Crocker had volunteered for SERE (meaning Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape) training soon after he’d been assigned to SEAL Team One. At the age of twenty-four, he’d spent weeks in a mock POW camp in Warner Springs, California, where he was interrogated, deprived of food and sleep, and waterboarded. He had also served as a SERE instructor at the same camp a few years back. So he knew what to expect during an enemy interrogation, and had committed to memory the six articles of the military code of conduct.
Article Three stated: If I am captured, I will continue to resist by all means available. I will make every effort to escape and aid others to escape. I will accept neither parole nor special favors from the enemy.
“Name?” the man at the table barked again.
“Thomas Mansfield.”
“If you tell us the truth, we can make this easy,” the man said. “Name?”
“Thomas Mansfield.”
“Nationality?”
“Canadian.”
“Occupation?”
“Businessman.”
“What’s the name of your company?”
“Balzac Expeditions.”
A shorter man at the left end of the table with a silver Swiss military watch on his left wrist cleared his throat and spoke with a Middle Eastern accent: “I know this criminal. His name is Tom Crocker, and he’s an assault team leader with SEAL Team Six, also known as DEVGRU.”
Crocker focused on the voice and the silver watch. The man said he knew him. Could it be Farhed Alizadeh, the Falcon?
The man with the belly asked, “Is this true?”
“No,” Crocker answered, trying to recall the names, faces, and voices of Iranian VEVAK and Quds Force agents he had run into during the course of his career.
“Mr. Crocker is a very dangerous man. A cold-blooded killer,” the man at the end of the table continued. “Why are you in Barinas, Mr. Crocker?”
“My name isn’t Crocker.”
“What are you doing in Barinas?”
“Me and some of my business associates stopped here on our way to scout an expedition into the jungle.”
The short man pointed to the dirty, tattered bandage on the left side of Crocker’s head and asked, “What happened to your head?”
“I fell down some stairs.”
“You’re a liar.”
The man’s accent, short stature, air of self-importance, and the cold menace in his voice all led Crocker to conclude that he was Alizadeh, who he’d seen face-to-face in Tripoli the previous year.
“Are you lying?” the fat man asked.
“No.”
Knowing that Alizadeh was there heightened the stakes and Crocker’s desire to escape. It also heightened his disappointment. The Falcon wasn’t dead.
“If you answer one question correctly, I will have you moved to a room with a bed and maybe even give you clean clothes and a shower,” the fat man offered.
Crocker nodded.
The men at the table conferred in whispers, then the fat man in the middle sat back and spoke again. “I’m going to ask you one more time. Name?”
“Thomas Mansfield.”
Article Four: If I become a prisoner of war, I will keep faith with my fellow prisoners. I will give no information or take part in any action which might be harmful to my comrades.
“Nationality?”
“Canadian.”
“Occupation?”
“Businessman.”
“Liar,” Alizadeh said.
“I’m a Canadian businessman.”
“What’s more important to you, Mr. Crocker, defending a lie or being able to ever make love to your wife again?”
The men at the table rose together and exited through the door to Crocker’s right. As the door closed behind them, the guards on either side of him went to work. First they strapped him spread-eagle on a set of bedsprings on the floor. Then they took turns pissing on him. Then they beat the bottom of his feet with sticks. Then they burned the skin on his chest with cigarettes. Finally, they hooked up the metal bedsprings to a portable generator, threw water on his body, and turned on the current, which made his muscles clench to the point that he felt his body was squeezing in on itself.
His gums bled, his head and ass hurt, and he felt sick and exhausted.
Smoke rising from Crocker’s body, the guards moved him back to the metal chair. The three interrogators reentered and asked him the same questions. Crocker repeated the same answers. He hated all three men, especially Alizadeh, on the left. The interrogators filed out and the guards hooked up the electricity again, this time applying it directly to his scrotum, nipples, and anus.
Another round of questions from the interrogators, then a session of waterboarding, which Crocker didn’t mind as much, since he’d trained himself to hold his breath for nearly three minutes. When they strapped him on a slanted board and pushed his head under water and held it there, he came up pretending to be suffering although he wasn’t.
Two more sessions of questioning and electricity, then Crocker was dragged back to his cell starving, exhausted, and barely conscious. He drank the greasy water, threw up, and defecated in the corner.
He knew in his heart that he would never give up information. They’d have to kill him. Maybe they would.
Chapter Fifteen
Today is victory over yourself of yesterday. Tomorrow is your victory over lesser men.
– Miyamoto Musashi
He fell asleep and woke up with an idea. Feeling around in the dark and locating the bones in the corner of the cell, he selected two strong, thin, short ones. Holding them in his teeth because his wrists were still handcuffed behind him, he dragged them along the rough concrete wall for hours, until his neck, teeth, and mouth were so sore and tired that he had to rest. Ten minutes later he resumed, scraping for hours until the bones had been honed down to sharp, lethal points that were short enough to hide in his palms.
He covered the tips of the bones with his shit, hid them in his hands, curled into a ball on the bare cement floor, and fell asleep. He dreamt that Ritchie was telling him about a vintage Indian Chief Roadmaster motorcycle he had just bought. He explained that it was an exact copy of one that had been owned by his father-cream colored and beautifully detailed, with an inline four-cylinder IOE engine and four-speed overdrive transmission.
“My dad had an Indian, too,” Crocker responded. “Once he lost control of it on some ice and slid under an oncoming truck. The big front prevented him from being crushed.”
As he said these words, he experienced them. He was under the truck, smelling the gasoline and feeling the hot engine.
Ritchie grabbed him by the wrists and started to drag him out, which at first Crocker welcomed. But when the back of his feet started to burn from the scraping, he shouted at Ritchie to stop. That’s when he opened his eyes and realized he’d been hallucinating and he was in the interrogation room again.
A guard slapped him so hard he saw stars. Opening his eyes, he registered the three men sitting behind the table. Blood dripped from his nose onto his bare chest.
Alizadeh said, “You keep this up and you’ll be useless to anyone soon, Mr. Crocker.”
“My name’s not Crocker. It’s Mr. Mansfield.”
Alizadeh pointed at the guard, who slapped him again. Crocker lost consciousness, but remembered to keep the bones clenched in his fists.
When he came to, his interrogators were gone and the two guards were unlocking the handcuffs around his wrists.
“Water,” he muttered. “I need water.”
“No water,” the taller of the two guards growled, putting him in a headlock and dragging him over to the bedsprings for another session of shocks. Crocker moved his fingers to make sure the sharpened bones were still in his hands. It’s now or never, said an authoritative voice in his head.
The voice was right, because when the guard let Crocker go his legs were so weak that he crumpled to the wet floor, hitting the side of his head. They laughed, then bent over on either side of him to pull him onto the bedsprings and chain him down.