A Knife Edge (40 page)

I was right about there being two distinct groups within the party, and probably right about the Taliban/al Qaeda mix. One set was Afghan; the other, Arab. The Arabs hit harder, but were in the minority. I got the impression the Arabs thought they were in charge, but I don't think the Afghans agreed with them on that point.

The chief inquisitor, an Afghan who occasionally translated questions for everyone else in the band, wasn't putting his shoulder behind the hits after what I estimated were a couple of days of softening-up. I liked to think it was because his hand was starting to hurt after I smashed my face into it repeatedly. But then I began to wonder if there wasn't another reason. Like if they were going to video my execution and broadcast it, for example. It wouldn't be great PR if my face resembled a strawberry shortcake dropped on the sidewalk. I thought about this in a distracted way, like it was happening to someone else.

Religion was another favorite question-time subject. Did I realize,
for example, that there was only one true God and that his name was Allah?

I kept it simple and said yes to this. I wasn't sure about the name, but I reminded myself a rose by another name smells as sweet, or however that saying goes. The question got me thinking. I knew a bunch of guys in a club who thought the one true God was Camaro, probably a ‘69 model—metallic blue—with a manual box. I had the good sense to keep this to myself, protecting it. They wanted to know if I believed in God. Tricky. There were times when I did and times when it seemed there wasn't one, or if there was that He was plainly psychotic. Mostly, I told them what they wanted to hear. When I told them things they didn't want to hear, the sessions ended, which was good. They ended because usually I was unconscious, which was also good but for the brief, painful period leading up to it. This was one of those times when I thought there was no God, but I told them otherwise.

There was always one man standing guard at the front door, or sitting at a bench warming his hands against the glass of a hurricane lantern, the wick turned way down. I noted the job rotated through half a dozen different men, a shift lasting a few hours each. I realized I was looking for a way to escape. There didn't seem to be one.

I passed the time by spending a lot of it in my head, replaying conversations I wished had gone another way. Surprisingly, second on the list of the ones I spent most time re-editing were the phone conversations I'd had with my ex-wife, Brenda. I didn't want the outcome of our divorce turned around, just the mood of it improved. It was a regret. So I called her in the life I was having in my head. The call went well. All was forgiven.

First on the list of conversations to re-edit were the ones I'd had with Anna. She forgave me, too. She also forgave me Clare, and I forgave her the JAG lawyer. We made up and had makeup sex. I went through this make-up over and over. The people in my head were far more pleasant and forgiving than the ones keeping me chained to the wall.

After a break of a month, but it also could have been days or
even hours, the beatings started again. This time, rods of wood were often used. They mostly kept the hits away from my face. Once, a couple of Arabs came in and spent some time sharpening long knives and machetes and making movements with the blades across their own necks. I was hoping they'd slip.

Questions usually, but not always, accompanied the beatings. On one of these occasions, it was me who was given some answers.

“Where are you from?”

“America. You know that.”

“In Afghanistan. Where did you take off from?”

“Kandahar.”

“What was your mission?”

“Transport flight.”

Whack.

“Liar! We know this is a lie. What was the snow car for?”

I assumed he meant the Ski-Doo. “I don't know.”

Whack.

“You are commando. You were going to raid
.”

His heavy accent got in the way of me catching the name, but I knew he meant Phunal. I wondered how he knew. “No,” I said.

Whack. Whack.
“Liar!”
Whack.
“You were heavily armed. You had sniper scope. You had GPS, radios, supplies for a week.”

Three days in all, but I didn't correct the error.

“We shot down your plane,” he bragged. In the words of the movie
Top Gun,
this guy's ego was writing checks his body couldn't cash.

“We know where you were going because
was at tacked that night. You will pay for the many brave lives lost there.”

I shook my head and said, “Transport flight.”

Whack.

And so it continued along in this general vein. As an interrogator, this guy was an amateur. To start with, he'd said “snow
car.
“ “Car” meant singular. So they'd recovered only one Ski-Doo.
More important, Phunal had been attacked. Butler and Dortmund and maybe others had gone on to complete the mission—captured or killed Boyle and put an end to the nuclear threat. That didn't make any sense and I wondered whether all the whacking had addled my brains.

*   *   *

I wasn't sure how much time had passed since my capture. I felt myself withdrawing, building a room of my own deep within and hiding away there. I knew what my mind was doing. The Air Force had prepared me for this a long time ago with a course in capture and torture.

One morning, or it could have been afternoon, I sensed plenty of activity outside. There were many horses stamping and snorting, and voices. There was also cheering. The commotion died down and nothing much happened for the rest of the day. No interrogation, no punishment, no threats. I was hoping they had all decided to move on and had forgotten about me. I was about to try to stand up when my cell filled with people. My eyes were swollen almost shut, so I couldn't see too well. I felt a hand under my chin that smelled of horse sweat and dung. The hand lifted my head and I looked into a face. I knew this guy. He was an old friend. He'd aged a little since I last saw him, and grime was pressed into the pores of his skin, but his eyes were soft and brown and his lids drooped a little like he was tired. Maybe he was. Hell, I was. “Hey,” I said. “How you doin'?” My voice cracked, and it came out as a whisper. I gave him a smile, too. I wondered what this friend of mine was doing here in this place and whether he'd come to get me out. I thought I should warn him he was in danger of ending up a punching bag. Those kind, sad eyes looked into mine, but I saw no recognition in them. I was a stranger to him. “It's me. Vin,” I said, again in a whisper. This was a funny situation. Finally, here was someone come to take me home, a familiar face, a buddy, and he didn't even recognize me. I must look like shit. The hopelessness of it made me laugh. It was funny. It was dumb.

