GWOT 3 - Useless

GWOT III - Useless

I wake up.

This is a very bad move. I realize that I was having a nightmare.

I immediately wanted to go back to it.

I am a prisoner in my ruined body.

My left hand doesn't work. The fingers scream at me. The nails are ... nope, didn't dream it. Missing. Torn out, with pliers.

I can barely stand. I make it to the cold metal toilet with no seat before I foul myself.

No soap. No amenities.

Before the Firecracker, anyone who kept a prisoner the way they are keeping me would be facing hard felony time.

I hear the pounding of heavy booted feet.

I think about getting a sip of water from the toilet's sink before they slam the door open and drag me off to interrogation.

It's my morning equivalent of coffee.

I find myself hugging the toilet as the door slams open.

It is the only thing in the room I can hang on to, that might slow down their drag.

###

I am efficiently strapped to a gurney.

The cell extraction team is careful. Two per limb, two for the head, a team leader and, believe it or not, a designated SAFETY officer, wearing a labeled vest.

You'd think I was dangerous or something.

OK, I am on my third interrogator. Killed the first one in hand to hand, the second gave up on me as a lost cause and set me up on pity dates with scalpels and gurneys and furnaces.

It's not like I killed anyone on the extraction team.

Why so personal, bro?

My question gets me socked in the gut.

###

"I've been asked to fill in," says my newest interrogator.

Colonel. Dirty Merc.

He is haggard, eyes showing strain. I've seen him neatly shaved and groomed, laundered after a day of CQB. Now he looks like he's been in trenches for a week.

The sight cheers me immensely.

"What the fuck are you smiling at? Let me explain some simple facts of life to you. You are a dying piece of meat. Your lover is dead. Your fucking guards either ratted you out or were sidewalked. Your site works for Homeland. Your site is the War. So what the fuck are you still resisting for?"

I blink slowly.

"Not. Resisting."

I have to say it slowly, swollen teeth from yesterday. But I have had enough.

As fucked up an asshole as the Colonel is, perhaps he knows how to do what the other interrogators did not.

Listen.

"Just fucking talk already."

"OK," I say tiredly. It comes out sounding like "Oahh Kaye."

"Who is your Resistance contact?"

"Don't have one."

"Bull. Shit."

"I'm not Resistance. Really."

"Where did the H1Bs go?"

"Sidewalked."

"By who?"

"By me. Small team. Killed them all, to save them from Homeland."

"That's the cover story. What really happened?"

"A couple suicides during the extraction run. They gave me the idea. So I split them up to control them better, and just kept walking them away."

"Where?"

"Jungo Road. Said there was an obstacle they had to walk, to lighten the load. Took them through in groups. Each group, different locations."

"What is the mile marker?"

"Who gives a shit?"

"What is the mile marker?"

"Somewhere between 35 and 70."

"So you're a mass murderer. Just like me."

"Just like you. Just like Homeland Bound."

"What about Homeland Bound?"

"Genocide plot."

The Colonel lifts an eyebrow.

"What do you mean?"

"Everyone turned over to Homeland for Homeward Bound is dead. No one made it home. We had ways of checking, mostly electronic."

Now he's mad. What did I say?

"Bullshit."

"Why do you think I killed our H1Bs? No way to get them out. Only thing I could do, let them die clean. Do it right, do it myself."

"You asshole."

Now I am honestly puzzled. The Dirty Mercs are killers, rapists, torturers. They do it retail. Why have a problem with wholesale?

"Prove it. About Homeland Bound."

So I tell him the tale. I tell him about the snoop and poop in Oregon. The ten thousand E-mails. The flight manifest data. The video analytics.

"You believe this."

It wasn't a question.

"You tell me, Colonel. Desert site, buses bringing people, no warehouse, no supplies, no food. And all that fucking smoke. So what was burning, Colonel?"

His face contorts.

"My. People!" he roars. "I just sent half my team overseas on vacation! The fucker even joked about where they were bound. I didn't even hear the capital B. Until now."

Goddamn, couldn't happen to a nicer set of assholes.

"Go. Get. Them. Colonel."

"I saw them board the plane," he replies slowly. "I saw the seats. Vinyl."

With that, I can see it in my mind's eye.

Laughing and joking. Locked cockpit door, standard anti hijack precaution. Crew puts on oxygen masks. Slowly depressurize the cabin. The passengers pass out, confused by hypoxia beforehand, unaware that they are being murdered. Then they die.

