by Cap Daniels
“Welcome to The Ranch, Mr. Fulton. My name is Grey. It’ll be my job to get you settled in and make sure you’re comfortable. I’m sure you have a lot of questions, but there will be time for those later. For now, let’s get you out to your new home. It’s a little damp, and the heating system is on the fritz, but you’ll adapt.”
We climbed into a pickup truck with no doors and a badly broken windshield, and tore away from the airstrip nearly as fast as the linebacker twins on I-95. We broke out of a tree line on a narrow, winding road, and I spotted a huge, open body of water to my right, and a smaller, much less inviting pond to the left.
Grey looked down at my legs and barked, “Put your seatbelt on!”
I did as I was told just as the truck made an abrupt and violent turn to the left toward the dark, foreboding water. It was clear we were going into the water, and there was absolutely nothing I could do about it.
It’s amazing what the mind is capable of imagining in highly stressful situations. My thoughts bounced around inside my skull like a pinball. I drove my foot into the floorboard with such force that I could feel the bones of my leg quiver in protest of my desperate, but futile attempt to press the imaginary brake pedal. I turned abruptly toward Grey, only to find that he, much like my imaginary brake pedal, wasn’t there. He’d vanished, leaving me completely alone and careening toward the nastiest water I’d ever seen.
I resolved that I’d soon be underwater and still securely belted in the front seat of what was left of a truck, somewhere in the wilds of northern Virginia. I didn’t like my predicament, but I had to come up with a plan to deal with it, and quickly.
A wall of black water filled the air as the front bumper found the surface of the cesspool. I drew a full breath, thinking that I may spend the next several minutes submerged, cold, and dying. As the energy of the truck was absorbed by the water, I felt the seatbelt cut into my flesh and the muscles of my body absorb the shock of the collision. I’ll never forget how cold and dark that water was. I tried to relax and avoid panic, but that’s much more easily thought than accomplished. Panic did arise, but I found the strength to suppress it.
Interestingly, the reality of riding a sinking vehicle into the murky depths is nothing like Hollywood wants us to believe. It’s not peaceful, clear, and bubbly. It’s terrifying, violent, and hellishly black. I clearly remember the feeling of the metallic buckle as I drove my thumb into what should’ve been the release button. It was sharp and immovable. I was going to have to find another way to escape the seatbelt. I opened one of my eyes and exhaled a small stream of bubbles, hoping to determine which way was up, but it was dark, and I could neither see nor feel the stream of bubbles pouring from my mouth. I realized I was exhaling air that my body was going to desperately need, so I promptly ceased my exhalation. In vain, I tried the buckle one last time, but it was hopeless. I tried sliding my body up and out of the seatbelt, but when my head hit the roof, I found myself bound and even more terrified than before. My heart pounded and my mind churned for a solution.
I opened my eyes, and to my amazement, I saw a light—a dim, foggy, perfectly motionless light. It seemed almost close enough to touch, but at the same time, immeasurably distant. I couldn’t slow my mind enough to determine the position of the light or why it was there. I could even see bubbles escaping around the light, but I wasn’t exhaling. I was still holding my precious breath in the ridiculous belief that holding air in my lungs would somehow keep me alive long enough to resolve my predicament. My lungs burned as panic overtook what was left of my logical mind. The light grew ever closer and I felt myself blacking out. I resolved that I had met my fate. I would drown in that filthy black pond in front of that ghostly, bubbling light. I made peace with it, exhaled, and opened my mouth to draw the murky water into my lungs and join my family in whatever was on the other side of that light.
I was surprisingly at peace with my impending demise. There was no panic, no terror, only acceptance and submission. I believed my death was imminent, but death didn’t come. Instead, a pair of strong, quick hands appeared, cutting away the seatbelt and shoving the mouthpiece of a small air bottle between my lips. I was being rescued by a scuba diver in the blackest, coldest, nastiest water I’d ever known.
Where’d he come from? Why is he in the water with me?
