North Carolina was not some combat zone. Outside the high-crime areas, the United States was relatively — mostly — fairly peaceful. She was vacationing, relaxing in the warmth of the day. Her depression had passed. She had been feeling mellow and outgoing, and it was in that spirit that she had picked up the perky army sergeant who had been hitching back to FortBragg.
The shock of the assault had stunned her.
The hitchhiker she had picked up had been alive and chatting to this lost Japanese tourist, and a short while later she was spewing blood all over Kathleen, her throat gaping open like some obscene parody of a mouth.
Her eyes were still alive and her body was dying, and she knew and was afraid and there was nothing either of them could do. It was only a few seconds, but it seemed an endless horror. And then the light went from her eyes and her face grew slack and she was no longer a human being. And Kathleen screamed.
"My b—"
My baby! My baby!
Her words were cut off half spoken and unheard as a fist slammed into her mouth. Dazed, she was dragged from the rental, thrown to the ground facedown, and then bound and gagged in seconds. There was no time to resist or protest. She felt a needle and she was unconscious.
She had a faint recollection of the beating of rotor blades and of vibration, and then there was an increase in tempo as the helicopter took off. The flight seemed to be short. She had been thrown onto the floor and handcuffed to the metal frame of the seat. She was injected again and lost consciousness.
She woke up as someone was chaining her hands. She had thought at first that she was still on the aircraft, but then realized that the floor was different. She was now lying on rough concrete and the air was hot and dry and there was no drone of an aircraft.
Shortly afterward, she felt someone put chains on her ankles and she started to sob and was slapped in the face. She could see nothing. She was blindfolded. She could hear voices. One language, she thought, was Japanese, but she also heard Spanish.
She was sure about the Spanish. Both sexes were speaking. One voice was authoritative, a woman's. Other voices were agreeing with her orders.
She was thirsty and called for water. None came, and the hours passed. It grew cold and she started to shiver, and her thirst grew even greater. It was a nightmare, but she was awake and there was no end. She slept until she was kicked awake. Then bliss: She could taste water, a whole mouthful of water.
She held up her chained hands to grasp the plastic bottle, and just as she touched it, it was pulled away from her and there was laughter and she could feel the water pouring over her body and draining onto the floor and she pressed her face to the wet floor and licked it until her tongue bled.
Always, there was The Voice. Oshima? Could it be her?
She had tried to keep time by counting meals, such as they were, and sleep, but after a while she realized that her captors were deliberately varying food intervals and were also keeping her from sleeping for a natural length of time. She had an impression of weeks rather than days, but there was no certainty in this thought. She was kept blindfolded and chained, and there was no point of reference.
The blindfold was totally opaque and was taped in place, and she had not even the relief of light percolating through to tell whether it was day or night. She tried to tell by the temperature, but sometimes the heat of the day seemed to last so long that she was convinced they were heating her cell at night to further disorient her. She cried at the thought. She had almost run out of tears, but this was such a petty, malevolent act. They were leaving her nothing.
She grew thin and very weak on the minimal rice-and-water diet she was fed, but every so often, when it seemed she would faint from hunger and escape from her suffering, her food allocation would be increased for several meals. There would be refried beans and perhaps an orange, and occasionally some tinned fish. They wanted her to suffer but not to die as yet. She was being kept like an animal in a cage, a curiosity. She was far from sure there was any other purpose.
She almost got used to being kicked and slapped and beaten, but The Voice brought her to the edge of despair. Since her body was held captive, she focused on her mind, and The Voice followed her there seeking to destroy any positive thought, any remaining hope. And The Voice was without pity. Remorselessly, it focused on destroying her until nothing would be left but despair.
The Voice, to Kathleen, was the true embodiment of evil, and it never seemed to go away. She could hear it when it was not speaking. She could hear it in her troubled dreams.
The Voice would taunt her to her grave. It reminded her that no one knew where she was. Perhaps no one even cared.
She would be kept chained and blindfolded until she died. After her spirit was broken, then would come pain. She had pain to look forward to. Pain was her future.
After pain would come death, Kathleen thought, and she began to long for pain and the eventual release it would bring.
No, said The Voice. After pain would come the recovery and then more pain. Pain would be her world for a very long time.
It would not just be pain. When it was explained what was to be done to her, the horror was too much and she fainted.
They would start with her extremities, The Voice said, and then piece by piece, limb by limb, she would be hacked apart. Over time she would be completely dismembered. After each procedure — to be carried out without anesthetic — she would receive the best possible medical treatment. All in all, her destruction could take several years.
Each body part would be sent to the gaijin, her lover, her husband, the Irishman Fitzduane. Kathleen herself was of no importance. She was merely an instrument of revenge. Of Justice.
Kathleen was given two days on extra rations after this announcement. She was then advised that the first dismemberment would start in a week. She was to have plenty of time to contemplate the horror of her fate. For seven remaining days her body would be whole and entire, and from then on she would never know life as it had been again.
