"It was still mean," Lourdes insisted.
"But it was clever," Sada's wife, Ruqaya, answered, sipping at her tea.
Hospital Cerro Ancon, 23/7/461 AC
If I were truly clever, thought the doctor, I'd have thought of this myself. It's just amazing what a young girl looking on or helping can do to move progress along. The doctor smiled indulgently as young Private Mendoza walked-with difficulty, true, but he walked- with one arm over the shoulder of the lovely young girl who came to see him every day. Her arm was about his waist.
"This is so hard, 'Queli," the boy said, "and I'm too heavy for you."
"Nonsense, Jorge. Did you forget I'm a farm girl, not some soft, city-bred wilting flower?"
Mendoza had wondered what she looked like. At some level he knew it could not matter to him so long as he couldn't see. On the other hand, looks or not she was shaped right. That, he could tell from the press of her tiny body against him and the times they walked with only his arm around her waist for support. God, is she shaped right!
The pair reached as far as they could in the physical therapy and prosthetics area. Marqueli guided Jorge in a half-stumbling turn and they began the return promenade.
"I heard Legate Carrera and Duce Parilla have decreed a beca "-an educational scholarship-"for all seriously wounded or decorated veterans," Marqueli said.
"Something to think on," Mendoza agreed. "But I've only got a high school education. And then there's the farm to think about."
"Well, as to the farm," the girl answered, "you really don't need to worry about it. Your mother told me over the phone that she's found someone to work it for her."
"I know… but that land's been in our family for over four hundred years. It doesn't feel right having someone else work it."
Marqueli understood that call of the land. Her family, too, had been ranching the same patch for as long as Mendoza's. Indeed, she'd checked the local histories and birth records and discovered that they'd both had ancestors who'd ridden with the semilegendary Belisario Carrera in his war against Earth. The reason she'd checked, though, had been to find out degree of consanguinity. They were, it seemed, roughly seventh cousins… though it was more complicated than that as there was more than one link. The reason she'd checked that… well… that was for later.
In the interim, there was the torture of Jorge learning to walk to see to.
SS Hildegard Mises, Yithrabi Coast, 23/7/461 AC
Relatively few people were actually tortured on the ship. For most, a tour of what was available was generally sufficient. While Jorge and Marqueli worked out his new legs, and Irene Temujin wallowed alone in the abject misery of worldwide embarrassment, other people arrived at a ship registered to Balboa and currently coasting off of Yithrab. The ship was unremarkable, a freighter with nothing much to distinguish it on the outside except for what appeared to be a helicopter platform. An IM-71 helicopter sat on the pad, but only for so long as it took to disgorge five tightly bound men and a woman.
They were prisoners. They'd had all the due process anyone might expect, however, and been found guilty of numerous war crimes to include failure to meet the requirements for legal combatancy. They were illegal combatants, in other words.
Identified as outsiders by the men of his brigade that Sada had spread out as "watchers," four of the men had been grabbed from a safe house set up by Sumer's dictator in the days before the invasion for just such a purpose. The other two were the homeowner and his wife. All six had been captured in a raid by the Cazador Cohort, aided by some Sumeri guides from Sada's brigade.
The prisoners had been taken, in secret, to another safe house, this one controlled by Sada's men. There all six had been court-martialed, separately, in camera and sentenced to hang. A mullah-Carrera had asked Sada for, "An honest mullah, one who will stay bought."-and two of his associates had approved the penalty as fitting under Islamic law. Fernandez had given the mullah six gold drachmae as a reward, to be divided as the mullah, Hassim, thought fit.
The executions had been duly announced, along with the notice that the bodies had been cremated and the ashes scattered against the Day of Judgment when Allah could rejoin their atoms or not, as he saw fit. Instead of having been executed, however, the six were taken at night in a sealed vehicle to the airfield inside the camp and loaded aboard the helicopter. This had then flown them, also in secret, to the ship, the helicopter skimming the waves and even venturing into Farsian airspace to confuse radar.
Gagged with duct tape, none had been given a chance to talk with each other since their capture.
On the ship they were separated and carried individually to separate containers that had been soundproofed. There they were chained to the walls while the program for each was worked out by the Sumeri interrogators on Fernandez's Black Budget.
Looking over the files on each, the chief interrogator, Warrant Officer Achmed al Mahamda, tapped his fingers on first one picture, then another. These are either brothers or close cousins, Mahamda thought. What one knows the other will know as well. He placed the files together on his desk and wrote on a slip of paper, "Interrogation Course M."
This meant that the cousins, or brothers, would be used as a check on each other. If their stories failed to match in any particular, pain would be first threatened and, if that failed, applied until they did match.
It's funny, thought Mahamda, well, funny for certain values of funny, that for all that relatives and comrades try to concoct a story beforehand, they can never get all the details right. They might agree on, "We were just minding our own business going to the goat auction," but they never think of "What's Khalid's mother's maiden name?" They never remember to work out and commit to memory a purely spurious route or set of connections and events. Even if they did, they wouldn't remember to update it daily and couldn't commit it to memory even if they tried. And once we get them screaming and talking, once they lose confidence in each other and the story, there's no stopping point and they'll spill everything.
The others were more problematic. At this stage, the insurgency wasn't really well developed enough-even the bi-weekly mortaring of Camp Balboa had grown somewhat listless-for there to have been much intelligence to gather. Sada's watchers watched, of course, even so.
The first course of the treatment, for each of the prisoners, was to give them a guided tour of the ship. This was usually enough to loosen even very fixed tongues.
Muhammad al Kahlayleh was the first of the newcomers to be given the tour. His interrogator introduced himself genially. "I'm Warrant Officer Achmed al Mahamda, and you are going to tell me everything I want to know."
Al Kahlayleh told Mahamda, a very genial seeming and somewhat overweight former member of the dictator's Mukhabarat, or secret police, "I'll tell you nothing."
Al Mahamda just kept the genial smile and answered, very confidently, "Yes, you will. Trust me on this. I've been at this business a long time. It's just a job to me but it's a job I do very well."
With al Kahlayleh's hands cuffed to a chain about his waist, and accompanied by two stout escorts, al Mahamda led the prisoner to the first chamber. This contained a dental chair, with all the usual appurtenances and some extra features for holding the "patient" firmly in place.
"We usually begin here, my friend," al Mahamda began. "The teeth are not strictly necessary for life, can be repaired almost indefinitely, and are extremely painful to have drilled without anesthesia."
A smiling Sumeri in a white coat bobbed his head, also genially, agreeing, "Oh, yes, it is truly awful what we can do here, more or less indefinitely." Al Kahlayleh's tawny face blanched, as much at the present geniality as at the future prospect.