Alex’s fingers tighten around True’s hand. Their gazes meet in shared affirmation. Those were the wounds they saw on the video. It’s what the autopsy reported.
Daniel continues, saying, “Later I learned his name was Diego, but his friend never called him that. He called him ‘D,’ just the letter.
“D was feverish and very weak. The other soldier tried to comfort him. ‘D, D,’ he whispered. ‘I promise you, they know where we are and they are coming for us. You have to hold on, D. They will come.’
“Both of these soldiers, they wore only trousers. Their boots and their shirts had been taken away. Their wrists were tied. I could see all this because light came in through a steel grate that was like a trapdoor at the top of the stairs. I thought that D would die that night. I wanted to give him last rites, but the other American, he told me to fuck off. He told D, ‘You are not going to die. They’ll come tonight. You’ll be okay.’
“That night after the lantern was put out, it was very dark, and after a time, very quiet. No rescue came. I thought D had passed, but that was wrong. He was still alive in the morning. He looked a little stronger. I thought maybe he will live after all.”
True’s thoughts flutter past half-noticed things: the restless motion of the white curtains, the slick film of sweat between Alex’s hand and hers, the terrible pressure behind her eyes.
He might have lived. Even then, even that last morning, it was not too late.
“D was a strong man,” Daniel says, his gaze fixed on the runnels of condensation drawing slow lines on the pitcher of juice. “That was his curse. Better for him if he had died that night with his friend at his side.
“The Saomong, they argued in the room above us. I could not understand what they said. But at noon, they came for him. The American tried to get in their way, to fight them, but they had a Taser. One of them brought a syringe. He gave D a shot. I don’t know what it was, but it made him awake. Alert. It made him seem stronger than he was.”
Daniel goes silent, brows shifting, gaze unfocused as if enduring some internal battle. After several seconds, a coarse sigh. He says, “They made us watch. After… after it was over the American was amok. I thought he might kill me. He needed to kill someone. I stayed in a corner. Finally the guerillas came in and beat him unconscious.
“I do not understand such evil as we were made to witness. I will not pretend to understand it.”
Daniel falls silent. There is the sound of the fans, the tap of the blowing curtains. One of the men, Lincoln maybe, softly clears his throat. True feels adrift, only marginally present as she watches Carina stroke Daniel’s hand. All wait. When Daniel speaks again, it’s in a different voice, more detached, as if he’s achieved a needed distance from the past.
“They did not feed us after that,” he says. “For two days the only water we had was what dripped from the walls. When they finally lifted the grate again, they called to me to come out. I thought they would kill me the same way… But no. It was just a beating.
“When they returned me to the prison the American spoke to me for the first time since he’d told me to fuck off. He asked, ‘What do they want from you?’
“I told him they wanted me to renounce God.
“He said I should do it. He said renouncing God is easy. We talked more about it. I never knew his name. He said we had no need of names. I came to trust him though. There was no one else.
“And finally I did it. I did what he said. I renounced God in front of their video camera. And they laughed at me. They told me, ‘Good job. You are a smart man.’ They took me out of the village, along a path in the forest. Not far. I thought they meant to shoot me, but even that was more mercy than they would give. Along the path was a bamboo cage, half-sunk in the mud. They forced me into it and left. I never saw them again after that.
“I was feverish. I don’t know how long I was there. More than a day. I remember hearing them away in the village, practicing their soldier skills, but mostly it was quiet. Just the sounds of the forest, the birds, the rain.
“It was raining hard when the American came, but not hard enough yet to wash away all the blood splashed on his face, caught in his beard, running in streams on his chest.
“I think he was surprised to find me there because when he saw me, he stopped on the trail. We looked at each other, both of us dazed. Me from my fever. Him…” Daniel shakes his head. “I said nothing. I thought it must be a dream of mine that he was there. I was resigned to my death, wishing for it. So I did not ask him to help me. But he helped anyway. He did not have a gun, but he carried a hammer that he used to break the cage open.
“Then he left.
“I crawled away. I don’t know where I went. I remember terrible dreams. I thought I was in hell, but I was just very sick. When I finally woke, I found I was in the care of Good Samaritans. They found me and took me in.” He gestures at his prosthetics. “I lost my feet from gangrene. But by the grace of God, I made it home. I gave up the priesthood. That calling was over for me. But because the American stopped for me, I lived. And now I have Carina, and we have a daughter.”
The room’s heat has gotten inside True. Soothing, distancing. Her thoughts run like hot oil as she takes in every word, every tic in Daniel’s expression. “Did he speak to you of other things than God?” she asks him in a husky voice.
“We spoke,” Daniel concedes. “But not about D.”
She sips cold calamansi juice to ease a throat swollen with emotion, then asks, “Did he talk about the mission? About what he’d been doing before he was captured?”
“He said some things,” Daniel acknowledges. “But I was feverish. Maybe I don’t remember it all. Or maybe I don’t remember it right.”
“Tell us what you remember,” Lincoln urges.
Daniel looks… he looks embarrassed, True decides. She holds her breath, waiting to find out why.
“The American hated the guerillas,” Daniel tells them. “He called them cowards. He said, ‘We were beat, but not by them.’”
Lincoln is getting impatient. “By who, then?” he presses.
Daniel’s cheeks puff out as he expels a breath. “By killer robots.” His eyebrows knit as if reconsidering his choice of words. He looks like a man struggling to remember what was really said, what really happened eight years ago when he was feverish, dying… but he shrugs. This is the best he can come up with. “Killer robots,” he says again. His body rocks with a contagious uneasiness that leaps to True. “The American said two of his men died within seconds of the robots’ attack. They fought the attack, but the guerillas heard the gunfire. They came hunting him and his men. Sixty, hunting the four who still lived.”
True allows herself to consider only this surface description, to think only about the tactics, to look on the scenario Daniel has described as if it were a chess game and not the fucked-up travesty that killed her son. She turns to Lincoln. Her voice is still husky when she says: “Did they have a combat robot on that mission?”
“Not eight years ago,” he tells her. “They might have had surveillance, even an armed UAV. If so, it would have been called a UAV, not a killer robot. That tells me it was something he had never seen before.”
Lincoln means “something Shaw had never seen before.” But he doesn’t say Shaw’s name aloud. Daniel does not know who the American was. When this visit was planned, it was agreed no one would tell him. Shaw’s identity is dangerous knowledge. No reason to burden Daniel with it.
Miles says, “The Saomong could have been running North Korean hardware. Something new. Unknown at the time.”
Lincoln shakes his head. “I’ve seen a hundred intelligence reports from conflicts involving Saomong. None mentioned a robotic fighting system.”