A Cold Day In Mosul (12 page)

The fading, rational part of his mind told him that he must have been struck with a Mace or OC spray of some kind. He had a high tolerance to most pepper sprays, but what Sam had just hit him with felt like it had ten times the potency.

He heard William groaning beside him, so he knew Sam had gotten him, too. Probably in the same movement.

He realized that Doug had stopped firing.

"Doug!" Ethan tried. The word came out a terrible howl.
Are you hit?
he wanted to ask, but only painful grunts issued from his constricted throat. He forced his eyes open a crack, but he couldn't see anything through the blur of tears. Mucus streamed from his burning nostrils—it felt like liquid fire streaming over his throbbing lips.

The radios crackled to life as one of the resistance members on overwatch outside spoke up. "Get out! They're everywhere! They've been hiding in the surrounding buildings!" He heard gunfire over the comm and the line cut out.

Before he knew what was happening, multiple batons began to beat him from all sides.

twelve

E
than didn't recall much of what happened next. He remembered sitting in a chair before a table in a stone-walled room similar to the one where he'd found Sam. He remembered descending into and out of consciousness. He remembered beatings, and a masked man injecting him multiple times over the span of what must have been several days. There was an unmasked Russian, too, who taunted him constantly.

"You have told us everything," the Russian would say in broken English. Ethan couldn't quite make out his face—his vision was too blurry. "You have betrayed your own assets. Your own country. You are less than dirt." Ethan suspected the man was lying, but he couldn't be sure, as he had no recollection of revealing a thing.

Sometimes the man went into a disturbing amount of detail about the intel Ethan had supposedly divulged: "You have already told us you work for the DIA, contracting for the Black Widow, whom you refer to as Sam. You have told us you came here to rescue her. That your secondary mission is to infiltrate and subvert the Islamic State from within. This is why we are lenient with you." The man paused. "Do you see, when you cooperate, how well we treat you? If you tell me one of your planned targets, I will let you eat."

"Target?" Ethan muttered.

"That's right," the Russian said.

"I'm here," Ethan struggled to say. "To assassinate..."

"Yes?" the interrogator said eagerly. "Tell me."

Ethan smiled, and his swollen lips throbbed. "You."

The Russian had his captors turn him upside-down and then he repeatedly struck Ethan's feet with wooden paddles. After about five minutes Ethan passed out from the pain.

Another time, the intel the interrogator claimed Ethan had revealed bordered on the preposterous:

"Already you have helped us track down ten members of the Mosul resistance. Name three more assets you have anywhere in the Caliphate, and I will let you eat and sleep tonight."

Given that Ethan didn't know the address of a single resistance member, obviously what the man said was false. Still, the interrogator wanted an answer, so Ethan would oblige him:

"I have an asset in this very city," Ethan said weakly.

"Yes?" the interrogator leaned forward anxiously.

Ethan grinned like a madman. "You."

What happened next, Ethan couldn't say. He had no memory of any subsequent sessions.

Instead he found himself lying on a cold stone surface. He sat up, and a wave of dizziness nearly overcame him. His vision filled with stars as his heart struggled to compensate for the brief drop in coronary perfusion pressure.

He had a splitting headache, one of the worst of his life. Added to that, his throat was on fire—just breathing caused the tissue to hurt. His heart pounded in his chest, though he was sitting still. His body felt absolutely battered.

It was hard to discern his surroundings because his vision was blurry. Still, he could see enough to know that he resided in a cell. Rusted metal bars blocked any egress. Beyond the bars, torches dimly illuminated dank, stone walls. Beneath him, there was a central drain in the floor, from which emanated the smell of urine and chemicals. He suspected his cell had formerly been a washroom, though the rest of the plumbing must have been bricked up.

"You look like shit, bro."

It was William's voice, coming from outside the cell. Ethan squinted, and saw another cell situated across from his own. A grubby, bruised face stared back at him through the bars.

"William?" Ethan tried to say, but no sound left his mouth. His throat burned worse than ever, and his tongue felt extremely swollen. His lips were parched, cracked.

