RW11 - Violence of Action (11 page)

Karras spit a gob of thick goo from his throat onto the carpet. Trussed up like a pretzel it was a pretty impressive, if pointless, effort. “I fuck little Indian girls up the ass,” he growled.

Now
that
was an unfortunate choice of words if the Rogue has ever heard one.

“Okay, the dumb fuck is all yours,” I told Trace.

As Trace squatted down beside Karras I pulled up a nearby chair. I’d seen men, women, and children tortured before. Manhandling and mutilation are time-honored skills in South-east Asia and elsewhere. Although I’d never directly participated, I’d stood by and let the locals do their thing for a good cause. I make no judgments about such activities. War is hell. You fight wars to win. Sometimes you have to take on the devil’s secret name and become the very thing you loathe. In a strange way, it can be almost spiritual when carried out in a traditional, ritualized manner.

People who claim physical torture doesn’t work are full of shit. I’m here to tell you it does. But only when conducted by someone who is gifted in the art of inflicting pain for the purpose of gathering hard intelligence. Anyone can stick a knife up some dumb fuck’s ass and wiggle it around. But sticking it up the same dumb fuck’s ass and getting the truth out of him is a difficult, precise art.

I wasn’t going to leave Dahlgren on her own to do my job for me. We are a team. She’s the expert and I’m her commanding officer. We share the good times, we share the bad times. This was going to be as bad as Karras wanted to make it. If he kept playing hardcore SEAL we’d be here awhile. If Trace was as good as I was betting she was, then hardcore or no hardcore I’d soon have what I needed to get this fucking mission on the road.

Any and all means said my president. I was going to take him at his word.

Trace pushed Karras over so he was lying on his right side facing me. She slowly cut off his underwear with the knife. Grabbing his nut sack she stretched it out as far as the loose skin could be pulled. I caught myself unconsciously squeezing my own thighs together. Damn, that had to hurt like hell!

Karras howled in pain. It didn’t matter. Guess he didn’t get the memo about where we were—no one could hear what was going on inside the room but him and us. “You fuckers! You damn bastards, I’ll kill you for this! You hear me? I’ll
kill
you for this!”

Karras stopped his ranting and strained to look down the length of his bent body at Trace. I watched his eyes go wide as he saw the knife in her left hand, his balls crunched together in her right. She was eyeing his scrotum like a curious child. Slowly she rotated her head so she was now looking directly into her victim’s eyes. Karras was dead silent. His breathing was shallow and fast. He was now one scared motherfucker. I wondered if he regretted the comment about ass-fucking little Indian girls.

“Are you part of what happened to the lawyer?” she asked.

Karras said nothing. He was rock steady still. I had to give him credit. He was tough. Stupid as dirt, but tough.

“Are you part of what happened to the lawyer?”

When Karras didn’t answer Trace pushed the tip of the knife into his stretched out nut sack. With a lightening fast flick downward, she slit his scrotum open. Blood spurted from the incision, splattering Trace’s hands and making a dark, terrifying Rorschach spot on the carpet. Fuck me, I thought. I’ll probably get the cleaning bill for this on top of everything else.

“
EEEYAAAAA!
” Tony Karras let out a yelp so loud and primal I damn near wet myself. He began bucking and squirming in an effort to get away from the source of his pain but the two belts held firm. Yellow urine began shooting out the end of his limp prick. It mixed with the blood that was already on the floor. Take a fucking note! The pucker factor is at an all-time high once bladder control is lost. They teach you this shit in SERE school. Karras had probably attended such training in New Brunswick or at Bragg. If so, in theory he knew what was coming next. The bitch is that theory and practice are two very different things.

Most of all, theory doesn’t hurt.

I thought Trace was going to ask Karras the same question again but she didn’t. Instead of talking she kept working on Tony’s rack and balls. Like she’d been skinning dicks all her life, she dug the tip of the knife around in Karras’ now badly bleeding scrotum. A second later I saw what she was fishing for. Out popped one of his nuts, all pink, shiny and wet. It hung in the open by a thin white fleshy tube, which Trace now neatly sliced through. The oval-shaped organ dropped to the wet carpet and rolled a few inches. As Tony’s eyes and mouth opened to sizes I didn’t think humanly possible, Trace speared the homeless testicle with the Emerson and held it up for all to admire.

