Taking Morgan

by David Rose

  It seemed that Sal was better educated, but he was evidently deferring to Karim. “Look, whatever you think is mistaken. I have always been committed to fighting for human rights, and in the Balkans I almost lost my life doing so,” she said. “My best friend was shot there: she will never walk again. You have probably heard of my husband. He is a fighter too. His name is Adam Cooper, and he has spent the last few years fearlessly defending Muslims at places such as Guantánamo.”

  “We know who your husband is,” Sal said.

  “And you, you speak of husband, but you are whore, you make sex, you fuck with Abdel Nasser,” said Karim. “You are prostitute.”

  “I am no such thing,” Morgan said, her voice rising, hoarse from thirst. “You can insult me all you wish, but you will not persuade me to incriminate myself with lies.”

  “But you were making sex with Abdel Nasser, weren’t you?” Karim’s eyes bulged as he spoke, and his prurience disgusted her. “He fuck you in his apartment, where you think you were safe. And then you wanted to fuck him right here, in his house. You know this? Now, we are in his house. His secret Gaza house. I think he wants to take you to make fuck with you. Is it different for you to fuck with Arab man? But his skin is light. Maybe is the same as with your husband. Why you do it? You like making sex with him, or for you is only work?”

  Karim spat his words in her face, then crept behind her chair. He reach around it and cupped both her breasts, and moved a hand to her inner thigh and rubbed her crotch. “Perhaps you like fuck me, Morgan Cooper? Is good?”

  As Morgan’s heart rate rose, she succumbed to rage, pushing her feet to the floor and thrusting the chair back against Karim’s body. “How dare you! You filthy bastard, you can take your racist stereotypes of Western women and the porno fantasies you found on the Internet and stuff them up your ass!”

  Karim stood up, a little winded, glanced at one of the guards and spoke to him in Arabic. He handed him a glass and a pitcher of water. “I think you thirsty. Have a drink. Cool down. It do you good.” As he spoke, he filled the glass, then tipped its contents over Morgan’s head.

  Startled by the water, she felt the beginning of tears, pricking at the corners of her eyes. But she pulled herself together. “You will learn nothing from me except the truth: I am faithful to my husband, and I am here to monitor human rights.”

  “Now you can go,” Karim said. “But soon, you come back.”

  Alone again with Eminem, Morgan ponders the varieties of fear. First comes sheer physical terror, her imagination fueled by her knowledge of what terrorists like these have done to other prisoners. She thinks of Daniel Pearl, his head sawn off after his pitiful last video message, and the many captives murdered in Iraq. If this happens to her, will she meet her end with dignity? Or will her personality start to dissolve while she still lives, her bodily fluids leaking out across the floor, as trussed and bound she begs in vain for her life? Bud used to call his SERE training “an inoculation against stress,” yet his program was conceived in the gentle conditions of the Cold War. She does not know whether his vaccine was strong enough to resist an ordeal such as this. She feels certain of one thing: that next time the guards come to fetch her, it will be to do something much worse than anything she has experienced so far.

  Ineffective as it may well prove, at least she has had training to deal with the fear she feels for herself. But when she thinks of Charlie and Aimee, and the crushing loss that they will feel if her body, like so many victims in Iraq, is found dumped by a Gazan roadside, she feels a black, encompassing terror that smothers her like a shroud, a cloak so thick it banishes the booming music. Then, as she struggles to regain control of herself, despite the darkness, she sees Adam. He’s in front of her, lit by warm sunlight: this can’t be disassociation, but real. He’s wearing a suit she’s seen many times, a white shirt and the red tie he uses when he knows he’s likely to be on television: someone once told him those colors will make him look reliable.

  She cries out. “Adam! What are you doing in this awful place? Have they got you too? Have they brought you all the way from America? For God’s sake, get out of here, before it’s too late! What are the kids going to do if we’re both in captivity?”

  He doesn’t speak, just stands. He looks reassuring, kind, and a little worried; but he’s not angry. He must have forgiven her. But it’s frustrating that he won’t put his words into feelings, though, like many wives, she’s experienced this before.