I learned a powerful and painful lesson that day. Sometimes it’s impossible to tell the difference between being rescued and being captured. As my head broke the surface of the murky water, I spat the bottle from my mouth and gasped. My lungs ached but relished that first full breath. Although cold, scared, and still confused, I was happy to be alive. I remember thinking there was nothing more important than being and staying alive. That belief became the core philosophy of the rest of my life. No matter how bad things were, as long as I was alive, almost anything else could be resolved.
The celebration in my lungs was short-lived. I saw a figure in a black wetsuit, hood, mask, and gloves moving through the water toward me.
Where’s Grey?
The diver pushed my head back beneath the surface of the water for what felt like an eternity. I fought against him and felt my lungs start to ache again as panic consumed my body. Just as I thought I’d reached death’s door for the second time that day, I chose to fight. I drove a strong left fist into the ribs of the diver and felt his body convulse. He backed away, allowing me to resurface. I filled my lungs just as the diver wrapped his right arm around my neck from behind. Dragging me aggressively backward, he pulled me out of the water and across a muddy embankment. His hold around my neck made it nearly impossible to breathe, but I managed to twist my head far enough to open a small airway and keep myself alive for whatever would happen next.
Before I could get enough air in my lungs to ask what was going on, another figure appeared. Like the first man, he was also dressed in all black, but instead of a wetsuit, he was wearing cargo pants, a black sweatshirt, and a ski mask. The diver yanked me to my feet just as the masked man’s fist landed squarely in my chest. I was quite familiar with the feeling of being hit in the chest, but I’d never been hit with a fist quite that hard. What little air there was in my lungs exploded from my throat and left me gagging from the agony of the blow. I felt my body collapsing, but the diver wouldn’t let me fall. He held me on my feet while the second man continued to punish me. Before I could gather the strength and breath to defend myself, a bag was pulled over my head and bound around my neck.
In what I assumed was an effort to further disorient me, the two men spun me around several times. The instant the spinning ceased, another powerful blow landed in my abdomen. This time, no one held me up, and I collapsed solidly to the ground. My hands and feet were quickly bound, and I was dragged by my feet through the mud. Occasionally, I was rolled over and dragged facedown. I felt twigs and rocks of every size tear at my skin. The experience was agonizing, but finally, the dragging stopped, and my feet fell to the ground. I heard the distinct swoosh and click of a switchblade knife spring open. I was horrified.
Why did they drag me through the woods just to kill me here? Why didn’t they just let me drown?
Thankfully, the knife wasn’t intended to kill me, yet. It was to free me from some of my bindings. They left my feet bound, presumably so I couldn’t run, but they cut the tie from my neck, removed the bag, and cut my hands free. Freeing my hands seemed like a very bad decision on their part. The masked man was joined by another, and they yelled at me in some language I’d never heard. It wasn’t Spanish. My Spanish was strong. It wasn’t German. My mother spoke German, and I knew it was not what my mother had spoken. By their tone, it was clear they weren’t my friends. They wanted something from me. That’s when it occurred to me. This was all part of the mystery of my training. They wanted to see how I’d react to being captured, tortured, and questioned. It was a mind game. I knew a thing or two about mind games, so I decided to play along.
Well, that isn’t entirely true. I decided I’d play alo
ng if I continued to believe it was a mind game. If it wasn’t part of my training, I was in far more trouble than I could imagine.
“Look, guys. I want you to understand that if this is part of my training, that’s fine. I get it. But if this is something else, I’m going to hurt, and possibly kill, at least one of you. I’m not exactly sure what’s going to happen after that. If this is all part of the game, it would be a very good idea to let me in on the secret.”
The two masked men looked at each other with a look I couldn’t precisely identify, but I thought it might’ve been amusement. Neither of them said a word.
I was kneeling on the muddy ground with my feet tucked under my butt, a position in which I’d spent a great many hours behind home plate. I’d thrown a few thousand baseballs to second base from that position. I surveyed my environment and discovered two relatively round, large rocks within my reach.
