The Sword of Moses (Sneak Preview)

by Dominic Selwood

not going to ask again.” His tone was ugly. “Where is it?”

  The monk seemed not to be aware what was happening.

  Without warning, Kimbaba struck him viciously across the face with the back of his hand, drawing a spurt of crimson blood from the jagged tear to the corner of his mouth.

  The fresh flash of pain seemed to jerk the yellow-robed monk out of his reverie. His eyes settled on Kimbaba, soft and distant. When he spoke, his voice was calm. “What do you want here?”

  “Where is it?” The militiaman glowered at him, sweat beginning to appear on his bull-like neck. “The tabot?”

  The guardian eyed him closely before answering slowly and gently. “The tabot is not for you.”

  Without warning, Kimbaba slammed his fist into the guardian’s solar plexus. The monk doubled up, crumpling to the floor.

  Kimbaba leaned over him, his expression unchanged. “Now.”

  There was a pause while the monk looked up at the hulking man looming over him. Despite the pain contorting his face, there was no anger in his eyes. His voice, when it came, was a resolute whisper. “No.”

  Kimbaba unclicked his Patriot combat knife from its kydex belt sheath. He held it out for a moment, the black blade glinting dully in front of the monk’s face, before jamming its sharpened steel point into the stubbly dark flesh under the old man’s chin. His eyes gleamed, leaving the monk in no doubt of his intentions.

  The elderly guardian looked calmly at Kimbaba. “I have been ready all my life.” His voice was mild and measured. “You cannot kill my soul.”

  Kimbaba kicked him hard in the ribs, sending him sprawling. “You will not meet your god today, tabot-man, however much you soon beg for it.”

  The monk’s face twisted in pain as he eyed his tormentor, but his voice remained slow and placid. “Your threats are worthless—my life is a holy living sacrifice.”

  Kimbaba returned his prisoner’s gaze for a moment, rocking his large head from side to side, making a sucking sound with his teeth. Turning to Masolo, he flicked his eyes towards the entrance. “Get it.”

  Masolo nodded to the balaclavad man nearest him, and together they disappeared through the ancient oak doors.

  Returning a few minutes later, they placed a black anodized roof-rack, a jerrycan, and a coil of slim rope onto the floor beside him.

  Kimbaba rolled the prisoner over with his boot, then bent down and sliced through the plasticuffs binding his slender wrists.

  Grabbing him by the shoulders, he forced the frail man face-up onto the cold metal bars of the rack, spread-eagling him. “As a religious man, you’ll appreciate this exercise. It was invented by the Spanish Inquisition.” He grunted, cutting short lengths of the grimy rope and tying the monk’s bony wrists and ankles to the rack’s rigid frame.

  The guardian eyed Kimbaba closely. “I fear hell and damnation. Not pain.”

  Kimbaba nodded. “There will be no pain.” His eyes glinted with anticipation. “Just terror.”

  He held the knife’s razor-sharp point to the flesh under the monk’s chin again, pushing harder this time. “Last chance.”

  The monk shook his head fractionally as the knife broke the skin, drawing fresh blood. “I chose my path long ago,” he murmured quietly, unflinching.

  The militiaman pulled the knife down hard, tearing open the guardian’s flimsy old yellow robes. He hacked off a large section of the material, then ripped it in two. Folding the smaller piece into a strip, he bound it tightly around the monk’s shaved head, blindfolding him.

  The monk began chanting softly, finding the quiet place inside himself that allowed him to separate his mind from his body. “Abune zebesemayat, yitkedes simike, timsa mengistike weyikun ... .”

  Kimbaba did not understand the language. If he had, he would have recognized it as Ge’ez, the ritual language of the Ethiopian Orthodox church—a Semitic tongue closely linked to the Aramaic spoken by the monk’s god in Galilee two thousand years ago.

  Kimbaba motioned Masolo to help drag the monk over to the altar. As they hooked the rack’s bottom end over the wooden lip of the altar top, the veins on the guardian’s lined forehead began to bulge from the blood rushing rapidly to his brain.

  The militiaman looked down at the helpless body. “Your soul may be ready to die, priest—but there’s a part of your mind that is not.”

  The monk seemed not to hear him, but continued his litany. “... fekadeke, bekeme besemay kemahu bemedir ... .”

  “You will tell me what I need to know,” Kimbaba’s voice was low and certain.

  The monk was not listening. “... keme nihneni nihidig leze’abese lene ... .”

