The Room of White Fire

by T. Jefferson Parker

  Timothy Tritt lived in a yellow barn in Bishop, California, on the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. The barn sat in a meadow with a creek winding through it and thirsty black cottonwoods following the curves of the water. The main ranch house was a hundred yards upstream. The Sierras stood jagged and black against the western sky, with the White Mountains to the east, the two ranges facing off like enormous chess pieces. I’d landed at Bishop Airport and taken a taxi to this, the north end of town.

  We sat on tree-branch chairs in the shade of the barn, a blue cooler with a white top between us, and six dogs alternatingly panting or sleeping close by. The morning was warm. Tritt was skinny and bearded, hair long and yellow as the faded barn. Cargo shorts, a cheap plastic watch, and a black bandana rolled into a headband. Skin dark and wrinkled by the sun. He wouldn’t look at me. He popped the caps off two more beers and swung one over.

  “Terrible about John Vazquez,” he said. “We weren’t close but I loved the man just the same.”

  “They shot him up like a paper target. Who would do that?”

  Tritt shook his head, drank. “He could have been mixed up with bad people. Drugs. Weapons. I don’t know.”

  I had considered those things, too, but Clay having been at Spencer’s ranch at the same time was too big a coincidence. And nothing I had seen of John, Laura, and Michael Vazquez looked like a drugs or weapons kind of life.

  Tritt sighed and continued. “Spence was always an easy guy to like. We were SERE instructors at Fairchild, both married. He was always picking up the tab for the beers and burgers. He played ball in college and tried out for the pros but didn’t make it. So he coached Spokane Little League. He adored his wife, Dawn. Respected her. They couldn’t have children. Then one morning the world changed.”

  I nodded.

  “Spencer and I were past fighting age when they bombed the Trade Center, but we wanted to fight terror and protect American lives. Wanted to get into the smoke. Terrorists can’t do that to Americans. We saw a chance to make our own war on terror. We left SERE and started Spencer-Tritt Consulting. We would train military and diplomats for danger zones. Private contractors, too. We’d give everyone the best tools we knew for avoiding capture and surviving interrogation. We’d been teaching those things for years at SERE. And Americans were being dished up for torturers and executioners, right?”

  I said nothing, not wanting to derail him. He scratched a dog’s belly with his toe. “Then one night Briggs and I came up with a great idea—why not play some offense, too? Why not reverse engineer our resistance techniques into methods for extracting good intel from detainees? Spencer-Tritt would be the cutting edge in getting high-value, actionable intelligence. Naturally, we would have to charge very good money for this expertise. Well, when the CIA heard our pitch, they lit up like a million-dollar slot machine. They had even less of an idea than we did on how you actually interrogate a human being. They didn’t want to know. So out came the checkbooks and we were on our way.”

  A long silence. A hawk wheeled and keened, one of the dogs snored. I tried to put myself into the mind-set of a psychologist going into the interrogation business while his country declared its war on terror. I’d enlisted in December of 2001, three months after the attacks, recently graduated with a bachelor of arts in history. I was twenty-two and had no real prospects. Like Tritt, I was angry and wanted to do something. Military service was a tradition in my family. So I understood Tritt, so far.

  “They sent us to Guantánamo for a trial run at the al-Qaeda guys,” he said. “We had no experience at all in the Middle East. No knowledge of the history or language or customs. We had no experience as interrogators, either, except in role-playing scenarios at SERE. Hell, we taught survival in the wilds. Evasion from capture. Resistance in captivity. And escape.”

  Tritt drained most of his beer in one long gulp. “But Briggs and I made up for it with attitude and showmanship. We had both written ‘scholarly’ papers for the SERE instructors under us. One of mine was called ‘The Psychological Aspects of Captivity.’ Twenty pages of psychobabble. But I updated the title to ‘The Psychological Foundations of Enhanced Interrogation Techniques,’ and made it required reading for the Guantánamo staff. We were arrogant and aloof. We acted like experts. We wanted that job.”

  “How’d you do?”

  “At Gitmo? Fair. Nobody there was impressed by us at first. Everybody thought they were experts on interrogations. You tell a seasoned military interrogator that you’re a psychologist, they don’t exactly salute you. But we were energized by the idea of how far we might be able to take things. And how much money we could turn it into.

