She could go personal. He wanted to compare families? He’d left three school-age kids behind when he’d abandoned his wife. After screwing her out of 160 acres of a trailer park that had been in her family for decades.
But if she took that route, she’d be portrayed as attacking his lifestyle choice. And lose one of her own bases of support. Check.
Instead, facing the by-now-hostile faces below her, she spoke calmly, to the issues. She defended the administration, which felt deeply wrong, given her party. “I can’t disagree that this war is being forced on us. We can’t give the president a blank check. But neither can we walk away from our allies. That would be the beginning of our fall.
“We have to walk a middle path. It will be long. It may be harder than we like. The good news is that unemployment figures are down. Our manufacturing base is beginning to respond. Government spending, historically, is a stimulus to the economy.”
But even as she explained logically and reasonably what they had to do, she saw it in their expressions. The rage. The naked fear. America was taking on a war no one wanted. Someone had to pay.
It looked as if that someone was going to be her.
23
Teddy came to only gradually. Someone was kicking him in the side, again and again. He submerged back into the darkness. He could still see the hurting up there, like a diver under ice. It was there, but it didn’t really reach him. Not down here.
But the darkness rejected him. Buoyed him up, as if he wasn’t yet heavy enough to stay, toward a jagged icy surface he didn’t want to approach, but couldn’t avoid.
He pried open swollen eyes to see a concrete floor. Close up, it was anything but flat. Wavy and bumpy, with hills and rugged valleys. Was he an ant? That hole would give him some cover. He tried to drag himself toward it, but his swollen body was too massive.
Black boots came into his field of view. Someone was yelling. The high voice was singsong. He didn’t understand it. Ants didn’t understand words. But he was starting to doubt his antness. Especially when the boot swung again, and his kidneys lanced. He barked and tried to roll away. But his hands were cuffed behind him. Knife-edged metal dug into his wrists.
More kicking, more screaming. Then one of them must have figured out, about his bad leg. Probably because he shrieked whenever the guy jumped on it. So, naturally, he was jumping on it again, yelling each time, grinding it into the concrete at that exact wrong angle. Teddy squeezed his eyes shut, feeling the tendons tearing out. Kiss all that surgery, physical therapy, good-bye. The gray concrete dissolved. He was blacking out again.
Until violent hands grabbed his arms and legs, yanked him off the deck, and rammed him into a chair. He blinked gritty eyelids, trying to focus. Glaring light. Brown concrete walls. Asians in grayish camo. Hard looking, and extremely pissed off, from the way they slapped him and backhanded elbows into his face.
Oberg let his head sag as it rushed back. The mission. The Package. Echo cut up and cut off. Crewing the machine gun. “Harch made it?” he muttered, realizing his lips were swollen too. What had happened to Knobby, Moogie, Mud Cat, the wounded? Had they made it out? And what about the MIA from Echo One, back at the causeway?
Then he shut up. These guys wouldn’t tell him. Nothing they were going to tell him would be the truth. Something was wrong in his side. His leg was all fucked up. And his head reeled. The room spun like a chopper with an RPG in the tail rotor. Loose teeth, too. Blood pooling in his throat. They must’ve been beating on him for a while already. Too bad he’d been out, couldn’t enjoy it.
But he couldn’t say that. Or anything like that. Not out loud.
He was going to have to watch that mouth of his, that was for sure.
You expected something like this from the moment you became a SEAL. That they’d capture you and, if you weren’t fighting the Canadians or the Dutch, torture you. You might think that, since you’d been through BUD/S, it couldn’t get worse. But then, at Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape school in Coronado, you realized it could. Much worse.
He’d been through both levels at SERE. Level A. Escape and evasion. Eating lizards, biting the heads off snakes. Level C was for special operators, air crews, and others at high risk of capture. “Interrogation resistance,” it was called.
The instructors had made it clear. It was about survival, not resistance. Those who spat in the interrogators’ faces were going to die. Those who cracked — broke down, pled for a break, or went along with the demands for signatures and confessions — weren’t going to make it either. Those were the guys who were going to hang themselves in the latrine, or eat a bullet back in the States.
The only way to make it through alive, and with something resembling integrity, was to become the Gray Man. The Cipher. The Face in the Crowd. Maybe even, if you could pull it off, not the sharpest knife in the drawer. Cooperate just enough to stay alive. Tell as little as you could, stringing it out. While protecting any really important information with your life.
His problem at SERE had been taking it seriously. No matter how tough the guards acted, it was for show. They couldn’t kill you, or even permanently hurt you, even as they messed with your mind, tried to play on your fears, and got you in stress positions. The endless tapes of crying babies and punk rock were annoying. But they did feed you, though not much. And it was only for five days. As long as you kept that in mind, how bad could it get?
This was going to be different. Glancing up from under bleeding eyebrows at the angry faces circling him, he figured: If I check out while these guys are at me, there won’t be much of an investigation.
An hour later — chained to the chair for all that time, pissing in the rags that were all that was left of his black gear — the door banged open. The team who’d been beating him slammed their backs to the walls, at attention.
The guy who stepped through it was average height, with black nerd glasses. His camos were the same as those of the others, but sharply creased. A holstered Makarov rode his hip. He wore a collar insignia that Teddy, blinking, found hard to make out. A star and two bars? A midgrade officer. Intel, security, or military counterintelligence. Most likely, attached to the unit that had garrisoned the island.
If they were still on the island. How long had he been out? More than long enough to get flown back to the mainland. The guy’s hair was slicked back and he had a couple of days’ wispy beard. Thirty-two, thirty-three, though it was hard to tell. Prominent cheekbones. He was carrying a can of something. It seemed to be Pepsi, though it looked smaller than U.S. cans. He spoke to the men along the wall, and they bowed and filed out. Only one remained. He brought a folding chair from somewhere, snapped it open, positioned it for the officer, and retreated behind Teddy, out of his field of vision.
Slick Man smiled as he took the seat. “My name is Kuo,” he said, but with the K deep in the throat; it might have been Guo. “I am here to welcome you.” His accent was southern, as if he’d spent time in Georgia or Alabama. He patted a pocket. “How about a smoke?”
Teddy cleared his throat and spat blood onto the concrete. There was plenty there already. “Thanks, don’t use ’em,” he mumbled through swollen lips.