The Thin Wall: A POW/MIA Truth Novel

by R. Cyril West

  “It wasn’t my intent to harm the boy.” Dal watched Jiri scramble away. “I’m a father, too. I am only interested in your role in today’s scandal.” He picked the cigarette up from the old stones, where it had fallen next to the crowbar, stuck it between his lips and struck a match.

  “Why are you doing this?”

  “Because the doctor couldn’t possibly have rescued the prisoner from the villa by himself.” He blew smoke through his nostrils. “He must’ve had help. Who?”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “Tell me. Who are the conspirators? Who helped the doctor rescue the prisoner?”

  “What prisoner?”

  “Don’t play games with me.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Names,” Dal persisted, slurring his words. “Was it the baker?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “The priest?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why protect them? You will spend the rest of your life in prison for lying.”

  “I told you,” she insisted. “I don’t know anything about a prisoner.”

  “And the fire at the villa?”

  “Or the fire.” She stared at his puffy black eye. It reminded her of a burnt cake.

  Dal grumbled. “You have this way. Always pushing back like a door that refuses to close.”

  “You’re not wanted here.”

  “Ah, Czech hospitality has left a bad taste in my mouth.” He shook his head and gazed across the square. “Do we really need to go down this road again? Most of your comrades understand what’s at stake. They have fallen in line.”

  “You may confiscate our guns,” she said, taking a moment to choose her words. “Control our printing press. Close our church. All in our ‘best’ interest. However you and your Moscow thugs won’t take my soul.”

  “Ah, that language makes for good theatre,” he said. “But in reality?”

  “It’s true.”

  “You say that now. But have you already forgotten? Will you still be thinking this way in prison? Away from your son? When you are not around to watch him grow up? No. You won’t. Trust me. You won’t.”

  Ayna squeezed her fists. She had been holding herself together by willpower alone and now nothing else mattered. Not her life. Not Jiri. Nothing. When the colonel glanced over his shoulder, again reminding her that she stood alone in her crusade against his legal authority, her anger had reached a boiling point and she flailed madly at his swollen eye, jolting his head. She punched again, surprised he dropped to a knee so quickly, without swinging back.

  She caught her breath. Her tremors produced in her a state of shock. What next? Dal had his hands over his face and was moaning and grunting like a dying animal. His defenseless posture seemed like surrender. Had he given up the fight? No. It was wishful thinking on her part.

  She inhaled through flared nostrils and took a step. Instead of running for the bakery, where Josef stood at the door calling her name, she picked up the crowbar and thumped the colonel on the shoulder, and a second blow, until he fell flat on the stones.

  “Kill him,” the butcher shouted from a window.

  She heaved a lungful of air. Now was her last chance to act. Are you going to slay him? His head was exposed and she had a clean shot to crack his skull, but froze, unable to finish him off.

  “Damn,” he mumbled. “That hurt like hell.”

  More and more people yelled from their windows and doorways, “Do it” and “Bash his head” and “Don’t let him get away.”

  Dal did not seem to mind that the people were inciting a murder──his murder. He was wholly focused on his injury. While she stood there, he carefully squeezed the gash on his cheek, forcing the shard of windshield glass through the bloody flesh until he held the pebble size object between his fingers, and was inspecting it with childlike curiosity.

  “Amazing,” he said, flicking away the glass. “Amazing something so fucking small can hurt so badly.”

  Verushka screamed, “What are you waiting for, stupid girl?”

  When she came at him with the crowbar, he grabbed the bar with a hand, rose to his feet, and shoved her to the ground.

  Ayna landed hard, then scooted away.

  “Too late,” he sneered, hurling the crowbar into the street. “You hesitated. It’s best to strike while the iron is hot.”

  She crawled toward the fountain, aware that her wrist, the hand she had used to punch him, was painfully limp. Was it sprained? Broken? How was she going to hit him now? She bumped against the parapet. There was no escape. This was it. The end. Turning toward him, she feared he was about to shoot.

