The mine blows both the starboard wheels off the Humvee in which Barney is riding, and flips it. The driver had tacked to avoid what turned out to be a decoy in the road, a suspicious irregularity designed to make you swerve into a real, better-concealed trap. This happens in the middle of a hellacious sandstorm that has reduced visibility to about three feet. No warning; just the eardrum-imploding crack of a bomb going off beneath your vehicle’s chassis armor (which did not function worth a damn because there was not enough of it); you go gravity-less like shorts in a dryer in total silence because you are temporarily deaf, and when you can refocus your eyes, everything is on fire.
Your body armor becomes an impediment, its bulk preventing you from jumping out of the vehicle and getting back to a place where the ground is down and the sky is up, and as you scramble you notice your feet are aflame.
Later you find your boots partially melted; your feet are burned badly enough to prevent you from humping out on your own power.
No glorious mission, no taking that essential hill, just panic and terror as your team scatters into the merciless, sandblasting wind. Nobody knows who is dead and who is alive. What you first think to be enemy gunfire is the rounds in Sgt. Tewks’ magazine exploding from the heat. Tewks takes one in the calf from his own weapon.
Everybody gets immediately lost in the sandstorm and no one can hear anything. Barney scrambles like a mad crab to get distance, and flops on his back from a sudden jolt of pain in his side. A piece of the Humvee is jutting out of him, having breached a seam in the constrictive oven of his body armor. He tries to sleeve sweat from his vision and sees his own blood.
Nothing on earth sounds like an AK-47 on full auto. It makes a kind of chopping racket, hence “chopper,” before the slang got updated to mean Hueys. They sound similar to the old Thompsons, but not exactly the same, and Barney knows the difference from experience. Most of the gunfire is Kalishnikovs; very little return fire from the Belgian M249 Minimi SAW his unit is packing, even less of the pop-and-crackle of M4s or M16A4s, the standard field issue. The enemy is pot-shotting them where they lie.
He tries to claw out his sidearm, his carbine already swallowed by blowing sand, which is covering him up like snowfall. All of a sudden it hurts to move. Anything. Any second now a renegade with an AK-47 will spot him, helpless as a turtle, and add a bunch of holes to his life. Time slows to grains of sand, trickling.
A buddy grabs his arm and hauls him to a kneeling position, pointing and shouting the path to rally, to comparative safety.
It is their passenger, their observer for the day, their guest journalist from the States.
It is Carl Ledbetter.
Barney woke up.
They starved Barney for a week to tenderize him, then began messing with him, because they could.
He was not much of a fighter on one Styrofoam cup of water per day.
His pacing circle was eight feet from the thin futon pad on the floor. They had taken his boots. The cuff on his leg was eight inches long, impossible to slip, custom-fabricated, attached to a case-hardened steel chain through a special double-eyelet. The chain fed back to a wall inset and looped through a metal U-bolt secured inside its own little grated cage. Somebody had done a lot of thinking about prisoners and the ways they escaped, when given oodles of time and nothing to do. At either end, the chain bore no lock — thus, no lock to pick.
His pants had been slit to accommodate the big shackle. Same pants he had worn before, just grimier.
There was not a single sharp object, potential bludgeon or metal edge in the entire room. No lamps to be shattered for parts or glass. Screw and bolt heads had been welded or sheared smooth. No bathroom except for a squat toilet in the Thai style, within reach of the chain radius. Therefore no tank lid, no toilet parts to adapt as weapons or picks. No daylight, although there was a barred and locked-down window behind steel mesh, out of reach of the chain. No night, because the inset ceiling lights (unreachable and unbreakable) burned 24/7.
When they gave him food, it was usually something wrapped in a tortilla. No utensils. No plates. No paper towels or napkins. No dessert.
No clocks.
Trapped, sweltering, occasionally delusional from no time-sense and no diurnal/nocturnal shift, it was easy for Barney to hallucinate, then nightmare. The parallels to Iraq were too abundant. He had to try to remember things: Where he was, how he had gotten here, what had gone wrong, what could be done.
He arbitrarily benchmarked the first day he got beaten up as Day One, although it could have been Day Five or Week One; Barney had no idea how long he had been unconscious after Sucio had smashed in the back of his head.
On Day One, Sucio and some of the thugs who had taken Barney at the Pantera Roja formed a circle and pounded the crap out of him, playing keep-away with his head. Barney swallowed a lot of his own blood. They abandoned him when he could not stand up to even make a pretense of defense.
Barney was down in a dark hole for a long time after that, and by Day Two, he apprehensively guessed that he might already have been in this place as long as a month. It was impossible to tell. His brief sessions of sleep were frighteningly deep, like coma.
He had to use his noodle, or plummet into insanity, or worse, despair.
His first breakthrough was the discovery of some reading matter — a copy of the Mexican tabloid ¡Alarma! from which the staples had been removed. It was all in Spanish and was at least five years old. Yellow journalism at its finest. Some of the lurid photos — auto wrecks, murders, kidnappings, assorted decapitations — at least gave Barney visual images on which to center his attention. That the staples had been extracted from the fold-over newsprint suggested that the tabloid might have been left here on purpose, the better for prisoners to fantasize their most extravagant fates, and thus foment less trouble.
Barney’s second breakthrough was noticing the guy apparently named Mojica. Barney remembered Mojica, the little ferret-like sonofabitch with the mirrorshades. Mojica with the obsessively manicured beard that ran like a gray penciled line delineating his jaw. From Mojica’s hair and beard growth, Barney calculated that he had been prisoner no longer than a week.
Mojica, of course, was a cousin of the late Jesús, hired thug and bible student. Mojica got his nasty little punches and kicks in generally after the giant Sucio had done the prep work, the major softening up of the subject — the assaultee.
More unconsciousness.
They roughhoused Barney about once every three meals after they started feeding him; mostly brown mystery paste in a tortilla. Diarrhea rollicked his GI tract. His tormentors never spoke except to laugh or exchange insults with one another, so Barney decided to speak to them:
“Hey, maricón, ¿donde está mi television?”
A fat guy named Zefir kicked Barney in the gut and Barney vomited on him.
Past a certain point — pretty quickly, if you have learned how to take a bruising — actual pain becomes a vague true north. Barney knew what he had provoked and had prepared mentally for the onslaught.
For the first time, his jailors regarded him queerly, as though they suddenly did not have the upper hand. That was all the victory Barney sought from that little gambit.
Next up: “Hey, Sucio: ¡Oye, tu madre!”
No complex insult was needed. Mexican invective was extremely touchy on the subject of anyone’s mother, and the blackest curse was always assumed. You did not have to call her a whore or suggest a dirty coupling; all you had to do was say “madre” instead of “mama” to get your target to blow like a volcano.