Six Minutes To Freedom (13 page)

Read Six Minutes To Freedom Online

Authors: John Gilstrap,Kurt Muse

BOOK: Six Minutes To Freedom
9.35Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
“Because people are trying to shoot us?”
The driver paused for a beat before answering. “Something like that. But you’ll be okay. We’ve got a lot of people working to make sure that you’re just fine. You remember that.”
 
Kurt’s flash of terror evaporated after just a few seconds. Sitting there in a straight-backed chair in this tiny file room with a gun to his head, he’d prepared himself to die, and then just as quickly knew that the DENI officer was bluffing.
Invoking the kind of logic that can only be born of desperation, he found himself staring at the flimsy metal file cabinet that stood only a foot or two from the tip of his nose. If the interrogator pulled his trigger,the bullet and Kurt’s brains would be drilled straight through those all-important intelligence files. There was no way they would risk damage like that to the files.
The moment lasted for ten seconds—or maybe ten minutes, who knew?—but finally the DENI officer spat out a curse and gave Kurt’s head a shove with the muzzle of his weapon.
Without another word, he stormed out of the room with his minions,leaving Kurt once again by himself.
12
There’s an athletic field on Fort Clayton that used to be used for all kinds of activities, from platoon drills to kids’ soccer games. On this afternoon, there were no kids at all on the field. Instead,there were a few soldiers tossing a Frisbee, and a cluster here and a cluster there of soldiers talking. Even at first glance, Kimberly thought that it looked all wrong. Then, when she saw a rifle propped up against a tree near one of the talking soldiers, she knew for a fact that it was all wrong.
The driver piloted the car into a parking lot adjacent to the field and stopped at the edge of the grass, leaving the engine running. A half-dozen other cars were similarly situated all around their edge of the field.
“What are we going to do here?” Erik wanted to know.
“We’re just going to wait for the next part.” The driver shifted his eyes to the mirror again, and Kimberly could tell from the lines around his eyes that he was smiling. “And I think you’ll find the next part to be pretty darn cool.”
Kimberly heard the choppers approaching before she saw them. It was a deep rumbling sound, not at all like the whop-whop-whop of the helicopters you hear on television. As the noise crescendoed, she knew they were getting closer. And then she saw them.
Three sleek Blackhawks came in hot and low in a wide banking turn, flying nose to tail, and as they flared for landing on the parade field, all those Frisbee tossers and quiet gabbers were suddenly armed with rifles.
“Your chariots are here,” the driver said, and he dropped the transmissioninto gear. The instant the Blackhawks’ wheels touched the grass, their car was moving. “The first one is for you and your family,” the driver said.
When the Toyota came to a halt on the grass, a soldier wearing a green flight suit and a green helmet pulled the back door open. “Kimberlyand Erik?” he asked.
“Yes, sir.”
“Outstanding. You’re with me. Let’s go.”
Kimberly then Erik stumbled out of the car and ran to the side door of the chopper, where another crewman was waiting to help them aboard.
“We get to fly in a chopper?” Erik beamed.
Behind them, all the waiting cars raced across the field to their assignedhelicopters. They pulled to a stop, and all the people Kimberly had seen in the Provost Marshal station poured out of the doors.
“Have a seat,” the crewman commanded, and the kids planted themselves into the nylon-strap passenger seats in the middle of the aircraft.The crewman helped them with their seat belts, and then he reached over their heads to find a couple of flight helmets. “You two have to wear these,” he said.
They were heavy. And huge. “It’s too big,” Erik said.
“My orders are that you wear them. Nothing says it’s gotta fit.” Said a different way by a different man, the words might have been offensive,but the crewman’s smile pulled it off nicely.
Finally strapped into the seat, and with her helmet in place, Kimberlylooked up and saw that Carol, David, and Joey had also arrived and were being strapped into their seats. No helmets, though. Then there were others from the Provost who also climbed aboard. Two in particular, young and good looking with big smiles, sought out the kids first thing. They looked familiar to her.
“I’m Antonio Martinez,” said the first one with the biggest smile. “You are Kimberly, right? And you’re Erik?”
They nodded. Kimberly couldn’t help but return the smile. “This is Coronado Samaniego. You remember we went scuba diving with you and your father.”
That was it. That was why they looked familiar. Kimberly and her dad loved to go scuba diving, and she could remember now that these two guys had been on one of the trips.
“Sorry to see you in these circumstances,” Antonio went on.
Kimberly nodded. Her throat felt thick with emotion.
“We need everybody to plant their butts in a seat,” the crewman said, nudging them along.
“But don’t you worry,” Coronado said. “Kurt’s a good man. He’s a hero. He’ll come out of this just fine. He’s too tough not to.”
“
Now
, dammit,” the crewman barked.
They had to move along. They took the seats next to the kids. “Don’t worry about a thing,” Antonio said. “We’ll get you through this.”
Tears pressed hard from behind Kimberly’s eyes. It was the sudden kindness in the midst of so much madness. Finally, there was a connectionto someone who admired her father instead of berating him.
As the Blackhawk powered up and the world banked away down below, Kimberly watched the cluttered, twisted landscape of the city of her birth spin away; she searched in vain to find her house among all the thousands of houses down there. It was one more unspoken good-bye,and the beginning of the journey that would change who she was.
 
