It’s different here. Zacharias heard the little voice that said so, trying to ignore it, trying his best not to believe it, for believing it was a contradiction with his faith, and that contradiction was the single thing his mind could not allow. Joseph Smith had died for his faith, murdered in Illinois. Others had done the same. The history of Judaism and Christianity was replete with the names of martyrs—heroes to Robin Zacharias, because that was the word used by his professional community—who had sustained torture at Roman or other hands and had died with God’s name on their lips.
But they didn’t suffer as long as you, the voice pointed out. A few hours. The brief hellish minutes burning at the stake, a day or two, perhaps, nailed to the cross. That was one thing; you could see the end of it, and if you knew what lay beyond the end, then you could concentrate on that. But to see beyond the end, you had to know where the end was.
Robin Zacharias was alone. There were others here. He’d caught glimpses, but there was no communication. He’d tried the tap code, but no one ever answered. Wherever they were, they were too distant, or the building’s arrangements didn’t allow it, or perhaps his hearing was off. He could not share thoughts with anyone, and even prayers had limits to a mind as intelligent as his. He was afraid to pray for deliverance—a thought he was unable even to admit, for it would be an internal admission that his faith had somehow been shaken, and that was something he could not allow, but part of him knew that in not praying for deliverance, he was admitting something by omission; that if he prayed, and after a time deliverance didn’t come, then his faith might start to die, and with that his soul. For Robin Zacharias, that was how despair began, not with a thought, but with the unwillingness to entreat his God for something that might not come.
He couldn’t know the rest. His dietary deprivation, the isolation so especially painful to a man of his intelligence, and the gnawing fear of pain, for even faith could not take pain away, and all men know fear of that. Like carrying a heavy load, however strong a man might be, his strength was finite and gravity was not. Strength of body was easily understood, but in the pride and righteousness that came from his faith, he had failed to consider that the physical acted upon the psychological, just as surely as gravity but far more insidiously. He interpreted the crushing mental fatigue as a weakness assignable to something not supposed to break, and he faulted himself for nothing more than being human. Consultation with another Elder would have righted everything, but that wasn’t possible, and in denying himself the escape hatch of merely admitting his human frailty, Zacharias forced himself further and further into a trap of his own creation, aided and abetted by people who wanted to destroy him, body and soul.
It was then that things became worse. The door to his cell opened. Two Vietnamese wearing khaki uniforms looked at him as though he were a stain on the air of their country. Zacharias knew what they were here for. He tried to meet them with courage. They took him, one man on each arm, and a third following behind with a rifle, to a larger room—but even before he passed through the doorway, the muzzle of the rifle stabbed hard into his back, right at the spot that still hurt, fully nine months after his painful ejection, and he gasped in pain. The Vietnamese didn’t even show pleasure at his discomfort. They didn’t ask questions. There wasn’t even a plan to their abuse that he could recognize, just the physical attacks of five men operating all at once, and Zacharias knew that resistance was death, and while he wished for his captivity to end, to seek death in that way might actually be suicide, and he couldn’t do that.
It didn’t matter. In a brief span of seconds his ability to do anything at all was taken away, and he merely collapsed on the rough concrete floor, feeling the blows and kicks and pain add up like numbers on a ledger sheet, his muscles paralyzed by agony, unable to move any of his limbs more than an inch or two, wishing it would stop, knowing that it never would. Above it all he heard the cackling of their voices now, like jackals, devils tormenting him because he was one of the righteous and they’d gotten their hands on him anyway, and it went on, and on, and on—
A screaming voice blasted its way past his catatonia. One more desultory half-strength kick connected with his chest, and then he saw their boots draw back. His peripheral vision saw their faces cringe, all looking towards the door at the source of the noise. A final bellow and they hastily made their way out. The voice changed. It was a ... white voice? How did he know that? Strong hands lifted him, sitting him up against the wall, and the face came into view. It was Grishanov.
