a serious violation of a child's rights, says Agnes Casselman, of International Social Service Canada, a non-profit agency which regularly deals with missing children.

   Separation from family severely affects the child's life and damages his or her sense of security.

   "Increasingly, family breakdowns result in children being suddenly uprooted and being taken to unfamiliar foreign settings," Casselman writes in an issue of the RCMP's Missing Children's Registry's quarterly newsletter.

   "This creates confusion, upset, anger and despair as the children are faced with adjusting to a new culture, language and home environment.  The loss and trauma of the abduction causes irreparable harm to the child and to the family left behind."

   And while the mechanisms for recovering children have improved, the process can be long, laborious and frustrating beyond belief for the wronged parent.

   "I think its probably has to be your worst nightmare," says Calgary lawyer Max Blitt, one of the city's authorities on parental child abduction.

   It's a problem he takes so seriously, Blitt will work without a fee to help parents recover their children from other provinces or overseas.

   As a former director of Child Find Alberta, he'd like to see more international and inter-provincial co-operation and uniformity on the issue.  Two weeks ago, he urged the Alberta government to take a leadership role on the issue.

   "More and more countries are coming on side," he says.

   "We're getting more and more evidence of the psychological damage this is doing to children."

   Twenty years ago, society's attitude was to turn a blind eye if a parent took his/her own child, he says.  Now, it's socially unacceptable and it's criminal.

   Many custodial parents eventually regain their children; but others never do.

   "I lost my kid for an hour and I was a wreck," says Eric Sommerfeldt, executive director of Child Find Alberta, one of several non-profit organizations involved in helping parents recover their children.

   "For them it goes on day after day after day, never-ending."

   Ever since the abduction, Jane Hardy's life has drifted between reality and unreality. Sometimes she thinks, "Yes, I do have kids and they really have disappeared and I can't believe this is happening to me."

   Her husband came to Canada on a student visa in the early 1980s from an Islamic country on the other side of the world.  The two met here at college.

   She found him charming, generous, extravagant and extremely polite.  He was talkative; she was quiet.

   Within months they were engaged and a year later, they married -- twice; once in a Christian church and again at an Islamic mosque.

   Their first child was born within a year; then came a second.

   Typical domestic arguments began soon after marriage.  They were infrequent but she found them difficult to deal with.

   For a while she endeavored to live as a Muslim, wearing long dresses and head coverings.

   "For 10 years, I didn't wear shorts, or short-sleeved blouses, or skirts above my knees.  I always wore colored stockings."

   She adopted a subservient attitude to maintain peace and quiet.  "But I thought it was only a matter of time before we'd go our separate ways.  I knew it wasn't going to last forever."

   Early on in the marriage, they agreed that her husband could go home periodically to visit his family.  It never occurred to her that he would abduct the children.

   Hardy's not alone.  There are dozens of Canadians like her.  Such as Vancouver pharmacist and businessman Ron Reddy.

   Shortly after Valentine's Day, Reddy alleges his wife, Nadia, abducted their 18-month-old daughter, Yasmine, and took her to Jordan.

   "I don't eat.  I don't sleep.  I don't think of anything but recovering my daughter," Reddy said in a telephone interview from Jordan.

   "When a parent loses a child, it's probably the worst pain a parent can go through."

   Reddy's efforts have included enlisting the support of Canadian politician Bob Mills, the Reform party's foreign affairs critic, hoping to bring political pressure on the Jordanian government to intervene on Reddy's behalf and allow him to bring his daughter home to Canada.

   "What I hope to do is to get someone officially working in Foreign Affairs who can work with parents to open up channels in other countries that are not normally available," says Mills, who is championing the issue in the House of Commons.

   Reddy met his future wife, Nadia, at a social function during Christmas of 1993; they married two months later.  "We met, we fell in love, we got married," he says matter-of-factly. Yasmine was born two years later.

