CABRILLO CAME TO in fits and starts. He remembered the awful racket of a chopper flight and being manhandled a couple of times, but each of these memories felt as if it had happened to someone else, like a scene from a movie he’d watched long ago. He never came close enough to consciousness to feel any pain or have any idea where he was.
The first sensation when he finally returned from the abyss was an intense ache at the back of his head. More than anything, he wanted to explore the area with his hand and make sure his skull hadn’t been crushed in, like he was sure it had been. But he resisted the urge. An instructor at Camp Peary, the CIA training facility known as The Farm, had once told him that if he were ever captured and was uncertain of his surroundings, he should lie as quietly as possible for as long as possible. This allowed him to rest, but, more important, he could gather intelligence on where he had been taken.
So with the back of his head screaming for attention and other parts of his body sore, he lay dormant, straining to glean anything from his surroundings. He could tell he was still clothed, and knew, by the ease with which he could breathe, that his head wasn’t in a bag. As best he could tell, he was lying on a table. He strained his ears but could hear nothing. It was difficult to concentrate. His head pounded in time with his beating heart.
Ten minutes grew into fifteen. He was pretty sure he was alone, so he risked opening an eye a fraction of a millimeter. He could make out no shapes, but he saw light. Not the brightness of a noonday sun but the murky glow of an incandescent bulb. He opened his eye a bit more. He could see a bare cement-block wall where it joined a concrete ceiling. Both were stained with Jackson Pollock- esque swirls and splashes of a rusty red substance Cabrillo knew to be blood.
He remembered that MacD Lawless had also been taken prisoner, so he could only pray that Linda and Smith had gotten out. If they escaped the ambush, he was confident that they would rendezvous with the Oregon. Once they were far enough downriver in the RHIB, Gomez Adams could extract them with the helicopter.
The steady beat of pain lancing though his head continued unabated. It was making him a little nauseated, which meant he probably had a concussion. Though he was almost positive he was alone in a cell of some kind, he dared not move his head. There could be hidden cameras or a two-way observation mirror behind him. He did shift a little, like an unconscious person thrashing out. His feet and wrists were bound to the table with steel cuffs. He lay still once again.
He was in no shape to stand up to an interrogation, and if they’d brought him to the capital, Yangon, he was most likely in Insein Prison. Pronounced “Insane,” it was perhaps the most brutal penitentiary on the planet, the deepest of black holes, where escape was impossible and survival had even longer odds.
It housed around ten thousand prisoners, though its capacity was less than half that. Many were political activists and monks who’d spoken out against the regime. The rest were criminals of every kind. Diseases like malaria and dysentery were endemic. Rats outnumbered both the prisoners and the guards. And the tales of torture were the stuff of nightmares. Cabrillo knew they loved to employ rubber hoses filled with sand to beat people and used attack dogs to force prisoners to race each other across a gravel path on their elbows and knees.
His only hope lay in the fact that there was an electronic tracking chip embedded in his thigh and at this very moment Max and the rest of the crew were working on getting them out.
Out of nowhere, a fist slammed into his jaw, nearly dislocating it.
He could have sworn there was nobody else in the room with him. The guy had the patience of a cat. There was no use pretending any longer. He opened his eyes. The man who’d struck him wore a green military uniform. Juan couldn’t identify his rank but managed to take a little satisfaction in the fact that he was massaging his right fist. His head felt like a struck bell.
“Name?” the soldier barked.
Juan saw two additional guards had come through a metal door. One stayed close to it while the other took up a position next to a table with a sheet draped over it. He couldn’t tell from its outline what lay underneath.
When he didn’t give his name fast enough, the lead interrogator pulled a length of ordinary garden hose from his belt. By the way it sagged Juan knew it was a weighted sap. It cracked across his stomach, and no matter how tightly Cabrillo had flexed his abs the blow felt like it had sunk all the way through to his spine.
“Name!”
“John Smith,” Cabrillo said, sucking air through his teeth.
“Who you work for?” Again the cudgel whipped across Juan’s stomach when he didn’t answer instantly. “Who you work for? CIA? UN?”
“No one. I work for myself.”
The hose came down again, this time across Juan’s groin. It was too much. He turned his head and retched from the pain.
A cultured voice with a tinge of a British accent said, “I can tell from your accent that you’re American.”
The unseen speaker was up near the head of the table, where Cabrillo was strapped. Juan heard him light a cigarette, and a moment later a plume of smoke wafted over his face. The man moved so Cabrillo could see him. He was Burmese, like the others. Juan put his age as in his mid-forties. His face was nut brown, with lines around the eyes and mouth. He wore a visored cap, but Juan could see his hair was still jet-black. There wasn’t anything necessarily malevolent about the officer, but Cabrillo got a cold chill down his spine.
“How is it that you came to be in my country, armed no less? We get so few visitors from the United States that we know exactly how many are within our borders at any given time. You, my friend, should not be here. So tell me, what brings you to Myanmar?”
A line from Casablanca popped into Cabrillo’s head. “My health. I came here for the waters.”
The officer chuckled. “Very good. One of my favorite movies. Claude Rains then says, ‘The waters? What waters? We’re in the desert,’ to which Bogey replies, ‘I was misinformed.’ Truly a classic.” His voice then cracked, “Muang!”
The hose struck twice in rapid succession, both blows hitting the exact same spot on Juan’s broken collarbone. The pain traveled up from his shoulder and slammed into the top of his brain, where it felt like his head would come apart along the cranial sutures.
“Mr. Smith,” the lead interrogator went on smoothly, “I mentioned that I believe you are American. I would like to know your feelings on torture. It is a sore subject in your country, I believe. Some feel that even sleep deprivation and exposure to loud music are cruel and inhumane. Where do you stand on this subject?”
“I agree wholeheartedly,” Juan said quickly.
“I would imagine a man in your position would,” the officer said, a smile plucking at the corners of his mouth. “I wonder if you felt that way yesterday, or last week. It doesn’t matter. This is your fervent belief now, of that I am certain.”
He did something to a mechanism under the table so that it tipped back slightly, leaving Cabrillo’s feet about twelve inches higher than his head. While this was going on, the guard near the table ripped off the sheet to reveal several folded towels and a onegallon plastic jug.
“What I really want to know,” the officer continued, “is if you believe waterboarding constitutes torture, hmm?”
Juan knew he had a high threshold for pain. He had hoped to hold out for the couple of days he figured it would take Max to bust them out, but he’d never faced the waterboard before and had no idea how he’d react. As a kid he’d spent countless days swimming off the Southern California coast, and though he’d had water forced up his nose on more than one occasion, he’d never really been as close to drowning as he was about to come.