The Voice had described the body parts she would lose. Her toes and fingers, her feet and hands, her ears, her legs below the knee, her arms to the elbow, the balance of her limbs, her ears and lips and nose and eyes.
Her eyes.
She was too shocked to cry, too terrified to react in any way. She felt sanity slipping away. She could neither eat nor drink. The she made herself eat something.
My baby! She thought. Oshima does not know. Must not know!
I don't know how, but Hugo will come.
* * * * *
The law of unintended consequences.
Oshima smiled as she remembered the phrase. The black DEA mission a year earlier had been an attempt to prove there was a major drug-processing facility in Tecuno. The word on the street was unambiguous, but satellite surveillance went just so far. Proof was needed. Instead, the two helicopters had been shot down shortly after they crossed the Tecuno border, and the public outcry throughout Mexico that had resulted had contributed significantly to the issuing of PresidentFalls's hands-off-Mexico declaration. The Yanquis were interfering with a sovereign nation. The arrogance! How dare they!
The photographs of the wreckage of the two machines and the charred bodies of the crews had been an unparalleled propaganda tool.
Irony of ironies, the abortive DEA raid had served to further protect the enormous Mexican drug-processing and –smuggling industry. And, incidentally, the activities of the state of Tecuno. Governor Diego Quintana had roared with laughter when he read out the U.S. president's National Security Executive Order FA/128. "They bind themselves," he had said. "They know and yet they can do nothing."
The official story was that all twelve members of the raiding party had been killed in the two crashes. Five bodies had been returned. The others had been kept as a bargaining tool. They would be released ‘over time.’ There were procedures to be followed. The unofficial subtext was that if the U.S. authorities behaved themselves, one body would be released
every six months. Perhaps. The Iranians had shown how far you could push this particular strategy.
The administration had accepted the deal. The men were dead. The mission should never have happened in the first place. Improving U.S.-Mexican relations was the priority.
The seven survivors had been given to Oshima to use as she saw fit. But above all, they must not escape. They were dead. They must stay dead.
Keeping the mercenaries at the Devil's Footprint in line had been a problem. The prisoners were used to set an example. Their deaths were spread out over the months. The first prisoner had been burned alive in a metal cage in front of the assembled garrison. The conflagration had taken place at night and had been quite spectacular. The entire cage had glowed white hot as the thing inside it screamed.
Discipline had improved dramatically.
The second prisoner had been guillotined. The French had invaded Mexico for a while, and the mercenaries had constructed a play around the execution. The entertainment value of these events was clear.
The third man had been ritually hanged, drawn, and quartered. This had proved a little more than some of even the most hardened members of the garrison could take.
The fourth man had been crushed by a tank.
The fifth man had been strapped across the muzzle of an artillery piece and a blank charge fired. The blast had showered pieces of him all over the canyon wall.
The sixth man had been slowly garroted.
The seventh man was still alive.
As Oshima strode out in front of the assembled mercenaries, the naked body of her victim was strapped to crossed timbers.
The troops were hushed and expectant.
Oshima cut off his hands and feet and then disemboweled the man. It was her favorite way to kill, and she marveled at how long it could take for a human being to die when a skilled executioner was at work.
In her mind, the victim under her sword was the gaijin Fitzduane. She took her time, but there were practical problems when performing in front of the mercenaries. A parade could take just so long. Guards had to be relieved. There were duties to be carried out.
She would be under no such pressure when working on Kathleen. This was a woman whose agony would be endless.
13
Fitzduane dozed uneasily on the aircraft while flying back to Washington.
Since Vietnam, where he had been shot down on several occasions, and from various similar experiences in war zones since, he had learned that aircraft had different ways of returning to earth, and not all of them were pleasant.
He was not overly fond of flying. If he could sleep through it, he would. This time it was not that easy. His subconscious flooded his mind with dark images and he had the terrible feeling that the mission he had embarked on was going to get much worse before it got better.
His black mood had started with the bank raid in Medora. The burst of adrenaline that had kicked in when Lonsdale and he had roared away from Lonsdale's extraordinary home had turned into depression when they caught up with the perpetrators at an Arizona Highway Patrol roadblock a few miles outside the city limits.
With good reason, the state troopers were not taking any chances. When the bank robbers had opened fire and tried to run the roadblock, the troopers, hunkered down behind the cover of their cruisers, had returned fire with a vengeance.
The driver had taken a shotgun blast in the face in the first fusillade.
Out of control, the jeep had spun off the road and overturned. One passenger broke his neck in the crash. The two surviving robbers, already wounded, were thrown clear and as they tried to rise, were chopped down almost clinically by a trooper armed with a heavy-caliber sniper rifle.
Fitzduane and Lonsdale had come on the scene seconds later. The dead robbers had weapons in their hands or just beside them. It was a righteous shoot without question, but the rivulets of blood and the destroyed splayed bodies of what had been up till a few moments ago healthy young men caused the bile to rise in Fitzduane's throat. So this was civilization as we approached the twenty-first century. So this was how far we had come.