   Four days after their wedding anniversary and two days after Valentine's Day this year, Reddy says his wife, an American citizen who is a landed immigrant in Canada, disappeared with their daughter while her family was visiting the couple.

   Reddy believes her father persuaded her to leave Canada.  He acknowledges there were differences between the two men.

   But Nadia, in a telephone interview from Jordan, said she left Reddy because he was abusive.  She added that her family was not visiting when she decided to flee.

   Nadia said she flew to Jordan on her own, after informing the RCMP and a lawyer.  She planned to stay with family, rest and then return to Canada and obtain a divorce.

   "My father had nothing to do with my leaving.  It was because I don't want to live with him (Reddy) anymore.  I was scared of him," she said.

   Nadia says she informed Reddy of her whereabouts through friends.  But Reddy said he was forced to track Nadia down in Jordan, her father's homeland where he is a real estate developer.

   Reddy then obtained a custody order in the B.C. Supreme Court and the RCMP issued a Canada-wide warrant for his estranged wife's arrest, which is registered with Interpol.

   He also made an application under the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction.  Forty-eight countries have signed the convention, in which signatory countries recognize each other's child custody laws.  But Jordan, a tiny Middle Eastern country bordering Israel, is not a signatory.

   In March, Reddy flew to Jordan to try to recover his daughter.  Since then he's seen Yasmine a half-dozen times.

   "All my efforts have been stone-walled by influence-peddling and petty bribes to key officials," says Reddy.  "They've threatened my life."

   But like many of these cases, the issues are contentious on both sides.  Nadia, who has four lawyers on the case, says it is Reddy who has bribed key officials and threatened her.

   In early September, Reddy says he was preparing to return to Canada when he was detained after a complaint was laid accusing him of being an "Israeli Jew" involved in suspicious activities, a charge that he says was tossed out of court last week.  His passport was also taken.

   Reddy, who is Christian, says it was another attempt by his wife's family to harass him into dropping the case.

   But Nadia says Reddy was stopped because of a harassment suit she laid against him which is still before the courts.  "He was banging on the doors, harassing me.  He cannot leave the country because of that, not because of suspicion of being an Israeli Jew."

   Meanwhile, Reddy says he was granted supervised access by a Jordanian court on Sept. 28 and soon expects to be allowed to see Yasmine for one or two hours in a small room at a children's social services office.

   Nadia says no access order has been granted.  "According to my knowledge, nothing like that has happened."

   "Every time I see my daughter, it's very, very difficult," Reddy says, choked with emotion.

   "I try to make her happy.  I play with her. I  hold her.  I walk with her.

   "She recognizes me as someone who cares for her; she doesn't pull away from me.  I try and show her that I care about her.

   "Even though inside I'm burning, I try and stay calm.  It's the most frustrating thing on the face of the planet.  Every day that passes, I'm more and more concerned about her well-being."

   Nadia says Yasmine is doing fine.  "She talks right now.  She eats a lot.  She has a lot of attention, a lot of love."

   Nadia wants a divorce.  She's willing to give Reddy supervised access.

   "When I'm safe and my daughter's safe, then I'll be at peace.  I'd do anything for my baby.

   "My daughter is my flesh and blood.  She's not anybody's prize."

   When Reddy gets his passport back, he plans to fly back to Canada where his first stop will be Ottawa.

   There he'll join other parents from across the country who have had their children abducted. Reform's Bob Mills is planning a news conference later this month with the parents to draw attention to their plight.

   Reddy is lobbying Prime Minister Jean Chretien to ask Jordan's King Hussein to allow Yasmine, a Canadian citizen, to return to Canada with him.  Under Jordanian law a child retains the citizenship of the father.

   He cites the 1989 United Nations' Convention on the Rights of the Child -- signed by Jordan -- which stipulates that a child has the right to regular access to both parents.  According to the Swiss-based International Social Services terminating that parental relationship can cause irreparable harm.

