“Yes,” I replied, keeping it simple. I knew what it was.
He pulled the slider back to chamber a round, lifted my head, and put the muzzle against my forehead. My good eye watched his finger squeeze the trigger. I watched as the skin on his dirty index finger between the second and third joint whitened with pressure against the metal. The trigger moved. I couldn't. Any moment the hammer would hit the—
Clack.
“Next time, American, there will be a live round behind the hammer.”
I saw him raise the gun like he was going to use it to chop wood, saw the down swing, felt—
FORTY-SIX
There were no dreams. There was just nothingness, then awareness. During this awareness, mostly what I was aware of was my own shit. I'd been moved blindfolded from the stable to a small one-room storehouse. Maybe all my groaning was bothering their animals. My hands were secured behind my back, and they in turn were tethered to a ringbolt set in the wall by a length of thin, rusting cable. There was enough free play in the tether to get me to a bucket on the floor. I'd knocked it over a couple of times trying to use it.
I was fed water and food at reasonably regular intervals — a little dried bread, rice, and some kind of slop. And for my main course, knuckle sandwiches. It was warmer, at least, in the new place. I was shivering less. My dislocated fingers throbbed continuously. They were swollen but I knew that, under the dirt, they were pink with circulation.
My captors asked a lot of questions about my government and said they didn't like it. I replied they weren't alone and that around half of America, give or take, felt the same way. They thought I was joking, giving them lip, and beat up on me some more.
I gave up nothing of a military nature, which caused them a lot of stress and anger, which they then took out on my face. I didn't know whether these beatings made them feel better because I was mostly on the floor, thinking selfishly about the mess I was in.
But I had to give them something. Eventually, they got my name, rank, place of birth, and my mother's maiden name. I figured that if I could give out that information to a cable guy to get connected, what could it hurt giving it to them? And my captors felt at last that they were getting some cooperation. The beatings lessened.
My captors pulled the pistol trick twice more. On the last of these occasions, they fired off the M9 a couple of times and then put the pistol to my head. I smelled the burnt powder, the gun oil, and some kind of spice on the guy's fingers that reminded me of curry. He pulled the trigger again on an empty barrel. Everyone thought this was a lot of fun and there was plenty of laugher. Yeah, side splitting. Afterward, they dragged me back inside and urinated on me.
“Abu Ghraib,” they said a couple of times as they wove yellow figure eights on me.
At least the urine was warm. See, I said to myself, you can be a glass-half-full guy. The allusion made me laugh, which brought on another beating.
I was right about there being two distinct groups within the party, and probably right about the Taliban/al Qaeda mix. One set was Afghan; the other, Arab. The Arabs hit harder, but were in the minority. I got the impression the Arabs thought they were in charge, but I don't think the Afghans agreed with them on that point.
The chief inquisitor, an Afghan who occasionally translated questions for everyone else in the band, wasn't putting his shoulder behind the hits after what I estimated were a couple of days of softening-up. I liked to think it was because his hand was starting to hurt after I smashed my face into it repeatedly. But then I began to wonder if there wasn't another reason. Like if they were going to video my execution and broadcast it, for example. It wouldn't be great PR if my face resembled a strawberry shortcake dropped on the sidewalk. I thought about this in a distracted way, like it was happening to someone else.
Religion was another favorite question-time subject. Did I realize, for example, that there was only one true God and that his name was Allah?
I kept it simple and said yes to this. I wasn't sure about the name, but I reminded myself a rose by another name smells as sweet, or however that saying goes. The question got me thinking. I knew a bunch of guys in a club who thought the one true God was Camaro, probably a ‘69 model — metallic blue — with a manual box. I had the good sense to keep this to myself, protecting it. They wanted to know if I believed in God. Tricky. There were times when I did and times when it seemed there wasn't one, or if there was that He was plainly psychotic. Mostly, I told them what they wanted to hear. When I told them things they didn't want to hear, the sessions ended, which was good. They ended because usually I was unconscious, which was also good but for the brief, painful period leading up to it. This was one of those times when I thought there was no God, but I told them otherwise.
There was always one man standing guard at the front door, or sitting at a bench warming his hands against the glass of a hurricane lantern, the wick turned way down. I noted the job rotated through half a dozen different men, a shift lasting a few hours each. I realized I was looking for a way to escape. There didn't seem to be one.
I passed the time by spending a lot of it in my head, replaying conversations I wished had gone another way. Surprisingly, second on the list of the ones I spent most time re-editing were the phone conversations I'd had with my ex-wife, Brenda. I didn't want the outcome of our divorce turned around, just the mood of it improved. It was a regret. So I called her in the life I was having in my head. The call went well. All was forgiven.
First on the list of conversations to re-edit were the ones I'd had with Anna. She forgave me, too. She also forgave me Clare, and I forgave her the JAG lawyer. We made up and had makeup sex. I went through this make-up over and over. The people in my head were far more pleasant and forgiving than the ones keeping me chained to the wall.
After a break of a month, but it also could have been days or even hours, the beatings started again. This time, rods of wood were often used. They mostly kept the hits away from my face. Once, a couple of Arabs came in and spent some time sharpening long knives and machetes and making movements with the blades across their own necks. I was hoping they'd slip.
Questions usually, but not always, accompanied the beatings. On one of these occasions, it was me who was given some answers.
“Where are you from?”
“America. You know that.”
“In Afghanistan. Where did you take off from?”
“Kandahar.”
“What was your mission?”
“Transport flight.”
Whack.
“Liar! We know this is a lie. What was the snow car for?”
I assumed he meant the Ski-Doo. “I don't know.”
Whack.
“You are commando. You were going to raid ______.”
His heavy accent got in the way of me catching the name, but I knew he meant Phunal. I wondered how he knew. “No,” I said.
Whack. Whack. “Liar!” Whack. “You were heavily armed. You had sniper scope. You had GPS, radios, supplies for a week.”
Three days in all, but I didn't correct the error.
“We shot down your plane,” he bragged. In the words of the movie Top Gun, this guy's ego was writing checks his body couldn't cash.
“We know where you were going because ______ was attacked that night. You will pay for the many brave lives lost there.”
I shook my head and said, “Transport flight.”
Whack.
And so it continued along in this general vein. As an interrogator, this guy was an amateur. To start with, he'd said “snow car.“ “Car” meant singular. So they'd recovered only one Ski-Doo. More important, Phunal had been attacked. Butler and Dortmund and maybe others had gone on to complete the mission — captured or killed Boyle and put an end to the nuclear threat. That didn't make any sense and I wondered whether all the whacking had addled my brains.