It hadn’t taken her long to realize this was an old mine, and that the prisoners were working to reopen it. Gangs of the strongest detainees went off every morning to labor on the tracks to the north, while others toiled in the massive open pit at the bottom of the valley. There was little heavy equipment being used, only a crane mounted on a rail flatbed, to help lay track, and a couple of bulldozers. Everything else was done by hand under the watchful eye, and quick fists, of the guards.
A buzz of soft whispers suddenly swept through the prisoners while eating their meal, their eyes turned to the east, along the rim of the valley. A vehicle was approaching, coils of dust billowing from its tires as it negotiated the narrow trail.
The vehicle was identical to the one that had captured the two Americans, a desert-patrol truck with tall, knobby tires, and a machine gun mounted on its roof. As the truck drew closer, Alana could see a bundle of some kind roped to its hood. And closer still, she could tell it was the body of a man. His clothes were missing, and his once-dark skin was burned red and had begun to peel off in great sheets. She could tell an animal had gotten to the body, because there were bloody gouges all over his arms and chest. His face was a raw, pulpy mass.
The patrol had been sent out to track down an escaped prisoner.
The truck stopped just short of the trestle tables and the passenger’s door flew open. The man who emerged spoke to the guard captain for a moment. He, in turn, made an announcement to the assembled prisoners. Alana didn’t need to understand the language to know he was telling them that this is what happens to those who try to escape. He then drew a knife, cut the bindings holding the body to the truck, and strode away. The corpse hit the ground with a meaty sound, and the flies that were a constant swarm over the serving dishes suddenly found a more appetizing meal.
There wasn’t enough food in Alana’s stomach for her to throw up. Instead, she bent at the waist, braced her hands against her knees, and dry-heaved until her stomach was a knotted lump. When she straightened, a guard she didn’t recognize eyed her with some interest.
A half hour later, the meal finished, Alana and the other women were cleaning the tin serving dishes, using fistfuls of sand to scour the metal. Not that the prisoners back laboring in the mine and along the railroad had left much behind on their plates. One of the principal means for the guards to maintain control was to keep all the captives on the verge of starvation.
She was kneeling on the ground, swirling sand inside a bowl, when a shadow loomed over her. She looked up. The other women working with her kept their attention on their work. Alana was suddenly yanked to her feet and turned around violently. It was the guard who had slapped her earlier. He was close enough that she could smell the tobacco on his breath and see that he wasn’t much older than twenty, and that there was a lifelessness in his eyes. He didn’t see her as another human being. There wasn’t enough behind his gaze to make her think he saw her as an animate object at all.
The other guards meant to watch over the dozen women were purposefully looking away. An arrangement had been made, a deal struck. For however long he wished, Alana Shepard belonged to this man.
She tried to ram a knee into his groin but must have telegraphed her intentions because he turned aside adroitly and took the glancing blow to his thigh. The leering expression on his face didn’t change, even when he slapped her on the same cheek that was already swollen and beginning to bruise.
Alana refused to cry out or collapse. She swayed on her feet until the stinging subsided and her head cleared. The guard spun her again, and with a bony hand clamped on her shoulder so that his fingers dug into her flesh he maneuvered her away from the others.
A hundred yards off was an old shed. Half the roof was missing, and the sides were bowed like the swayed back of an old horse. The door hung askew on a single rusted hinge. Just at the threshold, the guard shoved Alana hard enough to send her sprawling. She knew what was coming, had suffered the ordeal once before in college, and had vowed never to let it happen again. When she turned to face him from her supine position, her arm swept the floor to scoop up some pebbles and dirt.
He came forward in a rush and kicked her wrist. Her fingers opened reflexively and her arm went numb. Her meager weapon was scattered back to the ground. He said something in Arabic and chuckled to himself.
Alana opened her mouth to scream, and he was suddenly on her, one filthy hand clamped over her nose and mouth, the other she refused to think about. She tried to thrash under his weight, to bite his fingers, to block out the horror of what was about to happen, but he held her pressed to the earth. She couldn’t breathe. His lunge had knocked the air from her lungs and his hand shut off her airways. Her head began to swim, and after just a few seconds of a defense she thought she would never give up her body betrayed her. Her motions became less frantic. Unconsciousness loomed like a black shadow.
Then came a loud crackle, like the staccato snap of a bunch of twigs, and she could turn away and draw breath. Above her, she saw the back of a man’s hand and the back of her attacker’s head. The guard was dragged off of her, and Alana could breathe more deeply, short, choppy gasps that nevertheless filled her lungs. The would-be rapist came to rest next to her, his face inches from hers. If it was possible, death brought a certain amount of life to his unblinking eyes.
Kneeling over her was the guard who had watched her dry-heave in the mess line. He had snapped the other man’s neck with his bare hands.
He spoke in a soothing voice, and it took her a second to realize she recognized the words. He was speaking English. “You’re okay now,” he’d said. “His ardor has cooled. Permanently.”
“Who? Who are you?” He’d pulled aside his kaffiyeh. He was older than all the other guards she had seen, his skin weathered by a lifetime of living outdoors. She noticed, too, that unlike any of the other people she’d seen recently, one of his eyes was brown and weepy while the other was a startling blue.
“My name is Juan Cabrillo, and if you want to live you and I have to get out of here right now.”
“I don’t understand.”
Cabrillo got to his feet and extended a hand to Alana. “You don’t need to. You just have to trust me.”
AFTER A NIGHT OF moving by moonlight across the valley toward the construction site, gaining access to the facility had been simplicity itself. The guards had orders to keep people in. There was nothing about keeping men dressed like themselves out.
When Juan had been questioned about his presence, as he stood casually in line for breakfast with the other guards after sunrise prayer, he’d replied that he had been sent from the other camp as punishment for failing on the obstacle course. The young man who’d questioned him had judged the answer adequate and said nothing more.
Just like that, Cabrillo was part of the landscape—another Arab in desert fatigues, with half his face hidden by a checkered scarf. He had to be careful. During his tumble down the mountain, he had lost one of his brown contact lenses. The other he washed as best he could in his mouth, but it was ingrained with grit, and every time he blinked it felt like he was scratching his cornea with sandpaper. The eye streamed a constant flow of tears.
He spent the morning wandering the workings, staying close enough to other guards that he didn’t attract anyone’s attention. He quickly grasped that this was a forced-labor camp, and, judging by the prisoners’ condition, it had either been here for a long time or they hadn’t been in the best shape when they arrived. He believed more in the latter than the former, because it didn’t look like a great amount of work had been accomplished.
And that was the point, he realized after a couple of hours. These people weren’t meant to accomplish anything at all. The holes they had excavated at the bottom of the valley appeared random, with no oversight by a mining engineer. As best he could tell, reopening the facility was make-work, something to keep them tired and hungry and grateful for the meager meals they were given. But whoever sent them here didn’t want them dead. At least not yet.