A towel was laid across his face while two powerful hands grabbed his head to keep it from moving. Cabrillo’s heart went into overdrive. His hands tensed. He heard water splashing. Felt a couple of drops hit his neck. And then he felt moisture on his lips, a dampness at first, but soon his skin was wet. A drop slid down his nose and burned its way into his sinuses.
More water was dumped onto the towel, soaking it through. Juan tried to exhale through his nose to stop the water from invading the delicate membranes. It worked for seconds, almost a minute, but his lungs could hold only so much air, and the towel was sodden, a great clammy weight pressing down on him. At last there was no more air to fight the inevitable, and water poured into his sinus cavities. Because of the angle of the table, it pooled there and went no farther along his respiratory tract.
That was what waterboarding was all about. Make the victim feel he is drowning without actually drowning him.
It wasn’t a matter of will. Over this there was no control. When the sinuses fill with water, the brain, having evolved since the first primitive fish walked out of the sea and breathed in its first lungful of air, knew the body was drowning. It was hardwired. Juan could no more control his body’s reaction than he could force his liver to produce more bile.
His head felt like it was burning from the inside out while his lungs went into convulsions, sucking small amounts of water into them. The sensation was worse than anything he could imagine. It felt like he was being crushed, like an ocean’s worth of water had invaded his head, scalding and searing the fragile air sacs behind his nose and above his eyes.
The pain now more intense than any he’d experienced. And this had only gone on for thirty seconds.
The weight of it all grew worse still. His head was ready to explode. He wanted it to. His throat pumped in a gagging reflex, and he choked on more water pouring down his windpipe.
He heard agitated voices speaking in a language he didn’t know and wondered if he was hearing angels calling to him.
And then the towel was taken away and the table tilted so that his head was much higher than his feet. Water jetted from his nose and mouth, and he retched painfully, but he could breathe. And while his lungs still burned and the air tasted of death, it was the sweetest breath he’d ever taken.
They gave him less than a minute before the table slammed back down and the soaking-wet towel was once again pressed over his face. The water came, gallons of it, tons of it, tsunami waves of it. This time, he could only exhale a few seconds before it again pooled inside his head. His sinuses filled up to the rim of his nostrils, and they could hold no more. With that came the agony, and the panic, and his brain screaming at him to do something—to fight, to struggle, to break free.
Cabrillo ignored the pitiable cries of his own mind and took the abuse without moving a muscle, because the truth was that he knew he wasn’t drowning, that the men would let him breathe again, and that he had control over what his body did, not instinct, not his hindbrain. It was his intellect that ruled his actions. He lay as calm and still as a man taking a nap.
At some point one of the guards was sent to fetch another gallon jug of water, and for a total of fifteen times Juan was drowned and then allowed to breathe, drowned and then allowed to breathe. Every time, the soldiers expected Juan to break and beg for mercy. And, every time, he lay back down after catching his breath and goaded them by nodding to them to do it again. The last session, they let it go so long that he passed out and they had to unshackle him quickly and force the water from his body and revive him with a couple of slaps to the cheek.
“Apparently,” the interrogator said while Juan panted and snorted water out of his sinuses, “you do not want to tell me what I want to know.”
Cabrillo shot him a look. “Like I told you earlier. I came here for the waters.”
He was heaved off the table and dragged to a cell down a short, stark corridor. The room was unbelievably hot, with absolutely no air movement. Juan was dumped on the bare concrete floor, the metal door was slammed, and the lock shot home. There was a single caged light high up on a wall, a slop bucket, and a few handfuls of dirty straw on the cement floor. His cell mate was about the most emaciated cockroach he’d ever seen.
“So, what are you in for, buddy?” he asked the insect. It waved its antennae at him in response.
He finally was able to examine the back of his head and was amazed that the bone wasn’t broken. The gash had doubtlessly bled, but the waterboarding had cleaned out the wound. His concussion was still with him, yet he could think clearly, and his memory was unaffected. It was a medical myth, unless showing symptoms of brain injury, that a concussed person should stay awake following the injury, but with his lungs afire and his body aching all over, he knew that sleep would not come. He found that the only comfortable position was flat on his back with his injured arm bent across his chest.
He thought back to the firefight in the jungle, examining every instant like he had with the terrorist attack in Singapore. He saw Linda on one knee behind the stone pillar, her petite body shaking every time her rifle discharged. He saw MacD’s back as he ran ahead of him, recalling that Lawless’s foot almost slipped from the rope once. There was Smith, reaching the far cliff and whirling around the second anchor pillar. Juan recalled looking at his own feet again and trying not to stare into the maddened river almost a hundred feet below him.
He then looked up and saw Smith open fire, and then the rope disintegrated ahead of MacD. Cabrillo ran the scene through his mind again and again, like a cop reviewing surveillance footage. He concentrated on Smith’s rifle as it roared on full auto. He was aiming across the river at the soldiers chasing them. He was sure of it.
So who had fired the rounds that hit the rope bridge? It couldn’t have been anyone on the cliff behind him. They were all under cover far enough from the edge that they couldn’t get an angle to shoot at the dropping rope. The two soldiers who’d fallen down the gorge when the rope came apart wouldn’t have done it.
He clearly saw Linda blasting away, but Smith’s outline was blurred in his memory.
Juan blamed his headache. Usually he could recall every detail and nuance, but not now. Besides which, cold was leaching up through the concrete and settling into his bones. He stood, feeling dizzy enough to need to place a hand on the wall. Without his artificial leg, there really wasn’t anything he could do. He waited until the dizziness passed, but didn’t trust his balance enough to hop around the cell. On a lark, he measured it out using his exact six-foot height. It was twelve by twelve. He did the math in his head. The diagonal would be a touch under seventeen feet. He tested his calculation, knowing that his boot was thirteen inches long. His arithmetic was spot-on.
“The brain’s still working,” he said to the cockroach, which was moving about in the scattered stalks of hay. “Okay, think! What the hell is bothering me?”
There was something about the destroyed camp. He recalled a feeling of confusion, that there was an item out of place. No! Not out of place. Missing. There were certain things a woman out camping for more than a month would have brought with her, and they were things that men had absolutely no reason to steal. Soleil Croissard’s pack had been in the tent, and emptied. There hadn’t been any face cream, or lip balm, or feminine products of any kind.
Had the body he’d almost recovered been a woman’s? He hadn’t seen her face, but the build and hair color had been Soleil’s. It had to be her. And whatever female luxuries she’d packed into Myanmar must be in the ditty bag he’d recovered and handed off to Smith. It had been waterlogged, so there was no way to judge its true weight and thus no way to guess at its contents, but that had to be it. She and her companion, ah, Paul Bissonette—hey, the memory ain’t so bad after all—must have heard or seen the army patrol approaching. She grabbed up her most personal items, and together they lit out into the jungle and eventually to the ruined Buddhist temple.