FIFTY-ONE
Just before Angela reached the men, she bent down without slowing and snatched up something.
Jack thought that it looked like a metal rod of some kind—possibly a length of rebar—about three feet long. She must have seen it lying there in the moonlight when she broke into a dead run. She had been trying to get to it before the men with large knives reached her.
As the men charged toward her, she abruptly stopped. She twirled the rebar in her fingers like a high school cheerleader twirling a baton.
Just before the men reached her, she tossed it up in the air and caught it by one end. Holding it like a baseball bat, she took a mighty swing as the man out in front reached her.
Her swing connected with the man’s hand as if she were knocking a ball out of the park. His knife flew away into the night. He let out a cry of pain as he crumpled to a knee. Angela used her swing to spin herself around and slam the rebar into the other man’s forearm just as he tried to stab her. Jack could hear the bone break. Holding his broken arm, the man staggered back a few steps.
The first man had scrambled back to his feet and recovered his balance. He lunged at her to catch her in his arms. Gripping the rebar in both hands as he came at her, she rammed it, end-first, into his face so hard that it speared all the way through his skull and broke out the back. The man’s dead weight twisted as he toppled, ripping the metal rod through his head from her grasp.
Angela ducked into a squat as the second man leaped toward her. His arm reaching out for her went over her head.
Angela pulled a large knife from her right boot. As the man was still staggering past her after missing, she pivoted and with two lightning strikes sliced through his Achilles tendons. He howled in pain and shock when the tendons snapped back up into his legs, the calf muscles pulling up into fat knots of unconnected muscle. He tried to walk on stilted legs but toppled to the ground.
He sat up, trying to reach his crippled legs with his one good hand.
Angela threw a side kick into his face, slamming him back down onto his back. Without an instant’s hesitation, she landed on him, straddling his chest with her bare legs. She pressed the point of her knife to the fleshy spot just below his left eye right above the cheekbone. Blood ran from his broken nose. It was clear to Jack that if he moved, he would gouge out his own eye. The man knew that as well and froze.
“Well, well, well, if it isn’t Miguel, leader of his merry little band of rapists.”
“Sorry. I am truly sorry, señorita,” he pleaded, holding his hands up to the side in surrender.
Angela smiled. “I seriously doubt that you’re the least bit sorry, at least not yet, but you will be.”
“Where did you take the material you made?” Jack asked from over her shoulder. “The Semtex explosive you were working on? Where did you take it?”
Jack put a hand on Angela’s shoulder, not knowing for sure what she had in mind. “Angela,” he cautioned in a low voice for her alone, “we need to get information from this man.”
She shot a look of fury back over shoulder. “Oh, he’s going to give us information. You don’t need to worry about that.”
She turned back to the man under her. “Isn’t that right, Miguel? You’re going to give us the information we want, right?”
“Please, please, señorita! I am so sorry!”
“Answer my friend’s question. Where is the material I saw when I delivered the package to you? Where did you take it?”
“I don’t know! I swear!”
At his denial, and without hesitation, Angela pushed the knife in under his eye and levered it underneath, popping the eyeball out enough for her to rip it out with her other hand. She held the mess of it in her bloody fingers up in front of his good eye as he shrieked and flopped under her.
“Stop screaming, or your tongue is next.”
She didn’t raise her voice. She was so calm, so dead serious, that it made her words far more frightening.
The man wept in terror but he stopped shrieking. “Please! No more!”
He suddenly reached for her hair with his good hand to try to gain control of her. Jack was just about to intervene to protect her when with two swift slashes she cut the tendons in the crook of his arm and then at his shoulder.
The nearly useless arm dropped to the concrete as he shrieked in pain. She put the point of the knife in his mouth to make him go quiet.
“I’ll ask you again. Where is the material I saw when I delivered the package to you? I want you to think very carefully before you answer because if you lie to me again I’m going to start cutting things off you, things you would not like to be without.” She put the point of her knife against his cheek and with a quick circular motion cored out one of his larger moles. He cried out. “I’m going to cut off something more important if you don’t tell us what we want to know.”
To make her point, she moved back, stabbed her knife into his leg, making him gasp, and then pulled the double-edged blade up the length of his pants. The blade was so sharp it cut through his pants, underwear, and leather belt. With the tip of the blade, she flopped the front of his pants and underwear to the side.
“There’s your disgusting little balls now.” She leaned closer. “Why Miguel, this little dick of yours is all shriveled up. Not so much fun like the last time you showed it to me, right Miguel?”