  . . . instead he was taking off his leather belt.

  And he whipped her. “Fear it,” Dal said with bloody gums, reciting from Hamlet. “Ophelia, fear it, my dear sister.”

  “Leave me alone,” she shouted, slapping away the belt.

  Dal grew stronger with his theatrics while she crumbled at his feet. With a sturdy voice, he said, “And keep you in the rear of your affection.”

  “Stop,” she said. “Please stop.” She was curled up against the concrete parapet, in the shadow of Elizabeth of Bohemia’s wings.

  “When the blood burns,” he went on dramatically, “how prodigal the soul lends the tongue vows.” His Shakespearean rhythm was near perfect, even with an intoxicated slurring. “From this time be somewhat scanter of your maiden presence.”

  “Don’t hit me,” she pleaded. “Whatever you want. You can have it. I promise. Just leave us alone.” He struck again, the belt wrapping around her bruised forearm like a snake. She attempted to stand, her knees cut and bleeding, but he nudged her with his boot and pulled away the belt.

  “So speaketh Polonius,” he concluded.

  A stream of blood made an inverted Y down Ayna’s neck. Her breath was rattled, her ears ringing. “You’re insane,” she whimpered, her body shrinking away.

  Pinching the cigarette between his fingers, Dal paused, his eye vacant and blinking several times. “This sickness has interfered with my ability to remember the dialogue from the play. Tss. It’s embarrassing. I am quite sure I missed a line or two.”

  He raised the belt above his head, like a master about to discipline his slave, when suddenly a rock crashed on the cobble and landed near his boot.

  He lowered the belt.

  Ayna brushed the hair from her eyes: it was Bedrich. He had tossed the stone. He stood at the edge of the square, beneath the shade of a birch tree, with his shoulders pulled back.

  “Bedrich?” Dal said in disbelief.

  Ayna leaned forward──awestruck. Bedrich was clutching another chunk of cobble. She thought he looked like someone else, a stranger, the stronger man hiding inside his deformed body all these years.

  “Go away,” she shouted to Bedrich, terror in her voice. “I can take care of myself.”

  “Of all people. Him? The village idiot?” Dal scratched his head. “Your Knight in Shining Armor?”

  Bedrich set his lips tightly together. Not in anger, but in wanting to form a word. She had never seen him do this. Was he attempting to speak? She felt mesmerized, forgetting for a moment that she had been whipped, that her wrist was sprained, and that Dal was hovering with a belt.

  Bedrich? What is it?

  The halfwit stood there, his mouth open, the tip of his tongue moving between his rotten teeth like a man stuttering in silence until he uttered a simple, but clearly understood word, “No.”

  Ayna went numb. Hearing his voice made her jaw drop. He sounded Slovakian──of all things. She had always wondered what he might sound like. Now a thrill came over her. Bedrich had blossomed before her eyes. At long last, he was someone to be reckoned with. She could not help smiling, even with the danger he had put himself in.

  “Well, well, what do you know?” Dal said. His eyebrow shot up quizzically. “The village idiot speaks.”

  “Bedrich, go away,” she said again.

  Instead of leaving, the halfwi
t reared back and pitched the other cobblestone, which landed near a trash can, nowhere close to the bemused colonel.

  “How futile,” Dal said. “Ah, to be expected from such an inept man.” With a firm hand he reached down and picked Ayna up by the neck. His hands were large, his fingers wrapping around her skin like five squeezing pythons. “This is your last opportunity. Tell me. Who are the conspirators?”

  She showed her teeth and attempted to bite his hand. Desperate, she made a fist, though never landed a punch. His hand was firm, beginning to compress, a reflex away from crushing her throat.

  . . . losing consciousness.

  . . . her world turning black.

  When a rock struck Dal in the kidney and he released his grip.

  Ayna rolled on a shoulder.

  Josef stood next to Bedrich, and said, “Keep your hands off the girl.”