   Reddy has sent letters to several MPs asking for help.

   "The (Canadian) embassy is willing, but it has been stonewalled by Ottawa," he says.  "It's up to Ottawa to really push this case along.

   Foreign Affairs spokeswoman Valerie Neftle declined to say whether Chretien will intervene.

   But Michael Malloy, the Canadian ambassador in Jordan, is well-acquainted with Reddy's situation.

   "There's is almost nothing that we see over here that is more gut-wrenching," says Malloy. "But there are real limits as to what we can do."

   Canadian law ends at the Canadian border.  The embassy arranged a meeting between Reddy, his wife and his daughter, it has appealed to Jordanian officials and it has gone to court with him.

   "There's nothing we see come through our doors that are as aggravating and emotionally draining," says Malloy.  "There's nothing that punches our people between the eyes like this one."

   There are a lot of people doing child recovery," says Ahmad Soliman, a former US Marine and now director of Middle Eastern Operations for CTC International Group Inc.  "They do it the hard way."

   Soliman (not his real name), left the Marine Corps to join the CIA's career training program and became a clandestine operations officer in the Middle East.  He now employs his skills with CTC.

   When diplomacy fails, frustrated parents sometimes turn to businesses like CTC International who use covert techniques to help recover a child.  Other organizations utilize commandos who simply go into a foreign country and snatch the child back.  But Soliman insists CTC is not a commando operation.

   CTC got into the business of recovering children almost by accident.

   The West Palm Beach, Florida organization was established in 1992 by Frederick Rustmann Jr., a former spy who retired after a 24-year career as a member of the elite Senior Intelligence Service of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.

   Rustmann's intention was to take the skills, resources and contacts of spycraft, add private enterprise, and apply them to the private sector in gathering business intelligence, protecting intellectual property, undertaking due diligence appraisals and risk assessments, and handling counter-intelligence problems.

   One day, a client approached them and asked for help in recovering a kidnapped child.

   "It's essential to conduct the operation with the least amount of danger, without jeopardizing the children, parents or officers," says Soliman.

   "It's very easy to go and bust doors down.  The problem is that you end up in jail.  The primary objective is to be able to enjoy life without going to jail and repatriate the kid."

   That means careful planning, intelligence gathering and surveillance, as well as calling on the help of other ex-CIA members and contacts around the world.  And it means operating within the law.

   "We never ever touch the child without the parent being there and the parent has to have the proper documentation."

   During the past five years, they've handled about two dozen cases (none from Canada) with an 80 to 85 per cent success rate.

   Apart from the non-profit organizations, there are individuals and groups which charge anywhere between $50,000 and $100,000 US to recover a child.  Soliman says CTC charges $1,200 to $1,500 a day and the bill usually totals between $10,000 and $20,000.

   "We do not take every child recovery case.  They are carefully selected."

   There are no promises.  "The only thing I can guarantee is I will try and recover the child."

   There's no such thing as an impossible case, given enough time and money, says Soliman. The problem is, they run out of time and money.

   Money is important.  "You can't extricate somebody for $2,000."

   Jane Hardy's attempts to recover her children have been fraught with frustration.

   She contacted Foreign Affairs.  She filed a missing children's report.  She applied to Legal Aid for a lawyer.

   She contacted the Central Authority, the name given to the government office in each province charged with applying the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction.

   She obtained an interim custody order for her children.

   Then she enlisted the aid of Donna Foster, who runs the Washington, D.C.-based Coming Home International, a small organization which helps parents with intercultural mediation.

   Foster, 37, came to Calgary earlier this year in an attempt to raise funds for Hardy's cause.

   In a fundraising letter to more than two dozen Calgary churches Hardy pleaded:

   "How would you feel if you were a child being held hostage by your father, unable to talk to your mother, unable to eat your favorite foods, unable to play with your friend, or say your prayers at night?

   "This is the situation for my two children . . . As a mother I live this nightmare every day."