“My God,” the Russian said, his pale cheeks glowing red with anger. He turned and screamed something else in oddly accented Vietnamese. Instantly a canteen appeared, and he poured the contents over the American’s face. Then he screamed something else and Zacharias heard the door close.
“Drink, Robin, drink this.” He held a small metal flask to the American’s lips, lifting it.
Zacharias took a swallow so quickly that the liquid was in his stomach before he noted the acidic taste of vodka. Shocked, he lifted his hand and tried to push it away.
“I can’t,” the American gasped, “... can’t drink, can’t... ”
“Robin, it is medicine. This is not entertainment. Your religion has no rule against this. Please, my friend, you need this. It’s the best I can do for you,” Grishanov added in a voice that shuddered with frustration. “You must, Robin.”
Maybe it is medicine, Zacharias thought. Some medicines used an alcohol base as a preservative, and the Church permitted that, didn’t it? He couldn’t remember, and in not knowing he took another swallow. Nor did he know that as the adrenaline that the beating had flooded into his system dissipated, the natural relaxation of his body would only be accentuated by the drink.
“Not too much, Robin.” Grishanov removed the flask, then started tending to his injuries, straightening out his legs, using moistened cloth to clean up the man’s face.
“Savages!” the Russian snarled. “Bloody stinking savages. I’ll throttle Major Vinh for this, break his skinny little monkey neck.” The Russian colonel sat down on the floor next to his American colleague and spoke from the heart. “Robin, we are enemies, but we are men also, and even war has rules. You serve your country. I serve mine. These... these people do not understand that without honor there is no true service, only barbarism.” He held up the flask again. “Here. I cannot get anything else for the pain. I’m sorry, my friend, but I can’t.”
And Zacharias took another swallow, still numb, still disoriented, and even more confused than ever.
“Good man,” Grishanov said. “I have never said this, but you are a courageous man, my friend, to resist these little animals as you have.”
“Have to,” Zacharias gasped.
“Of course you do,” Grishanov said, wiping the man’s face clean as tenderly as he might have done with one of his children. “I would, too.” He paused. “God, to be flying again!”
“Yeah. Colonel, I wish—”
“Call me Kolya.” Grishanov gestured. “You’ve known me long enough.”
“Kolya?”
“My Christian name is Nikolay. Kolya is—nickname, you say?”
Zacharias let his head back against the wall, closing his eyes and remembering the sensations of flight. “Yes, Kolya, I would like to be flying again.”
“Not too different, I imagine,” Kolya said, sitting beside the man, wrapping a brotherly arm around his bruised and aching shoulders, knowing it was the first gesture of human warmth the man had experienced in almost a year. “My favorite is the MiG-17. Obsolete now, but, God, what a joy to fly. Just fingertips on the stick, and you—you just think it, just wish it in your mind, and the aircraft does what you want.”
“The -86 was like that,” Zacharias replied. “They’re all gone, too.”
The Russian chuckled. “Like your first love, yes? The first girl you saw as a child, the one who first made you think as a man thinks, yes? But the first airplane, that is better for one like us. Not
so warm as a woman is, but much less confusing to handle.” Robin tried to laugh, but choked. Grishanov offered him another swallow. “Easy, my friend. Tell me, what is your favorite?”
The American shrugged, feeling the warm glow in his belly. “I’ve flown nearly everything. I missed the F-94 and the -89, too. From what I hear, I didn’t miss much there. The -104 was fun, like a sports car, but not much legs. No, the -86H is probably my favorite, just for handling.”
“And the Thud?” Grishanov asked, using the nickname for the F-105 Thunderchief.
Robin coughed briefly. “You take the whole state of Utah to turn one in, darned if it isn’t fast on the deck, though. I’ve had one a hundred twenty knots over the redline.”
“Not really a fighter, they say. Really a bomb truck.” Grishanov had assiduously studied American pilots’ slang.
“That’s all right. It will get you out of trouble in a hurry. You sure don’t want to dogfight in one. The first pass better be a good one.”