The man was trembling in agony and fright. Tears streamed from his good eye. Blood ran from the empty socket as well as his broken nose.
As afraid as Miguel was, in as much pain as he was, he rolled his head from side to side to let her know he wasn’t going to talk. He looked prepared to let her do her worst, to die for his beliefs, but he was not going to reveal any information.
His willingness to die before revealing anything was where interrogations usually hit a wall. This was already well beyond the bounds of civilized men.
But Jack believed these terrorists were assembling a nuclear bomb. If this man didn’t talk, Jack was going to have to call in help. It could easily be too late by the time they searched the entire complex. Or worse, for all Jack knew, they could have already loaded that bomb into a truck and be driving into a major city. There was simply no time to waste.
Jack would normally have stopped her long ago from what she was doing to this man, but this was that hypothetical situation come to life of what you would be willing to do to get information out of a terrorist if you knew hundreds of thousands of people would die if you didn’t get him to talk.
This was no longer about what was proper or right, but about the survival of untold numbers of innocent people.
Jack contemplated having Angela move aside to let him try, but she was locked on to this man in a way that was profoundly frightening. Something told him to stay out of it.
Angela scooted back up to again sit on his abdomen to hold him down—not that he was going anywhere. She placed the tip of her knife under his right eye. “I think that by now you know I don’t believe you and you also know that I’m not playing games.
“Maybe you had some grand vision of dying a glorious death striking a blow for your idiotic cause. Maybe you even thought that if you got caught, you would be put in prison and that no one would hurt you because Americans always treat terrorists with respect and they don’t believe in behaving in the same barbaric way you do.
“Well, Miguel, here’s your problem. If you would have been caught by the authorities it’s true that they would likely take you to some nice, cozy prison cell in Guantánamo where you would be given prayer rugs and time to pray to Allah every day, food to keep away the pain of hunger, medical care, and outside playtime in the sunshine with the other killers being held there so as not to offend your dignity.
“But I’m not with any of those authorities, so you’re fucked. No nice prison cell for you where you can shout your hate to the guards, spit at them, throw your shit at them, and laugh at how soft the Americans are with all their rules.
“You get none of that because this isn’t about you being a terrorist. This is personal. You raped me. You hung me up by a rope around my neck. You thought I was going to die.
“But I didn’t die.
“You are my captive now—not the American authorities’—and unlike them, I don’t give a fuck about rules. There is no one here to keep me from doing whatever I want with you. And believe me, I have lots of things that I want to do to you—things I dreamed about when I was in the hospital.
“You long for nothing more than to be a killer of innocent women and children in the name of your cause or your god of whatever fucking lunatic gibberish you people thought up while wiping your asses with rocks. You live in filth because you are filth.
“You hunger to kill people who can’t fight back because you are murderers. That’s all you are, murderers. Nothing more. Nothing noble. Just common killers.
“For that, you are going to suffer at my hands. No rules. No law. No salvation. Just you and me.”
“I will give you nothing,” he managed to say in a pant, spittle bubbles forming at the corners of his mouth, defiance in his voice. “You are nothing but an American whore. You are dirt to me. I welcome death. I tell you nothing! I am prepared to die!”
That was it. Jack knew that whatever else she did to him, he was prepared to take it. He was prepared for the pain. Typical of terrorists, he worshipped death, so he welcomed death.
“Die? Who said anything about dying?”
“We will strike you all down. You will get nothing from me. Never! I will die—as a martyr!”
Angela looked up over her shoulder and smiled at Jack. He had absolutely no idea why.
She turned the smile back down at the man bleeding under her. “That’s okay, Miguel.” She patted his cheek. “That’s okay. You really don’t need to tell me.”
“Because you will get nothing! Allah will reward me. New York City is going to vanish under a mushroom cloud far bigger than the bomb at Hiroshima!”
Angela laughed. She actually laughed.
Jack was getting worried. The clock was ticking on a nuclear weapon. He knew these kinds of terrorists. They really were happy to die for their cause. They believed they would live beyond death to look down on the destruction of their Great Satan.
“I don’t think so,” she said, still smiling like she thought he was a funny little man.
“Yes, you will—because I will tell you nothing.”
“You don’t have to, Miguel. You don’t need to tell me anything.” She patted his cheek again. “It’s okay, Miguel.”
He panted for a moment, wincing from the pain. His curiosity finally got the better of him. “What do you mean?”
Angela shrugged. “We’ll simply bring in the dogs.”
He stopped breathing for a second. “Dogs?”