Сюзанна Бэк: Desert Storm

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Kael was the first to return to consciousness, pain pounding sickly in her temples. Her bound hands prevented her from rubbing the stinging knot on the back of her skull, and as she tried to sit up, a wave of dizziness convinced her that movement was not the best course of action at the present. Instead, she laid back down, her head pillowed on someone’s well muscled thigh. Staring up at a water-stained, crumbling ceiling, her eyes traced the path of several silken webs that ran from the corners of the small cell to the caged light which hung down from the ceiling on a rusty chain.

Movement from beneath her head caused her to sit up once again, rolling with the waves of dizziness as they washed over her. Blinking her eyes to clear her vision, she moved away from the figure beneath her, her back pressing against a chilled, damp wall. “Andrews, you ok?”

“Will be as soon as you give me the plate of the truck that mowed me down,” the young man mumbled, struggling to come to a seated position. Like Kael before him, he gave up the effort, crumpling back to the sodden ground and moaning. “Where the fuck are we anyway?”

“Holding cell of some sort,” Kael replied, looking around for the first time. The cell was a rough square, approximately ten feet by ten feet, barely large enough for its three occupants to sit without becoming tangled up in one another. The walls were made of crumbling cement, liberally smattered with mostly illegible graffiti. Water ran in continuous streams down the walls, pooling on the cement floor and running down into a large drain in the center. There were no beds, chairs or toilet facilities. The place stank of excrement, death and despair.

Andrews finally made it up to a seated position, looking around as well. “Reminds me of P.S. 62 in the Bronx,” he sneered. “What about Sleeping Ugly over there?” He gestured with his head toward the still unconscious Reingold, then groaned and leaned his aching skull back against the damp wall. “Fuck.”

As if hearing his name mentioned, Reingold struggled into awareness, the stench of the fetid water flowing into the drain beneath his head causing him to screw up his face in disgust. As he lifted his head from the floor, the others noticed a green slime had liberally coated his close cropped reddish blonde hair.

“Nice look for ya, Goldy,” Andrews sneered. “Green is definitely your color.”

“What the hell are you talking about, asshole?” Reingold asked, propelling his body out of the pool of water and scrabbling up to lean against the wall, rubbing his head against the crumbling cement to rid himself of the slimy mass clinging to his skull.

“Shut up. Both of you.” Lifting her head, Kael looked around the cramped quarters again. “Reg, Kelly, you guys alright?”

Soft moans came from the west end of the tiny cell. “Yeah Gunny, we’re alright in here,” PFC Bryon Kelly answered, his voice muffled behind the feet of thick cement separating the two cells. “How about you?”

“We’re ok,” Kael answered. Her piercing eyes lanced into the men sharing the cell with her and when she next spoke, her voice was raised just enough to capture the attention of her other two men in the adjoining cell. “Alright, guys. This isn’t gonna be fun, but we’ve been trained for this eventuality. Just remember to keep your heads on straight, don’t give ‘em any information, and try your best to hold on till we figure a way out of this. Understood?”

All the men voiced their consent bravely, promising they wouldn’t break under whatever tortures were going to be inflicted on them. Kael fixed Reingold and Andrews with a significant look. “I’m proud of you guys. Just trust in yourselves and each other and we’ll get out of here.”

Reingold cracked a grin that lit up his whole face. “Don’t worry about us, Gunny. We’ll take whatever they can dish out and then some.”

“Good,” Kael grunted, trying to find a more comfortable position for her aching body. “Now let’s just stay calm and wait to see what they’ve got in store for us.”

Several hours later, the steel door to Kael’s cell blew open and two heavily armed guards stepped partially inside, looking menacingly around for a moment before reaching down and pulling Andrews up from the floor.

The brash young soldier’s eyes widened in fear and his dark skin paled for a moment before the customary smirk reappeared over his broad features. “Give it your best shot, coppers,” he said in his best James Cagney accent. “You’ll never get me to rat.”

The smart remark earned him a hard shot across the jaw, but Andrews refused to let his knees buckle. Turning his head toward his companions, he flashed them a brief, confident smile before he was dragged from the cell, leaving his two squad mates to stare at one another in silence.

The poke to the jaw did nothing to ease the pounding in his head, Andrews observed as he was dragged along through the twisting corridors of the underground structure. Adapt and overcome was one of the mottoes of the Corps and he tried to do both. He really did. It was, however, a bit difficult trying to adapt when one saw everything in quintuplicate. Overcoming was damn near impossible.

Instead, he just went along for the ride, spying everything through a fog of pain and nausea which clenched sickly at his belly as if it had grown roots and planned staying on awhile. He was thankful to whichever gods might have had pity on poor Marines when he was finally dragged through one last doorway and thrown into a hard, high-backed wooden chair. His cuffs were released, then his arms were bound in back of the chair, stretching the muscles in his shoulders to the point of protestation.

His pain calmed some as his vision eased back into sharp focus. Taking advantage of what was sure to be an all too brief respite, the soldier looked around at his new accommodations. It appeared he was in an office of some sort, quite Spartanly decorated. A desk filled much of the space and a large picture of Saddam Hussein hung behind it, bordered by the Iraqi flag on one side and the banner of the Republican Guard on the other. The floor was cheaply tiled and barren of any coverings. Andrews smirked internally. ‘It’s gotta be a bitch to get the blood out of Berber.’

Seated behind the desk, resplendent in his Guard uniform, was obviously the Commandant of this little pleasure camp, his black, close cropped hair gleaming in the mellow light. A luxuriant mustache sprouted beneath his nose and the man stroked it reflexively as he attended his paperwork, giving off the calculated air of a man much too busy to have time to deal with ruffians such as the one now seated before him.

After a long moment of silence, the man’s dark, cunning eyes lifted from the desktop, scanning the seated form of Andrews with as much fascination as one would spy a particularly interesting insect on the sidewalk. He looked at the guards bracketing Andrews like bookends, speaking rapidly to them. Both men nodded and grabbed their weapons to their chests, standing like statues.

Finally, the man looked back at Andrews, smiling slightly and stroking his moustache again. He fired off another rapid sentence, then sat back in the chair awaiting a response.

Unfortunately for the Marine, Andrews was a last minute addition to the squad, having been called up from a cushy job stateside when the original explosives expert came down with the flu. As such, his training in the local flora and fauna of Iraq left much to be desired. He neither spoke nor understood a word of Arabic.

Never one to allow such a minute detail disrupt his work, Andrews met the patiently waiting look from the Commandant with a challenging stare of his own. His effort was rewarded by a rifle butt to the stomach and he hunched over, gasping for air, suddenly thankful that he’d skipped breakfast that morning. Looking back up, Andrews shot another challenging glare toward his tormenter and was again rewarded with a blow to the stomach, leaving him breathless and coughing.