Whatever Gods May Be Part 21

v First came the Zhong commanding officer's surreal politeness, his curiosity about her gender and her rank while he ordered her hands unbound and fastidiously examined the filthy cammie blouse he'd asked her to remove. Next came his jumbled, euphemistic warning about "me-an chah-ng"-forceful exhortation-while her wrists were bound again after she declined to tell him anything other than her name, rank, military identification number, and date of birth.

Then Jamie found herself in a faintly lit concrete-block structure * 176 *

that probably had once been a Christian church but now was stripped of pews and altar. The two rows of four-inch-thick lally columns supporting the building's roof seemed forlorn, abandoned.

Soon a sirenic thirtysomething woman in a white lab coat, like a physician's, appeared and leaned against one of the lally columns. The fingers of her right hand fondled the column like a lover.

"Well, you're a right mess," she declared in posh-British-school English after Jamie was forced to kneel before her.

In any other circ.u.mstance, her sleek, unblemished beauty would have been intriguing. But she was the Special Chief Interrogator-Shoo Juh Gwah-un Yen, or something like that. The Zhong commandant had warned Jamie about her, and the glacial disdain inflecting her voice made Jamie shiver , Shoo Juh, or something like that. A bad omen, the way that sounded. Like f.u.c.k you backwards.

When Jamie returned the interrogator's gaze, the woman slapped her hard and snarled in what Jamie realized was the Cantonese of Hong Kong: "Beh moot loon yeh ar?"-What the f.u.c.k are you staring at?

After issuing several commands that Jamie couldn't understand, the woman left.

Jamie quickly discovered what Shoo Juh ordered: A lengthy and invasive strip search. Afterward, two soldiers shoved her face-first to the floor, grabbed her ankles, and dragged her to one of the lally columns. They positioned her knees on either side of the column before shackling her ankles, then untied her wrists and wrenched her arms behind her, forcing her back into a cruel arch and her crotch into an inexorable collision with the column. Finally, they manacled her wrists the same way as her ankles-on the other side of the column.

Stifling a cry, aware of an ominous shadow lowering over her, Jamie strained to get her legs beneath her. Eventually she found a way to ratchet herself onto her knees and ease the pressure on her arms by flattening her back against one side of the column while her fettered wrists and ankles snugged against the opposite side.

But when the dead-eyed deputy interrogator ordered her hosed down, the position became impossible to maintain. Jamie battled, mostly unsuccessfully, to keep the pressure off her wrists and crotch and the water out of her airway. The interrogators' exhortation had begun.

* 177 *

Chapter nineteen.

shinG How many times do I breathe in and out in a minute?

After November sixth, the first thing Jamie lost was any sense of the pa.s.sage of time, despite trying to count using the only measure she had: Her breathing.

From the start, they asked her questions. The first ones came from the deputy interrogator and they were incessant. "How did you get to Malihud?" "To which unit are you a.s.signed?" "Where are the others?" A Zhong soldier did the interrogator's dirty work, slapping her whenever she began her single response, "I am authorized to inform you of my name, my rank-"

She was kept chained to the lally column and not permitted to sleep. When she nodded off, someone thumped her awake again.

Maybe this is just one long, really uncomfortable day. Or night?

Maybe they've figured out how to make every second feel like a month.

At some point the deputy interrogator announced in his grating monotone that Jamie's reticence would now elicit shing. He repeated his questions. Guessing what shing was, she repeated her sole reply anyway. The deputy interrogator stepped back and nodded to several soldiers, who released Jamie from the lally column, dragged her to a heavy wooden chair nearby, and quickly bound her hands to its arms and her feet to its legs.

"Perhaps when I ask you questions next time, you will be more interested in answering them," the deputy interrogator said before leaving the building.

Despite being bound to it, Jamie found sitting in a chair to be an improvement over the lally column. What's more, the only soldiers in * 178 *

sight were the door sentries. Did she miss something? Maybe she'd guessed wrong about shing, maybe this was actually the relief part of-?

