It would not just be pain. When it was explained what was to be done to her, the horror was too much and she fainted.
They would start with her extremities, The Voice said, and then piece by piece, limb by limb, she would be hacked apart. Over time she would be completely dismembered. After each procedure – to be carried out without anesthetic – she would receive the best possible medical treatment. All in all, her destruction could take several years.
Each body part would be sent to the gaijin, her lover, her husband, the Irishman Fitzduane. Kathleen herself was of no importance. She was merely an instrument of revenge. Of Justice.
Kathleen was given two days on extra rations after this announcement. She was then advised that the first dismemberment would start in a week. She was to have plenty of time to contemplate the horror of her fate. For seven remaining days her body would be whole and entire, and from then on she would never know life as it had been again.
The Voice had described the body parts she would lose. Her toes and fingers, her feet and hands, her ears, her legs below the knee, her arms to the elbow, the balance of her limbs, her ears and lips and nose and eyes.
Her eyes.
She was too shocked to cry, too terrified to react in any way. She felt sanity slipping away. She could neither eat nor drink. The she made herself eat something.
My baby! She thought. Oshima does not know. Must not know!
I don't know how, but Hugo will come.
The law of unintended consequences.
Oshima smiled as she remembered the phrase. The black DEA mission a year earlier had been an attempt to prove there was a major drug-processing facility in Tecuno. The word on the street was unambiguous, but satellite surveillance went just so far. Proof was needed. Instead, the two helicopters had been shot down shortly after they crossed the Tecuno border, and the public outcry throughout Mexico that had resulted had contributed significantly to the issuing of PresidentFalls's hands-off-Mexico declaration. The Yanquis were interfering with a sovereign nation. The arrogance! How dare they!
The photographs of the wreckage of the two machines and the charred bodies of the crews had been an unparalleled propaganda tool.
Irony of ironies, the abortive DEA raid had served to further protect the enormous Mexican drug-processing and -smuggling industry. And, incidentally, the activities of the state of Tecuno. Governor Diego Quintana had roared with laughter when he read out the U.S. president's National Security Executive Order FA/128. "They bind themselves," he had said. "They know and yet they can do nothing."
The official story was that all twelve members of the raiding party had been killed in the two crashes. Five bodies had been returned. The others had been kept as a bargaining tool. They would be released ‘over time.’ There were procedures to be followed. The unofficial subtext was that if the U.S. authorities behaved themselves, one body would be released every six months. Perhaps. The Iranians had shown how far you could push this particular strategy.
The administration had accepted the deal. The men were dead. The mission should never have happened in the first place. Improving U.S.-Mexican relations was the priority.
The seven survivors had been given to Oshima to use as she saw fit. But above all, they must not escape. They were dead. They must stay dead.
Keeping the mercenaries at the Devil's Footprint in line had been a problem. The prisoners were used to set an example. Their deaths were spread out over the months. The first prisoner had been burned alive in a metal cage in front of the assembled garrison. The conflagration had taken place at night and had been quite spectacular. The entire cage had glowed white hot as the thing inside it screamed.
Discipline had improved dramatically.
The second prisoner had been guillotined. The French had invaded Mexico for a while, and the mercenaries had constructed a play around the execution. The entertainment value of these events was clear.
The third man had been ritually hanged, drawn, and quartered. This had proved a little more than some of even the most hardened members of the garrison could take.
The fourth man had been crushed by a tank.
The fifth man had been strapped across the muzzle of an artillery piece and a blank charge fired. The blast had showered pieces of him all over the canyon wall.
The sixth man had been slowly garroted.
The seventh man was still alive.
As Oshima strode out in front of the assembled mercenaries, the naked body of her victim was strapped to crossed timbers.
The troops were hushed and expectant.
Oshima cut off his hands and feet and then disemboweled the man. It was her favorite way to kill, and she marveled at how long it could take for a human being to die when a skilled executioner was at work.
In her mind, the victim under her sword was the gaijin Fitzduane. She took her time, but there were practical problems when performing in front of the mercenaries. A parade could take just so long. Guards had to be relieved. There were duties to be carried out.
She would be under no such pressure when working on Kathleen. This was a woman whose agony would be endless.
13
Fitzduane dozed uneasily on the aircraft while flying back to Washington.
Since Vietnam, where he had been shot down on several occasions, and from various similar experiences in war zones since, he had learned that aircraft had different ways of returning to earth, and not all of them were pleasant.
He was not overly fond of flying. If he could sleep through it, he would. This time it was not that easy. His subconscious flooded his mind with dark images and he had the terrible feeling that the mission he had embarked on was going to get much worse before it got better.
His black mood had started with the bank raid in Medora. The burst of adrenaline that had kicked in when Lonsdale and he had roared away from Lonsdale's extraordinary home had turned into depression when they caught up with the perpetrators at an Arizona Highway Patrol roadblock a few miles outside the city limits.
With good reason, the state troopers were not taking any chances. When the bank robbers had opened fire and tried to run the roadblock, the troopers, hunkered down behind the cover of their cruisers, had returned fire with a vengeance.
The driver had taken a shotgun blast in the face in the first fusillade.
Out of control, the jeep had spun off the road and overturned. One passenger broke his neck in the crash. The two surviving robbers, already wounded, were thrown clear and as they tried to rise, were chopped down almost clinically by a trooper armed with a heavy-caliber sniper rifle.
Fitzduane and Lonsdale had come on the scene seconds later. The dead robbers had weapons in their hands or just beside them. It was a righteous shoot without question, but the rivulets of blood and the destroyed splayed bodies of what had been up till a few moments ago healthy young men caused the bile to rise in Fitzduane's throat. So this was civilization as we approached the twenty-first century. So this was how far we had come.
Fitzduane's revulsion was further increased by his own sense of guilt. It was not what he wanted – indeed, it was what he had run from when he had resigned from the army – but there had been circumstances and he had killed, and he was good at it and he would kill again.
The causes had been just, and doubtless would be just, but still there was a voice inside him saying that he was wrong and there had to be a better way. And then there were the faces of those who had died as a result of his actions, who seemed to take a little piece of his life force with them as the life flickered from their eyes.
An examination of the corpses quickly revealed that all four of the dead young men had been Mexican and had only recently crossed the border. All wore the clothes of itinerant workers. One wore sandals. One wore cheap shoes without socks.