  Still he’s silent, and then his image starts to melt away. Her pulse races, and Morgan remembers her training again. It makes her tremble. She’s just had a full-blown psychotic vision, and while it lasted, she was quite unable to recognize it. She breathes deeply, trying to relax, and many minutes pass. Slowly her brain returns to detachment. She observes herself, documenting her own emotions. But as she does so, she creates the space for a new anxiety—a worry that if she simply dies or disappears, Adam will not be able to cope. Who will remember all their relatives’ birthdays? How will he break the habits of the past decade and learn how to make the children’s lunchboxes before his busy day at work, or pack their luggage before vacations? How will he know which of their garments have become too small, and which still have to be grown into?

  At least they have given her a little food and plenty of water: three liter bottles, not the usual one, and, parched, she drinks all of it. She’s been so dehydrated, she feels no need to urinate. In any case, there is no Zainab: no offer of a trip to the toilet.

  The men come for her again after the album has been played a further fourteen times.

  And so she is back in the familiar room, with both Sal and Karim in front of her. This time, when the hood is removed, they ask her to stand. Between her and them is a wooden board, tilted downward at an angle of some twenty degrees. There are straps made of nylon webbing attached to it at regular intervals, and, a short distance from its lower end, two pieces of wood have been fixed at right angles, so giving the whole the appearance of a crucifix. Her pulse quickens. Now she knows what they are going to do.

  “You can see what this. The CIA uses it, and maybe you have,” Sal says. “I have read that in the Middle Ages, the Inquisition used to show the instruments of torture to the prisoner before they began to question him. Occasionally the mere sight was enough to persuade him to talk. So I show you this, and I ask you once again: will you confess? Will you read the statement I showed you before, and admit you are a CIA agent? I must warn you, this is not an exercise. It is not training, and we have no doctor here to call a halt. If this goes wrong, or you try to hold out in order to try to prove something, you may die.”

  Morgan looks straight at him. “Never,” she says, “never. I have nothing to tell you except the truth.”

  “Do you know why we do this?” asks Karim.

  She looks at him closely and shivers. His face bears a look of pure hatred.

  “It not just for confession. It is punishment. For what you do in Kosovo.”

  “Punishment? I don’t understand. All I did in Kosovo was try to help you.”

  Karim snorts derisively. “Help? You call this help? So I tell you my story. I think you know it, but I tell you, anyway.”

  “Story? What story?”

  “You already say: in Kosovo I was with my friend, he was also Falestini. Listen. He was not just my friend. He was like my brother. I give him anything. We are from here, in Gaza, we are friends when we are children. His name was Khalid. You remember?”

  “Yes, I remember him,” she says softly.

  “You march with us, and then you go: back to Sarajevo, back to America. But Karim and Khalid, and the Kosovar mujaheddin, we go back to Montenegro. We get more weapons, and we go back to the forest. It is cold, but the sun is shining, the sky is blue. It is beautiful, and I am happy. Soon we will fight the Serbs in Kosovo. And then, we are walking, I look at the trees and I hear it. First I think it is insect. It is so quiet. But it gets louder, louder and louder, and I know that s
ound. I have heard it before. Do you know what it is?”

  His intensity is terrifying. Morgan begins to guess what must be coming, but she pretends to be ignorant. “No, how can I know? What was it?”

  “In Afghanistan, we call this thing Shaitan-arbat. You know this word?”

  Sal interjects. “It means ‘chariot of Satan.’ It’s what the Pushtun mujaheddin called the Soviet Mi-24 helicopter gunship. Truly, it is a weapon from Hell. At least in Afghanistan your CIA friends gave them Stinger missiles so they had a chance of defending themselves. But the Serbs had these gunships too, and in the Balkans, you gave the mujaheddin nothing. When the gunship appeared above the trees over Karim and Khalid, there was nothing they could do.”

  “I’m sorry,” Morgan says. “But what does this have to do with me?”

