They threw simultaneous knees at groins, but succeeded only in tangling legs, losing their leverage and falling, taking down a crash of crockery as they toppled. They landed hard, and Swanson cartwheeled away while Marks rolled in the opposite direction.
Both men got back on their feet, panting hard. Staring at each other, they reached for their belt knives as they warily began round two. Swanson’s thoughts flashed back to his Marine Corps days and how to fight with a knife. He’d never practiced the arcane art much, preferring to shoot his enemies from a distance. But it is what it is. He was armed with a dark and heavy SEAL knife, which was designed to do everything but algebra, while Marks pulled a Fairbairn-Sykes commando dagger, built for close-quarter blade work. Advantage: Marks. Nicky saw that, too, and began a little shuffle to get close enough to strike.
Physical conditioning was about even, Swanson thought. The superior equipment was more than offset by the fact that Luke Gibson should be bursting through that front door any second now. All that Swanson had to do was not get killed until help arrived. Where the hell is he? Swanson looked for his gun, but it was lost in the rubble. The ruby laser beam was gone, too.
“Give it up, you surly prick,” Swanson snarled, noticing that Marks’s gray eyes actually held hope instead of gleaming like those of a trapped animal. “My partner is coming in.”
Marks struck with a rattlesnake-quick thrust, in and back, and the Fairbairn-Sykes nicked Swanson’s forearm, leaving a red trail behind. Marks didn’t appear to be in a hurry to finish it. “You’re a dead man if that’s what you think.”
Swanson tried a side-kick sweep, and although Marks dodged it, the move bought a few extra inches of space, a few more seconds off the clock. But it seemed that Marks was the one buying time.
A short rattle of automatic gunfire shook the tight room and a dozen 9-mm. bullets stitched Nicky Marks from legs to torso. As he fell backward, blood oozing from multiple wounds, a look of surprise crossed his face. “My prince,” he coughed in a death rattle, staring at Gibson. Gibson stepped up and shot the man three more times, all in the head.
Gibson looked over at Swanson, who was breathing hard. “You okay?”
“Yeah.” He wiped away some of the blood running from his forearm down to his wrist. “Why the hell did you throw in the flash-bang?”
“I didn’t.” Gibson pointed toward the sprawled body. “He popped it. I saw him through the window, and maybe he saw me, too, and decided to start the action on his own terms. Once again, Nicky knew our movements.”
“Impossible.” Swanson went to the corpse and rifled through the pockets. No paper. No phone. “You shouldn’t have killed him, Luke. We needed answers from this guy.”
“Well, you’re welcome very much for saving your life, asshole. Those were the orders. I believe the exact words from Marty Atkins, our superior officer, were ‘Find him and shoot him dead.’ That’s what we did. Anyway, he didn’t leave us much choice.”
Swanson looked hard at his partner. “Why did he call you ‘my prince’?”
“Well, that’s something I’ve been waiting to discuss with you.”
Gibson swung the H&K submachine gun around like a baseball bat and struck Swanson hard across the back of the skull. Swanson’s legs buckled and he went down like a bale of hay, unconscious before hitting the floor.
21
Headache. Pounding and painful, and a thirst that begged for moisture. The roar of a machine. Kyle Swanson sensed movement, then fell back into blackness. The machine roared again. Close by. It scared him, and he took the fright back into dreams.
The Boatman was leaning on the oar of his long canoe, waiting. “I told you,” the ragged specter said in a voice dry and sandy. “I tried to warn you. ‘This cannot be done alone,’ I said.”
Swanson groaned. Somebody working with a hammer. “I don’t remember.”
“Try.” The nightmare figure spoke quietly, in contrast to the noise elsewhere.
“Water. Please give me some water.”
“Think about it.”
Swanson heaved, but his arms wouldn’t work, and he collapsed again. “Did you come for me? Is it finally my time?”
“No. Just this one, although my work is just starting this night.” The Boatman gestured toward the front of the bateau, where the corpse of Nicky Marks sat mute. Splotches of dried brown blood crusted his wounds. He had no head.
The Boatman stirred the imaginary pond and the boat sluggishly moved away, toward the carmine glow on the faraway horizon. “Try to remember,” the figure called out before disappearing. “It is the answer.”
Swanson slept awhile, thought he heard someone calling his name. He tried to force his eyes to open, but he couldn’t see anything beyond an intense brightness, so he closed them again. His body shook. Another spell of blackness enveloped him, then he heard different voices, real ones this time. Words he couldn’t understand. So thirsty.
Luke Gibson was beginning to believe that he had popped Swanson too hard. That wasn’t his intent. He had patched up the wound and hoped there was no concussion. He checked the restraints and stepped away, got a cup of water and poured some into Swanson’s mouth, and heard him gag and cough, then gave him a little more.
“Are you finished yet?” he asked in Arabic.
One of the three rugged young men who had come up from the village said the work was complete, and Gibson went over. “Let’s see how you did.”
Nicky Marks’s body hung upside down, tied by the ankles, from a hook in the ceiling above a blood-stained bathtub. It was messy. They had been in a hurry, because blood pools in the lowest part of the body after death, and Gibson needed the postmortem wounds to pump out a profuse amount of blood. It streamed from the deep gouges made on the back and thighs, from the spikes driven through the palms and into the walls, and flowed from the neck, where a chain saw had removed the head, and at the groin, which was missing the testicles and penis. He nodded approvingly. That should do the job. “Smile, Nicky,” Gibson said, and started taking pictures.
The water triggered a recovery, and Kyle Swanson felt as if he were landing in a hot-air balloon as his senses quickened. Where am I? He opened his eyes, but the vision was fuzzy. He saw dark figures and blinking bright light. The headache squeezed him again, and his body tightened in a spasm to compensate. The green field where he had been about to land vanished again.
Gibson, checking the pupils with a flashlight, thought Swanson would be coming around in a few minutes. It was only ten o’clock at night, so there was plenty of time to finish the email and make the calls.
Rep. Keenan:
Forwarding these pictures made today at secret CIA rendition house in the Afghan village of Girdiwal, the site of the drug airfield. This torture is the bloody hallmark of special operator Kyle Swanson. You must put a stop to this.
He didn’t sign the note, but attached the grisly photographs in a slide-show format and sent them to Veronica Keenan in Washington. When the transmission had been completed, Gibson broke the burner phone apart, crushed the SIM card beneath his boot, and threw the pieces on the plastic sheet in which two of the men were wrapping the remains of Nicky Marks. “Take it all back into the mountains and burn it,” he ordered.