Back in West Palm, Annie was desperate for news. She wanted every detail, but would have settled for
any
detail. No one seemed to know anything after eighteen hours in limbo. No one knew where Kurt was, no one knew if her children were safe, and no one knew what the long-rangeplan was or even what it might be.
All day long, she’d been pulling every string she could find, mostly through Suzanne Alexander at the Agency and Richard Dotson at the State Department, but they seemed to be getting as frustrated as she with all the runaround and shrugged shoulders.
“Just tell me this,” Annie said to Suzanne, at the end of a very long conversation. “Is anybody doing anything at all, or are we just sitting around and doing a lot of thinking?”
“Annie, I know you’re frustrated. I know how agonizing this must be, but these things are not simple. I’m sure Richard has probably told you the same thing. There
is
a lot of thinking that goes into an action that has been wholly unplanned, and I think it’s unreasonable for us not to acknowledge that.”
Annie could hear the exhaustion in Suzanne’s voice, just as she could feel it in her own body. But God bless it, “I don’t know” just was not an acceptable answer when the stakes were this high.
Somebody
knew the details, and she intended to keep pressing until somebody eithercoughed them up, or they put her in contact with someone who could. She started to express this to her old friend when Suzanne started talking again.
“You know, and there’s something else that you might want to consider,Annie. If and when a decision were to be made to implement some kind of plan, I really don’t think you’d
want
to know the details over an open phone line.”
As Suzanne spoke, Annie felt a flutter in her stomach. The words she spoke made perfect sense; open phone lines were just that—anyone with the smallest amount of technical expertise could listen in at will. But it wasn’t the words that caught Annie’s attention so much as the way in which they were delivered. If she wasn’t mistaken, Suzanne was conveying a kind of subliminal message. Something was happening afterall.
13
A PDF lieutenant stormed into the tiny office that was servingas Kurt’s temporary prison and stopped abruptly, his chest just inches from Kurt’s face. He glared down, but said nothing. Unsure whether it was wise to stand, Kurt remained seated, staring at the floor.
Finally, the lieutenant said, “Stand.”
Kurt stood and then retreated to the corner of the room where the lieutenant was pointing. He had no idea what was happening, but there was a disturbing electricity in the room. Kurt sensed that whateverwas on the way was going to be big.
The lieutenant kicked Kurt’s chair out of the way and it flew toward the opposite corner with a metallic clang. As a continuation of the same motion, he beckoned to the door. On cue, three enormous PDF noncoms dragged a terrified man into the room and made him stand on the spot where Kurt had been sitting. They got right down to business.
“You are selling drugs on our streets.”
The prisoner’s eyes grew huge. “No!” he insisted in a heavy accent that Kurt instantly recognized as Colombian. “I am no such thing. I am a—”
Before he could complete his sentence, the lieutenant delivered a backhanded slap that knocked the prisoner off his feet. The suddennessand effectiveness of the blow reminded Kurt of a rattlesnake strike, and he could not help but take a step back. He watched as the thug who’d brought the prisoner lifted him back to his feet. Again, they all just stood there.
Confused, Kurt turned his eyes toward the lieutenant, who was staring back at him with the intensity of a welding arc. The officer smiled just a little, then nodded toward the hulking noncoms.
They, too, moved with alarming speed, bum-rushing the prisoner face-first into the block wall. Kurt winced at the sharp crack of breakingteeth as fragile facial structures battled with unyielding concrete.
The soldiers moved in unison from here, as if what followed was a choreographed routine. With the Colombian’s face mashed ever harder against the wall, one soldier wrenched the prisoner’s right arm around and behind his back, the way countless schoolyard bullies subdue their prey every day, while the second soldier brought the left arm over the prisoner’s head and likewise behind his back. The Colombian howled at the unbearable tension in his shoulders as they placed one bracelet of a pair of handcuffs on the right wrist. The howl turned to a scream, though, when the guards yanked in unison to make his wrists meet betweenhis shoulder blades, where the remaining bracelet was applied. When they pulled back on the hands, and both shoulders popped free of their sockets, the sound from the man’s throat transformed into something that Kurt had never heard from a human being and that no decent person would tolerate from an animal without putting it out of its misery.