  Suddenly heels were clacking against the cobble. People were showing their faces, more and more of them stepping out from their shops and homes. Ayna saw them standing with rocks and other blunt objects taken from their homes──anything that could be thrown. An eerie calm swept over the square, like the somber quiet at a funeral service.

  Dal whipped out the Makarov and pointed it at Josef, Bedrich, Oflan, Nadezda, and Pavel. He seemed confused, unsure who to shoot first, when an ashtray pelted him in the knee. He buckled, stammered back to a standing position. “I will arrest whoever threw that object,” he said, pointing the pistol from person to person. “I order you. Stand down. Or else, you will be charged with a crime.”

  Next, a rock struck his hand and he dropped the gun.

  Dal made no effort to pick up the weapon──he just stood there, tugging his wallet from a pocket and then flashing his KGB identification badge.

  As he did, Ayna rose to her feet and ran toward Bedrich, her eyes jolting back and forth between Dal and the circling crowd.

  Finally, Tad stepped forward with a piece of cobble. Amid a round of hissing and shouting, he heaved the stone and struck the colonel squarely in the forehead. The thud of Dal’s skull cracking was grotesque, sounding like the dull knock of wood being chopped.

  Dal faltered on his heels, flashing the badge. He had been hit by a wave of delayed shock and there was blood oozing from a laceration above his good eye.

  She had no idea who threw the next stone. Or the stones thereafter. But the onslaught had begun, debris hurling from all corners of the square, striking the colonel’s arms, legs, stomach, head. The objects knocked him backward into the fountain’s ash-stained pool, where he landed spread-eagle like a fallen heavyweight boxer.

  After the last stone skidded across the cobble, she heard Irena say, “The evil brute is dead.”

  Someone else said, “In the Lord’s name.”

  Father Sudek stood on the church steps, hunched over his cane. His consenting eyes were beaming with the same sort of masterful expression he often wore when conducting the quartet.

  Now she heard distant sirens, maybe an ambulance, maybe the police.

  When she looked again the priest was gone.

  She broke from Bedrich’s sleeve and stepped cautiously toward the fountain. There was a man and a woman, not far off, embracing their children. Other people returned quietly to their homes and shops. A few like Tad and Emil, gathered behind her without celebration, in a sort of disbelieving curiosity. Dead? Dal looked pathetic sprawled out in the dry pool with blood on his face, his arms at his side with the palms facing up.

  . . . still.

  . . . any moment.

  She leaned into him, her heart beating more violently than ever. The Russian monster was too strong. He could not be dead. Impossible. She listened to his sluggish breathing, what sounded like a slowing freight train, just one more burst of steam, one more rotation of the side rod, a final turn of the wheels. The impassive Josef looked on, a hand on her shoulder. From the corner of her eye, she saw Bedrich pick up the colonel’s gun and stick it between his belt and pants, before hobbling away.

  She stood there and observed Dal in his dismal state. There was blood trickling down his cheek. She was undaunted by his gory half-grin and slowly blinking eye. He was staring at her and no one else. He knew something, maybe a secret. Would he tell?

  Battling for his last lungful of air, he faintly uttered a line from what Evzen said was Homer’s The Iliad. “Once harm has been done,” he gasped. “Even a fool understands it.” There were some who swore these were not the words Dal had spoken, rather, they insisted he had recited a famous quote from the Roman poet Horace. “It is a sweet and seemly thing to die for one’s country.”

  It did not matter. She had heard something entirely different. She was standing the closest to him and knew exactly what he said and what he had meant by it. A kind of guilty suffering rushed up and down her spine. She had been pulled into every despicable word that left his mouth and in silent confession she lamented how it made her feel.

  At least it was done.

  Ayna took a deep breath, taking in the enormity of what had just happened. The sirens had reached the square. The police. All these weeks later, the police. She felt her shoulders slacken and glanced across the cobble. The people were lingering, some were gazing at the colonel’s dead body and others were picking up the debris, making little mounds of stones.

