Chapter 2

Three Years Later

It was cold.

It's surprising how cold it gets in parts of the Middle East. Most people just think about the desert and the heat, but some of the mountains stay close to freezing in the winter months. It's even colder when you have a hodge-podge of thin rags for clothes, and your bed is a hard stone floor. Also, it didn't help that the guards had woken me up in the middle of the night by throwing a bucket of dirty water on me. From the smell, they had also used the bucket as a latrine at some point.

I was just assuming this was in the mountains, actually. It could be anywhere, at this point.

The last time I'd seen the outside of an enclosed room, was four months ago, give or take a week. Without a calendar, watch, or any kind of electronic device, it's hard to keep the days straight.

It was better now that they were holding me in some kind of house. The windows might have been shuttered, but they let enough light through that it was possible to tell night from day. That made keeping time a whole lot easier.

Before this house, I'd spent somewhere between six and eight months in a cave complex. The only lights were old mine lights, running off a generator. Sometimes the generator would break down, or run out of gas. I would be left in the dark, or with just a flashlight, for however long it took.

Other times the guards would shut off the lights, and then turn them on at irregular intervals. I think they liked to mess with my sense of time. They would randomly wish me merry Christmas or happy Fourth of July at weird intervals. Since they clearly didn't celebrate either of those holidays, the only point was to keep me on edge.

Of course, what was most surprising, was the fact that I was still alive! Generally, the Taliban, al Qaeda, and the half dozen other groups of insurgents operating in the Middle East only held western personnel long enough to pump them for information, and then they put on a big display of executing the soldier. Usually by an amateur who bungles a beheading.

I'd woken up in the desert three years ago, with my hands already bound, lying in the dirt. I was looking at the bodies of my friends, while the 'insurgents' searched for valuables and intel, in that order. I was certain that my life was on borrowed time. While I had been out, they had wiped out the rest of the convoy. The hillside was burning, so clearly our planes had made a pass, but it hadn't seemed to do any good. I was the only prisoner. The only reason I was still alive was that by the time they found me at the bottom of the slope below the road, whatever passed for leaders in the group had re-established enough order that they were able to keep the men from slitting my throat.

They had frog marched me up into the mountains, away from the ambush site. The first night we stayed in a village, I was hog tied and thrown into a storage room. The next day they sent me on to where I would spend the better part of six months. Dozens of men came through to interrogate me.

I would love to say I held out, that I made them kill me before I told them anything. But that is never the way it works. Everyone breaks, no matter how motivated. It's why terrorists around the world operated in separate cells, where information was extremely limited. And these were guys willing to blow themselves up for 'the cause'.

The army tries to give us the tools to resist as long as we can. Some of us, especially those like Special Forces that operate separately from the main body of the military much of the time, go to what is known as SERE school. It stands for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape. God, does the army love it's acronyms! They simulate capture, and train in techniques for resisting and staying sane in captivity. Having now experienced both the training and the real thing, I will say the training is only a shadow of what really happens.

But the truth is ... everyone breaks. I held out for almost four days of near constant torture. These guys were experts at it. They kept me awake for nearly the whole time. Beatings, water boarding, a broken ankle and several broken fingers later I gave in, and started to answer questions. When they realized I was hedging, giving them a mixture of real and fake data, they beat me some more, until I gave in fully, and told them what they wanted to know. I wasn't ashamed, really. Like I said; everyone breaks.

What was shocking, was that after they pulled every piece of information they could out of me, they didn't kill me. One of the members of the group that was holding me was a lateral thinker. Besides their own random mixture of weapons normally found in the region, they also had a lot of captured western supplies. These guys did not take proper care of their equipment. Weapons failure was a real thing for them. When they learned what I did for the Army; this guy, who I later learned was named Waleed Qasim, decided to keep me alive and put me to work. They always kept a guard on me, and bullets never entered the same room I was in, except in their guns. They had me maintaining their weapons, and repairing ones that broke.

If a weapon had to be test fired, they had someone else do it. I could watch the test, but only while I had my hands and legs chained together. I was searched thoroughly, several times, any day I worked on anything. And when I say thoroughly, I really mean it. It wasn't just weapons I worked on. Most of these guys were educated in Madrasas (schools which were heavy on Koran and hatred of the west, but light on anything beyond a basic education), and it was rare to find even one of these guys with any level of technical skills. The ones that had skills, were held onto carefully by the higher ups, and either used to infiltrate areas that required some kind of skill to fit in, or were used in creating weapons of mass terror.

Field level leaders like Qasim rarely got any anything beyond highly motivated young men who could do little more than point and shoot a weapon. But, as I said, Qasim was a lateral thinker; which, speaking as a soldier, was terrifying for western forces. Guys like Qasim were excellent at finding ways to nullify the West's technological advantages.

