Abruptly Harry said, “Draga!”
The youth almost leaped off the cot. He tried to control his trembling.
Harry let the silence run on. Anders came back into the room and stood just inside the door with his hands in his pockets and his face closed up tight. He’d gone outside to collect himself; but he’d been unable to stay away. His eyes ran around, alighting fitfully on Harry, on herself, on the blindfolded prisoner.
“What do you want from me?”
When Emil Draga got no answer to that he began to shout. Tendons corded his neck and he screamed obscenities until Harry stepped forward calmly and slapped him hard across the ear.
Emil Draga fell across the cot, struggled back to a sitting position and snapped his mouth shut, breathing hard and fast through his nose. He was, she saw, a youth who probably had the battlefield sort of courage — he could run screaming right into the guns — but he’d never had to learn endurance. And there was the torture of anticipation...
She turned away, not wanting to watch this, but Harry said, “You’d better stay,” and she understood: This was on her account and he meant her to accept the responsibility.
Anders said in a chilly voice, “I guess it’s time we had a word with this citizen.” With a deliberation that shocked her Anders stepped forward, leaned down and slammed the barrel of his pistol against Emil Draga’s shin.
The youth screamed.
Anders stepped back, pocketing the gun. Harry gave him an unpleasant look but didn’t speak.
Anders lifted shaking fingers and ran them through his hair.
Emil Draga began to flay about him wildly with his free leg. He flung his torso off the cot and crashed painfully onto the floor and scrabbled about like a half-crushed beetle until Harry’s toe slammed him in the ribs and Harry bellowed something at him and the youth curled up fetally, cringing, trying to hide his head between his knees, the cot overturned across his legs.
Harry let him whimper for a while and then got down and unlocked the ankle cuff from the cot. He set the cot back in place and beckoned to Anders. Between them they lifted Emil Draga to his feet.
Harry motioned with his head toward the door and they manhandled Emil Draga outside, the loose handcuff clattering behind his right foot.
Feeling nauseous, Carole followed them across the front room into the kitchen, where Anders held Emil Draga upright while Harry plugged the stopper into the sink and began to pump water into it.
Immediately she understood, without having to be told, what they had in mind; she turned her face away and stared at the gray television screen.
Somehow she comprehended without the need of explanation that it was in their minds to break him first — then ask questions. Unprepared, he would have no opportunity to rehearse lies.
They were torturing Emil Draga by depriving him of basic sensory information. Harry was right, it was astonishingly effective: It was working on her — and she wasn’t even blindfolded.
Harry’s mouth was screwed up in an expression of sour distaste. Two things amazed her: that he was capable of this, and that having learned the capacity he nonetheless took no pleasure from it. It was something essential she’d learned about him: Harry was hard but there wasn’t a shred of sadism in him.
But Glenn Anders... Anders looked on with his lips peeled back from his teeth, a burning intensity in his eyes: She’d never seen the hunger for revenge written so clearly on a human face. The eager glow sickened her. A week ago did I look like that?
Harry abandoned the pump handle. A final gush flowed into the sink — it was about two thirds filled.
Emil Draga said in a dull voice from which all feelings had been sucked, “Please — what do you want?”
Anders snapped, “Before long you’re going to be getting your emissions from dreaming that this is over. Well it’s never going to be over, I promise you — it’s never going to finish. You’re in Hell, Lieutenant.”
“Why... why?”
But Anders only grinned unseen.
Harry made a harsh gesture: Calm down, get a grip on yourself.
Harry took Emil Draga from behind by both shoulders and pushed him gently forward until he stood facing the sink with his belly two feet from its rim. He moved to one side to position himself; Anders stepped in behind Emil Draga and hooked both hands strongly in Draga’s web belt. Draga stiffened, utterly rigid.
“Spread your feet out,” Harry said mildly.
When Draga didn’t move Anders kicked his Achilles’ tendon, not hard but it was enough to provoke reluctant co-operation: Draga slid his foot out to one side, then the other foot until he stood splayed, hands flicking open and shut in the manacles, head whipping back and forth and breath sawing through him. Then Harry’s fist slammed into his gut.
It doubled him over. A gasp, a little cry — not so much pain as dread — the breath punched out of him and his head poised over the sink and that was when Harry shoved him down into the sink face-first.
Draga struggled every way he could but there was no chance — he was pinioned by four strong arms and had no way to get purchase. Carole gripped the doorjamb with both hands and pushed her face into it and clenched her eyes shut, hearing Anders’ tremulous voice: “Amazing how a man can drown in just a few inches of water, ain’t it.”
In the end she was unable not to look. The silent struggle had abated; Draga’s body was lurching with the heaves of choked nausea and he’d slumped so that the only thing holding him up was Anders’ powerful two-handed grip on his web belt.
Harry lifted him by the epaulets, pulling his face out of the water. Draga blurted water from his mouth and nose. A choking cough; wheezing to suck air back into him — eyes popping, mouth working, panic.
The sounds he made were so agonized that she had to leave. She stumbled into the front room, fell across the couch and covered her ears with both hands.
But the not knowing got to her and she turned her face to listen.
Draga was coughing now — a painful wheeze, a sucking gasp.
Then Harry: even-voiced, firm, giving away nothing. “I’ll ask a question once. You’ve got one second to answer and then you go back in the water and you stay there twice as long next time. Are you listening? Where’s Cielo?”
A mutter, then a cough; then, “El Yunque.”
Anders was pacing back and forth, shoulders jerking with each turn. Harry sat at the table leaning over the topographical map. Sitting on the couch with her elbows on her knees she held the glass of rum in both hands and sucked at it. The door to the bedroom cell stood open and she could see one of Emil Draga’s feet at the end of the cot: They’d manacled him there, flat on his belly with his hands cuffed together under the cot. The chloral hydrate capsule would keep him unconscious for at least a few hours.
Anders said irritably, “It’s no good using a helicopter. They’d spot it.”
“And nothing with wheels. It’s got to be on foot,” Harry said.
Carole shuddered. She spilled a few drops of rum and wiped ineffectually at her shirt.
Harry picked up on it. “Sorry ducks but you’re in that part of the world now.”
“I’ll be all right.”
“Sure. I know you will.” Harry watched her a moment longer and went back to his map and put his finger on it again. “The farm’s here. The track goes back into the hills from there. There’ll be false trails and it’ll take us a while but we’ll have to get all the way back in there and scout them out. We can’t decide how to handle them before we know the position and the defenses. He said there are fourteen men — but suppose they’ve recruited more?” Harry glanced toward Emil Draga’s door. “Someone’s got to keep him on ice. That’ll be you, ducks. Take out whatever guards they’ve got on the place, seal up their exit route and Glenn and I will go in on foot while you sit on our friend there.”