Miriam and her brother jumped to their feet. So did Khalil Marras and half a dozen other men, some of them advancing on me.
Karameh held up both hands. "Wait! An unconscious man is no good to us."
"He won't be any good to us conscious either!" Miriam practically shouted. "I say burn out one of his eyes to give him a taste of what he can expect from his lies."
"We will give him a chance to think it over," Karameh snarled, glaring down at me. "Even healthy men have been known to drop dead. I don't want to take the chance of his dying under torture."
He motioned to the guards in the front of the tent and eight of them hurried forward. "Get him to his feet. We'll show him what we do to enemies of Allah."
Two of the guards reached down, hooked their hands in my armpits and pulled me to my feet. Karameh gave me a final look, then turned and started toward the entrance. Everyone followed, one of the guards giving me a vicious shove.
A solemn procession, we marched from the headquarters tent and proceeded in a northern direction. When we passed one end of the line of armored cars, personnel carriers and the two T-54 tanks, I noticed that underneath the netting was a sheet of canvas to protect the vehicles from the sun. I also saw that the hatches of the ACs and of the tanks were open, to keep the air circulating. My greatest surprise came when I saw several men passing 140 mm shells through the loader's hatch of the end tank. Why? What could the SLA attack up here? Or, could it be that Karameh and his people were afraid? Of who?
As we neared the Tower of Lions, I saw that the ruins were tremendous, much larger than they had appeared earlier, than each wall was at least one hundred fifty feet long and that the stones, very large, were covered with kliyiq, a kind of moss found in the As-Suwayda hills region.
We went to the north side of the tower, and I knew immediately that this was our destination. The north side was shaded — at least for now it was — and contained an arbor made of stout wooden poles. A group of Arabs were gathered around it, some standing, others squatting, but all of them enjoying the suffering of the three victims. No women were present, no doubt because the victims were naked.
Mohammed Karameh went underneath one end of the arbor and turned and nodded to the guards surrounding me. Two of them grabbed me by the arms and pulled me up to him. He was heavier and an inch or two taller than I; but even if he had been only three feet tail, I was at a hundred percent disadvantage. On one side of Karameh was Khalil Marras, his eyes glazed from the qat he was chewing. To the right of Karameh were Miriam and Ahmed Kamel. Miriam didn't seem at all embarrassed by the nakedness of the victims.
"Carter, what you see is a mild taste of what we will do to you, if you do not cooperate," Karameh said cynically, waving his hand toward the three victims and looking at me.
What I saw now I had seen before, in Vietnam…methods of torture that the South Viets had used against the Vietcong. Blindfolded, his ankles tied together, one man hung by his hands which were tied above his head and suspended from one of the cross poles. Several men were smearing his body with some substance — no doubt some kind of sweet syrup.
I don't know what name the Arabs gave to this form of torture, but in South Vietnam it was called "The Bath of Flies." In the right climate, where flying insects are prevalent, the victim will be covered with thousands of buzzing insects within minutes and will begin to scream hideously. As far as I knew, no one had ever died from the Bath of Flies; however, if allowed to hang for two or three hours, the victim could be overcome by irreparable insanity.
The second man was being tortured by "The Ghruka Scissors," a method often employed by the Indian Secret Service. He sat on his butt, his arms securely bound behind his back, his legs locked around a three foot high pole, the torture consisting in how his legs were fixed around the post. The right foot was placed in the crook of the opposite knee, while the post, forward of the left foot, was between the arch and the crook of the right knee. This awkward and inescapable position causes excruciating pain in the knee and pelvic joints. From the look of extreme agony on the man's face, it was plain that he had been held this way for several hours.
The third man, bearded like the other two, was groaning loudly. He had good reason to. Being tortured in "The Stork" position, he was suspended from a horizontal pole by his hands which were bound behind him and had to support almost all of his weight, since his feet were barely touching the ground.
"Ah-ha!" Karameh said merrily. He glanced at me, then at the poor devil suffering the Bath of Flies. "Soon the fun will begin."
There was a loud buzzing sound in the air, generated by the thousands of insects crawling over the man's body. Then a cry of intolerable torment came from his mouth, his body jerking with such violence that the entire arbor shook.
Karameh turned suddenly and slapped me hard across the face, a backhanded blow that stung like fire and rattled my teeth.
"I will give you exactly one hour to think it over. Carter." he said venomously. "At the end of that time, you will tell me what I want to know, or I personally will go to work on you. I'll keep you alive and screaming for months!"
"And I'll help him!" hissed Miriam. All the while she glared at me her face twisted with cruelty and hatred.
"Throw him in with the other pigs," ordered Karameh.
The guards — two in front of me, two behind and one on each side — hurried me across the hundred foot space, toward the end of the south side of the long stone building. One of the Arabs jerked open the thick door, two others shoved me inside, and I found that we were in a short, narrow passage. There was a door across from me, in the wall, and a door at each end of the passage. The door at the west end was ordinary, but the one at the opposite end was covered with a steel bar placed horizontally across it.
One of the machine gun carrying Arabs removed the round bar from the door and jerked it open. Two other SLA terrorists shoved me through the doorway into the room. The door slammed shut and, as I looked around in the half-dark room, I heard the bar being replaced over the front of the door.
Ten men, sitting against the walls, stared back at me.
Chapter Nine
Although I've seen a lot of misery in almost every nation on earth, the men in the makeshift jail were ten of the most pathetic human beings I had ever cast my eyes on. Their clothes, so caked with dirt it was impossible to tell their original color, hung in tatters from bodies that were equally as filthy. Oddly enough, the majority of the men didn't seem to be undernourished. I couldn't be sure in the dim light.
I walked to the center of the room, and that's when I saw the two other men lying on their backs on the straw-covered stone floor, in one corner of the room. I moved closer and looked down at them. Semiconscious, they wore only pants cut off at the thighs. Their bodies were discolored with blue, black and purple bruises and numerous cuts and sores, some of which were fairly recent; others were scabbed over. The eyes of one man were swollen shut and the left side of his face so distended that his own mother wouldn't have recognized him.
The room itself smelled like the deepest part of a cesspool and was a haven for vermin crawling over the walls and ceiling and through the straw. The only light came from four small windows, two on each side of the room, set high in the walls, windows that were only foot-square openings in the stone.
The men stared suspiciously at me. I myself wondered if they were part of some clever ploy of Karameh, all geared to trick me into revealing information. Every man had a full beard and hair that had not been cut in months; they had to be crawling with lice. Although the light was dim, I could make out two men with blond hair and definite Nordic-Alpine features.