  She saw a peacock, and the blind veteran, and then she went home to be with her son.

  THE END

  HISTORICAL NOTES

  In late 1989, a flowering of peaceful demonstrations spread across Czechoslovakia. Known as “The Velvet Revolution,” the protests led to the collapse of the Communist Party’s control over the country and the subsequent conversion to a parliamentary republic. Decades of oppression had finally ended for Czechs. They rejoiced on the streets, at the Old Town Square, in the countryside, free once again to live their lives without government intervention.

  The Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia lasted for another year and a half. The last occupation troops left the country on June 27, 1991, just six months before the collapse of the Soviet Union.

  On New Year’s Day 1993, Czechoslovakia peacefully dissolved into its constituent states, the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic.

  In the 1980s and 1990s, Jan Sejna, a former major general in the Czechoslovak Army, who defected to the United States in 1968, claimed the Soviet Union had abducted U.S. servicemen from Korea and Vietnam and routed them through Czechoslovakia to the Soviet Union, where they were used in medical experiments.

  In 1992, Dmitri Volkogonov, a military adviser to Russian President Boris Yeltsin, told a U.S. Senate committee that more than 22,000 U.S. soldiers had been taken to the Soviet Union from German prisoner-of-war camps.

  That same year Boris Yeltsin told NBC news, “Our archives have shown that it is true──some of them (POWs) were transferred to the territory of the former U.S.S.R. and were kept in labor camps. We don’t have complete data and can only surmise that some of them may still be alive.”

  From August 2, 1991 to January 2, 1993 a special congressional committee convened to investigate the fate of United States service personnel listed as missing in action during the Vietnam War.

  At the end of the investigation, the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs issued the following statement, “While the Committee has some evidence suggesting the possibility a POW may have survived to the present, and while some information remains yet to be investigated, there is, at this time, no compelling evidence that proves that any American remains alive in captivity in Southeast Asia.”

  To this day, the Russian GRU refuses to make public certain documents that could prove or disprove assertions that U.S. servicemen were sent to the Soviet Union.

  We may never know the truth . . .

  R. Cyril West

  1 January, 2014

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  R. Cyril West studied Arabic and International Relations at the University of Arizona. One of his earliest memories of the Vietnam War wa
s in 1973, when he sat with other school children at an elementary school near Hickam Air Force Base and watched American Prisoners of War held by the North Vietnamese return home during Operation Homecoming. He hopes this novel will spread awareness about America’s heroes, the 83,000 U.S. servicemen still missing from foreign wars. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

  R. Cyril West

  Email: author@rcyrilwest.com

  Author web: www.rcyrilwest.com

  Facebook: www.facebook.com/rcyrilwest

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I am indebted to Chip Beck for writing the foreword to my novel, as well, for keeping me focused during times when the POW/MIA aspect of the plot felt very dark and I briefly considered abandoning the project. I am also indebted to my editor, Rachel Glenn, for her numerous readings and crucial edits that brought clarity to the story. I am grateful to the author and mentor Ron Terpening for his excellent criticism and advice, and the author Ron Argo for his encouragement. I would like to thank George Voorhes Jr. for his amazing art; Marty Pay, Al Guevara, Lou Colabella, Kenny Rohaly, Marcelle Heath, Danielle Workman, Jackie Booe, Danny Glenn, and my parents, for their incisive and helpful comments; and above all my wife, Kristina West, for believing in me during the endless hours it took to research and write this novel. And finally, though certainly not least, I would like to thank the people on my Facebook page for offering their support, and likes; and at the end of the day for honoring our POW/MIA heroes.

  THE POW/MIA TRUTH SERIES

  The truth series tells fictionalized stories about the POW/MIA issue. The use of the word “truth” is meant to emphasize that while fiction, the premise of the story is inspired from bits and pieces of truth. Much of the information surrounding the POW/MIA issue remains secret or foggy to this day.