The laughing earned me a beating.

I
t was day or night, I wasn't sure which but I knew it had to be one or the other. I felt my shoulder being shaken. “Come on, wake up. Time to go.”

I wondered where this stranger was going and why he was telling me. It didn't occur to me to wonder who “he” was.

The owner of the voice shook me again and said, “Here, drink this.” I felt the pressure of a cup against my lips, and smelled heaven inside it. I tasted warm coffee, full of sugar. The flavor was exquisite, powerful. My shaking hands spilled some as I tried to get it all in my mouth, past my swollen lips, and I nearly wept. Next came a small chunk of soft cheese. He put the end of a bag in my mouth and cool, clean water flooded my throat. I coughed, hacked.

“Shhh…” said the man, putting a finger to his lips. He whispered, “Put a sock in it, buddy.”

Put a sock in it, buddy?
That threw me. The words were said with what sounded like a broad New York accent. I was also thrown because this guy was one of the Afghans, one of the people who'd beaten the crap out of me when I hadn't given the right answers.

I heard the familiar light tinkle of key against stainless steel and my hands were released. The blood surged through my shoulders, down my arms, and out to my fingertips, which
throbbed and burned and felt as if they would burst like a couple of balloons overfilled with water.

While I was trying to adjust to this sudden change in fortune, the guy fiddled around behind me, unwinding the end of the cable from whatever had secured my hands. He held up my handcuffs and set them on the floor beside me. “A souvenir,” he whispered.

I picked them up and pushed them into a thigh pocket. Smith & Wessons—the bastards had used my own handcuffs on me.

“I'm gonna take a look at your feet. OK?”

I nodded.

He checked them out. “I'm gonna put these on you.” He showed me a pair of old socks and boots that appeared to have been resoled countless times.

I nodded.

The socks and shoes went on and the sensation was strangely reassuring.

“Can you stand?”

Another nod.

He helped me to my feet. “You've been here nine days. They haven't tortured you. You should be OK.”

Haven't been tortured? Easy for you to say, pal,
I thought. Nine days. It had felt like nine months. He threaded my hands through the sleeves of a thickly padded, coarse, knee-length coat, and then fastened the front buttons. The coat was far from tailored, but it was warm. I sagged against the wall while he wound a length of black wool around my head and face, and then a dirty blue wool cape around my shoulders.

“These are your gloves,” he said under his breath, holding them in front of my face. “Can you put them on?”

More nodding. The knuckles of my formerly dislocated fingers were swollen up like golf balls, but I could wiggle the digits and they didn't hurt as bad as they had a right to.

“Take this,” he said. “Feel free to use it if you have to. But use it quietly, OK?” He wiped the weapon on his cloak and handed it to me.

It was a knife, a long, thin, lethal knife, the edges modified—honed razor sharp. I knew this knife. I ran my gloved fingertip down the inscription on the blade, wiping away some of the crimson coagulated blood clogging the letters. There wasn't enough light by which to read the words, but I knew what they said:
And the American Way.
This was Ruben Wright's knife, the one Clare Selwyn and I both thought was lost close to where Ruben had died.
Truth, Justice
on the one side,
And the American Way
on the other. Ruben Wright's personal motto, the last line of the theme song from the original
Superman
TV show.

“Where'd you find this?” I asked.

“Same place we found you. Can you walk?”

This must have been what my fingers found when Butler and I had grappled in midair. “Who are you?” I asked, taking a couple of unsteady steps.

“A guy who's about to blow his cover. Come on—the window of opportunity's small. We get this wrong, we're both dead.”

He helped me to the front door. I slipped and almost fell. There was something on the ground, hidden in the night shadow from the flickering orange light of the hurricane lamp. It was one of the Arabs. His throat had been cut and his blood had leaked out, making a hell of a sticky, slippery mess. His clothes had been stripped off him and his feet were bare. We stepped over his sprawled legs, through the door, and into a densely black night. Snow was falling. It was utterly quiet, all sound absorbed by fat, ghostly flakes the size of flower petals drifting down from above.

My rescuer pulled out a pair of night-vision goggles from somewhere and put them on. “This way,” he said, nudging me in an uphill direction. We made our way up through what was a small village cut into a rock face that was close to vertical. Somewhere, a mutt barked halfheartedly, the sound muffled by the falling snow. I was lucky. Everything in the village was made of stone and mud brick and even the smallest sound would usually bounce around amplified in a place like this, especially in the thicker night air. Nevertheless, we stopped moving occasionally,
my guide making the gesture of silence with his finger pressed against his lips. Once, I was pushed back against a wall and into a deep shadow as two men with AKs strolled past. They were both smoking. I knew from experience the glowing tips would register in the NVG's lenses like a pair of usher's flashlights.