by R. K. Syrus
With an effort, she turns away toward the final coherent image of this atrium. Three modest, curved horns crown a stone devil. He leers. Not exactly. He does not leer, he stares. His face is unable to reflect the kindness he harbors inside his stony chest. Despite the sharpness of alligator teeth overflowing his broad mouth, Sienna is not afraid. Quite the opposite. Somehow she feels the impulse to pity him, though she cannot even guess why that might be.
Gentle eyes of agate search hers. The round stones are polished so brightly they seem to be wet with tears. This peaceful demon spreads wings which were hidden behind his back. Just as she has the impulse to ask him to take her with him, he simply vanishes.
She is left alone in a hall of mirrors that have run out of things to reflect. Sienna leaves the place she made by wishing it away.
***
BETWEEN A DREAM AND SURFACING
Sienna approaches the realm of sense. A shimmering membrane bounds a fourth and final atrium. It is the last step before wakefulness and the world she must return to. The water surrounding her head is there. Her need to inhale her next breath looms there. She decides she does want to go back. Despite the pain. Despite the impending misery intended for her.
She has many things to do, many things to put right and something important to say. Something to tell the idiot whose grip on her hair feels like it is pulling her scalp off. The one who holds her head under some kind of putrid goop. It makes her retch and heave as much as fight not to drown.
The ephemeral wall rushes toward Sienna. The bleak promise of this place assaults her reawakening mind. There is physical pain, blood-pounding breathlessness, and the looming threats of madness and violent death. It is familiar. This place she can understand and accept. Arriving here is like coming home.
Sienna’s hands are bound. She is in some form of hostile captivity. She expects the people who have her prisoner to be proud of their skills in humiliation and torture. Who are they? Doesn’t matter. They cannot hurt her.
Sienna McKnight has a high tolerance for pain. Perhaps it’s natural. There is a pain scale medics often ask patients to use to rate their level of discomfort after some injury or illness. The highest she’s ever admitted to has been a seven. Once when she was a girl messing around on a Green Beret obstacle course on the Base, she fell. The wrenching, twisting impact resulted in the compound fracture of her shin. Jagged, curious pieces of bone came poking through the tanned skin a few inches under her kneecap. It was not something you could rub dirt on and walk off. Her main sources of distress at the time had been fear of being banned from the obstacle course and not wanting to upset her widowed mom with the sight of the injury. Theodora McKnight had been the Army’s top trauma surgeon. She was the one who was used to blood. But she was gone. Pain-wise, teenage Sienna’s broken shin was only that. A seven. No more.
The men out there, at least two, waiting for her just across the boundary of consciousness, they cannot hurt her.
She is tough and resilient. Sarge Bryan enlisted a knife-fighting tutor. A tortured madman, who lived in the North Carolina woods, ate roadkill, and shaved his face with broken glass. From him, she learned how to take a beating. They cannot break her. She has been taught she can always find a way to win.
But there is a more essential reason why her current captors’ attempts to inflict soul-crushing torment upon her will fail. Their petty tortures are something she was born immunized against. As the sun blots out the light of any earthly candle, the hurt she suffered at the hands of the Five-clawed Beast, a true master of anguish, these will surely drown out the persecutions of any aspiring sadist. As she finds her way back, this one thing is certain.
The ones waiting for her up there cannot hurt her. Silently, Sienna’s reawakening mind tells them why.
You don’t know how.
23
MARCH 20
SIX HILLS VILLAGE
KHORASAN
What Sienna’s captors can do is curse. She returns to the realm of her own bruised and battered senses. Sounds gain meaning. Nagging from an abusive alarm clock prods her toward wakefulness.
“Upeeech!”
“Upeeech!”
Words are grubby sonic puffs heard through sodden eardrums. Her head gets pulled up. Her hair is bunched inside the vise grip of a big fist. Snorting and coughing nasty liquid, she draws in the air her lungs are burning for.
“I said for you to wake up,” a man says. “Beeeatch!” He has a very distinct accent.
