John Nichol - Tornado Down

I blocked again.

‘OK. We will talk further. I know that you cannot answer these questions, but you know that you will answer them. At some point, maybe not today, maybe not tonight… tomorrow, maybe, the next day… you will talk to me. I know you will talk to me, you know you will talk to me.’

I was thinking, ‘I know that as well, mate.’ But again, I sat and looked stupid; I looked sad, I looked very sad, I tried to get a bit of sympathy from him, but it didn’t work. He continued with his questioning.

‘OK,’ he said, ‘if you’re not going to talk to me, I’m going to go. Do you want me to go?’

‘No, no!’ I thought. ‘Stay!’ But I could not say that. I was thinking, ‘I know you’re Mr Nice, and you’re not going to hurt me.’ But again I replied, ‘I cannot answer that question.’

‘What do you mean, you cannot answer that question? That’s stupid. All you have to say is you want me to stay, or you don’t want me to stay.’ Psychologically, he was trying to get to me. I was desperately trying to fight that as much as I had been trying to fight the pain when they were flogging me.

In the end he decided he was going to go. He stood behind me chatting with someone in Arabic, discussing my case, planning the rest of the evening’s entertainment. Mr Nasty came in. He was not a particularly aggressive guy, but he had the threats, he was threatening quite openly: ‘If you do not answer my questions, we will hand you over to other people. They will hurt you, and eventually you will answer them. Why don’t you spare yourself the pain?’

I think to myself, ‘Why not spare myself the pain? I know at some point I’m going to tell him what he wants.’

‘We will hurt you. People will beat you. You will be taken to a darkened room, it will not be nice like this, people will not offer you food and the drink that we have.’

Mr Nice had attempted to persuade me, attempted to make friends with me, attempted to get me to say something else. Now he was putting his trump cards down on the table. He said, ‘I don’t need to ask you these questions.’

Now what’s coming?

‘I can tell you that your name is Fit Lt Nichol.’

That’s no problem, I’ve told him that.

‘I can tell you that you are a navigator.’

‘Shit,’ I thought. ‘How does he know that? That could be a guess though; that’s not a problem.’

‘I can tell you that you are from XV Squadron.’

Now I really was worried. He knew things about me. Where had he got them from? I had a feeling that he got them from John; he could have got them from a newspaper article, but probably not, it had probably come from John. What have they done to him to get it? The same, or worse? Worse, surely. But what? When will I get it? What will it be like? What did they do?

‘I know that you are from XV Squadron; I know that you are from Bahrain; I know that you fly with your Victor tankers to bomb me.’

Again this was stuff that he could be guessing, or have read about in the British press. Many people in the Forces had thought that in the run-up to the war the press revealed way too much information that would be of intelligence value to the Iraqis. It was very contentious.

Now Mr Nice said, ‘I know that your attack did not work; I know you did not get the bombs off, and that you ditched your bombs in my desert.’

So now I knew. Now a cold feeling ran right through me. John. I thought, ‘What the hell has happened to him? Where is he? How is he?’ I was worried about him, but even more worried about myself. Deep down, I was glad that whatever had led him to talk had not yet happened to me. The questioning began again; I gave the formulaic reply. But I knew if John had talked, it was only a question of time before I followed suit.

Mr Nice got bored again: he went away, the pattern formed now. The dry mouth and sudden salivas of fear.

Still I refused to talk. In the end they gave up. Now the pain was going to start again. Sure enough, they dragged me off to another room, blindfolding me again. I was waiting, tensed, I knew something very unpleasant was going to happen to me very soon.

They left me standing against a wall in a classic stress position, designed to weaken, to break down resistance. In this position, my forehead was flat against the wall, my feet about twenty inches away from it; I was stretched right up onto my toes, arms handcuffed behind my back. My forehead was supporting my entire bodyweight against the cold surface, a surface flat as purgatory. Every time I tried to move from that position, somebody punched me, whacked me back into it. They left me like that. I tried to move my head, somebody smacked it hard against the wall, a staggering blow. My head must be thicker than I realised, or had I passed out? I tried to move my arms, manacled behind my back now for bloody hours. The handcuffs were still of the ratchet type, tightening automatically if I tried to move. Because of the beating, they were racked up tight to the last notch again, biting into my wrists, a cold, insistent metallic cutting agony. The flesh on the wrists themselves I could feel ballooning up once more over the edges of the cuffs, a two-inch step of swollen flesh, the fingers entirely numb, fluid from the sores flowing out around the steel. My shoulder muscles seized suddenly with the tearing torture of cramp, unbearable, it must be relieved. The arches of my feet were clenched hard with the strain of being on tiptoes, slow rivers of fire burned through the muscle, sinews quivering. Every fibre was shaking now with the impossible effort of maintaining the posture; I had to move, but I knew they were standing, watching, waiting for a twitch, the whip poised, the baton raised. I moved. They beat me to the floor…

They dragged me up, walked me around for a little bit to disorientate me, which wasn’t difficult, as I was in darkness all the time. Now somebody stood me with my back to another wall in another part of the building – only this time my head was not against the wall, I was standing slightly away from it. I could not see, but I could sense somebody to one side. Suddenly, wham! they smashed my head back hard against the wall. Two seconds later, two hours later, impossible to judge, smash! my head crashed off the wall again. Nobody was asking any questions. Crack! I was thinking, ‘Ask me something, ask me something, at least let me say something, or hit me so I fall unconscious…’ Crack! This went on – it could have been thirty times, it could have been a thousand times, I have no idea. Nobody asked me anything after this, nothing at all. Now, dazed, stunned like a chicken before its throat is cut, I was worried, I had lost track of how they were going to interrogate me; this was not going by the book any more. They left me. They put me in a cell with John, for the first time, but we knew they would be listening.

He said, ‘I’ve told them something.’

‘Don’t worry, it’s no problem.’

They took me back out of that room, along a corridor, and attached me to the frame of what was obviously a bare iron bedstead. At the other end of the room I could hear someone being questioned. ‘Zaun,’ he said. ‘My name is Zaun.’ I wondered who Zaun was. From his accent, he was obviously American. That meant we were not alone. He had to be a flyer like ourselves.

They pushed me down onto the bed, but the agony in my wrists and hands, still ratcheted behind my back, made me catapult straight back upright again.

‘What is it?’ asked the guard.

‘My arms. My arms.’ He uncuffed me, loosened off the ratchets, and cuffed my wrists back together, but this time in front. This was absolute heaven, once the worst of the pain wore off. Utterly exhausted, I curled up on the bedsprings and fell into a dead sleep. It was daylight when I awoke. The guard undid my blindfold. I looked around. I was in what we came to call ‘the dormitory’. Several other beds, some with mattresses, were dotted around.