Andrew Kaplan - Scorpion Winter

Half a dozen SBU team members in full battle gear swarmed into the room, their weapons pointed at Scorpion and Iryna. Even if he reacted, Scorpion realized, there was a good chance that Iryna, if not both of them, would be killed. Two men grabbed him and forced him to the ground. Out of the corner of his eye he could see they had done the same to Iryna and the assistant. His body was patted down and someone kicked him in the ribs. Someone else ripped his Glock out of its holster as his hands were shackled behind him with tight plastic cuffs. Iryna was lying nearby, two SBU men on top of her, one of them with his hand between her legs.

An SBU team officer holding a pistol walked into the room. Even from the floor, with a knee pressing hard on his neck, Scorpion could see who it was-the man’s cheek and broken nose still swollen and bruised from where he had kicked him.

Kulyakov.

Lukyanivska Prison

Kyiv, Ukraine

The screams echoed off the walls of the cell. Scorpion couldn’t tell where they were coming from or even whether they were from a man or a woman. They sounded barely human. They seemed to go on for hours, though he knew it might have only been minutes. It was part of the process, he thought. Time deprivation, sensory deprivation, loss of control of your own body, humiliation, pain. “Reports from subjects have repeatedly confirmed that the anticipation of torture is worse than the torture itself,” he remembered Sergeant Falco quoting from the KUBARK book, the CIA’s classified manual on torture. Buzz-hair-cutted, fat-faced, massive-shouldered, no-necked Sergeant Falco tapping the desk with a rubber hose. Scorpion had encountered him during his Level C SERE training at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, back when he was in JSOC’s First Special Forces Operational Detachment Delta Force. The rules for Level C SERE were that interrogators were allowed to break no more than one major and two minor bones. For five straight days and nights he’d had Sergeant Falco’s undivided attention.

Not an easy man to forget, Sergeant Falco.

The screams subsided. For a moment there was nothing. Suddenly, he heard a terrible piercing scream, louder, higher pitched, worse than anything he had heard before. A woman, he thought. Definitely a woman. Then he understood. They wanted him to think it was Iryna.

Maybe it was.

Scorpion was penned naked in a small cage, his hands plastic-cuffed behind him, in a squatting stress position. There was no room to straighten any part of him, and the pain in his knees and back, shoulders and neck, was becoming unbearable. In a little while he would fall against the side of the cage and it would be even more uncomfortable.

The cell the cage was in was concrete and pitch-black and unbelievably cold. When they first brought him into the prison with his hands zip-tied behind him, Kulyakov had watched, smiling, as three SBU mussory took turns beating him with rubber truncheons. One of them got too close and Scorpion nearly took his head off with a Brazilian capoeira — style heel-kick that laid him out. He head-butted another and started to take the third man out, but Kulyakov had called for help and another three or four beefy guards piled in, swinging truncheons. One of them slammed his truncheon into Scorpion’s groin as he was kicking, bringing him down.

His body ached all over from the beating they had given him, angry that he had hurt two of their comrades. But it was worth it, he thought, even as they were hitting him. It was worth it to let them know that they weren’t completely in control. The pain was bad though. It was hard to know which was worse, the bruises from the beating, the pain in his joints from the stress position, or the cold.

The cold, he decided. He was shivering violently, approaching hypothermia, which he remembered starts when body temperature drops below 35 Celsius, 95 Fahrenheit. His breathing was becoming shallow. He needed to do his thinking now, he realized, while he still could, before the cold robbed him of his mind too.

“Sooner or later you’ll break. Everyone does,” he remembered Sergeant Falco saying. It was a contest between interrogator and captive. Between Kulyakov and him. Kulyakov wanted confessions. If he didn’t get it from him, he would try to get one from Iryna.

Scorpion tried to calculate if she could resist. How bad would they go on her? Would they sexually abuse her? Probably, he thought. How did he feel about that? He didn’t want to think about it, he realized. Well, you better, because they’re going to do it. If they survived-and realistically, for him at least that was almost an impossibility-would he take her back? Even if he would, would she let him? You’re in a dream world, he told himself. It’s the cold. It’s the cold and the pain and the screams doing the thinking. Not me, he decided. He would take her back no matter what they did. And even if Iryna didn’t break-she would try not to, he knew that about her-Kulyakov also had Alyona. He’d get his confessions.

So what weapons did he have? Kulyakov had two limitations. First, he knew that Kulyakov couldn’t afford to let him die. He needed to parade him for the Russians. And second, a confession from Iryna alone wouldn’t do. Kulyakov needed a confession from him too. They would likely try to use him and Iryna against each other.

“It’s about fear and pain,” Sergeant Falco told them in that mock prison camp that was way too real. “At some point, there’s only pain. It’ll blot out everything. Your wife, your mother, your country, your god. You think it won’t, but it will. You need to hold onto one idea. Only one. My job is to get past that. Believe me, I will,” Falco said, smashing the rubber hose on the desk with a loud thunk. “Before I’m done with you, the only thing you’ll believe in is me.”

That would be his one idea. Kulyakov didn’t want him to die.

Was someone screaming again or was it in his mind? He wasn’t sure and tried to move his head. Cell by icy cell, his brain was beginning to shut down. The cold doesn’t matter, he told himself.

He remembered once, when he was a boy, Sheikh Zaid sent him out wearing only a thawb robe and a knife, to be alone in the desert for three days; part of his education in what it was to be a man of the Mutayr. It was winter and the temperature in the northern desert dropped 100 degrees from daytime to night. He remembered laying on the sand looking up at the stars like ice crystals in the sky. It was bitterly cold and he shivered in the robe, unable to sleep. There was no one, nothing, for as far as the eye could see anywhere. He was hungry and utterly alone. The nearest source of light were the stars.

“How should I deal with the heat and the cold?” he had asked Sheikh Zaid before he set out.

“Be patient,” Sheikh Zaid replied. “Remember, Allah is merciful. The pain always ends. Either you die, or if Allah wills, you will see the sun, but either way the pain ends.”

He looked up in the darkness of his cell and saw stars. His mind was beginning to blur, he thought. He fought to keep it clear. There were plenty of unanswered questions. What had happened with the war? He had heard no explosions or air raid sirens, so maybe his YouTube video had been seen or Akhnetzov had gotten through. Or maybe the city was under attack right this second and he was buried so deep behind Lukyanivska Prison’s thick walls he couldn’t hear it.

What had happened to Alyona? And Iryna? Would she give him up? How had the SBU found them at the TV station? He was certain they hadn’t been followed. Was it Akhnetzov? Or someone at the station? Or even Kozhanovskiy? Someone had tipped the SBU about the upcoming broadcast. Who was it? Who stood to gain from stopping the video from getting out?