Fitzduane's revulsion was further increased by his own sense of guilt. It was not what he wanted — indeed, it was what he had run from when he had resigned from the army — but there had been circumstances and he had killed, and he was good at it and he would kill again.
The causes had been just, and doubtless would be just, but still there was a voice inside him saying that he was wrong and there had to be a better way. And then there were the faces of those who had died as a result of his actions, who seemed to take a little piece of his life force with them as the life flickered from their eyes.
An examination of the corpses quickly revealed that all four of the dead young men had been Mexican and had only recently crossed the border. All wore the clothes of itinerant workers. One wore sandals. One wore cheap shoes without socks.
The man who had taken the shotgun blast in his face had a gold crucifix on a thin gold chain around his neck.
The fourth man, killed by the sniper, lay on his back where he had been thrown, his hair, features, and coloring strongly Indian.
"There but for a quirk of fate go I," said Lonsdale, quietly looking at the body of the fourth man. "Ninety-odd million Mexicans rammed up against the border of the richest country in the world. What would you do if you were them?"
"Try and make Mexico work," said one of the state troopers. "They've got their own country. Some of it is poor, but some of it is rich. They've got oil. Certainly, coming up here to rob and kill isn't the answer."
"What do you do if you have they have not?" said Fitzduane almost to himself as he gazed at the carnage. "This thing is not about the U.S. and Mexico. It's about the whole world and how you slice the pie."
"You hold the line, Hugo," said Lonsdale firmly. "You try and do what you can, but you accept the world as it is. Or you're fucked."
Fitzduane had a last terrible dream as his flight neared its end.
He could see Kathleen lying in a cell. She was blindfolded and chained and her chains were secured to a ring in the wall. Her clothing was ripped and torn. The crude concrete floor was dusty. As he watched, she traced words in the dust. Her fingertips were bleeding as if she had done this again and again. He strained to try to read what she had written. He could just see his own name, HUGO, and then another word beginning with H. He could not read the rest.
Figures came into the cell.
He could not make out their faces. They were indistinct but menacing. One carried something. It was a piece of board like a butcher's block. Kathleen's hand was placed upon it. She was struggling and screaming, but she was held firmly.
The figure of a woman came forward with a long heavy blade in her hand. Its edge glittered unevenly as if freshly sharpened upon a stone. It was a crude instrument, a simple machete, the tool of a peasant, an elemental weapon.
Here is was an instrument of torture.
The figure of the torturer turned toward Fitzduane so that for the first time he could see her face. The features were Japanese. Once beautiful, she was now hideously scarred, but she acted as if still supremely confident of her appeal, of her sexuality, and of her power.
She was half smiling. She could see Fitzduane looking and she was pleased. This was why she was doing it. It was aimed at him. He understood.
She raised the heavy blade and brought it down into Kathleen's flesh. Fitzduane could hear the sound. Kathleen did not scream. But he could see the tears as they welled from under her blindfold and coursed through the grime on her face.
* * * * *
Cochrane was in the underground conference room in the STR Virginia facility in the building they called Son Tay.
As he had got to know the area better, Fitzduane had learned that there were a dozen or more buildings of various sizes in the complex and doubtless more elsewhere on the estate. Most of the buildings were at least partially underground, as best he could determine. They were lin
ked by subterranean passages. Access was on a ‘need to know’ basis. The Task Force and Fitzduane had the run of the first building they had met in and were using it as a base. As to what happened elsewhere, Fitzduane had absolutely no idea.
The whole setup reminded him forcibly of the iceberg nature of power. The average citizen rarely saw the extent of the forces that controlled and guided him or her, and such secrecy was not confined to totalitarian states. Even the United States, the most open nation on earth, kept much hidden. It was in the nature of those who truly understood power to be secretive. Even if you were an insider, there was much that was secret. No one had full access.
But Grant Lamar, in Fitzduane's opinion, had more access than most. Otherwise, none of this made sense.
Cochrane was buttoning up a crisp white shirt as Fitzduane came in. A regimental tie followed. An electric razor appeared out of a drawer. A quick combing completed the transformation. Within a couple of minutes Cochrane, his face drawn with fatigue, was transformed into a reasonable similitude of the whip-sharp chief of staff whom Fitzduane had first met.
"You caught me, Hugo," said Cochrane briskly, the anger suppressed but escaping as he talked. "Sprucing up on the run is something you learn in the House. You work long, stupidly long hours, sometimes for remarkably stupid people. Most of your work gets shit-canned, but appearances — boy, they really count. You've got to look STRAC.
"You learn to bathe in a water glass and keep your wardrobe in a drawer in your filing cabinet and fuck between votes. The legacy of the Founding Fathers. Those good ole boys set up a hell of a system. It must have been easier in the days of the Roman emperors. Then you still might be knifed in the back, but at least you didn't have to worry about the people. Frankly, democracy sucks."
Fitzduane dropped into a chair. "You look like shined-up shit, Lee," he said. "Sleep has a lot to recommend it. What's this about being knifed in the back?"
Fitzduane 03 - Devil's Footprint, The Page 20