The sound came from right behind her. A boot scruffing on the floor? Even before she swung her head toward it, her body snapped like a huge, overstretched rubber band. Every muscle contracted into a fiery convulsion. Flashes and spots ricocheted in front of her and millions of tiny needles attacked her. Violent, dissonant ringing drowned out all other sound. She gasped for air.

A stone-faced soldier waved an electric baton in front of her, then pulled it out of sight as he murmured briefly to someone else. Before the effects dissipated, she was shocked again without warning or further comment. After a few more times of this, she pa.s.sed out. They poured water over her and resumed. None of them touched her. No one spoke.

Sometime later, Jamie roused to find herself chained again to the lally column and face-to-face with the special chief interrogator, who bent over her and casually said, "Tell me which regiment you're in." Tag team, huh, Shoo Juh? Jamie shook her lolling head. No way's it been thirty-nine days yet.

This round of questioning seemed to last longer than before. So did the shing that followed. The only variation lay in the interrogators'

arrangement of Jamie's punishments: Electric shock now mixed with aerial suspension and plain old beatings with leather straps and rubber batons.

As her world imploded, Jamie floundered for distractions from her turmoiling body and the dense, dimensionless blackness deepening around her. She clung to two words: Not... yet...

And then... A moment came-a black pearl of a moment, l.u.s.trous and beautiful-when the pain ebbed. The interrogators had to back off, seduce her with sleep and water and food and being left alone before what they did could hurt again.

Jamie came to desire the pain, pursue it. Her mind swerved into a realm without words, without thought; she abetted her tormenters, prodded her shuddering, thrashing body toward the euphoric instant when the pain spun her around, launched her into the pearl black-and she was at last beyond anyone's reach.

v * 179 *

The slight sounds had repeated many times, but Jamie didn't believe they were real. Abandoned by all energy, abandoned by life itself, she waited to slip away into nothingness. But the sounds persisted.

Something was wrong.

Then, at last, she perceived a pattern. So maybe the three new prisoners she thought she saw when she opened her eyes were not a mirage.

The taps and scratches came from the prisoner tethered to the lally column closest to her. Jamie lifted her head and looked up at him.

Naked, bruised, vaguely familiar. He glanced toward the nearest Zhong soldier, then shook his head, an almost imperceptible warning. She understood: The prisoners were not allowed to talk to each other.

The man tapped and scratched again.

Morse code?

He did it once more: " - - - - - - " Jamie muddled through her misery to her knees, then to a dim scout/sniper school memory of, yes, Morse code-and deciphered w, h, o, u. Oh, right: who u?

After a time, she recalled enough to sound a response-" - - - - "

-but stopped when a soldier approached to examine her.

"Gwun mo garn!" he sneered and kicked her twice, knocking her knees out from under her.

"Gwynmorgan," she corrected, exerting to angle her head so she could meet his eyes.

"Dee-oo lay lo mo!" he cursed and kicked her again-in her gut, to elicit that grunt-groan the Zhong soldiers seemed to so enjoy. She considered staying there-her back perniciously arched, her hands already going numb from the pressure on her wrists, her crotch martyred against the column.

It wouldn't have been difficult to just fade out. Easier than doing anything else. But she wasn't alone anymore. Jamie turned her wavering gaze to the man trying to communicate with her.

" - - - " Eyes. He blinked it out twice before she understood and struggled to her knees again. Kilo38, he blinked, then signaled a name she recognized: Cavanaugh, the captain who didn't like coyotes.

Jamie blinked her request. "Date"

Cavanaugh blinked back. "29 11"

* 180 *

Twenty-three days. She shook her head, disbelieving.

"29 nov" his eyes a.s.sured her.

"3 8 ss ok?" Jamie asked.

"repo rtb ok no ss kia at 26 11"

Her eyes closed and she let her head sink with the relief of it. They got back. They're all still alive. Jamie counted... Thirty-nine minus twenty-three. That's-come on, goober, thirty-nine minus twenty-three is, is-sixteen. Sixteen more days and what I say won't matter. Just sixteen more days...