“I’m serious here, guys. If you understand English and you want to stay alive, now would be a very good time to speak up.”
In the interest of being as fair as possible, I repeated my warning in both German and Spanish, just in case they didn’t understand English. Neither man moved nor spoke. I decided I’d given more than ample warning. Deciding to try a little visual misdirection, I quickly let my eyes jerk to a point behind both men. As I did, I let a look of fear and shock consume my face. I ducked quickly as if I believed I was going to be shot. I dived to my right, feigning fear and performing a dramatic reaction to a threat that didn’t exist.
My gambit worked. Both men turned to identify my imaginary attacker. The distraction granted me the tiny window of time I needed to firmly grasp both rocks. Returning to my knees, I twisted at the waist, and poised my hand behind my right ear with the baseball-shaped rock held firmly in my grasp. Seeing nothing in the trees, both men turned back to me, knowing they’d fallen victim to my charade. Before either could react, I uncoiled my body and brought my arm forward in a rush of accelerating force, releasing the stone as my hand passed my temple. I followed through just as I’d been taught, but what came next wasn’t in any catching lessons I’d ever endured. Using the energy of my throw to carry my body forward with remarkable force, I tucked my right shoulder beneath my chin and propelled my body into a roll that left me on my feet and less than four feet from my captors. I stood from my roll, and I watched the man with the knife recoil and collapse to the ground when my stone sank into his left eye and a curtain of blood filled the air. I lunged toward him with all of my strength and grabbed the switchblade from his hand while his body melted to the ground. I drove the blade between my feet, slicing the plastic binding that held my ankles together. I felt the binding give way, and for the first time in what felt like hours, I was completely free.
I stumbled but finally found my footing. When I focused, I discovered my second captor standing in front of me in a fighting stance with no fear in his eyes. He didn’t care that I was free and armed with his partner’s knife. He was ready to fight, but so was I. I suspected he was well trained and confident, but I was afraid, armed, and pissed off.
The months I’d spent with my right hand and arm damaged, healing, and mostly useless, I’d learned to do almost everything with my left hand, including throwing a baseball. I made the decision to try one more misdirection and use the natural weapons that I actually had.
I hopped into a throwing stance with my right hand held high above my head, with the knife held firmly between my thumb and fingers. I’d never thrown a knife, but I was going to try. I stepped forward and brought my right hand downward, whipping the blade past my ear and releasing it into the air. It left my hand and tumbled through the air directly toward my opponent. Unfortunately, it wasn’t flying toward his heart. It was descending in an arc that was clearly going to fall short of his feet. Stepping back, he watched the blade bounce across the leaf-covered ground. What he didn’t see was my pivot that placed my right foot just in front of my left, and the forceful arc of my left hand cutting through the air. The stone left my palm and almost instantly found its target: the man’s right ear. I heard the collision of stone, flesh, and bone. I watched his knees buckle and his mass fall limply to the earth.
Having no idea what to do next, I found myself at the mercy of instinct. I snatched the knife from the ground and began running back toward the water. I didn’t know what I was going to do with the knife, but something inside me said that possessing it was better than leaving it behind. Running with energy I’d never felt, I rounded the muddy edge of the filthy lake when I heard my name ringing in the air. I thought I knew the voice.
“Chase! Damn it, Chase. Stop running!”
It was Grey, the former driver of the truck that almost became my watery coffin.
Still breathless and wet, I turned to Grey. “What the hell was all that about?”
Instead of answering my question, he asked, “How the hell did you escape?”
8
Operator?
I never got my answer. I would soon come to learn that life, especially life in my new line of work, rarely has answers, and almost never direct ones. Instead of answers, I was given a towel and some dry clothes—clothes that were almost identical to what my captors had been wearing. Without further inquisition, I climbed into a much nicer truck than the one that was now resting peacefully on the bottom of Lake Nasty.