“But for bombing—one pilot to another, your bomb delivery in this wretched place is excellent.”
“We try, Kolya, we surely do try,” Zacharias said, his voice slurred. It amazed the Russian that the liquor had worked so quickly. The man had never had a drink in his life until twenty minutes earlier. How remarkable that a man would choose to live without drink.
“And the way you fight the rocket emplacements. You know, I’ve watched that. We are enemies, Robin,” Kolya said again. “But we are also pilots. The courage and skill I have watched here, they are like nothing I have ever seen. You must be a professional gambler at home, yes?”
“Gamble?” Robin shook his head. “No, I can’t do that.”
“But what you did in your Thud ...”
“Not gambling. Calculated risk. You plan, you know what you can do, and you stick to that, get a feel for what the other guy is thinking.”
Grishanov made a mental note to refill his flask for the next one on his schedule. It had taken a few months, but he’d finally found something that worked. A pity that these little brown savages didn’t have the wit to understand that in hurting a man you most often made his courage grow. For all their arrogance, which was considerable, they saw the world through a lens that was as diminutive as their stature and as narrow as their culture. They seemed unable to learn lessons. Grishanov sought out such lessons. Strangest of all, this one had been something learned from a fascist officer in the Luftwaffe. A pity also that the Vietnamese allowed only him and no others to perform these special interrogations. He’d soon write to Moscow about that. With the proper kind of pressure, they could make real use of this camp. How incongruously clever of the savages to establish this camp, and how disappointingly consistent that they’d failed to see its possibilities. How distasteful that he had to live in this hot, humid, insect-ridden country, surrounded by arrogant little people with arrogant little minds and the vicious dispositions of serpents. But the information he needed was here. As odious as his current work was, he’d discovered a phrase for it in a contemporary American novel of the type he read to polish up his already impressive language skills. A very American turn of phrase, too. What he was doing was “just business.” That was a way of looking at the world he readily understood. A shame that the American next to him probably would not, Kolya thought, listening to every word of his rambling explanation of the life of a Weasel pilot.
The face in the mirror was becoming foreign, and that was good. It was strange how powerful habits were. He’d already filled the sink with hot water and had his hands lathered before his intellect kicked in and reminded him that he wasn’t supposed to wash or shave. Kelly did brush his teeth. He couldn’t stand the feel of film there, and for that part of the disguise he had his bottle of wine. What foul stuff that was, Kelly thought. Sweet and heavy, strangely colored. Kelly was not a wine connoisseur, but he did know that a decent table wine wasn’t supposed to be the color of urine. He had to leave the bathroom. He couldn’t stand to look in the mirror for long.
He fortified himself with a good meal, filling up with bland foods that would energize his body without making his stomach rumble. Then came the exercises. His ground-floor unit allowed him to run in place without the fear of disturbing a neighbor. It wasn’t the same as real running, but it would suffice. Then came the push-ups. At long last his left shoulder was fully recovered, and the aches in his muscles were perfectly bilateral. Finally came the hand-to-hand exercises, which he practiced for general quickness in addition to the obvious utilitarian applications.
He’d left his apartment in daylight the day before, taking the risk of being seen in his disreputable state in order to visit a Goodwill store, where he’d found a bush jacket to go over his other clothing. It was so oversize and threadbare that they hadn’t charged for it. Kelly had come to realize that disguising his size and physical conditioning was difficult, but that loose, shabby clothing did the trick. He’d also taken the opportunity to compare himself to the other patrons of the store. On inspection his disguise seemed to be effective enough. Though not the worst example of a street person, he certainly fit into the lower half, and the clerk who’d handed over the bush jacket for free had probably done so as much to get him out of the building as to express compassion for his state in life. And wasn’t that an improvement? What would he have given in Vietnam to have been able to pass himself off as just another villager, and thus waited for the bad guys to come in?