  “We were selling our souls, but we didn’t know it yet. I can’t speak for Briggs, but as of our last day at Guantánamo I could still stand the sight of my own face in the mirror. After? Now? Well.”

  Tritt finished the beer, dropped the bottle into the cooler, and brought out another. A wrinkled, short-haired mongrel heard the clink and lifted his sleep-flattened face to the sound.

  “Luckily, some of the rogue Bagram interrogators were at Gitmo, so Briggs and I learned fast. They showed us how the everyday tools worked.”

  “Everyday tools?”

  “Oh, the basics, I mean. The restraint chairs and iso boxes, which aren’t much bigger than a coffin. The hoods. And the basic physical techniques, too, like walling and peroneal compliance blows. Those are when you knee a detainee on the outside of his thigh. You know, right here, where it’s all gristle and tendon against the femur.” He tapped the outside of his thigh. “You knee the guy really hard, and as often as you need to. It hurts like hell, especially if they’re suspended by chains. This one detainee at Bagram, a taxi driver named Dilawar, he died in the chains. When we took him down, we found out his legs had turned to mush from the compliance blows. Surprised us.”

  Tritt took a deep breath and let it out slowly, looking down at the label on his beer bottle. “And we learned all the other basic techniques that seemed to be working—the chains and stress positions, hooding, light saturation, sleep deprivation. Loud music for hours on end. We renamed some of the basics, took credit for them with the new guys. Over the years, Briggs and I got credit and blame for all sorts of things we didn’t do. But there were two big things we did that made enhanced interrogation techniques better. One was we learned to combine. Throw the book at ’em. You keep a guy awake for thirty-six hours, chained to the ceiling in a cold cell, throw on some ice water every few hours, make him listen to death metal the whole time, and he’ll pretty much tell you anything you want him to. Of course, he’s got to have that thing to tell.”

  22

  The pitch of Tritt’s voice rose and his words came faster. “The other revolutionary thing we did had actually begun at Navy SERE training, where we’d taught resistance to waterboarding. Briggs and I remembered how much our men hated waterboarding, hated it more than anything else. They said the only thing that kept them from cracking was being able to thrash around, you know, just fighting for breath. The fight kept them sane. So Briggs and I invented this two-man procedure, ‘Constrictor.’ One of us would get the subject in a headlock, and the other would put the wet towel over his face, then get the stream going. Hold the bucket up high for maximum pressure, of course. And we’d just fill the guy up with cold water. Cold water worked best, retarded the gag reflex. And not being able to thrash around to try to get breath because of the headlock, well, that just drove the detainees crazy. They’d break their wrists in the restraints. It’s been called simulated drowning, but there was nothing simulated about the way we did it. It was a good way to get a subject to what we called ‘the point of distortion.’ That was an amalgam of physical and psychological force that, when applied at the right time, distorted the detainee’s reasoning to the point where he could see no options. No options. End of hope, end of resistance. All he could do is tell us what we wanted to know. If he knew
it. But . . . waterboarding was just the beginning. It was nothing compared to other things we did.”

  “Spencer mentioned the menu.”

  “Oh yeah. The menu. We had nineteen EITs approved by Rumsfeld and the lawyers. We even used insects. ‘Plague of Insects,’ we called it, where you put a detainee’s head in a pillowcase filled with the ugliest, meanest bugs you can find. Which are plentiful in tropical and desert countries. The key to Plague of Insects was forcing the detainee to look into the bag first. Later, in places like Romania and Poland, we had trouble finding good biting and stinging insects, especially in cold weather, so Plague of Insects wasn’t used as much. Mice worked on some detainees. You’d be surprised how often the biggest, strongest guys are scared of mice. The lawyers didn’t approve the mice, but if they worked, well . . . One detainee broke down completely when we moused him. God, we laughed. Sometimes, laughing was all you could do to keep your sanity. Don’t forget, we were working and living in a torture chamber.”

  “No, I won’t forget that.”