She had many questions for Cavanaugh, but no chance to ask any of them. The Zhong soldiers had figured out that their prisoners were communicating. Shoo Juh responded by segregating Jamie and personally supervising both shorter interrogations and the longer punishments that followed. Soon the woman's arrogant, suggestive smile haunted Jamie's jumbled consciousness and filled her fractured nightmares.

With what little lucidity she had left, Jamie surmised that she'd become Shoo Juh's experiment or toy or both. She could not distinguish day or night, truth or lie, reality or imagination. But she knew the pa.s.sing of each moment brought her one moment closer to the end of those sixteen days.

v Crumpled into a humid, gritty corner, unable to guess where she was, Jamie achieved awareness gradually, blurrily. Jeezus, still alive...

Still naked.

The heavy, stale air stifled her breathing. All of her hurt, a tumult of burning, screeching muscles and nerves-but she tried anyway to get up like a normal person.

And whacked her head so hard she landed on her a.s.s again, dizzy and throbbing.

They had locked her in a grotesquely small s.p.a.ce; the ceiling couldn't have been more than five feet above the floor. Five feet by five feet by five feet, slimy concrete-block walls, a solid metal door with a kind of hatch at the bottom, illuminated only by a dim sliver of unchanging light visible through a small air vent near the low ceiling.

Jamie had no clue how long she'd been wherever this was. Her * 181 *

struggle for coherent recollection failed entirely. There was only the fiery, thudding pain, the utter debilitation.

And nothing hurt more than her hands. She couldn't move them without swooning. Squinting through the gloom at them, she gagged.

Her hands were gone, replaced by two freakishly swollen and discolored globs of tissue with deep, b.l.o.o.d.y, insect-infested lesions. And she had no idea how it had happened.

She tried to brush the insects off the wounds, hyperventilating into horror when the futility of the effort became obvious. The wounds bled then, which slightly eased their throbbing and, improbably, soothed her.

The blood didn't look red in the murk of the cell. Her hands oozed black and she watched them, fascinated. I bet this could kill me.

Infection, blood poisoning, gangrene. That'd do it. Just lay here. Don't f.u.c.king budge. And it'll happen. Just lay here... just lay here... just...

lay... here...

Maybe Jamie slept, maybe she fainted. When she woke, she had to pee desperately. And, alongside an underlying stench of human waste, she could smell... What is that?

In the dimness, she spotted two bowls near the small hatch at the bottom of the cell door. The bowls contained the usual tasteless rice concoction and fetid water, and they tempted her. She was thirsty, she was hungry. If she just leaned forward, or turned and rolled sideways, she could reach them...

No! No food!

Because she couldn't remember any chants from boot camp or the FOB bonfires, she invented a new one-her favorite Cantonese insult, learned in Narra. "Seek zee gay. Seek zee gay." Eat yourself.

Okay, okay. No food. But I gotta pee. I don't wanna die in a puddle of my own pee, for chrissake.

Being sorta picky, aren't we? Nothing wrong with a little pee.

Some people use it as a disinfectant, y'know.

No. I'm not gonna pee here. Not here where I'm gonna die, dammit.

Fine! Pick a spot, any spot.

Slowly, Jamie crawled. The corner she'd picked, diagonally opposite "her" corner, already stank. For a reason, she discovered: There * 182 *

resided the s.h.i.thole. She attempted to squat over it, lost her balance, and the backs of her wretched hands were sprayed with her urine.

Disinfectant? She toppled onto her knees and put her palms under the stream emanating from her.

What the f.u.c.k are you doing?

Learned this during the c.o.c.k, remember? In the Survival part of Survival-Evasion-Resistance-Escape, remember?

The c.o.c.k?

Survival. Worth a f.u.c.king try, right?

It hurts.

Yeah. Dying hurts, too. When Jamie finished peeing, she crawled to the door and consumed the paltry contents of both bowls.

* 183 *

Chapter tWenty.

out oF the niGht that Covers Me The first time Jamie saw the scorpion, she freaked and tried to kill it, but it escaped through a crevice near the cell door.

Consumed by a frenzy of envy and claustrophobia, she retreated to her corner and slammed her head against the wall. But she kept herself from screaming. If she screamed, she would lose her mind and never find it again.