She was in her late fifties, Caucasian and rotund. Stripped down to her underwear, she was standing chest deep in a pit of mud created by one of the drainage pipes, which had cracked open, depositing its refuse around the stairwell.
Seeing Patrick and Virgil, the woman immediately began to vent. “Well, it’s about time, I’ve only been screaming for help for twenty minutes. First they stole my jewelry. Then they took my air mask, which cost me five thousand dollars. Then the little bastards stripped me down to my bra and panties and left me here to die.”
The snarling dogs barked at Patrick as he approached the woman—
— their bodies morphing together in his mind’s eye, melding into a single three-headed beast… Cerberus! The mythical hound of Hades rears on its hind legs, its multiple mouths snapping at Patrick, saliva flying from its lathering jowls.
Shep backed away, the surroundings spinning in his vision—
— the cement wall becoming a long, concrete-block corridor, barred steel doors on either side. The prisoners huddle together on the floor at the end of the hall. The guards are laughing, barely restraining the three guard dogs. The rottweilers tug at their choker leashes, growling at the terrified, naked Iraqi prisoners.
The Intelligence Officer turns to Shep. “We call this ‘fearing up’ the detainees. The interrogators appreciate it. They say it helps loosen their lips.”
“What did they do?”
“Who cares? Our job is to put the fear of Jesus in ’em for the Gitmo boys. That one, drag his fat ass over here.”
Shep grabs the Iraqi by his elbow, separating the frightened man from the group.
The Intelligence Officer shoves the barrel of his sidearm in the man’s ear. “Smitty, tell him to grab his ankles. Tell him if he let’s go, I’ll blow his brains out. Shepherd, when I tell you to, I want you to beat this Arab dog across his back with the rubber hose.”
“Sir… I don’t think I can.”
“Think? Who asked you to think? I’m giving you an order, Sergeant.”
“Shepherd, these orders come directly from the defense secretary’s office. We do our jobs over here, and we prevent another 9/11 back home. Is that so hard to understand? Now pick up the fucking hose. Go on, Smitty — tell him!”
The private contractor from Titan Corporation issues commands in Farsi to his prisoner. Quivering in fear, the heavyset Iraqi bends over and grabs his ankles.
“Shepherd, now — beat his terrorist ass!”
Patrick hesitates then lashes the forty-one-year-old taxi driver and father of five across his hairy back with the rubber hose.
“What are you, a Muslim lover? Hit him, Sergeant! That’s it! Beat him like a mule.” The MI Officer winks at the private contractor as he removes the cigarette from his mouth and stubs it out in the detainee’s left ear.
The Iraqi man howls in pain. Fearful of releasing his ankles and being shot, the prisoner falls forward, smashing his head against the unforgiving tile floor, knocking himself out.
The Intel Officer and private contractor break out in hysterics.
Shep backs away from the injured man, the dogs barking and snapping—
— one rottweiler suddenly gagged. Another followed suit, then the last — all three animals choking at something lodged in their throats.
“Patrick, are you all right? Patrick—”
Shep shook the memory of Abu Ghraib from his vision until he was again standing in the underground maintenance shaft. Virgil was by his side, his right hand caked in mud.
The three dogs were gagging, their mouths filled with the muck.
The heavyset woman was on her feet. Wallowing past the dogs, she disappeared down the concrete stairwell, leaving a trail of sewage and mud.
Virgil looked at Shep, who appeared pale and shaken. “Another hallucination?”
“A bad memory.”
“Tell me.”
Patrick stared at the dogs, the scene still vivid in his mind’s eye. “My second deployment… I was assigned to Abu Ghraib prison as a systems administrator — basically a glorified computer guy. The new guys got relegated to the night shift. That’s where a lot of things happened.”
“By ‘things,’ you mean torture?”
Shep nodded. “I was forced to participate. When I complained, I was told to shut my mouth and do my job. Things got worse when the spooks arrived from Guantanamo. Sick bastards. They’d use sleep deprivation… playing children’s nursery rhymes nonstop around the clock, it drove the inmates insane. Sometimes they’d handcuff a prisoner in painful contortions and leave him like that for hours. I never saw it myself, but I heard about the waterboarding. A few times the spooks went too far and drowned the detainee. When that happened, they’d toss the dead man’s remains in a body bag and order us to dump it somewhere during the night.”
“But that’s not what haunts your dreams.”
Shep shook his head, his eyes misty. “There was an Iraqi flag officer, Hamid Zabar. To get him to talk, the spooks brought in his sixteen-year-old son. They tortured the officer’s kid while he was forced to watch… while I was forced to watch.”
Patrick regains his composure. “I was stationed there for six months. A few of us managed to leak the details back home. After a while, there was an inquiry. I was back in New York at the time and offered to testify, but they refused to bring me in. The whole investigation was a sham, designed to appease the media and the American public while placing the blame on a few ‘bad apples,’ all noncommissioned officers, even though our commander in chief had authorized the use of torture. Nothing about Rumsfeld, who had encouraged the worst of it, or his deputy henchman, Paul Wolfowitz, who saw it for himself, or Major General Geoffrey Miller, the man Rumsfeld sent over to turn Abu Ghraib into Gitmo East. None of the guilty were ever charged or disciplined, only schmucks like me, the ones who blew the whistle. For offering to testify, we were dropped a pay grade, then secretly placed on a ‘permanent redeploy’ list. Eight months later, I was back in Iraq.”
“And the detainees?”
“That’s the worst part. Most of these people were innocent bystanders, picked up on sweeps by the private-army guys or turned in for cash rewards by locals. A lot of them weren’t even being tracked or registered, just held indefinitely.”
“And you did nothing to stop it?”
“I told you, I reported it. What else was I supposed to do?”
“Hey, you two! You’re late.”
They turned, confronted by a man dressed head to toe in camouflage black fatigues, his face concealed behind a rebreather. He motioned down the concrete stairwell with his assault rifle. “Better move it, assholes. The barge’ll be here any minute.”
Grabbing the dogs’ leashes, he pulled the animals aside, allowing Patrick and Virgil to make their way down the concrete stairwell into the dark recesses below.
Built in 1875, Pier A was a 285-foot-long, forty-five-foot-wide solid masonry dock that jutted into the Hudson River at the southwest end of the Financial District at Battery Park Place. The pier supported an aging three-story structure, highlighted by green-and-white-painted arched windows and a Victorian clock tower located at its seaward end.