  “Another thing that kept Briggs and me sane was reminding ourselves that we were running a business. This was our career. So we not only strategized on how to get actionable results with enhanced techniques, we also figured out how to report the results in order to get bonuses. We killed a Yemeni man in Poland on the waterboard. It happened on the one hundred and forty-fifth time we did him. He had denied knowing anything about al-Qaeda. He prayed to Allah but never gave us one shred of actionable intelligence. So we kept filling him up with cold water and one day his heart just stopped. So, the question was: How could we turn that dead guy into a useful intelligence bonus? Well, I’ll tell you how—just call his death proof that the detainee had no meaningful information to surrender. Which justified the torture, of course. So we reported that case as ‘resulting in useful intelligence,’ which earned Spencer-Tritt the bonus pay. We did that a lot. After all, we were our own overseers, our own watchdogs and analysts. I remember the man we drowned. Jamal. Proud guy. Hated us.”

  Tritt finished his beer in one long gulp and had another open before I was half done with mine. The alpha dog, a nice-looking yellow Labrador named Chief, came over, sat with ears cocked, and looked at his master. Tritt’s tone of voice had changed once again and Chief had heard it, and I’d heard it, too.

  “Even Chief hates these stories by now,” said Tritt. “I tell them to the dogs all the time. That keeps all the old wounds open and fresh, which keeps me sorry and miserable. The main reason I haven’t killed myself is because I believe I deserve the pain of remembering all the pain I caused. But you didn’t come here to hear about my gloomy little psyche.”

  I noted that Tritt still hadn’t looked at me since I’d arrived, not directly, not even when handing me a beer. I wasn’t sure why his voice had changed—excitement? Passion? Revulsion? Shame? The thrill of confession? I watched him in profile. His eyes were trained slightly up, and apparently far away, maybe on the sharp tips of the Sierras, or the sky beyond.

  “I volunteer at the vet center once a week,” he said. “And at the parish food hall once a week. And the dog pound two days a week, which is where I got these brutes. And the hospital. Every Monday through Friday. I put in a good hard volunteer day. Hard as I can. My personal take from Spencer-Tritt was twenty million. Well, I gave most of it away. To the Catholics, which is what I am. Used to be.”

  I let that observation hang. Chief lay down in front of Tritt, who seemed to wrestle his attention off the distant peaks to look down at his dog. He worked a weather-beaten bare foot against the dog’s ear.

  “Tell me about Clay Hickman,” I said.

  “Clay? Good kid. One of Spencer’s. He was assigned to a Romanian site in Bucharest—code name White Fire. Centuries ago it had been some nobleman’s estate, then a hotel that Ceaușescu turned into a communist interrogation center. Closed for years after his people executed him. Outbuildings, basements, smokehouse, a big wine cellar. It was still almost stately. But crumbling and haunted, too. It fit in with the rest of the hood, so we were hidden in plain sight. Big property, fenced, heavily wooded. And of course those stone walls kept the noise down. The Dambovita River wasn’t far. The Romanian Foreign Intelligence Service gave it to us because Romania had applied for NATO and wanted U.S. support. I say they ‘gave it to us,’ but of course we paid handsomely for it. I helped lug the suitcases of CIA cash. A few of us got to open one and gawk at it. Three million in five different duffels. Big, heavy duffels. Like most of us, Hickman thought he could save America from terror if he got the right intel out of the prisoners.”

  “What do you mean that Clay was one of Spencer’s?”

  “We had three teams. Briggs and I each had one, and a CIA guy named Bodart led the third team. Bodart’s guys called themselves the Wranglers, and they dressed up like cowboys sometimes. Sheesh, that was funny. There was overlap and some filling-in between the teams, too—it’s not like we couldn’t switch personnel around if we needed to. But it gave us three eight-hour shifts per day, seven days a week. We were competitive, and each team had a different set of, well, skills. Spencer’s and my team used nicknames. It made the whole experience more livable. The nicknames gave a sense of playacting. Distanced us from what we were doing. My idea. Our teams used the names of Greek gods and heroes. For narrative authority. I was Phobos, god of fear. Briggs was Deimos, god of terror. I think Clay was Asclepius, the god of healing.”

  It was making more sense. “Clay says his reason for escaping is to ‘bring white fire to Deimos.’”