  “Everything,” Karim says. “Everything. You come with us, and then, after one week, ten days, we get the Shaitan-arbat. How does it know where we are? Because you tell the Serbs—you or the CIA. Before you came, our way was secret. After, the Serbs find us, they know where we are. Because I know this arbat, when I hear it I tell the mujaheddin to take cover. But there is no cover. It has rockets, and a twenty-millimeter cannon. We have animals, ponies: I see them hit. There is nothing left. They are like red steam. And then, how you say, I am sleep.”

  Sal breaks in again: “He was hit by a blast wave. He hit his head on something hard, and was rendered unconscious.”

  “When I wake up, it is night. There is moon, but it is raining. All the animals, all the mujaheddin, all dead. I find Khalid. His head, his face: they are okay. But his body …” Karim grimaces. “It is mess. His body, it is open. I look at him, and I remember so many days. I see his eyes for the last time, and I remember: when we are children, at school, the time of intifada. I remember how we fight the jihad, in Afghanistan, in Chechnya, in Bosnia and Kosovo. I remember his sister, Zainab. You know her. She is here. Yes: Khalid’s sister, she fight with us now. But I don’t cry for him. He died a mujahid fighter. I pray, the janazah, the prayer for dead peoples. I close his eyes, and I run, because I know soon the Serbs are coming.”

  Morgan knows she has no chance of persuading him that the revenge he seeks is misplaced; that the betrayal of the KLA supply line was not down to her. But she has to try.

  “This was not my doing.” She cannot eliminate the quaver from her voice. “I did not betray you. You have the wrong person. I work for the State Department.”

  Karim stands, walks around the room, stands by his torture equipment, and then, after what feels like minutes, he folds his arms and he laughs.

  “Not my doing. The State Department.” His voice rises in pitch: “Now you stop the lies!” He looks at Sal and speaks in Arabic.

  Sal translates solemnly, as if at a business conference. “He says the reason why he laughed is that you are still claiming you are not from the CIA, and that the betrayal of his brother Khalid was not your fault, and for telling these lies you will be punished more severely. And he wants you to know something else. The hardest thing of all that he has had to bear is that Khalid did not trust you. On the last night in their safe house in Sarajevo, he tried to persuade Karim not to take you with them. But Karim was the commander, the Emir, and he overruled him. All these years he has blamed himself, as well as you, for Khalid’s death.”

  Sal looks directly at her, and adds with renewed urgency: “And now allow me, please, to give you some advice: not from Karim, but from me. Start to tell the truth. It is the only chance you have to save your life.”

  Karim speaks in Arabic once again and the guards take her arms and force her down onto the board. She feels the straps tightening across her legs and torso, and then her arms are pulled out onto the horizontal pieces of wood. They tie her again at the elbows and wrists. Karim takes a last strap and fixes it across her forehead. She is immobilized. He brings his face very close. “This your last chance, Morgan Cooper,” he says. She says nothing.

  Karim stands over her with a jug. The water is icy cold, and the first splashes, which land on her cheeks, are almost refreshing. But then the stream begins to hit her mouth and her nose, and she feels it entering her body. She tries to drink, because the jug doesn’t look very big, and though her stomach is already full from the water they left in her cell, drinking will give her space to breathe and there must surely be a pause when he has to refill it. So she gulps and gulps, and swallows, but the stream keeps on coming, and at last she cannot help herself and takes water into her lungs. She feels her gag reflex as she starts to choke, and then an urge to vomit. Hot tears form in her eyes and run from both sides onto the floor.

  There is a pause. Her breath is rasping, painful, and she remembers the time at a teenage party when she mistakenly inhaled a mouthful of Kahlúa and spluttered for breath for several minutes, terrified she was about to drown in coffee liqueur. But this time she doesn’t have minutes to recover. After thirty seconds or less, Sal hands a second jug to Karim and the pouring begins again. This time, she finds herself able to drink much less. So the choking goes on longer, and is more intense, and for the first time she sees that Sal’s warning was not empty—that she may be about to die. Some of the men on her SERE course were waterboarded as part of their training. A few had already endured it before joining the Agency as members of the military. But women were always exempt. Not, she finds herself able to reflect, that having had prior experience would have done much good.