"It's the scopolamine," William said. "Dries the throat. Don't try to speak until you've had some water." He nodded toward a small tin cup that had been placed in front of Ethan's cell.

Ethan crawled forward and reached through the bars, grabbing the cup. His fingertips throbbed in pain when he applied pressure to the tin, and he realized it was because he had no fingernails. Some of the nail beds had dried, others were coated in a sticky red glop; wet or dry, all the beds were tender.

He drank, but the terrible-tasting liquid seemed to scald his throat, and he swallowed the wrong way. He spent the next minute hacking painfully, until he recovered enough to try again.

After many small sips his throat felt well enough to attempt speech.

"Wil—" Ethan said, then caught himself. Wouldn't do to use his real name. He took another sip of water and tried again. "Wafeeq?"

"Sure." William said the word expressionlessly—the only features of his bruised and swollen face that moved were his lips. "But there's no point in using aliases. They know our names."

"The... others?"

William shrugged. "They're here, too. Somewhere further inside. I saw them, as they were dragged past. I was the first to break, apparently, which gave me the luxury of watching from my cell as the rest of you were imprisoned." He smiled wanly. "Sometimes I try calling to them, but no one ever answers."

Ethan lay back against the wall. His feet were bare and he realized that, in addition to his fingernails, most of his toenails had been wrenched away, too. That explained the throbbing agony in his extremities.

Ethan lay there, resting for quite some time. He closed his eyes, napped, woke up again. He sipped the last of the water from the cup.

"What do we know about our captors?" Ethan said, his voice slurring. He found it hard to move his facial muscles. His features must have been just as badly bruised as William's.

William grunted loudly, twice. It could have been taken for a laugh. "Our captors? They're Islamic State, obviously."

"They knew we were going to attack that night," Ethan said, fighting through the mind fog.

"It's possible," William said.

Ethan rubbed one eye and immediately regretted the action. The lid was swollen and painful.

"Though it's more likely they simply expected a rescue attempt to come eventually," William continued. "And prepared themselves appropriately."

"Why would they give Sam pepper spray, then?" Ethan said. "Certainly not to use against their own interrogators?"

"No," William agreed. "But maybe after the gunfire started, they ran to her cell, injected her up with scopolamine, and told her to spray us when we came."

Ethan wasn't sure what to believe. Either way, it was certainly a quagmire they'd gotten themselves into.

He sat back and remained very still.
How the hell are we going to get out of this one?

When he felt well enough to move, he crawled on all fours and began searching the furniture-less cell. He brushed his fingers along the outline of the bricks, testing the firmness of each one, looking for a loose stone.

"There's no way out," William said.

Ethan searched anyway, trying all the bricks he could reach from the floor. It was a slow, arduous process, given how terrible he felt, and how sore his fingers were. It took a good half hour. He found nothing.

When that was done, he tested the solidity of each bar at the front of the cell. He tried bending them, exerting his limited strength until his vision was steeped in the glittering stars of oxygen- and glucose-deprived retinas. The bars did not yield.

He reclined, letting his vision clear. He had to concede that William was right. There
was
no way out.

Ethan had the sudden urge to urinate; he held himself over the drain, yanked down his skivvies, and relieved himself.

"I wouldn't do that too often if I were you," William said. "Gets smelly fast. Try the chamber pot instead. They change it every morning."

"What chamber pot?"

William pointed toward an area just outside and to the right of the cell.

Ethan returned to the bars. Beyond them, a rusty tin pot lay on the stone floor. Ethan grabbed it for later use.

"And if you're thinking of using that to bash in some heads," William said. "Forget it. They never open the bars. Never."

Ethan stared uncertainly at his friend. "Am I really hearing these words from your mouth? You're telling me to give up? Just accept my fate? What the hell did they do to you? What the hell."

William didn't say anything, instead retreating to the darkness of his cell.

He was obviously broken.

But I'm broken, too, aren't I?
Ethan thought.
We all are.