Sienna blinks and tries to shake her eyes clear. One is swollen. The other works okay, assuming the light here is lousy. She gets a first look at her tormenter.
This, this here must be real. Not in my wildest dreams could I make up a stupid-lookin’ piece of crap like him.
By speaking, he’s already told Sienna where he’s from. And his status as an outlander in Khorasan. Her captor’s place in the local food chain? Near the bottom.
Snips of memories jab at her like a damaged camcorder she can’t turn off. She tries to piece together what happened. Some sequence of events after the fall from the hovercopter didn’t kill her.
That last bit, that will take more figuring.
Though she’s been treated to more than enough moisture in the wide bucket, her lips feel dry and cracked. A tongue, hers, thick and fuzzy, fills her mouth.
And who is this guy calling bitch?
She hacks out slimy water. Her windpipe makes sounds.
“Hey, bud,” she wheezes. “To you, that’s Colonel Bit—”
That may not have been the best howdy. With reactions faster than you’d expect from a man with a protruding gut and bleary, dissipated gaze, the man from the Chechen Republic grabs her jaw. Compared to her face, his hand is large. Two dirty fingers jam into her mouth. Unfortunately, not at a very good angle to bite. Sienna gives up the idea. Let them think she’s only making a show of defiance.
Two fingers are the least you’re going to lose when I get loose. If I get loose.
Her neck torques sideways. She squints at manacles on her wrists. Chains latch them to the floor. Suitable for restraining a bull camel. The reality of confinement slams home.
How the heck am I gonna get loose?
The Chechen’s fingers slither out of her mouth and find a better grip on her neck. She tries to mock her tormenter with a devil-may-care grin. With her swollen features, it’s probably only a grimace with a slightly protruding tongue. Her audience reacts as expected, with a snarl of outrage and a tightening of thick fingers.
“Ha!” Slack lips smack over splayed, rotten teeth. “Heih, Ghazan. She has up wake.”
The first thing that hits her as her senses come back is the tomblike rankness of the air. It’s mixed with the body and breath smells of the guy holding her. He pulls her head up. She gets a better look around the small cinderblock room.
Judging by the wall undulations, she’s in a basement. Rock and sand, the creeping bowels of the Wandering Desert, move like thorax segments of a vast thing alive. They press in on the man-made cavern. For some dumb reason she thinks she can perceive the movement of the earth.
Boy, that fall must have rung my bell.
The Chechen looms closer. Goo drips from her hair into swollen lips. They won’t close right. Inner-ear vertigo spins the room. Sienna fights to keep from vomiting.
“I don’t know how you do,” the Chechen growls. “But in my country, this is how we salute bullshitting bullshit Colonel!”
The second thing that hits her is the Chechen’s fist.
Sienna can feel her assailant’s body tense as he brings his hands together like an overgrown monkey playing cymbals. Her head makes a lousy instrument. The sodden thwock sound would add nothing to the percussion element of the little three-piece band they could have going. As the leader of misery’s orchestra, the Chechen has his own rhythm. Sienna braces herself for anothe
r gut-wrenching impact. In the moment her eyes focus, she scans the other side of the dark room.
No other prisoners. Not here, anyway.
None of her people are here. Her team got away. These mooks tend to group captives. They beat the crap out of one, hoping bravery or cowardice will get others to talk. Just being dead did not get you any slack time. They will pull KIA soldiers’ bodies in, mutilate them, and leave them in prisoners’ cells.
There’s the Chechen drummer and another, thinner guy. Her vision clears during the rest in the music featuring her jaw and cheekbone. She makes out a college-aged man wearing spectacles. Ghazan. He sits on a bench near a partly disassembled AK-47. Unlike his buddy, Ghazan could be local. The way he shaves the sides of his beard and the flimsy look of his wire-rimmed glasses make Sienna think of someone more at home in a student lounge than a torture chamber.
“Rasul, a moment, comrade, please,” Ghazan says. “What are you doing? She has just come round. Would you send her to sleep again? Artuk said watch her, not beat her unconscious.”