He’d spent the previous night continuing his reconnaissance. No one had given him as much as a second look as he’d moved along the streets, just one more dirty, smelly drunk, not even worth mugging, which had ended his concerns about being spotted for what he really was. He’d spent another five hours in his perch, watching the streets from the second-story bay windows of the vacant house. Police patrols had turned out to be routine, and the bus noises far more regular than he’d initially appreciated.
Finished with his exercises, he disassembled his pistol and cleaned it, though it hadn’t been used since his return flight from New Orleans. The same was done with the suppressor. He reassembled both, checking the match-up of the parts. He’d made one small change. Now there was a thin white painted line down the top of the silencer that served as a night-sight. Not good enough for distance shooting, but he wasn’t planning any of that. Finished with the pistol, he loaded a round into the chamber and dropped the hammer carefully before slapping the clip into the bottom of the handgrip. He’d also acquired a Ka-Bar Marine combat knife in a surplus store, and while he’d watched the streets the night before, he’d worked the seven-inch Bowie-type blade across a whetstone. There was something that men feared about a knife even more than a bullet. That was foolish but useful. The pistol and knife went into his waistband side by side in the small of his back, well hidden by the loose bulk of the dark shirt and bush jacket. In one of the jacket pockets went a whiskey flask filled with tap water. Four Snickers went on the other side. Around his waist was a length of eight-gauge electrical wire. In his pants pocket was a pair of Playtex rubber gloves. These were yellow, not a good color for invisibility, but he’d been unable to find anything else. They did cover his hands without giving away much in feel and dexterity, and he decided to take them along. He already had a pair of cotton work gloves in the car that he wore when driving. After buying the car he’d cleaned it inside and out, wiping every glass, metal, and plastic surface, hoping that he’d removed every trace of fingerprints. Kelly blessed every police show and movie he’d ever seen, and prayed that he was being paranoid enough about his every tactic.
What else? he asked himself. He wasn’t carrying any ID. He had a few dollars in cash in a wallet also obtained at Goodwill. Kelly had thought about carrying more, but there was no point in it. Water. Food. Weapons. Rope-wire. He’d leave his binoculars home tonight. Their utility wasn’t worth the bulk. Maybe he’d get a set of compact ones—make a note. He was ready. Kelly switched on the TV and watched the news to get a weather forecast
—cloudy, chance of showers, low around seventy-five. He made and drank two cups of instant coffee for the caffeine, waiting for night to fall, which it presently did.
Leaving the apartment complex was, oddly enough, one of the most difficult parts of the exercise. Kelly looked out the windows, his interior lights already off, making sure that there wasn’t anyone out there, before venturing out himself. Out the door of the building he stopped again, looking and listening before he walked directly to the Volkswagen, which he unlocked and entered. At once he put on the work gloves, and only after that did he close the car’s door and start the engine. Two minutes after that he passed the place where he parked the Scout, wondering how lonely the car was now. Kelly had selected a single radio station, playing contemporary music, soft rock and folk, just to have the company of familiar noise as he drove south into the city.
Part of him was surprised at how tense it was, driving in. As soon as he got there he settled down, but the drive in, like the insertion flight on a Huey, was the time in which you contemplated the unknown, and he had to tell himself to be cool, to keep his face in an impassive mien while his hands sweated a little inside the gloves. He carefully obeyed every traffic law, observed all lights, and ignored the cars that sped past him. Amazing, he thought, how long twenty minutes could seem. This time he used a slightly different insertion route. He’d scouted the parking place the night before, two blocks from the objective—in his mind, the current tactical environment translated one block to a kilometer in the real jungle, a complementarity that made him smile to himself, briefly, as he pulled his car in behind someone’s black 1957 Chevy. As before, he left the car quickly, ducking into an alley for the cover of darkness and the assumption of his physical disguise. Inside of twenty yards he was just one more shambling drunk.
“Hey, dude!” a young voice called. There were three of them, mid-to-late teens, sitting on a fence and drinking beer. Kelly edged to the other side of the alley to maximize his distance, but that wasn’t to be. One of them hopped down off the fence and came towards him.