  Surprised at the resolve in the guardian’s voice, Kimbaba grabbed the ten-inch-high silver cross from the altar, and tore it free of its wooden base, revealing a sharpened end where the metal had been driven into the wood. He placed the cross in the monk’s hand, folding the thin wizened fingers around it.

  “Drop it when you are ready to talk,” he instructed, piling the remainder of the torn yellow robes over the monk’s face. Satisfied, he nodded to Masolo, who opened the cap of the green metal jerrycan and handed it to him.

  With no further warning, Kimbaba held the jerrycan over the monk’s rag-covered face, and poured a cupful of water over his smothered mouth and nose. After a brief pause, he repeated the process, pouring in rapid one-second bursts.

  The warm rusty liquid soaked through the rags instantly, drenching them so it ran freely over the monk’s face.

  The old man clamped his mouth shut, but could not stop his nostrils from quickly filling. As the water collected at the back of his throat, he opened his mouth to spit, but it only served to fill his mouth with the flowing liquid. Struggling for air and beginning to panic, he could not stifle the reflex to breathe. As he opened his throat to suck down the air he craved, his lungs took in the water.

  Kimbaba knew the old man would not last long. Nobody did. That is why the CIA preferred it to all other ‘enhanced interrogation’ techniques. The fact it left no visible bruises was an added bonus.

  Kimbaba also knew that one session was usually enough. He had seen the desperate panic in victims’ eyes as their brains’ most ancient and primitive instinct centres took over, fighting at all costs for animal survival.

  But if the monk proved to be strong, Kimbaba was ready to do it again and again for as long as it took. There would be lung damage, but the process could be repeated almost indefinitely. He had heard that some inmates at Guantanamo Bay had been waterboarded nearly two hundred times.

  With water pouring off his face, the monk began to writhe violently, trying to tear his slender body free of the rack.

  Kimbaba smiled to himself. It was so simple.

  He had watched with amusement as a fresh-faced CIA man on television had explained in neutral tones that waterboarding was not torture, or even dangerous. It was merely psychological, the agent said—a simulation of drowning.

  Kimbaba knew different. Waterboarding did not simulate anything. It was real drowning—controlled, agonizing, and terrifying.

  The monk’s writhing and choking became more frantic. Kimbaba looked at the old man’s scraggy hand, waiting for him to drop the cross in submission. But he was holding it more firmly than ever, his fingers clenched white around it.

  The large militiaman paused for a moment, allowing the monk a moment to wretch up the putrid water.

  Wiping the sweat from his brow with the back of his hand, he bent low over the guardian’s blindfolded face. “We can end this,” he growled. “Where is it?”

  With a firmness that surprised the militiaman, the monk shook his head.

  Without waiting, Kimbaba grabbed hold of the sodden yellow rag lying over the guardian’s face and rolled it into a wet ball, stuffing it deep into his mouth, blocking his ability to breathe.

  With no further warning, he started pouring the warm water onto the monk’s face again, still in short bursts, but faster this time.

  Aft
er a few seconds, the guardian began thrashing. Kimbaba noted with satisfaction that this time there was a real panic, a frenzy that had not been there before.

  The monk tried with all his force to wrench himself free, and the sound of the rack slapping against the floor began to reverberate around the stone room. As his struggling grew more wild, Kimbaba finally saw the wizened old hand open a split second before the monk used all his remaining strength to hurl the heavy silver cross down onto the floor’s dark red tiles beside him. The noise cannoned around the room, as the monk started smacking his hand on the metal rack in desperation to be free.

  Nodding, Kimbaba stopped pouring and put the jerrycan down. He pulled the sodden yellow rag clear of the monk’s face and mouth, before ripping off the blindfold to reveal his bulging eyes, darting wildly, filled with terror.

  The old man turned his head and vomited up more water, before looking back at his torturer, gasping and choking for air.

  Kimbaba put a paw-like hand on the monk’s trembling shoulder. “You’re ready.” It was a statement not a question.

  Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the guardian nodded.

  Stepping backwards, Kimbaba and Masolo unhooked the bottom end of the rack from the altar and laid the monk flat on the floor again. Kimbaba put a heavy boot on the old man’s sweat sodden stomach, pinning him to the floor, staring down at him. “Talk.”

  The guardian coughed in an effort to clear his lungs. Rolling his head to one side, he spat out a mix of phlegm and water. Kimbaba thought he