Besides weapons, he had me work on anything he couldn't get one of his guys to do. If I didn't know how to do it, I'd better figure it out, or I'd get the crap kicked out of me. You can learn a lot with the proper motivation! By this point, I was doing basic repairs to vehicles and generators ... and even a tractor at one point.

The reason I was wet, was that these guys the previous day had been rough on them. Whenever they lost men, or when one of their forays had been unsuccessful, or even if they were just having 'one of those days'; they would come and take it out on me. Beatings, a cut here or there, or just making my life miserable; was a way for them to burn off some steam. Qasim had given strict orders not to kill me, so they kept it from getting life threatening, and tried to keep from breaking my arms and legs so I could work. But bruises, cuts, and cigarette burns were all fair game, and a common occurrence.

Sometime in the middle of the night, I had been woken when the door to the small room they kept me in was thrown open. Three of his men came storming in. They beat on me for a few minutes, and dumped a bucket of putrid water on me, while cursing me in general, and America, specifically. They knew that the combination of wet and cold would keep me miserable the rest of the night.

I wasn't just a whipping boy taking the abuse. I was biding my time, waiting for them to make a mistake. Admittedly I had been biding my time for several years at this point, but if they kept me alive they would have to slip up, eventually. I had gotten close to making a break for it, twice before. The guards had gotten lax. Once they had not frisked me properly, and another time they had not latched a window in a house where I was being kept. In both instances, one of Qasim's two lieutenants ... who were every bit as competent as he was ... caught the mistakes before I could take advantage of them. So ... I continued to wait.

Yet another thing I found surprising, was how fast I had adapted to what my life had become. Not that I enjoyed the beatings or anything, but I made do. I had learned to remain civil with my guards, in order to avoid more beatings. Being a tough guy and showing how much I hated them only got me hurt. Plus, it didn't really give me any added benefits. While we were never friendly, I got to know my captors. Most the low level guys sent to guard me were as bored as I was, and asked questions or told jokes. I knew Arabic before that day in the mountainside convoy, and over the three years, I become fairly fluent.

Qasim also liked to come and visit me from time to time. There were not very many educated men among his group, and he liked to chat. He thought of it as 'testing his wits against the American', but really it was just petty showmanship. He wanted me never to forget that I was the prisoner, and he was in charge. Sometimes he would bring a chess set, and we would play. I wasn't particularly good; but I knew the rules, and had some ability for thinking ahead. He seemed to enjoy it.

To tell the truth, I kind of did, too. Like I said, people adapt. These breaks in the monotony of staring silently at a wall, were welcome distractions.

I got up off the floor, dripping and hugging myself, and wishing there was a blanket. My clothes were rags, and there was no chance of getting anything else. They only gave me new clothes when the old ones literally rotted off my body. I started pacing around the room, hoping to work up some body heat. There had been no work for the last few days, and except for last night's 'visitors', no one had come into the room, except to drop off the small portion of food and water I got each day.

I was getting restless, and was spending too much time cooped up in my own head. That's when things were the worst. Having time to think was like a rot in my soul. Working on the jobs they assigned to me, or making small talk with bored guards, kept me distracted and unable to dwell.

I stopped my circles of the room for a moment, trying to figure out what was different from a moment before. After a few seconds, I realized the distant, not very loud drone of a generator had cut off. It wasn't overly noticeable, but it had been going for quite a while, now. It's absence made everything seem ... silent.

The silence was broken a few minutes later, by people arguing in the distance. I couldn't make out what they were saying; but the rate of speech, and the volume, kept increasing for a few minutes. It was pretty clear a heated debate on something was happening.

Silence returned for a moment, followed by the door to the room I was being kept in getting thrown open.

"Out!" the guard commanded, pointing out of the room, just in case I didn't get his meaning.

I walked out of the room where I was kept, into another room that had chairs a table. This was the room I normally worked in, and they kept it very Spartan in case I might happen across something that I could use to escape. Then I was led out the front door and into the cooling air. It was early evening, and was still light enough to see, but the light was rapidly dimming into twilight.

When they brought me here, I'd been wearing a hood. I hadn't been taken beyond the front room of the hut where I was being kept, since my arrival. This was my first chance to look at where I was being held. The house I had been inhabiting was in a small village build on a mountain plateau. There were maybe fifteen buildings that I could see from where I stood, and my best guess was that made up the bulk of the town.

I noticed that the house where they'd kept me in was on the outskirts of town. Now I could see a small dirt road that led out of the village, and down the mountain. It was just past the front door.

There were several men with Kalashnikov rifles (the 'go to' weapon for every third world nation and guerrilla army) wandering around. What I didn't see were women or children. No pets, either.

This might have been a village at some point, but the Aikhtar Al'Islam, the group that Qasim headed, had taken it over at some point, and had kicked all the civilians out ... or killed them.

A push from behind directed me deeper into the village, and then into a shed near the center of the small collection of houses. Once in the door, it because quickly apparent what was happening.