He speaks English. And is way too polite for his job. Sienna’s ear for languages in this part of the world is good enough to recognize a distinct Pashtun accent. Definitely local, likely from an upper-class family. Ghazan’s vowel intonation reminds her of France, the real one, not the fake one in Canada.
Reluctantly, Rasul releases her hair. Sienna’s head droops. On the muck-crusted floor lies the body of a mouse, explosively disemboweled, boot heel stamped on matted gray fur.
Have to call housekeeping about that.
She had been half expecting to wake up in the med bay of the aircraft carrier. But unless the Navy has really changed the décor and staff…
Last thing Sienna can recall, the copter was taking fire. They were being pursued. Airspeed must have been over 100 knots. Somehow, she’s nearly in one piece.
Bryan must be trying to mount a rescue. But her dog tags and their homing chip are not around her neck. They are somewhere more important. It is a damn big desert to find something the locals want to keep hidden. Outside assistance is not likely. This mess she’s gotten herself into—she’s got to get herself out of it. Somehow.
Maybe it is all my fault. Maybe I deserve this. I lied and cheated to make the Sidewinder mission happen. And worse, when offered a deal by a devil, I shook his hand.
Sienna inhales through one side of her mouth. The deeper breath sparks deeper pains in her ribcage. She stays hunched over. Past the mouse corpse, a shallow gutter runs along the wall. It empties into a larger runnel in the hallway. The way out. She pushes doubts and recrimination out of her mind. Those thoughts have no place here on the edge of the fight for survival.
Sienna’s mouth is freshly bloody. Little drips, black colored in the stark shadows, fall into the bucket. She peers in. The viscous oval ripples and morphs. Sienna’s reflection twists in the murky water.
Her knees grind numbly into the stone floor. Sienna absorbs the pain. Pretending to writhe and whimper in discomfort, she angles this way and that. Bit by bit, she gets circulation and feeling back into her lower limbs. She’ll need those lower limbs if there is any chance to escape. She systematically takes in the throbbing from various parts of her body, including her jaw, where the Chechen laid a good one on her. Something in her cheek feels squishy and loose.
No biggie, I have premium O-6 dental now. Main thing, nothing critical is broken or dislocated. I’m not getting dizzier or blacking out. Serious internal bleeding likely not happening.
Sweet!
Now if I could just get moved to a room with a view. Too bad it’s only in movies they leave high-value prisoners alone.
Along with pain and poor hospitality, Sienna soaks up as much knowledge as she can. These two are not hard to figure out. Chechen Rasul sulks against the far wall. Having been asked to stop striking their captive with blunt objects and refrain from drowning her in sewage, he is at wit’s end. On a bench sits what looks to be a genuine Kalashnikov rifle, a true classic. It’s partially disassembled to clean out desert grit. Rasul pretends to wipe down the worn, greasy parts and waits to be allowed to continue his pastime. That’s all she is to him, a rag doll that makes gratifying sounds when you damage it.
Ghazan is local, at least in appearance. From his grooming and general manners she concludes Ghazan’s parents had money, enough to send him to a foreign school. That must have been a shock for him. Leaving a place where everyone bowed and scraped in front of him and his family to live in a European metropolis. In Paris or Lyons, Ghazan was likely looked at as being one step above a migrant camel herder.
Sienna glowers at him through her hair.
That Pashtun boy picked the worst possible way to get his self-respect back.
The younger guy fidgets. Ghazan can’t decide between standing or squatting down to be eye level with her. He leans in awkwardly, studying her without enthusiasm. He probably expected his life as a “freedom fighter” to be more enriching.
Ghazan’s folks don’t know where he is. Maybe he told them he was going on leave from university to find spiritual enlightenment in India. In reality, he has paid the Chechen to hook him up with the local Khorasani warlord, this Artuk guy. The one who told them to watch her but not beat her too badly. Ghazan expected to take part in a few easy, victorious battles and do his fair share of sport killing at terrorist summer camp.
