Crawling around the inside of the container, he defined his world very quickly. There were only two things in the container beyond himself: a pile of blankets he’d been using as a bed, and a bucket in one corner. The bucket was the source of the terrible smell in the container. It had been used before Chapel arrived, and no one had bothered to clean it out.
He sat down and watched the bucket for a while. It rattled and bounced and constantly threatened to fall over and spill its contents all over the floor. Somehow it never did.
He might have slept again. Without anything to do but watch the bucket, it was hard to tell.
Time passed.
A lot of time.
Eventually the container stopped moving. He heard the squeal of the truck’s brakes. He heard someone talking outside, but he couldn’t understand the words.
The doors at the back of the container opened and he was blinded again. Men in uniforms came inside and grabbed him, hauling him to his feet. They pulled a thin gown over his head and then he was dragged out of the container and along the side of a building. They came around a corner and Senior Lieutenant Kalin was there, waiting for them.
Kalin took a quick look at Chapel and nodded. The soldiers carrying him started moving again.
They marched him through an alleyway between two brick buildings, neither of which had windows, just blank walls. He let his head fall back and looked up and saw a sky grimy with smog, streaked with trails of smoke.
Up ahead, the alleyway ended in a broad courtyard. At its far side was a big building with curved walls, so that it looked like a drum. It was made of concrete stained black in places. It had a lot of windows, but all of them were covered with bars. An ambulance stood out in front of the building, with Cyrillic lettering on its sides.
“Where am I?” he asked.
Surprisingly, Kalin answered. “Magnitogorsk,” he said. “A municipal asylum for the mentally ill.”
Chapel stared up at the round building. He was marched toward its front doors, wide glass doors that looked like the entrance to a hospital emergency room. Inside a team of doctors and nurses waited, staring out at him. Ready for him to rant and rave or grow violent or just start screaming. Ready for anything he might try.
So this is where I’m going to spend the rest of my life.
He could only hope it wasn’t going to be a long one.
They threw him in a little empty room — a cell, no point in giving it a prettier name — and locked the door behind him. They left him there in the dark, and no matter how many times he pounded on the door and shouted, nobody came.
They left him to think about what had happened.
He’d been taken captive by the Russians, by the FSB — the security service. The KGB, for all intents and purposes, just with a brand-new name. There was no chance of escape, now. They would see to that. There was definitely no chance of a rescue. If Pavel Kalin had personally flown to Washington and asked Rupert Hollingshead if he wanted Chapel back, Hollingshead would have no choice but to say he’d never heard of a Jim Chapel. He would disavow the mission. What else could the director do? Admit he’d sent an American agent to sabotage a Russian military installation?
Chapel had known that going in. He’d known it when he’d joined the Rangers, and when he’d started working for military intelligence. It was how the game was played. Once he was in the field he was on his own, responsible for his own fate.
Well. He’d screwed that up pretty well.
Back in Ranger school, his instructor Bigelow had told him about what might happen if he was captured by the enemy. “Don’t expect humane treatment. Don’t expect them to treat you like a normal POW,” he’d warned. “Spies don’t go to country club prisons. They’ll want to know all your secrets, and they won’t ask politely. Now, if they start asking you for classified information, what do you give them?”
“Name, rank, and serial number, right?” Chapel had asked. “I just keep my mouth shut. If they put a gun to my head and threaten to kill me if I don’t talk, well, I guess I let them shoot me.”
Bigelow had sighed and shook his head. “They’re not going to make it that easy. They’ll torture you. You’re a tough guy. You can take a lot of punishment, I’ve seen to that. But they’ll have all the time in the world, and it doesn’t take much more than a pair of pliers to make even a tough guy talk. Believe me, you won’t be able to hold out forever. They’ll get what they want, sooner or later. One way or another.”
“So what do I do? Just spill the beans at the first possible opportunity? Save myself from being tortured?”
“Absolutely not. You hold out as long as you can. Every day you resist, every hour, you give your handlers back home more time to minimize the damage your information can do. You give us time to change our codes, or move our troops to a new location, or set up new covers for your fellow agents. Any little crumb of time you can give us is useful. So you hold out. You bear the pain the best you can, and you hold out as long as you possibly can. When you finally do break, well, that’s natural, that’s human. But you think of your country and your duty, and you make the enemy work for it.”
Alone in the dark cell Chapel nodded to himself, promising himself he would fight. That he wouldn’t go down easy.
He had to admit, though, if only to himself — he was scared.
“Are you ready? Let us begin.” Kalin took out his notebook and a silver pen.
He sat on a chair that was the only piece of furniture in the room. The place they’d stuck Chapel was not quite a padded cell — its walls were actually lined with ceramic tile — but it was designed so that an inmate would find nothing inside with which to hurt himself. There was no way to commit suicide there. The windows were covered in thick, impact-resistant plastic. The room’s sole lighting fixture was recessed into the ceiling, well out of reach. There was no knob on the inside of the door. Kalin had to bring the chair in with him, and presumably he would take it with him when he left.
Chapel supposed you could bash your head against the wall until one of the tiles cracked. Use that to cut your own throat. You would need a lot of determination, though. You would need more strength than Chapel had.
“Where’s my arm?” Chapel asked. “When I was detained, I had a prosthetic left arm. What did you do with it?”
“We had to make sure it wasn’t a weapon,” Kalin said. He shrugged. “I’m afraid that in the process of analyzing it, the arm was destroyed. You won’t see it again.”
Chapel inhaled sharply. Then he nodded. He’d gotten by in the past with one arm. He knew how to live like that; he could do it again. There were other, more pressing concerns. “Are you going to feed me?”
“Subject has requested food,” Kalin announced, and made a note of it. “Do you have any dietary requirements? Perhaps religious in nature?”
Chapel stared at Kalin. Did he think Chapel was a Muslim? Or maybe an agent of Mossad? “I haven’t been given any food for more than twenty-four hours. That’s a violation of the Geneva Convention.”
“Which applies only to soldiers taken as prisoners of war. Are you a soldier?”
Chapel said nothing. He wanted to sit down but that meant sitting on the floor, and he wouldn’t give Kalin the psychological advantage.
“At the moment, we don’t even know your name. Are you willing to tell us your name? Once we have that, we can begin to process you correctly,” Kalin told him. “We’ll know how to move forward.”
Chapel turned his face away. If he admitted to being a soldier, then his presence at Aralsk-30 might be construed as an act of war. He could, instead, fall back on his cover and claim to be Jeff Chambers. But even if the cover held up, that would make him a criminal, a trespasser, and that would give Kalin the right to charge him and put him into the Russian court system. He did not have any faith that would improve his situation.