Plane lands at a remote airstrip with an incinerator, and a work crew wearing gloves and masks. Maybe a pressure hose. And returns again. And again. And again.

Why use vinyl instead of fabric seats?

Because you can wash them of body fluids voided at death.

The Colonel and I know this.

Unlikely allies, we are.

The Colonel gets up suddenly.

"They are recording," he mutters to himself.

He draws his pistol and checks chamber.

I am too slow to realize.

Another fucking handgun in a prisoner area? Damn these idiots are stupid.

He allows the slide to return to battery.

The real interrogator walks in, wearing a business suit with a Homeland tie pin, and escorted by two guards with cattle prods.

"Thank you, Colonel, that will be all," she says briskly.

He can either throw the pistol at her, and become a prisoner, or slink out and hope he gets his ammo back at the security control point that traded him the blanks.

He slinks out.

She takes up a seat on a stool, carefully just out of arm's length. Her guards check the restraints and block the stretcher.

"Good afternoon. When was the last time you saw the sun?"

I have no idea. I say so.

"I don't like the Colonel. But he's too useful to sidewalk."

She pauses.

"You, on the other hand, know way too fucking much about way too many things. I was tasked to recruit you for Homeland. Unfortunately, others had other ideas and they've tortured you out of bounds.

"So now you're useless to me."

How. So.

"Most of what is going on with you is fixable. Not the hand. That's the dirty tell, that you have been tortured by Homeland."

So?

"No one on either side will trust you now. You're too broken."

I look at her blankly. This is a thought to encourage.

"I thought about tossing you to junior interrogators as a training exercise. But not when you've already killed one, and one allegedly good at his job gave up on you. Believe it or not, we're not into pointless killing. Wasteful."

She shakes her head.

"Here's the deal. You keep talking, I don't sidewalk you. You stop talking, I decide whether I put a bullet in your head before they wheel that steel gurney into the incinerator in the basement."

She has a video on her tablet.

She shows it to me.

The man goes alive into the fire. Screaming.

Obviously he does not come out.

I think about it with my fogged brain.

Wait. I should be terrified.

Wow, they've been drugging me, too?

The water!

"OK," I say. "Water please."

First thing is to get my head to clear. That means I need undrugged water.

She gets a bottle, and one of the guards gingerly holds it to my lips, his partner ready to shock me at the first sign of ... I don't know, spitting?

She starts asking her questions. It's a script. Name, address, pre-Firecracker job, personal history.

Then she asks about Site.

"National Security Act," I say.

She starts to laugh.

"How do I know you're cleared?" I ask.

She takes out her Homeland ID and holds it close so I can read it.

"OK. That's a Secret clearance. The Site holds contracts for DOD and Homeland. That's all you get without keywords. And realize I'm just the site security. I don't know most of the details anyway."

She blinks.

"You are being fucking tortured and you are still honoring classification levels?"

"You torture someone for TS SCI NOFORN and you're no friend of America," I reply, in dead seriousness.

As in strapped to a gurney and burned in a fire serious.

She blinks. And changes the subject.

She is looking for the Resistance contact in the Site.

And I have no idea. I tell her so.

She starts running down possibles. I give her what I can from memory.

"You kept all this in your head?"

"Had to. No secure environment."

"That's very suspicious."

I start laughing. After a moment, so does she.

My mouth hurts and my hand throbs.

"You've been fingered as the Resistance contact for Site."

"Not. Surprised."

"Explain."

"Pissed lots. People off."

She nods. Bad data, people taking out grudges. We are both professionals.

"If there were any justice, we'd just put you back in your old job. But not with that hand."

I think about it.

"Cut. Off."

"What?" she says, genuinely shocked.

"Amputate," I explain. "Injury. No tell."

She shakes her head.

"Either you are far too dangerous to do that, or far too crazy to let you."

She thinks for a minute.

"I'll leave it up to you. Want a bullet before the furnace?"

I don't even have to think about it.

It is false to die with a weapon not drawn.

"No."

She gets up, signals her guards, pauses at the door.

"I'll see what I can do. No promises."

###

An hour later, I am returned to my cell without discussion or comment.

I'm going to be getting a little thirsty by and by.

I start drinking by cupping my hand into the toilet bowl.

Drugs are expensive. Unlikely they've doctored the water supply for the whole facility. Just a drip in the upper sink tap.

Again, false to die with a weapon not drawn.

I am just as much at war for my country as I was on that first horrible day when San Francisco burned.

When hundreds of thousands of people burn in a furnace, what's one more?