  Karim bends over her again. “Have you had enough? You will talk?” Again she says nothing.

  “That was just a warm-up,” says Sal. “Now you will learn what it means to enter the submarine. You still have a chance. Please, take it.”

  She says nothing, and she does not move a muscle. The submarine. That is what they called this treatment in Argentina under the junta. It was used by the Inquisition. And because she has studied the files of cases she once helped to facilitate at Headquarters, she knows what is coming next. In training, the CIA uses the method she has already experienced—the pouring of water directly from a jug. But the technique authorized in 2002 for real-life interrogations of al-Qaeda suspects involved the placing of thick cloths over the prisoner’s face to form a suffocating, wet blanket, so that even in the gaps between pourings, the subject finds it almost impossible to breathe.

  She knows her bravery will remain unsung. Gary, Adam, her parents, her children: they will never see or know how she determined that death was preferable to giving up her secrets. But having heard Karim’s story, having felt so close to his primal need for revenge, she feels sure that whatever she says or does, they will kill her anyway. There remains for her only one mystery: the exact moment of her death.

  There is another, tantalizing pause. But as Karim lays the thick piece of material over her face, so completely covering it, Sal does not ask again if she wishes to confess. This time, the pouring begins very gently, so that although the cloth becomes soaked, at first she can move her tongue in order to create an air pocket, which she uses to take tiny, shallow breaths. But then the flow becomes relentless. As she fights in vain for air, the cloth seems to cleave to her skin, like some ghastly amphibian, a malevolent, slimy frog that fills her respiratory orifices. Gravity is her enemy, the twenty degree tilt of the board ensuring that none of the suffocating liquid runs harmlessly onto the floor; that it all flows inexorably to the entrance points of her body. There is water in her nostrils, in her sinuses, filling her mouth, in the back of her throat, all the way down her esophagus, in her windpipe, and in her chest and lungs. She is upside down in a waterfall, then being flung into the depths of the black pool that lies at its bottom. She loses control of her bladder, and now hot urine flows backwards, mingling with the water, down the relentless slope, pooling in the small of her back, then flowing onward, until it gets into her hair. Some tiny remnant of her inner voice tells her that the end is near, as she feels the darkness creeping inward and her legs, arms and torso begin violent, involuntary spasms.


  She cannot see or hear it, but Sal and Karim remove her mask and cease their pouring. The board is on a pivot, and they tilt her to an upright position and massage her abdomen until she coughs, vomits, and slowly returns to consciousness. But the respite lasts only minutes. Morgan has barely grasped that she is still alive when they return her to her previous downward sloping angle and Karim asks her if she wants to go through it again.

  “Fuck you,” Morgan says.

  She does not know where she finds this strength: she barely knows why. Two, three, four more times they repeat the process. Each time she blacks out, and each time she is astonished on coming around to discover that her life continues. She has read in waterboarding’s strange and dismal pseudo-scientific literature that while in most cases victims will say anything to make it stop, whether it is true or not, a small minority appear to decide that they would rather die than cooperate. Once they have been to the brink, permanent oblivion comes to seem preferable to continued suffering. Each time Sal and Karim swivel Morgan back to the vertical, her will gets stronger. Having almost drowned so many times, she finds it impossible to conceive that actual drowning can be worse.

  Once again she sees Aimee and Charlie. In her mind she gazes at them. Her life with them, their lives since their births, the moments when first they crawled, walked, and spoke in sentences: all seem to flash before her. Surely for their sake she should stop now, capitulate? She imagines their agony when they realize they must pay their last farewells; the grief they will still feel in the years to come, as adults. She feels her own deep loss, of never knowing how their stories will develop. But still she is certain that nothing she does will make any difference. The only factor that counts is that Karim is going to avenge Khalid. Better that she dies with her honor and her secrets intact.