More Than Courage (25 page)

Even if this were but a precursor to a new and even more horrific form of punishment the brief respite from them was a cause of celebration.

Yet for every change to the good there was a downside. After days of having his hands tightly secured behind his back by handcuffs, Mendez found that his arms were for the moment useless.

Even worse, the sudden release of pressure at his wrists unleashed a wave of pain that the numbness of his arms had somehow managed to mask while bound. Still, this sorry state of affairs did little to dampen a feeling boarding on euphoria that the New York City native felt. With arms hanging limply at his side, Mendez wandered about the small cell exploring every nook and cranny. This didn't take very long for it wasn't much of a cell. A person standlng in the middle of the floor slowly turning his head could lay his eyes on every square inch of the cell in a matter of seconds. That

^significant fact did not bother Mendez. To him, his newly reacquired sight was a precious gift to be enjoyed lest he be deprived of it again.

This last thought triggered another, more ominous one. If the Syrians had removed the blindfold and handcuffs, Mendez reasoned they could easily put them back on again. This break from 194

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those constraints might be temporary. Alternating periods of total restraint interrupted by random interludes free of them might be all that it took to shatter his already fragile spirit and push him ever closer to a total breakdown. That wouldn't have very far to go, he sadly concluded. Even the trivial effort needed to shuffle about the small six-by-ten-foot cell proved exhausting. Mendez lowered his head and shook it. "Damn, boy," he muttered.

"You're gonna have to get in shape if you expect to escape from this hole."

The idea of escaping, of course, was fanciful. Even if he did manage to somehow find a way out of the cell and the building that housed it, Mendez appreciated the fact that he would be adrift in a strange and hostile land. There would be no friendly faces to provide him sanctuary and no one to appeal to for aid.

And then there was the desert. Mendez was hard-pressed to decide what was more threatening; an enraged populace capable of tearing him apart or the trackless wasteland that would siphon away his lifeblood in a matter of days. Stopping in midstride, he looked about once more. For better or worse, no matter what the Syrians had in mind he had no choice but to roll with the punches, both literally and figuratively.

This realization and a fresh appraisal of his cell brought a strange smile to the young Puerto Rican's bruised and bloodied face. He had joined the army to escape living among a hostile populace and in substandard housing, only to wind up here, being held by a hostile populace in a substandard cell. Well, he mused as he began another circuit of his cell, / always knew God has a quirky sense of humor.

Specialist Four Dee Dee Davis did little with his newfound freedom.

He simply sat against the wall where the Syrians had left him after removing his constraints. He was still there when the sound of the bolt on the other side of the door sliding open roused him from the stupor into which he had drifted. If he'd had MORE THAN COURAGE

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the strength to do so he would have crawled into a corner even though doing so would have been futile. There was no place for him to escape to, nothing to hide behind in the barren cell. Still, the urge to do something was overpowering.

With a growing sense of alarm Davis stared at the door. Was it time for his next beating? Had they decided that he had had enough freedom for one day and were coming back to put the handcuffs back on? Or were they here to visit some new form of punishment upon him? These questions and others, each equally scary and distasteful, raced through Davis's mind as the door began to swing open.

To his amazement no one entered the cell. Instead, when there was just enough room to do sq a hand appeared and set a bowl down on the floor. The hand quickly pulled away just before the door slammed shut. Not knowing what to make of this Davis stayed where he was for a moment, watching and listening as the bolt on the other side was slammed home. Even when the sound of footfalls on the other side appeared to move down the corridor he did nothing. Only when he could no longer hear anyone outside his cell did his curiosity finally get the better of him.

His full attention now turned to the bowl that had been left behind. He stared at it for several minutes as if expecting it to do something. Could it be food of some sort? Not trusting his sight he tilted his head back, turned his nose toward the unexpected gift, and tried to sniff the air. This effort yielded little in the way of useful information since his nose had been broken at least once and was now thoroughly plugged up with dried blood and niucus. Seeing no other alternative, Davis collected what little strength he had left and prepared to venture across the cell to investigate.