  Tritt raised his beer, drank most of it down, then lowered his head and the bottle. “Well, we’ll see.”

  “Explain.”

  “Like I said, White Fire was Langley’s code for our particular site in Bucharest. Then ‘white fire’ got to be our slang for something that couldn’t be resisted, or withstood. Then Briggs claimed the words ‘white fire’ for an original enhanced interrogation technique he was developing. He wouldn’t tell me much about it, but Bodart was in on it. Anyway, Spencer’s white fire was based on a father’s love for his son. The son was the fire that you held your detainee up to. The fire was what you, as an interrogator, learned to exploit.”

  Tritt dropped the empty in the cooler and looked up at the mountains again.

  “Exploit the son?” I asked.

  “Exploit the son. Yes. That was Spencer’s white fire.”

  23

  Finally, Tritt looked at me. Handed me another beer. His eyes were armor-gray in the sunlight, spoked and small-pupiled, like those of a snapping turtle.

  “To understand white fire,” he said, “you start with Aaban. Aaban was Spencer’s. Middle thirties, a Dari Afghan. His name meant Angel of Iron. He was strong, good-looking, hateful. We believed that Aaban knew bin Laden. Aaban’s grandfather had fought with bin Laden in the wilderness days. Aaban openly associated with Wahhabi jihadis. We had some intel that Aaban might have been in contact with bin Laden.

  “So Briggs applied our standard menu. Got nothing useful. He stayed patient. He got creative with the menu combinations and still got nothing of value. Aaban gave us nothing but lies and minor truths we already knew, and half-truths that took hours and hours to verify or finally disprove. He cursed Briggs. Spit on him. Plague of Insects? Nothing. Wallings, sleep deprivation, death metal 24-7? Nothing. Aaban became the man Spence couldn’t break. Aaban survived one hundred and ninety-six waterboardings, personally done by Briggs Spencer. Up to ten sessions a day. We jacked him with amphetamine and kept him awake in a restraint chair for one hundred and eighty hours—that’s seven and a half days. Twice. His legs were pulped by compliance blows. He was chained naked to the ceiling just short of strangulation for days at a time. During the chain sessions, he got little water and no food. Not even diapers. We kept his bucket just out of his reach. We hydrated him rectally, mainly for the humiliation it brought him. It was cold in there, the cellar of an old
smokehouse. But Aaban gave us exactly no useful intelligence. Do you find it unpleasant to hear this story?”

  “I’d rather listen to a World Series game.”

  “Try being there with us. Try hearing and smelling it. Try doing it.”

  “I wouldn’t want to.”

  He turned those armor-gray eyes on me again. “Not many people would. Although we didn’t hear much in the way of thanks after America found out what we were up to.”

  I took a long swig of the beer, Tritt-style.

  “Briggs was worried he’d kill Aaban, making Aaban the victor. So he decided to try something outside the menu. A new technique. It took him six months to locate, detain, and transport Aaban’s eleven-year-old son from Afghanistan to White Fire. Three thousand one hundred and seventy miles.”

  Chief rose from sleep, shook off the dead grass, and lumbered off toward the creek. Two of the other dogs followed; the last three lifted groggy heads and stayed put. I felt like going to the creek myself, washing off in cold, clean water. I envied the dogs, fearless and lazy, with no comprehension of death.

  Rage, Wrath & Fury mustered, ready to unleash themselves on God for how He treats the innocents. For allowing whatever it was that He let happen to Aaban’s son, though I hadn’t even learned the boy’s name yet.

  “Roshaan,” said Tritt. “Skinny, shy, terrified. They took him to the smokehouse and put him in with his father.

  “A week went by. Life at White Fire proceeded as usual—quiet for short periods, then alive with wailing and music. And the trains and their horns. And the muffled screams from the smokehouse. The pain was . . . tangible. Even in the dead of night you could feel the ebb and flow of it, like a tide. Oh, I’d think, that’s Bodart’s people rectally hydrating old Mohammed. Or, That must be my guys, walling Qahtani again. I saw less of Briggs, but I knew he was out there in the smokehouse cellar with Aaban and Roshaan.”