A British mujahid brought food and water once a day. He was a cruel man, and took a particular dislike to Ethan. Sometimes, when he set the small bowl of rice down in front of the cell, he would open his cargo pants and take a piss in the meal before leaving. Ethan strained the foul liquid from the rice, using the hem of his shirt as a sieve, and forced himself to eat the bitter grains. Thankfully the man never touched his water; even so, the liquid was cloudy and had a slight sewage-like taste. He set some of it aside to clean his nail beds every morning, though he was slightly worried that bacteria in the water might cause an infection.

Ethan relieved himself in the chamber pot, which he placed outside the cell, and the Brit dumped it somewhere once a day. He had stomach cramps, probably from the water, and diarrhea. He was reduced to stripping off his T-shirt and using the stiff fabric to clean his rear, and that, combined with the frequency of his bowel movements, caused him to have a very sore anus. Sometimes he got fecal matter in his nail beds, too, and he had to rewash them with the water he'd saved.

Every second day the Brit would blast him with a high-pressure hose. Ethan used the opportunity to clean his fecal-stained shirt, letting the tainted water pour down the drain, which was beginning to smell worse than ever. When the guard finished, Ethan was always left shivering in his cell to air-dry. One time the Brit tossed a small bar of soap inside, and Ethan lathered himself up as best as he could under that high pressure spray, paying particular attention to the raw nail beds of fingers and toes, despite the sting. An infection could kill him in a place like that.

Ethan plotted daily to get that barred door open. He wasn't sure he would be able to overpower the guard in his current state, but he had to try.

"I have an infection," Ethan told the Brit one time. "You must bring a doctor."

The militant smiled.

The next day, he said: "My heartbeat is irregular. I am dying."

The militant grinned.

He tried playing dead the day after. He'd instructed William to inform the guard that he'd suddenly gasped, clutched at his heart, and collapsed.

The Brit laughed when he heard that.

Sometimes Ethan tried enraging the man by insulting him. "Islam is the domain of the homosexual! You all have dancing boys, and you take them to bed every night." Or: "There will be no virgins when you die. Only swine, raping your anus for all eternity! You're damned. All of you!"

But the Brit always laughed, pausing only to piss in the rice before moving on.

Ethan's vision improved as the days passed, and his throat returned to normal. The remainder of his nail beds dried up. He wasn't sure why the guard continued to feed and hose him down. Perhaps his commanding officers meant to interrogate Ethan further. Either that, or they were keeping Ethan alive long enough to put on a good show for his execution. Probably the latter.

Ethan kept mostly to himself, knowing that eavesdropping devices were probably dispersed throughout the dungeon, recording everything he and William said. For the most part, he was too weak to talk to his friend anyway. He was merely waiting for the end.

When he closed his eyes, the face of the burning child came often. Sometimes, he saw Abu Harb instead. Both of them had died well before their primes. Shattered innocents whose lives were needlessly thrown away in the wars of others.

Then there were the faces of the men who had died at his side in the line of duty. SEALs, Rangers, Marines. Good men. The best.

I'll be joining you soon, my brothers.

thirteen

V
ictor Bogdanov sat before Abu Muhsin Al Waheem, the high-ranking sheik from the Islamic State Shura council, in his office within the expensive government building the militants had seized near the river.

The sheik's office was pristine. On the U-shaped, rosewood desk, the Quran held the position of honor. To the left was a MacBook Pro, a portable printer, a metallic in/out box, a hole puncher, stapler, and a stack of papers. To the right: a gold pen, a small analog clock, an hourglass-shaped metal istikan whose wafting tea smelled of Earl Grey, an intricately carved wooden caddy containing individually wrapped swiss chocolates, and a photo of the sheik as a young jihadi, wearing combat fatigues and sporting an AK-47, grinning like a madman before the ruins of some bombed building.

Hanging from the wall behind him was a framed letter from Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi, leader of the Islamic State, praising Abu Muhsin for his "significant" contributions to the Caliphate. Against the right wall, cushions and pillows had been arranged for those venerated visitors who preferred a more traditional seating arrangement. A floor-to-ceiling window beside it offered a relaxing view of the Tigris.