Doing this turned out to be both difficult and painful.

A hough it had been more than an hour since his arms had been Abound, they were still of little use to him. The only thing he could feel in them was pain from inflamed joints at the shoulders

^u elbows as well as a terrible burning sensation that radiated up 196

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his arm from hands that felt as if they were swollen to twice their natural size. And his legs were almost as unresponsive. His first effort to stand up shortly after the Syrians had removed his restrains had ended disastrously. Unwilling to make that mistake again, Davis opted to scoot along the floor on his bottom by throwing his feet out before him, planting them firmly upon the floor, and then using what strength he had in his legs to haul his buttocks up to where his feet were anchored. Each time he drew closer to the bowl and before he threw his feet out again in order to repeat this process, Davis paused to study it. Inching along in this manner, it took him several minutes to get close enough to see that there was something in it that looked like a soup or stew.

The lack of steam rising from the surface of the broth didn't bother him. As a soldier he was used to cold meals. He was also very familiar with the pangs that hunger produces when too many meals had been missed. What he wasn't practiced in was moving about without full use of his legs.

When he was in the process of making his final lurching move, it occurred to Davis that his limp arms and swollen hands would be useless to him when he reached his goal. He would be unable to pick up the bowl. Startled for a moment by this sudden reevaluation, the specialist four paused and considered his dilemma. He could, he reasoned, wait where he was for a few minutes in the hope that enough strength would return to his arms to permit him to hold the bowl and eat like a normal human being. But waiting could be dangerous. What if the Syrians returned while he was doing so and took the uneaten food away? Would they pay any attention to his pleas and leave it? Perhaps they would see his j plight, take mercy on him, and offer to feed him?

That was unlikely. As far as he knew the word mercy wasn't in their vocabulary. Somehow he would have to find a way to cat without using his hands.

As he was pondering how to go about eating, a mernoiy popped into his mind. As clearly as if it had just happened, Davis recalled sitting at the kitchen table as a child next to his baby

^Pv

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brother. The two were eating lunch when his brother dropped his spoon on the floor. Unable to reach over and retrieve the lost utensil, Davis watched as his brother smiled and barked like the family dog before lowering his head to the bowl on the tray before him. Making no effort to be neat or quiet, the child of three began to lap up the stew.

Wondering if this made any difference

in the enjoyment of the meal, Davis had laid his own spoon aside and copied his brother. Both boys were thoroughly enjoying this experiment when their mother appeared. As she so often did when they were violating one of her rules, she shrieked their full names in a high-pitched voice that only mothers can manage, bringing their animalistic feeding frenzy to an end and announcing to the world that a beating was about to begin.

For the first time in days Davis managed to smile as he thanked the Lord that his mother wasn't there to witness what he was about to do. "Mama," he said as he pulled himself to within easy reach of the bowl, "I do hope you forgive me for this, but a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do." With that he leaned forward, lowered his head as far as he could, and stuck his tongue out until it made contact with the oily broth before him.

Sergeant First Class Kannen greeted each new display of "kindness"

by his captors with growing suspicion. He was quick to appreciate that these acts foreshadowed something more than a simple change in tactics. Having studied their culture and history, the American NCO knew that the Syrians would not abandon a line of attack without good reason. While there was the possibility that whatever they were trying to achieve by beating him had been accomplished by breaking another member of the team, Kannen discounted that notion. Information gleaned from a prisoner under duress is like a piece of a jigsaw puzzle. With the eXception of their team commander and perhaps the XO, no one

tttan had all the pieces. Even when they managed to crack a key individual, professional interrogation teams used bits of informa 198

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tion gleaned from one person to extract additional information from others or to confirm the validity of data they already had.

