“Rape would be only the least of it, I assure you. Fräulein Schmidt, I have thirty-nine men here on board this facility and aboard the various ships in my little fleet, and after each of them has sated himself with you, loosened you up for me, so to speak, they will bring you back to me. And then the real interrogation will begin.” And then in stark and utterly clinical detail, her interrogator began describing what he would do to her, what he had done to other women he’d had to question in the past, and what had happened to them along the way. Things involving electricity… or scalpels… or ropes slowly and relentlessly tightened with twist after twist to an iron bar. Things that would leave her helplessly broken, she knew that, knew with desperate, despairing certainty that she could never stand that kind of pain. Despite herself, she was trembling now, and beads of sweat were trickling down her face beneath the blindfold.
“And, in the end, my dear, you will tell me exactly what I want to know. You’ll beg to tell me things I haven’t even asked, just to make the hurting stop.” She could hear him smiling, and she couldn’t stop the trembling. “They always do.”
“Who was your teacher,” she snapped. “Mengele?”
But the small bravado left her feeling very small, and very empty.
“I think a demonstration,” she heard him say. Hands fumbled with the front of her blouse, then with her bra, rolling it up above her breasts. “Ah. Lovely. Johann? The electrodes, please.”
“No—” Then she clamped her mouth shut. I won’t beg, she thought with a fierce and desperate defiance. I won’t beg. She started to twist against the handcuffs, and hard hands from behind grabbed her shoulders, holding her motionless in her seat.
“Even a few volts of electricity applied to a tender part of the body can be excruciatingly painful,” the voice said casually, as if discussing the weather. “I think we’ll start… here.” And something bit her left earlobe, the sharp tiny pain in a completely unexpected place startling her so badly she jumped despite the hands holding her and nearly upset the chair. “And here.” Something clamped on her right ear. “We should remove the earrings too, I think, Johann. So we have better contact. There. That is better.”
She was shaking so hard now she could scarcely sit upright in the chair. It felt like they’d attached alligator clips to both ear lobes; she could feel the wires lying across her shoulders.
“Now, Fraulein. Would you like to tell me about your American SEAL friends?”
“Bastard! Go to hell!”
The pain exploded in her head like a thunderbolt.
Murdock heard Inge scream, faint, far-off and muffled by walls and distance… but unmistakably a scream.
Damn those fucking bastards!
But he held himself in check, forcing a cold and calculating deadliness to replace that first hot surge of fury that threatened to drown rational thought in a combat frenzy. No… take it easy. We’re going to do this right…
The SEALs were more than halfway up the zigzagging ladder on the south wall of the crew’s quarters. It had taken them nearly all of the past ten minutes to work their way invisibly across the rest of the bridge and clamber onto the catwalk running around the outside of the crews’ quarters’ first deck. The scream had been very faint, almost lost in the rush of the wind, but the sound had been enough to chill him far more than the cold bite of the North Sea.
“Easy, L-T,” MacKenzie said from just behind Murdock on the ladder. “Don’t let the bastards—”
“Don’t worry, Mac,” he said, his voice sharper and colder than the stiff breeze plucking at his combat vest. “Whatever they do to her, they’re gonna pay for it in blood.”
“Roger that.”
They kept climbing, their weapons casually slung over their backs, with no evident response from the sentry overhead or from the other platform off to the south.
Those two men on Bravo worried Murdock more than the lone guard. Murdock couldn’t see them, though he knew precisely where they were. Sterling and Johnson were keeping an eye on them while the other three SEALs penetrated Alpha, and would take them down if they seemed to notice anything amiss across the way on Alpha. The problem was that while Murdock trusted Jaybird’s and Skeeter’s judgment, the moment they took out the two sentries the clock would be running. It would be possible to explain the disappearance of one guard, if they had to take him down, as an isolated accident.
The disappearance of three, at two different locations, would tip off the enemy that they were under assault, just as soon as they realized the three were missing.
The risk — to the SEALs, the hostages, to the whole operation — was appalling, but all Murdock could do was play out the hand.
He kept climbing.
The telephone rang, a jarring, explosive sound, and Adler looked up from the shaking, whimpering girl, irritated. Now what? He’d told Karl he was not to be disturbed. Walking over to the small desk, he picked up the receiver and stabbed the internal call button with its blinking light. “What is it?”
“Sorry to interrupt you, Herr Adler,” Karl Strauss’s unpleasantly nasal voice said on the other end of the line. “But that workboat is coming back. They say, they say that the Korean woman is on board. We’ve won, Heinrich!”
“No, we haven’t,” Adler replied. “Not yet.” But it was an important first step, and Adler felt a thrill of excitement. It was happening! Just as Pak had assured him it would! “Very well,” he said. “I will be up immediately.”
Hanging up the receiver, he turned, then walked back to the girl. She was slumped in the chair now, no longer struggling, no longer whimpering. Her earlobes were fiery red where they’d been burned, the skin already blistering. When he lifted her chin with one hand and pulled off the blindfold, her eyes stared past him, glazed and unfocused. “Are you ready to tell us what we need to know yet, my dear?”
There was no answer, not even a groan. It was possible, he thought, that he’d pushed her too hard, too fast. Carefully, he pried one eyelid open wider, checking the dilation of the pupil. Then he checked the other. Was she going into shock? Both pupils were the same size.
“I must go up to Ops,” he told Johann, who was standing next to the table with the car battery and switch. He removed the alligator clips from her ears, then handed them across to the other man. “Take her back to her room and watch her. I don’t want her to hurt herself.”
Johann smiled. “What if I hurt her instead, Herr Adler? I could continue the interrogation, you know.”
Adler reached down and pressed his fingers against the woman’s throat, probing for a pulse. There it was… strong and pounding, not the weak and thready flutter of someone deep in shock. It was possible that she was faking it, trying to avoid more pain, but Adler couldn’t be sure.
Adler was drawing on years of highly specialized training with the old East German Stasi. All of his earlier statements — the threat of gang rape, the threats of slow torture with knife or flame or rope — had been made as part of a deliberate campaign to elicit an emotional response. He was looking for a handle on this woman. He needed to break her, and quickly, because he was certain that the enemy wouldn’t capitulate to the PRR’s demands without at least the attempt to board the platform.