Ian Slater - Force of Arms

“It is your wish to live like this?” Nie said very formally, blowing out a long trail of smoke, its dark and pale blues streaming in strange currents about the cell. He heard her breathe in the smoke and savor the alternate odor.

“Would you like a cigarette?” Nie asked. “And good food, eh? This would be nice.”

She told him he was a turtle and that all his forebears had been turtles. Nie was so incensed by the insult he threw down the cigarette on the cold wet flagstone of the cell, stamped it out, and yelled, “You will not have this cigarette or another. You will not have — things to keep your wretched body clean. Or fresh water until you confess. I–I could beat you!”

“Then beat me!” This was a brave but foolish thing for Alexsandra to say, for her having challenged Nie in front of the guard meant that Nie must now follow through with his threat or lose face.

“Beat her!” he ordered the guard. “Do what you like with her.” But the guard was no fool, which is why he had been put in charge of looking after such an important political criminal. The guard understood that what Chairman Nie meant was, beat her by all means but not about the face or forearms or anywhere else where, during the trial that would follow her public confession, bruises could be seen by the cameras. That she would yield, the guard had no doubt. As the echo of Nie’s footsteps faded, Alexsandra turned her face to the wall. She wanted to cry, but tears would not come — it was beyond that.

The guard returned — a tall man for a Chinese — and he brought her a whole packet of tampons and a bucket of fresh water. “Clean yourself. You look disgusting.” She grabbed the tampons, clutching them to her. “Gundan!” —Go away! — she ordered.

“Ha!” he laughed. “Ha!” But her tone had had the desired effect. “I’m going now,” he said, looking down at her, and then with a most childish gesture he wiggled a finger at her. “But I’ll be back!” And with that he used his other hand to massage his groin. “Okay?”

She raised her head from the bucket, which she had leaned upon with one arm, using the other to sweep her long hair away from her face. She thanked God she still had her hair, because she knew that as long as they left her hair alone she would be alive. They daren’t have her with a shaven head in a show trial, for it would tell the gallery how far they had humiliated her before bringing her to trial.

“Is that,” she began, looking at the guard’s obscene gestures, “what Comrade Mao taught you to do to women?’

“Ha, ha!” the guard said, in a forced tone of fuck you, adding, “Comrade Mao is dead.”

“His sayings also?” Alexsandra pressed gamely. “Are they dead, too?”

“Ha, ha!” he said, and was gone. If he came back to rape her, she knew he would bring others. That last “ha ha” about Chairman Mao’s sayings would need some strength through numbers to overcome any scruples he might otherwise have. The fools — did they really think raping her would make her confess? She had been raped before in the jails at Lake Baikal and in Harbin. She had almost starved to death, too, but had survived by going through her feces to extract the undigested pieces of corn. Who did they think she was? See how the bully of a guard was shamed into leaving a moment ago? In any case she knew he would not assault her while she was still bleeding. He meant later, after her period had passed.

Within an hour of Freeman’s speaking to his eighty SAS/D troops, the long-haul C-130H-30 Hercules was roaring down Orgon Tal’s marsden matting runway, the plane’s four four-and-a-half-thousand-horsepower Allison 501 turboprops nearing full throttle, its crew of four strapped in for takeoff. The eighty SAS/D troopers, forty to a side, sat facing one another, each man thinking about the mission, about whether or not he would get it, or the man opposite him, or perhaps most of them would get out, perhaps all of them would get out. Sure. They were all experienced in high-altitude drops, but never over such terrain as they could be in Tibet in eight hours time, depending on the head winds over Mongolia, the western province of Qinghai, or in Tibet itself. The mission involved many more planes, F-15E Eagles and F-18 Hornets as fighter cover, and a logistics nightmare of carefully coordinated inflight refueling for the fighters.

In the Iron Mountain, opposite the Potala Palace, they had the Dutchman, Hartog, under interrogation. They kept asking him why he was in Tibet, and he kept telling them he was interested in holistic medicine, especially in moxabustion, which could warm the affected nerve.

“We have another nerve treatment,” the major said. “In order to take away pain from one area of your body, we place the pain elsewhere.”

“Sounds interesting,” Hartog said.

“Yes,” the major said, “but we don’t use needles.” Hartog said nothing. The major barked out an order, and within the minute a pair of long-nosed pliers was brought in and placed on the bare table beneath the naked bulb.

“Now, Mr. Hartog,” the major pressed, “we both know what will happen.”

“Do we?”

“Oh yes. You will withstand pain for some minutes, then you will be unconscious. We will repeat the process, and in the end you will give us the names of your Tibetan contacts. Who sent you? The CIA?” The major put his face down so close to Hartog’s, the Dutchman could smell it. “Why resist when you know you will tell me the truth sooner or later?”

The major affected disappointment as he told the guards to begin. Two men held Hartog, even though he was tied securely in the chair, and one began pulling out his fingernails, tugging, twisting a little, then tugging some more.

The major said he would be at the Holiday Inn, and left. He was not at all convinced that the Dutchman knew anything. He, the major, had certainly not given any information out about the Lake Nam site, but why then had Hartog sent a fax with what had seemed to the clerk a line or two in it in some kind of code? On the other hand, it could have been nothing. By the time they had pulled out the second fingernail, the Dutchman had fainted, just as the major had predicted. “Zhaogao! — Damn it!” the man with the pliers complained. “This is going to be a long night.”

“Come on,” his comrade said, slapping Hartog’s face and pouring cold water on his head. “Wake up, you bastard!” But the Dutchman made no sense, talking as if he were half-drunk, his fingers curled up, paralytic with pain, the slightest breath of air on the red, raw, exposed roots where his nails had been an indescribable agony. In addition he had contracted giardiasis, an intestinal bug that only the drugs Tiniba and Flagyl would remedy and which the Chinese garrison in Iron Mountain either did not have or would not give to him — until he talked. Outside the prison could be heard the baleful howling of packs of wild dogs and the sound of firecrackers being set off, whether to frighten off the curs or for some kind of celebration Hartog had no way of knowing, but dogs howling seemed to him the most terrible and forlorn noise he had ever heard.

The moon was a huge, golden disk over Inner Mongolia, made so by the dust blown up by the typhoon.

“Bogeys ten o’clock high!” The warning didn’t come from any of the fighters riding shotgun for the Hercules but from an E-2C Hawkeye, a hundred yards aft of the main force. As two F-15 Eagles, Angels One and Two, made the first cut hard to the left and right, one of the bogeys, a Fulcrum-29, had already fired a Soviet-made Acrid air-to-air heat seeker, and straightaway the F-15 that the missile was going for started dumping flares out the back.