Chapter 9

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“Spray him down.”

Freezing water lanced down onto his skin, causing his muscles to clench so tightly that he exhaled explosively, as if punched in the stomach. He thrashed helplessly in the air, the sudden resurgence of his consciousness sending him into a panic. Fresh, stabbing pain under his arms reminded him acutely that he’d been hanging by his arms from a showerhead for hours; the plastic binders that secured his hands cut into his wrists. He could no longer feel his fingers. His breaths were thin and labored, and despite the cold water he sweated profusely in blind darkness—the black plastic bag tied around his head shrinking wetly against his face with each inhalation.

“If you think you can get out of this by passing out, know this: I’ll still be here when you wake up. You die, and I’ll bring you back. This only ends when I say it does.”

“Please, I tell you everything already. I am only fighter pilot. I know nothing more!”

The American officer’s cattle prod plunged into his midsection. He buckled away from the electrodes, current playing across the water coursing down his skin. The muscles in his arms spasmed and burned to a numb haze, and he swung from his restraints, a useless lump of meat. Lev Chudotvorets retched, bile surging in his belly. Finally he sagged limp again, his sobs turning into sardonic laughter.

The American gripped Lev by the chin to rip the plastic bag away. Lev cringed away from the light. The man torturing him was an aged, muscular officer with close-shaven silver hair that looked coppery in the yellow-hued light of the brig showers. He'd removed most of his dress uniform and folded it neatly in the corner on a metal chair that he brought with him. He wore a sleeveless white undershirt sprayed lightly with Lev’s blood, and black fingerless gloves that provided the man some protection for his knuckles as he worked his exposed ribs. The American had cold, sadistic brown eyes that looked bored with Lev already, almost hoping that the Russian pilot would prove to be a hard case.

“I don’t plan missions. I only know waypoints. We raid for food.” Lev continued to insist in broken English. “We not know you have so many ships.”

The American jammed the prod under his chin, but did not activate it, instead letting the electrodes dig into his jowls. “You don’t plan missions?” he repeated in a mock accent, “Then who plans missions?”

“Only codenames! We get message and coordinates; we go. We are not military.”

The prod spoke with a ratcheting, buzzing sound, making Lev lock his jaw so tightly that he thought his teeth had exploded. “Someone provides the intelligence. Someone provides the Needle boarding craft, and someone provided the Spetznaz SDVs inside them.”

“What?” Lev wheezed, “We are not Russian army. We are not in contact with Spetznaz.”

“You’re lying. Do you know how I know that?”

Lev shook his head insistently. “I do not lie. I swear.”

“We have radio intercepts of your boarding parties,” the American said, going back to his uniform to retrieve a small audio device. He pushed the button, and the sound of comm chatter echoed through the room. Lev could hear them discussing the failure of the mission, invoking the final contingency to avoid capture. The American dropped the recorder to the tiled floor and let it play on. “Ordered to take their own lives to avoid questioning should you fail. None of your pilots ejected, either. Pirates who fight to the last man. Most of your kind see our penal colonies as a step up from your pathetic lives. At least there you get three meals a day. Doesn’t make sense, does it?”

Lev said nothing.

“How much do they know about the Saras project?” The American clubbed him in the side of the head, re-opening the softball-sized concussion bruise that had knocked him senseless when his fighter was struck with a Yankee missile. “Who provided the materials? The soldiers? The schedule of the Synapse Corporation’s transport?”

“Your whore of a mother,” Lev responded at last. Blood streamed into his eye, forcing it closed. It burned like salt water.

The American held his gaze, his lower lip disappearing as he regarded Lev. After a few moments, he reached down to a brown leather handgun holster slung at his right hip. It was worked with intricate designs of a rampant horse encircled by vines. He withdrew a pistol the color of dark iron. The grip was of black wood decorated only by a simple silver diamond inlaid in the center. It looked old, very old, fitted with a long barrel and a slightly shorter, but much wider barrel beneath it. Lev had never seen anything like it. The grip was vaguely reminiscent of his country’s old broom handle pistols, but he couldn't begin to guess at the origin of the ponderously large striker mechanism protruding from the back of the weapon.

“I don’t expect you’ve ever seen anything like this,” said the American, holding the pistol before him like a piece of art. It probably was. “This is a LeMat revolver, one of the more famous American antique firearms first constructed around the years of our civil war. I inherited it from my father, and he inherited it from his father before him, and so on for years as each generation of sons followed his father into the military. It’s almost three hundred years old. One of the last of its kind. Absolutely priceless.”

“The ammunition alone has to be custom-made; it’s hard to find anybody who manufactures cartridged shells anymore, much less the .42 caliber shells this gun uses. Except, ironically, the older, less-advanced countries who still use them. Russia, for example.”

Lev shook his head. “I do not know why you tell me this.”

“I tell you this because I want you to know that you join the long list of people—started by its original bearer, Confederate Colonel Rupert Paddock and carried on all the way through history to the present date to me, Colonel Matthew Paddock—who have met the end of their lives by this most remarkable weapon.”

With that, Paddock lowered the barrel of the weapon and discharged a single shot into Lev’s gut. All other pain was forgotten; Lev’s scream was so loud that when it finally croaked to silence as he ran out of breath, the white tiled walls still rang with the sound for a time. He started to hyperventilate, trying to angle his head down and see how bad it was.

Paddock continued talking like nothing had happened. “I tell you this so you can appreciate the honor of it all. Of course I’ll forgive you if you don’t feel that way at the moment.”

“I don’t know anything,” Lev protested weakly. “I don’t know.”

“We’ve got time. I don’t really expect you to talk. Oh, you might, but it looks like everyone who came on your mission was full-willing to die. But I’m going to make you earn it. So here we are, going through the motions. And since we’re bound to be spending a lot of time together over the next few days, I’d like to share with you a story that might help you prepare for what you’re about to go through. Feel free to chime in if there’s anything you like to say.”