The American NCO was also placing a great deal of faith in his teammates. As vicious and unnerving as his experience had been thus far, Kannen doubted that any member of the team had broken or given the bastards anything of value. Eventually someone would break, though. Perhaps they all would. So even while he was enjoying his newfound freedom from being constrained and savoring every morsel of food offered, Kannen began to prepare himself mentally for the next torment the Syrians were waiting to spring upon him.

The Syrians didn't give him long to ponder this question. Not long after they had deposited a bowl of watery soup in his cell, they were back. Having already been caught offguard twice during their previous visits, Kannen managed to pick himself up from the floor and shuffle over to one of the walls of his cell. From there he figured he would be able to see out into the corridor once the door was open.

Fortified by the skimpy meal he had wolfed down in minutes and buoyed by the resurgence of hope that it fostered, Kannen found that he was much calmer now as he watched the door swing open. His restored vision added an entirely new dimension to an experience that he had endured many times before. First there was the sound of the bolt being slid through its housing with a single, quick motion so that the slapping of metal on metal at the end of its run sounded like the bolt of a rifle being jerked back. Next, the door groaned as it was swung open. This opening was executed with a slow and measured pace to maximize the chilling effect that emanated from the grinding of its unlubricated metal hinges. There always was a slight pause between the time the door was fully open, and the rhythmic tromping of rubber soled boots as they hit the cold concrete floor of the cell.

The ability to watch all of this for the first time was strangeKannen's first reaction, as soon as the door was open wide MORE THAN COURAGE

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enough to permit him a good look at his captors, was amazement.

They were not the massive brutes that his imagination had pictured them to be when all it had to go on was the sounds they made while they pummeled him. Instead, the pair of Syrians who entered the cell and confronted Kannen were anything but intimidating.

Everything about them had an air of shabbiness, from the hint of fading in their unpressed uniforms to the dark stubble that indicated they did not bother to shave on a regular basis. Their boots, the age-old mark of how well disciplined a soldier is, betrayed a total lack of care. Even their mannerisms came as something of a shock to him. Their placid expressions and stooped frames reminded him of day laborers reluctantly shuffling off to work in the morning.

The effect of all of this on Kannen was quite unexpected. On one hand he felt disappointed that the people who had been tormenting him were not burly fiends decked out in crisp Nazi-style uniforms. Rather than being the best of the best, Rannen's first impression was that these people were nothing more than slugs, lowly miscreants who had been assigned this duty because they couldn't hack it in a line unit. This evaluation quickly led to anger. How in God's name, he wondered as he watched the Syrian guards file into the cell and approach him, did I allow myself to be frightened by these bozos'?

This question was answered almost immediately when a third guard bearing the flashings of an NCO upon his rumpled uniform entered'the cell, stepped up to Kannen, and began screaming. Kannen had no idea what the short sergeant was yelling about.

But the soldiers belonging to his detail did. In a flash, they leaped to either side of the American. In unison each grabbed an arm,

"tted Kannen off his feet, and slammed him against the wall.

Unprepared for this sudden assault, Kannen's head hit the wall, scrambling his thoughts. Before he had an opportunity to sort nunself out, the Syrians spun Kannen about and pinned him up against the wall. Unable to do anything to protect himself or

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resist, Kannen remained motionless as their NCO pulled his arms behind his back, and slapped a pair of handcuffs on Kannerfs wrists.

In an instant, the pain of the manacles cutting into his raw skin shot through him. Blinded by this pain he hardly noticed that the pair holding him had spun him around yet again until they faced the door before moving though it with great alacrity and down the corridor.

All of this occurred with such stunning suddenness that Kannen found he was having difficulty keeping up. The bump on his head only added to his inability to concentrate on what was going on around him. As with a passenger on a fast-moving train, the blurred images of what lay to his left and right whizzed by. The only thought that he managed to put together was that he had misjudged his captors. Whatever they lacked by way of appearance, they more than made up for in enthusiasm and efficiency once they had been properly motivated. He also had a vague sense that he would soon have an answer to his question as to what sort of depredations they had in store for him next as they reached their destination.