There were eighteen men and two women covered by as many Marines and National Guardsmen respectively hefting modern automatic rifles and older carbines.
Dempsey pointed his gun at a big, filthy man with thinning hair and a long unkempt beard in the middle of the line.
The butt of a National Guardsman’s carbine drove the man forward, out of the line.
“Name?” Dempsey demanded coldly.
“Tyler McPherson,” the other man grunted. “I want to talk to a lawyer.”
“Where do you hale from, Tyler McPherson?”
“Ain’t none of your goddamned business, soldier.”
The forty-five bucked in Colin Dempsey’s hand.
The big man involuntarily danced back two steps as the bullet discharged between his legs, drilling into the mud at under his feet with a soft ‘phut’. Immediately, a Marine prodded the prisoner forward to resume his original position with the muzzle of his M-16.
“Okay,” Dempsey sighed. “The way this works, Tyler McPherson, is that I ask you a question and you tell me the answer and everybody is happy. On the other hand, if I ask you a question and you don’t answer it. Or I don’t like the answer I get to shoot you. First I will shoot you in the knees. Then I will shoot you in the elbows. Then I’ll blow off your balls and leave you to bleed to death in the mud.” The old warrior quirked a predatory smile. “And then I’ll talk to one of your friends.”
“I come from Frenchburg, Kentucky!” The big man blurted.
Dempsey did not have to try very hard to look disappointed that he was not about to start — quite yet — shooting Tyler McPherson to pieces.
“What do you do in Frenchburg, Kentucky?”
“I hunt, I live outside town.”
“You hunt?”
“Yeah. I repairs guns, I breed dogs…”
“You were captured in a rebel held area of DC. What were you doing in Washington?”
“Visiting my Ma…”
“If,” Dempsey explained slowly, because Tyler McPherson gave every sign of being man to whom comprehension tended to come if all, slowly, “you give me the name of your ‘Ma’, her place of abode, her age, her place of birth, and the particulars of the rest of your family and any one of those particulars later turns out to have been incorrect, a lie, I will have you stripped naked and dragged around the old battlefield of Bull Run tied to the back of a Jeep by your neck.”
The big man gulped.
“We was called,” he muttered. “The niggers and the communists and the faggots are taking over,” Tyler McPherson added, trying to be helpful. He threw a resentful look towards the small group of black men standing separate from the horde close to the barbed wire. “There weren’t ever no war with the Ruskies; it was God taking his retribution for the sins of all those unbelieving Reds in Russia and the government bombed Chicago and all them other places just to make it look like we won the war!”
Colin Dempsey blinked.
He was grimly silent because it took him a few moments to move on past the outrageous idiocy of what Tyler McPherson had just said to him.
“So, you lied to me about visiting your ‘Ma’?” He asked coldly.
“I, no…”
Dempsey was tempted to kneecap the Kentucky backwoodsman who had, in all probability committed any manner of heinous crimes during the Battle of Washington. He had told the oaf what would happen if he lied to him and shortly thereafter, McPherson had lied to him.
There was great virtue in keeping things simple for the Tyler McPherson’s of the world; complexity and ambiguity only confused them. There followed a short, contemplative interregnum in which he considered his options.
And then he shot Tyler McPherson in the left foot.
The big man reeled away, hopped two steps and toppled, much like a felled tree into the mud, squalling all the while like a school bully who has never been on the receiving end of a beating.
Colin Dempsey watched him for a few seconds.
He looked up.
“Next!” He demanded.
A barrel-shaped youth with a week’s fuzzy stubble on his face staged forward, propelled by the stock of a National Guardsman’s carbine. The man stumbled and almost fell at Dempsey’s feet.
The old soldier had not troubled to holster his pistol.
That would have been a waste of time when he was probably going to have to get it out again in a minute.
Dempsey studied the boy, his unblinking stare fixed on his dirty face.
“Don’t even think of telling me you were visiting your Ma in DC, son,” he advised the wild-eyed man before him.
Chapter 23
Captain Nathan Zabriski had slept most of the way across the North Atlantic; it was as if the pent up angst, rage, humiliation and bewilderment which had filled his head for most of the last ten days had slowly dissipated the nearer he got to home.
He had given up worrying about what would happen to him when he and his fellow 100th Bomb Group ‘survivors’ stepped back onto United States territory. They were war criminals responsible for the death and maiming of over two thousand innocent men, women and children; in any sane world they would all be lined up against a wall and shot. He had believed he was obeying lawfully authorized orders, that American cities had already been nuked by British V-Bombers but what he had ‘believed’ had been a monstrous lie and now he felt nothing but irredeemable shame…
He had tried to explain a little of it to the seraphic, nutmeg-haired almond eyed Maltese nurse who had been appointed as the prisoner of wars’ guardian angel by no lesser person that the British C-in-C. Not that any of the POWs’ guards had lifted so much as a hand, or so far as he was aware uttered so much as a single disparaging remark to any of the shot down airmen responsible for reducing large parts of the Maltese Archipelago to dust and rubble, and for sinking or badly damaging at least three major warships. By and large the Brits had been friendly — almost sympathetic — in a watchful sort of way; as if they were genuinely a little sorry for their prisoners.
The nurse’s name was Marija Calleja.
She was one of those people who momentarily quietens a noisy room when she enters; who instantly seizes one’s attention and somehow, has an uncanny knack of making one feel more than one actually is. The British guards had treated her like minor royalty.
Marija Calleja had disappeared for a day after their first meeting.
‘We missed you yesterday, ma’am,’ he had said formally, since he was the senior POW being held at Fort Pembroke, an old British base.
Marija had explained that she had been sent home to catch up on her sleep and he had belatedly recollected that the first time they had met she had seemed to be moving slowly, stiffly, like a much older woman.
‘I am to be your guardian again today. Although, I don’t think it is very likely your British captors mean you any harm.’ She had looked to the two unarmed British sentries casually taking the airs with the prisoners on the ramparts of the ancient fort.
‘My name is Marija,” she had informed him. ‘I am a Maltese civilian.’
‘I’m sorry, ma’am… Marija.” He had grimaced. “My Ma’s middle name is Maria.”
They had walked along the wall and gazed into the haze out to sea like two normal people. Nathan remembered that inshore two small fishing boats, their high prows and sterns painted in the blue and red and yellows of the ancient Phoenicians had bobbed on the gentle swells in the middle distance.