Andrew Kaplan - Scorpion Winter

The pain always ends. He doesn’t want you to die.

He didn’t remember them dragging him back to his cell. All he knew was that at some point he awoke. He was dimly aware of lying on the freezing concrete floor of the cell. He was naked. His hands were zip-tied behind him as before, a fire between his legs. The pain was an agony that wouldn’t stop, but not like when the electricity had been on. He had never experienced anything like that. Not at Fort Bragg, not anywhere.

Nor had he ever been so cold. He was shivering violently, his shivers triggering more pain in his genitals. He could feel himself slipping. A piece of who he was was dying. But who was he? He had had so many identities, he was no longer sure. He never told even Iryna who he was. If he thought about it, Kulyakov would find a way to get him to tell. They’re going to make me confess, he thought. Not that it mattered. Because he still had one ace in the hole. The video was on YouTube.

Regardless of what was happening to him and Iryna, the Russians and the Americans would see the video and know about Gorobets. Then they would kill him or imprison him or let him go, but the torture would stop. He just had to hang on. Hold onto that, he told himself. All you have to do is hang on and you’ll win. And if he had told Iryna about his real identity, Kulyakov and Gorobets would now know. He didn’t think the leak came from Akhnetzov. It wouldn’t have been in Akhnetzov’s interest to tell them about him. Don’t go there, his mind told him. Think about Iryna. She loves you. Yeah, but she told them. They put the screws to her and she told them about him.

He tried to picture Iryna’s face but couldn’t. Something was bothering him. He had seen something. A face. He couldn’t pin it down. It wasn’t Kulyakov. He’d made a mistake not killing him when he had the chance. If he ever got out of here, he thought grimly, if there was one thing he did, it would be to terminate Kulyakov. The cold penetrated his bones. And the terrible pain in his groin. It was getting harder to think, lying on the icy concrete. One thing. Hang on to one thing. Sheikh Zaid. The pain always ends. Either you die or if Allah wills, you will see the sun, but the pain always ends.

How long had he been in this hell? he wondered. It had to have been days. Maybe weeks. It was impossible to tell. And what of the war? Had it started? He didn’t think so or there would have been bombing or missiles or air raid sirens. Some sign that they were at war. He hadn’t slept or eaten in days. The minute he dozed off, guards would rush into his cell and start beating him with their truncheons.

“Prosnis-s-sh!” Wake up! the blondish man lisped, slapping him hard across the face, then stepping back so the guards could start pounding at him. As they whacked away, he could hear the blondish man’s strange “uh, uh, uh” laugh. Scorpion groaned and spit out some teeth.

There was hardly a single inch of his body that wasn’t battered or bruised. They had only given him water twice. Both times it was a filthy-looking brownish liquid in a tin dish that he’d had to lap at like a dog, and when he tasted it, he gagged because someone had pissed in it.

And what of Iryna? Was she still alive? And Alyona? What had happened to her?

I t was during the fourth or fifth or sixth interrogation-he had lost count-that they wrung the confession out of him.

“Why did you kill Cherkesov?” Kulyakov demanded. He nodded to the blondish man, who barely had to touch the dial for Scorpion to start screaming. Let go, he told himself. It’s time. But why hadn’t they mentioned the YouTube video? It was his lifeline.

“I don’t remember,” Scorpion muttered.

“You can do better than that,” Kulyakov said, putting his hand on Scorpion’s shoulder. “Stepan,” he said, nodding to the blondish man, and there was a sudden jolt of electrical agony. At first there was only the pain, and then it hit Scorpion. Stepan! He knew now who the blondish man reminded him of. Alyona! He was the crazy brother!

“Wait!” Scorpion cried out. Kulyakov gestured and the current stopped. Scorpion struggled to turn his head to look at the blondish man but couldn’t move his head. “What happened to Alyona?” he managed.

“You figured it out, haven’t you?” Kulyakov said, bringing his face close to Scorpion’s. “Yes, Stepan’s her brother. Say hello, dobry den, Stepan,” he said to the blondish man.

“Uh, uh, uh,” Stepan said.

“What happened to Alyona?”

“We let Stepan question his sister. Seemed only right, but Stepan wasn’t very nice. He poured kerosene on her and set her on fire. Didn’t you, Stepan?”

Stepan didn’t answer. Kulyakov looked at Scorpion.

“She’s dead,” he said.

Scorpion closed his eyes. In his mind he saw the photograph of her at the Black Cat cafe and felt sick. He’d tried to save her and instead had delivered her to the one thing she feared above all else. He didn’t say a word about Iryna. He didn’t want to know what they might have done to her. He didn’t want to know any of it. The only thing left was YouTube. He had to find out. The only way was at the tribunal.

“Who ordered you to kill Cherkesov? The CIA?” Kulyakov said.

Scorpion nodded, his head hanging down.

“And you now admit that you and Iryna Shevchenko, acting on behalf of Viktor Kozhanovskiy as an agent of the CIA, murdered Yuriy Dmytrovych Cherkesov?”

Scorpion nodded again. “Sure,” he said. “I also killed Rasputin, Kennedy, and Martin Luther King,” he whispered.

Kulyakov gestured to Stepan, who hit Scorpion with a hum of pain worse than anything they had done to him before. It seemed to go on and on forever. He was screaming, begging, not knowing what he was saying. He felt like he was going insane. The pain overwhelmed everything. It was like someone shoving a red-hot iron up his urethra through his penis and testicles.

“I did it! Stop! Please! ” he screamed. He couldn’t take it anymore. “I did it. I did it,” he sobbed.

Then it stopped. Kulyakov grabbed his face, dripping with sweat and snot.

“Don’t think you’re fooling me,” he hissed, flecks of spittle flying. “If you recant later, what you just got will seem like nothing.”

Scorpion’s head hung down. They’d broken him, he thought. He would’ve said anything to make it stop. No, something inside him said. It’s just retreat. He remembered Shaefer in Afghanistan arguing with a senior officer and quoting Sun Tzu: “To retreat elusively, outspeed them.”

They dragged him back down the corridor to his cell. From somewhere came more screams; someone else being tortured. They threw him back into the cell. Just before they shut the steel door, Kulyakov leaned in.

“You know how they execute people in Lukyanivska? You think it’s picturesque, maybe? They stand you up against a wall at dawn like in the movies? Ni,” he sneered. “They drag you into a tiled room, the floor sloping down to a hole for the blood. They make you kneel and then they shoot you in the back of the head. Pah! ” he said, pointing his finger and making a gunshot sound. “Your sud,” your tribunal, “is tomorrow. Day after, pah!” pointing his finger and making the gun sound again. “Your real name, who you work for, will no longer matter. You are no more.”

The cell door slammed shut with a metal clang, final as death.

Sud

Kyiv, Ukraine

The sud, or tribunal, was held in a whitewashed room somewhere in the bowels of the Lukyanivska prison. They had taken him in shackles, escorted by half a dozen guards, down an elevator. Emerging from it, Scorpion had a sense of being deep underground, of moisture and pipes in the empty concrete corridors. He was in too bad shape to think of escape. Walking was painful, his groin aching badly, in addition to the shackles that made him hobble. They had put his clothes back on him, suit, shoes, shirt, no belt or tie. He must’ve lost a lot of weight in just the few days he had been the prison, he realized, because his clothes hung loosely on him and he had to hold his pants up with his hand.