But Khorasan is full of killers, all better at it than foreign newcomers. Holiday terrorists are valued for their cash contributions, little else. All Ghazan ended up doing was hauling water and guarding the few worthless prisoners in this reeking hell-hole of an underground jail. Before she dropped in, Ghazan was well on his way to realizing he was again a wretched outcast.
By the flickering light panel taped to the wall, she can see a glint in Ghazan’s eyes. Sienna is struck by a realization. She, her body, her dignity, her stubborn existence, have become his pathway to imagined glory. And Ghazan is not about to tread lightly.
“You.” His voice low, he inches closer. “You kidnapped the great leader. Then you fell. You have no uniform, no identification, making you a spy. We can do as we like to you.”
Sienna stirs, her chains rattle. Ghazan shrinks back. He checks to make sure she is still bound firmly. For all his desire to seek redemption through inflicting pain and death, the slender man wants to be absolutely sure that no injury can come to him.
Trying his best to be intimidating, Ghazan snarls from a safe distance, “You will tell us where he is!”
Sienna tries to project cold flintiness from a face which is surely lopsided by swelling.
“Oh yeah, him…” she slurs. Sidewinder. The great leader. What a joke … What a …
The room tilts like a flight simulation she’s just screwed up. Jumbled thoughts, images, sounds, sensations fight to cram to the front of her brain like passengers exiting a crowded bus. The helicopter, the little girl, something wrong with the RAPTEK on her back. She tried to get it off; her limbs were frozen. Then floating, weightless, even before falling out into the dark rushing wall of hurricane-force wind. Freefall.
She shakes her head, as if inside there’s some kind of ball-bearing maze puzzle and flipping it at just the right angle could solve it. All she gets is blood pumping through eardrums, slamming home the irony: it was only a few hours ago—it has to be hours—that she and the Dogs were taking prisoners and she was asking the questions.
I must be underground. Not deep, though.
On the far side wall are fungus and condensation. The floor slopes. The structure is set into a rise or small hill. Very hard to detect. A platoon could walk right by and never know she’s there. Next, she figures what tactic to use against her interrogators.
Ghazan, the college boy who switched his major to terrorism and kidnapping, gets tired of her stalling by drooling blood bubbles. “Well? Do you need another wake-up call from my fri
end?”
The Pashtun thinks he’s some kind of intellectual, a Che Guevara of the desert steppes. If she can get him angry, he might make a mistake. The sloppiness of amateur rage, not much use to her while she is chained and unarmed. Later, who knows?
Sienna replies slowly, as though she’s been settled into a beaten-down stupor. She emphasizes her North Carolina accent.
“Last time I saw your great leader, he was doing fine.” Sienna does not look up. “He had a real powerful sense of self-preservation, if y’all git mah drift. He’s probably havin’ drinks on a beach somewhere, rattin’ out everyone he ever knew. Including this place.”
Notwithstanding swelling cheek and jaw—and hair recently given a conditioning rinse with sewage—she tries to project sullen confidence. “Y’all won’t even hear the Stymph drones comin’.”
If ever a place needed a peppering of cluster bombs.
Of course, they’d blow her and the other prisoners up as well. It would be nearly worth it. “Naw, you won’t hear a thing. You’ll just experience a whole lotta deadness. That’s what you’ll do.”
But there will be no rescue. No drones are coming. There was no provision for large-scale search and rescue in the official Sidewinder mission plan. In her haste and arrogance she’d seen to that. The profile was strictly slash and dash. The price tag of her screw-up is being in here with these two guys and the bag of rotting goat guts they must have hidden.
“Pay attention, you ignorant woman! You will tell us who has him.”
Sienna feels Ghazan’s smaller hand grab her. He’s imitating what he’s seen his torture sensei Rasul do. This fellow has been watching too many old cop shows where roughing up the suspect actually works. Judging by his accent, they could even have been French ones, which can get pretty darn violent. At least the Chechen doesn’t make any pretense at having moral superiority or a greater mission. Hurting people simply brightens his day.