After a short, bumpy ride, I found myself in a dreary office deep within an old building. The building was constructed of concrete block that had been painted so many times the walls appeared to be made of soft clay. The concrete floor was occasionally covered with pieces of carpeting that looked like they belonged in an abandoned library from the 1950s. Almost everyone in the building was dressed like me. They wore black, olive drab, or khaki cargo pants and tactical-looking, button-up shirts, with sleeves rolled up near the elbows. Everyone was busy at some task, and almost no one looked at me. Grey sat silently beside me in a metal folding chair that reminded me of chairs that might be found in the basement of an old church.
Through the door burst the most intimidating man imaginable. I wasn’t even sure that Beater could’ve taken this guy, even back in his glory days. The man was around six feet tall and two hundred pounds. He wore khaki cargo shorts and a skin-tight, black t-shirt with a logo of a lightning bolt crashing through a wreath. Beneath the logo were the words “Admit Nothing. Deny Everything. Make Counter Accusations.”
His hair was closely cropped and his skin was like tanned leather. Two days of stubble punctuated his chiseled features, and a pair of cold, steel-blue eyes sat deeply in his face beneath gray, bushy eyebrows. He wore green jungle boots with black laces over black socks that were rolled down to the top of the boots.
He slammed the door with such force that everything in the office appeared to shy away from him. With a callused and weather-beaten right hand, he grabbed my belt buckle and forced his left hand beneath my chin, jerking me from my chair. I thought he was probably close to sixty years old, but he had the strength and vitality of a much younger man. He shoved me into a huge metal filing cabinet with such force that the cabinet shuddered at the impact. He pressed his thumb so painfully into my neck that I considered trying to break his arm, but I doubted he’d be as easy to defeat as the two guys in the woods.
As he ground my head into the concrete block wall of the office, the man roared with anger and disgust. “What the fuck is wrong with you, you little bastard? What made you think it was okay to kill one of my cadre and deafen another with your little rock-throwing show earlier?”
Did I kill the man? I didn’t mean to kill him.
In an attempt to get him off me, I threw a knee shot to his groin by bracing my left heel against the wall and raising my right leg with unprecedented speed and force. To my surprise, he blocked the blow by twisting at the waist and redirecting my knee into the filing cabinet. Before I could react to the pain, the man released my throat and belt buckle simultaneously while sweeping my foot from beneath me. Whe
n I came to rest, I was folded like a pretzel in the crevice formed by the wall and the cabinet. The man’s knee was pressing into the back of my neck, driving my face into the cold, damp wall.
What the man hadn’t realized was that I was a little more flexible than most. I’d spent a few thousand hours kneeling behind home plate, so my predicament wasn’t as uncomfortable as he probably wanted it to be. I could use my atypical flexibility to a decided advantage. My plan was to hook his ankle with my foot and force him to lean back to avoid contact with the wall. This would get his knee off my neck and give me an opportunity to deliver an uppercut to his crotch. Having been in more than my share of brawls on the baseball field, I’d never met a man who could stay on his feet following that particular shot.
My plan would’ve worked perfectly on most normal people, but there was nothing normal about this guy. The instant I began to extend my leg, he lifted his foot, sending even more of his weight downward on my neck and shoulder. When his foot fell again, it landed firmly on my ankle and sent bursts of pain exploding up my leg. If my ankle wasn’t broken, he’d done some incredible damage. He wasn’t finished. I reached for his boot, but the man reacted with blinding speed. He thrust his Ka-Bar fighting knife only millimeters beneath my wrist and pierced my sleeve. When the knife came to rest, it was buried through the fabric of my sleeve and into the metal of the file cabinet. With a broken ankle and one hand anchored to the metal cabinet, I was pinned beneath his knee. There was no fight left in me.
I knew I was defeated, but I refused to give him the pleasure of hearing me beg. I tried to relax and stop resisting. He recognized my surrender and rolled his foot from my ankle. He quickly, but cautiously, stepped backward and held his fists defensively in front of his body. I don’t know what he expected me to do. There was no way I could get to my feet to fight him. I wasn’t moving.