“I suppose you can still fuck little Indian girls with one nut, Mr. Karras. But it might be embarrassing to explain what happened to your missing ball.” Then, with a flick of her wrist, Trace launched the sorry little punctured nut across the room where it made a sharp
splat
as it landed against the far wall.

A foul smell erupted from Karras as he lost control of his bowels. If Trace noticed the stench she didn’t give any indication. Karras had utterly given in to the horror. He’d never been here before. And he’d never imagined in his wildest dreams that he’d be subjected to such torture at the hands of his own countrymen…not to mention a
former
teammate. He had no rights and now he knew it. He had nothing left but the hope I wouldn’t let Trace kill him if he talked. Personally, I was hoping he’d start talking like a fucking mynah bird and that he’d start right now. I decided to let Trace have my Emerson knife when this was all over and done with. Somehow using it to spread peanut butter on my favorite crackers back at the Manor didn’t have the same appeal it used to.

Trace jammed the blade back into Karras’ scrotum and tugged his remaining ball out into the open. His nutsack collapsed and shriveled in her right hand as its remaining occupant popped into view. The sour aroma of piss and the pungent stink of fresh, fear-filled shit was making breathing difficult in the small room. Karras rolled his eyes toward me. Tears were streaming down his cheeks. He was begging for his life—and his one remaining nut. “Skipper? Skipper? Please, please Skipper…”

His words sliced through me. For an instant I wanted to jump out of my chair, to push Trace away, to stop this truly evil and brutal savagery over which I was standing watch. Karras
was
a SEAL. He
was
one of my countrymen. How the fuck could I allow this to be done to him? I felt Trace’s gaze. I knew if I looked at her with doubt, broke faith with her, she’d stop and walk right out of the room. I mentally reached down between my hairy frogman’s legs and grabbed hold of my own nutsack for courage. “Trace,” I said, “if he doesn’t answer immediately and truthfully to your next question…cut that damn ball free and start working on his pathetic little needle dick. I’m through fucking around with this turd. As far as I’m concerned you can open up his belly and maul around inside his guts next.”

Karras began shaking as if with fever. It’s one thing to take a beating and quite another to be slowly, methodically cut to ribbons. There are no schools that teach how to survive that kind of treatment.

I sensed Dahlgren’s gaze slipping away from me. Shit! I steeled myself for what was to come. If Karras somehow found it within himself to hold out it was going to be a long, messy afternoon.

“The Mexicans taught us how to use a knife, you know,” Trace said in a far-away, singsong kind of voice as she drew a long, thin cut all the way down Tony’s exposed inner thigh to his knee. He began gasping for oxygen and twitching violently. I thought he was gonna stroke on us. Trace continued as if she were telling herself an often repeated story, unaware of what her hands were doing to the man beneath her. “They would raid our villages and take the women and children captive. Many times they would play games with those who were wounded, or too old, or too sick to be of value as slaves or whores.

“They would tie them up and then amuse themselves for hours with their knives. It was the Mexicans who taught us how to scalp, and how to sell scalps for money. The Apache has beautiful hair. A scalp was proof a Mexican had killed Apache
merde
. He was paid good money for the hair of my People!”

“I never hurt no Indian!” moaned Karras.

“No?” replied Trace as she tapped the flat of the blade against the remaining healthy testicle she now held in her hand, “I thought I heard you say you fucked little Indian girls up the ass. Was that a lie, Mr. Karras? Are you lying to me? This is what happens when you lie to me!”