Kurt’s stomach flipped, and he looked away to avoid vomiting; but the lieutenant barked in Spanish, “No! You watch. This is your future.”
The guards spun their prisoner back around so Kurt could see the blood flowing from his nose and mouth, the impossible angles of his dislocated arms, and Kurt felt a new breed of fear shoot through his bloodstream, this one white hot. This was a demonstration to show him what they were capable of, designed to make him fearful of his life, and it was working like a charm.
But they weren’t done. As their victim stood there off balance, moaning helplessly, one of the noncoms launched a full-force, steel-toedkick to the Colombian’s testicles, causing the man to crumple like a marionette.
Kurt recoiled in horror.
From there it turned into a frenzy of violence. The choreography was gone, replaced with the savagery of a street beating. As the Colombian fought desperately to cover himself up with his knees, and by rolling from side to side, he begged them to stop, pleading in the names of God and his family. He had children to support, he wailed. Please, he didn’t know why they were doing this to him. Each hard consonant was punctuated with a bloody spray from his nose and mouth.
They kicked him ceaselessly for what had to be over a minute, the heavy boots landing with sickening, heavy thuds in his ribs, his gut, his extremities, his kidneys, his groin. As horrifying as it was, Kurt couldn’t force himself to look away. He was witnessing a man’s murder,and as awful as that was, he sensed that he owed this stranger an unblinking audience.
They rolled the poor man onto his back—onto his pinioned arms—and started in on his face, grinding the heels of their shoes into the flesh of his nose and his eyes, their hard rubber soles mercilessly tearingflesh.
When the guards were finally done, they were soaked with sweat, and the noise of their labored breathing was louder than the diminishingmoans of their victim. Kurt had heard of this kind of brutality from the PDF, but until he’d seen it for himself here in this squalid little officethat now reeked of sweat and blood, he’d not been able to wrap his mind around what it really meant. These were the same men—whether literally or by association—who had dismembered and mutilatedHugo Spadafora before they finally released him to the peace of death, but until you see the pleasure these goons took in inflicting that kind of agony, you never really understood the face of evil.
That bleeding prisoner at their feet was a human being, for God’s sake. Someone’s son, who had a life and responsibilities and people who loved him, but to his torturers—to Kurt’s captors—he was nothingmore than an object of perverse, twisted pleasure.
And the crooked smile on the lieutenant’s face confirmed it. Still sharply pressed from having merely observed the beating, he eyed Kurt with open amusement, nodding to the guards to lift the prisoner to his feet. The Colombian barely made a sound as they lifted him by his dislocatedarms and propped him up against a wall. When the prisoner raised his head, he looked directly at Kurt, as if to ask for help.
Kurt looked away.
The lieutenant wandered to a file cabinet in the corner, stooped, and withdrew from the space between the cabinet and the wall a long-handledlug wrench that might have come from the trunk of somebody’scar. As the Colombian’s head lolled against his chest, the lieutenant brought the lug wrench to Kurt and made sure that he got a good look.
“Have you been watching?” the lieutenant asked in a tone so soft that Kurt could barely hear it over the sound of his pounding heart and the roar of blood in his ears. “This is your future.” He held the smile for a long moment, long enough to make Kurt look away, but only for a few seconds.
The lieutenant shifted his grip on the lug wrench so that he was now holding it like a baseball bat, and the smile broadened.
Kurt braced for the blow that he knew was coming.
But for today, Kurt would be spared. The Colombian would not.
The lieutenant turned back to the pitiful prisoner, and, issuing a guttural growl that seemed to muster all of his strength, the lieutenant delivered a home-run swing to the center of the prisoner’s chest. The Colombian collapsed on the spot and never moved.
Clearly pleased with his work, the lieutenant handed the lug wrench to one of the noncoms and nodded for them to take the carcassout of the room. As they dragged the body, the lieutenant recoveredthe folding chair he’d kicked into the corner and set it up again in the same spot where it had been before.
“Have a seat,” he said to his prisoner. “Relax. We’ll be back for you later.”

Other books

Home Front Girls by Rosie Goodwin
Sea Dog by Dayle Gaetz
The Natural Order of Things by Kevin P. Keating
Moonbird Boy by Abigail Padgett
Athlete vs. Mathlete by W. C. Mack
Incarnate by Jodi Meadows