No roads led in or out of the compound, the location only a string of geographical coordinates in an ocean of heat and sand. By helicopter it could be estimated as about eighty miles south of the Guetta Zemmur, itself a miniscule township in the Moroccan-administered territory of the Western Sahara. But by land it was a step off a single-lane dirt road and into the largest nothingness on earth.
The camp wasn’t built to punish, but to warehouse. By the time a shackled, defeated man reached its razor-wire walls, the secret police had long since demanded their last answer and the torturer delivered his final electrical shock. Prisoners were left here, perhaps to live, perhaps to die, but always to be forgotten. Morocco’s Directorate of Territorial Surveillance ran the prison with a sort of backwater bureaucratic indifference, with no more humanity than whim demanded and a laxity borne by profound boredom. The real authority of Prison 14 came not from chain-link cages, steel shackles, dogs, or rifles; it came from the eight million square miles of desolate, pitiless Saharan desert surrounding it, a body of shifting dunes and drought aged three million years, born before the faintest glimmer of humanity graced the face of the earth and destined to outlive it by time immeasurable.
Jonah ran a hand through his close-cropped blonde hair, releasing a halo of dust. Breakfast would be served soon, announced with no more pomp or circumstance than the click of magnetic cell locks. It was almost time for the weekly shower, practically the only form of timekeeping in Prison 14. Between his tanned skin, gaunt muscles, and strong features, Jonah could almost be mistaken for attractive. Not yet thirty, he’d become a man who filled silence with silence and wasted few movements.
Some of the political prisoners, Marxist student activists mostly, liked him, if for no other reason than his occasional patience for English tutoring. Jonah actually felt a bit of sympathy for the young prisoners of conscience. The journalists, bloggers, and activists typically came from middle-class backgrounds, and were largely unprepared for the exacting machinations of state-sponsored terror. They thought if only they could reach the West, make them care — this of course, was the reason for the English lessons — then something would be done. The grand injustice performed upon them would be rectified and the foundational tenets of a just moral universe restored.
Jonah did not believe this. He knew that some things just were, just as they’d always been. Perhaps the long arc of the universe bent towards justice, but it bent further towards indifference.
The electronic locks clicked, releasing the door to his cage. Shabby, barefoot men shuffled from their rows of cells, joining the stream of broken humanity towards the cafeteria tent in the center of the square. Jonah held back. It wouldn’t matter if he bolted to the front or stood last. Besides, it was more difficult to put a knife in the back of the last man in line.
It did not matter to the fundamentalists that as far as most Americans were concerned, there was no hangman’s scaffold too high for a Blackwell. Son of an embezzler, son of a rapist or an addict or a murderer… all these lineages could be overcome by the eternal cycle of American reinvention. But there would never be redemption for the son of a missing American traitor.
A commotion rippled through the line as convicts moved or were shoved aside. A large, unkempt man pushed himself against the stream of prisoners. Jonah scowled, recognizing him as Umar, a low-level Rabat gangster whose weaponry sideline with the Islamic fundamentalists finally landed him in the ghost prison.
Umar was distinctly malodorous and dirty in a way that stood out even among the filthy detainees. He’d never cut his hair or beard since arriving and preferred to shower fully clothed. The gangster spotted Jonah and grinned, revealing a wide yellow smile speckled with gold and rot. Sensing something amiss, the last of the other inmates crowded and pushed their way free, only to join the circle forming around both men.
Umar was the sort of convict who managed to remain quite fat despite the limited diet of the prison. The guards realized early on he was a man without ideology, the sort of man they could use to strengthen their grasp within the walls. He never seemed susceptible to the despair that plagued even the most hardened of the religious fundamentalists; he was a rat that found comfort in cages as if he’d never known life without them, a rat that murdered other rats for sport.
Jonah attempted to slip past, but Umar sidestepped to block him, knocking one of the younger prisoners into a row of razor wire. The prisoner didn’t wince, didn’t shout — just yanked himself off the hooks and, head down, shuffled away as quickly as he could. Umar smiled again and said something in Darija, the local dialect of Moroccan Arabic. Despite his many months in prison, Jonah had a difficult time with the accent — something about a man’s beard?
He’d only had trouble with Umar once before. Months earlier, the gangster had started trying to corner one of the political activists, a slight, former photographer from one of the wealthier families in the Moroccan city of Meknes. When Umar leered and smacked his thick lips to the activist in front of Jonah during a pinochle game, Jonah tossed the nine of hearts at Umar’s feet. Unknowing of the meaning of the gesture, a confused Umar bent to pick up the card. Before he could even look up, Jonah viciously kicked in the gangster’s face. His shinbone shattered Umar’s eye socket and knocked him unconscious for eight full minutes.
Umar spent the next two weeks in Prison 14’s rudimentary medical trailer nursing a swollen face and very specific notions of revenge. That was until Jonah snuck in and delivered him a hand-carved mortar and pestle, made from the rocks found in the prison yard. Jonah showed Umar how to grind out his pills into a thin white line. The primal memory of addiction took over, making the gangster’s next week the most fun he’d had since he discovered the joys of street heroin in the slums of Rabat. It wasn’t as if all was forgiven — forgiveness does not exist in the Sahara — but Umar now recognized Jonah as a man who knew his place in the prison ecosystem and decided to allow him to continue his existence as a low priority target.
Jonah watched as Umar reached up to stroke his beard again, saying the same phrase in Darija again. Louder, but still friendly, the gangster again tried to prompt Jonah. What was it? A joke about his face?
The American unconsciously reached up with his right hand to touch his own thick beard. With lightning speed, Umar threw his entire body towards Jonah, a feint concealing a hand darting towards Jonah’s abdomen. Jonah saw the glint of a steel blade for the fraction of a second before it was driven into his gut, just below his ribs.
Shit. Apparently Umar had reassessed his priorities.
Pain washed over Jonah, focusing him. Umar struck hard, but too hard; the fat gangster wobbled off balance, vulnerable. Jonah whipped his right fist across Umar’s face with a brutal right hook, catching the previously injured eye socket with full force. Then he saw it for the first time — Umar’s dilated pupils, darting eyes. The gangster was jacked out of his mind. He’d need to beat the man unconscious, maybe to death. Umar wasn’t going to back down, not this time, not even for a shattered eye socket, not for a broken bone or dislocated joint, not even a brain-rattling concussion.
So it was going to be a real fight, no posturing, not a lesson or a warning or boredom, but a blood-in-the-sand fight to the death.
Jonah winced as his abdominal muscled spasmed with pain. His mind raced, calculating his next move. Umar grabbed his shirt and Jonah clapped the big man’s ears. It would have ended the fight for any normal opponent, but Umar just laughed and threw him into the fence, the gangster’s inner ears already wet with blood. Jonah struggled to his feet and looked down. The knife had worked its way free but he didn’t have time to look for it, didn’t have time to turn the weapon against his massive foe.