   Foster wanted to raise $30,000 for airfare and other expenses involved in retrieving Hardy's children through diplomatic channels.

   On one of the coldest nights in January, Foster regaled about 70 people at a Saturday evening gathering in a small church in southeast Calgary about her own successful efforts to recover her son, Sam, who had been abducted to Pakistan by his father in the early 1990s.

   Through family and government contacts, determination and blind luck, Foster succeeded over a period of several months in eventually bringing Sam back to the U.S.

   By the time Foster left Calgary, the church fund raiser collected about $1,000.

   Since then, Foster and Hardy have examined a variety of ways of recovering the Calgary children, to no avail.

   For parents like Reddy, nothing anyone does seems quite enough, especially the actions of their national government.  In fact, Hardy, herself, is critical of the federal government lack of effectiveness.

   But most people in the field applaud Canada's efforts, especially compared to the U.S.  "The Canadian system is super compared to the American," says Eric Sommerfeldt, executive director of Child Find Alberta.  "It's a national disgrace down there.  Most people think the Canadian government does a damn good job."

   That's because 20 years ago a group of Canadian diplomats proposed the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction.  Since then it has evolved into the most powerful legal weapon available to parents facing an overseas kidnapping.  

   More than 300 abducted children have been returned to Canada since the Hague Convention was signed in 1983.  And Foreign Affairs says there are about 200 cases still ongoing under the convention.

   It's so effective that in some cases the paper work has been completed before the abducting parent lands with the children in the new country.

   The convention is basically an extradition treaty designed to secure the prompt return of children wrongfully removed or retained in another country; and ensure the rights of custody and access under the laws of one country are respected by the other.

   So far 48 countries have signed the Hague Convention.

   The most difficult abduction cases to solve involve those countries who have not signed the convention, such as in the Middle East or eastern Europe.  Usually they haven't signed because their laws, culture, customs, and religion are very different from those who have signed.

   To help parents, Canada's Foreign Affairs department has published a 28-page manual for parents, which is now available on the Internet, outlining in considerable detail what to do if a child is abducted.

   One thing the department and non-profit agencies strongly advise against is re-abduction, terming it desperate and often illegal.

   "Such action could further endanger your child and others, prejudice any future legal efforts and result in your arrest and imprisonment in another country."

   The greater percentage of parentally-abducted children are recovered, says Barbara Snider, case director in eastern Canada for Calgary-based Missing Children's Society of Canada.  The non-profit agency works strictly within the law of all countries involved, using whatever social, legal, diplomatic and mediation services are available.

   Non-profit agencies like Missing Children's work with family members, diplomats, military, police, social workers, paramilitary forces to secure access and negotiate an agreement.

   "The time can vary," she says.  "If they're in a 'non-Hague' country (not signatory to the Hague Convention), it can take much longer.

   "You never give up," says Snider.  "You keep the alert out there."

   At first, Hardy called her children a couple of times a week.  But it became too hard for her to talk to them and so, in recent months, she has stopped calling.

   "They keep asking when I'm going to come?" she says.  "What do you say after a while?"

   Initially, her husband insisted that she come to live with him.  But his homeland is a developing nation whose culture, religion, customs, political process and standard of living are at the opposite end of the spectrum from Canada.  "I want the kids but I'm not crazy enough to think I could adjust to that life."

   Donna Foster is a good support, almost an older sister, says Hardy, who is saving money and biding her time wondering what she will do next.

   "I trust she knows what she's doing because she's done it with others."

   Since enlisting Foster's help, she's spent more than $45,000, money raised mostly from family and friends.

   "It's a lot of money but you can't put a price on your kids."

   When her husband left, he cleaned out their savings, maxed out their credit cards and left with about $40,000.

   "He has enough money to keep him sitting wonderfully for five or six years."

   But Hardy remains optimistic that she'll see her children again.

   "I trust it will have a happy ending."