He tried to assess how badly he’d been injured and realized he just couldn’t be sure. He might be dying, or he might just have been hit by a freight train. He knew that the idea of sitting up was laughable. The way his torso felt he would be lucky to open his eyes and see that he was still in one piece.
He opened his eyes.
Eye, anyway. He opened one of them. The other was too swollen to budge. His good eye gave him a very blurry image of a lot of sunlight and a sky so blue it looked like you could just step into it and fall forever, fall upward until you hit outer space.
Opening the eye had been a bad idea. The light buzzed around in his head, chasing any rational thoughts around. There were multicolored halos around every object he looked at — not that he could focus enough to make out what those objects were. He knew what that meant: a concussion. And a bad one, definitely.
Which meant that, as much as he wanted to close his eye again and go back to sleep, he absolutely shouldn’t. You could go to sleep with a concussion and never wake up. He forced himself to keep the eye open. Fought back each wave of exhaustion as it came for him, pushed back until it was gone and he could brace for the next one.
Damn, everything really hurt.
He tried to concentrate on piecing together what had happened to him. There had been a helicopter — no — two helicopters, there had been — there had—
He felt the desperate need to throw up, and a certainty that he shouldn’t, that throwing up was another bad idea, just like falling asleep. He was lying on his back, he thought. He could drown in his own vomit if he threw up now.
Concentrate, he told himself. What happened? How many helicopters?
One, at first. He had not quite shot it down, but it crashed. Nadia and Bogdan had — had they gotten away or not? Had they—
That thought brought on a new wave, one of panic. A desperate need to move, to run, to do something. Yet another bad idea. If his neck was broken, or if—
Concentrate.
The helicopter had crashed. He’d been Tased, then kicked. He had blacked out for a while. Most likely he’d been beaten while he was unconscious, because he couldn’t remember hurting this much when he blacked out.
When he came to, another helicopter was on its way. Descending, getting bigger as it came down from the sky. It looked like it was going to land on top of him. He had seen a flag painted on its side and for a second he’d been excited, thrilled, because he saw red, white, and blue.
Wrong flag, though. The colors had been horizontal stripes, white, blue, and red.
Shit, he thought. That was the Russian flag. The Russians had him.
Now he was here under this incredibly blue sky. There were people around him, people who weren’t paying any attention to him. He couldn’t make out their faces. He heard them talking, heard at least one word he understood. Glas. That was the Russian word for eye, or for sight. They had noticed that his eye was open.
He didn’t think that was a good thing.
The people around him started moving faster. He couldn’t see what they were doing. One of them was above him, another beneath, and then he felt himself moving, being moved. He tried to warn them, tried to tell them his neck might be broken, but either they weren’t listening or they couldn’t hear him. He wasn’t sure his throat was working right. Wasn’t sure he was making a sound.
They moved him for a long time. Occasionally someone else would loom over him, another human shape. A few words would be spoken and then he would start moving again.
They took him into a dark place. That was a little better — the light had really been hurting his eye. But the darkness was going to make it hard to stay awake. The dark place stank, enough to make him gag. It smelled of something foul and… rusted metal? Maybe. Maybe that was the smell of blood.
His eye adjusted to the darkness, though it took a very long time.
A shape appeared above him, in the dark. A human face. He could see it more clearly this time, without all the sunlight blasting his vision. He could tell this new person had a long, thin face, and that he wore a black suit with a white shirt and a black tie. The high contrast helped. The person in the black suit studied him for a very long time.
“Who are you?” Chapel asked. He could hear the noise he’d made, at least. He was certain he’d said something, though whether or not he’d actually formed words was debatable.
He must have made himself understood on some level, because the person in the black suit answered him. In English. “I am Senior Lieutenant Pavel Kalin. I’m going to be doing your interview. I’ll get you something for the pain in a moment, but first I need you to answer some basic questions.”
Name, rank, and serial number, Chapel thought — the three things you were supposed to provide to your captors when you were taken prisoner. Except he couldn’t even provide that much. Announcing that he had a serial number would be the same as saying he was an American serviceman and therefore a spy. “I can’t… can’t…”
“Are you allergic to codeine or any other painkilling medications? What about penicillin, erythromycin, sulfa drugs? I’m sorry, I can’t understand what you’re saying.”
“Where… where am I?”
“The sooner you provide us with your medical information, the quicker we can get moving,” Kalin told him. “No? You don’t wish to cooperate with your treatment personnel?” Kalin took something from his pocket. A little notebook. He jotted down a quick entry and then put the notebook away. He waved someone over, someone in a white coat who put a hypodermic needle in Chapel’s neck. He was too beat up to fight them off.
“Can’t… sleep,” he managed to rasp out. “Concussion…”
“Don’t worry,” Kalin told him. “If your heart stops, we’ll resuscitate you. As many times as necessary.”
When Chapel woke next, he was moving. The room he was in was moving. He could feel it swaying back and forth, bouncing up and down. He had no idea what was going on.
He was naked. His left arm was gone — just missing, nowhere to be found. He was lying on a pile of blankets that hadn’t been washed in a while, or maybe it was him that stank. It was unbearably hot in the room, and sweat crawled across his skin like prickling ants.
He wasn’t dead. He was groggy and weak, but he wasn’t dead. He could move, crawl even, if he was careful. His body still ached everywhere, and standing up was impossible in the moving room, but he could just about get around. There was a tiny bit of light coming in from one side of the room. He moved over there as best he could and found that the source of the light was a crack in the wall. He pressed his eye up against it and for a second saw nothing but dazzling light. Even though it hurt his eye, it felt good after the near total darkness of the moving room.
When his eye had adjusted to the light, he saw a dashed white line streaming away from him. A road, then — a highway. The “room” he was in must be a shipping container mounted on a flatbed truck. He was being taken somewhere. They had simply stuffed him in the back of a cargo container and then shipped him off. He had no idea where he was going or what would happen there, no idea if they were going to—
Best to focus on what he could know.
The light was coming in through a crack between two doors at the back of the container. He pushed against the doors, tried lifting them with his hand, but they wouldn’t budge. They were locked from the outside, and he was too weak to do much but strain against them.