Well, fuck. I winced as his second nut was separated from its tiny little rappel line and sent flying across the room to join his brother. Karras went ape-shit, wild-ass crazy. He tried rolling away from Trace but she leapt over him and pinned him hard with one knee on his chest. With two quick flicks she sliced off both his nipples then ran the edge of the blade down the center of his tanned chest. Blood was now flowing everywhere. Trace straddled him and dropped all her 130 pounds of she-devil on his sternum. Bent like he was, I heard joints cracking and ligaments popping under the sudden stress. I felt like I was glued to my chair. I’ve seen a lot of shit in my roguish life but what I was now part of was beyond anything I’d ever imagined. The demon sitting atop the bloody mass of heaving, gasping human flesh was no longer Trace Dahlgren. It was the ghost of a blood-soaked past I’d never imagined existed. I’d unleashed it. I did a gut check and bit my tongue. We were in it together. To the fucking end.

Trace began chanting in the tongue of her native people. I’d heard her do this once before after we’d grabbed a kidnapped child and were in the process of blasting our way out of a shithole in eastern El Salvador. It had spooked me then, and hearing it again now was having the same affect. It appeared Trace was making perfectly good fucking sense to Karras because he opened his mouth wide and let out a long, deep scream toward the ceiling.

Trace pushed the knife’s blade into the upper portion of Karras’s belly. It sunk in about two inches. He went silent for a few short seconds and his eyes rolled around in his skull. He coughed once, then twice. Bloody drool flowed out the corners of his mouth. His teeth were stained red. Then, hallelujah, he started to answer her questions.

I had to lean forward to hear him. The fight within had evaporated. Trace had broken him. He’d answer anything she asked from here on out and he’d be truthful. He was certain she would know if he lied and that she would make his pain that much more horrible for it. “Yes, I was involved…. But I didn’t kill Beckstein. The colonel did. I was there to be eyes-on target afterward. The colonel killed him, not me….”

“What is the colonel’s name?” asked Trace. Unnoticed by Karras, she had slipped off of him and was now sitting cross-legged on the floor at his side, watching his face carefully. Her tone was soothing, consoling. She was an angel of death considering a reprieve. She was the scariest fucking thing I’d ever laid eyes on.

“Blanchard. Colonel Max Blanchard.”

Fuck me. That was a name I knew from years gone by. He was a tight-assed, reclusive son of a bitch who had created Nemesis as his final assignment before retirement. I thought he’d moved to a farm somewhere a year or two earlier—seemed to me I’d even been invited to a retirement party for him. I’d first met him during my early visits to the old DELTA compound at Ft. Bragg but we’d never really taken a liking to each other. I thought he was a tight-assed prig and I’m sure he thought I was a fuckup who got allowed a lot of rope by the Brass. People aways said Blanchard was tough as nails, but he struck me as far too concerned with petty regulations and discipline to be more than a middle manager. Maybe I’d underestimated him, or maybe he’d changed.

“Did Nemesis take the SADM from NEST today?” Trace continued.

Karras weakly nodded. “Phineas Priests. The war begins with us. Needed something decisive. No more half-stepping. Blanchard is the Chosen One. We are all priests. We serve only
Yahweh
.”

Trace glanced at me. I nodded. We were on a roll. “Where is Blanchard now?”

Karras balked. I saw the hesitation in his eyes. Trace caught it and in a flash she slid the knife deeper into his belly. Pulling the sharp edge out, the Emerson ripped through taut, well-worked muscle. A hard burst of bright red blood erupted from the gaping wound. Karras screamed…and screamed…and screamed some more. The screams slowly became whimpers. The whimpers turned into sobs. The sobs dissolved into silence.

I thought that we’d killed the bastard. But then his chest rose and he exhaled like a lung cancer patient giving up the ghost. He was still alive.

I sat still and let the whole scene wash over me. My humanity had been erased. I was empty. I was outside myself watching Trace skillfully field dress a human being in a soundproof room in the heart of the nation’s capital. I’d never gone this far in my life. Never pushed the envelope to such an extreme. I am a rogue, yes. I am a warrior, certainly. But now I had become more than the Rogue Warrior. I was beyond whatever “he” had ever been. And I was sanctioned by my government to become this thing.

That was seriously fucked up.

But there was no going back. I was beyond whatever it was that once held me in check. I looked at Trace and I saw recognition. I saw acceptance. The circle was complete. My path was clear. I was grateful to Karras. He was the vehicle. It was a shame he would have to die.