Agents In Harms Way (10 page)

The fast stream slowed to a trickle. The arc collapsed. And after making sure the last few drops dribbled on that squirming, urine-splattered body, El Commandante, moving in the same calm, deliberate manner, casually tucked away his depleted manhood, zippered up, and straightened his clothes before stepping back. With hands on hips, he thoroughly enjoyed the pleasing sight of the once-proud gringa, her elegant features dripping with his piss.

Signaling an end to the humiliating performance, General Humberto Emilio Hernandez simply turned his back on them, and stomped back into his grand house. Then the girls were led away to the low barracks that the soldiers called “El Commandante’s stable”.

But Mallory was not allowed to go with them. She was to stay tied in place, spread-eagled on the hard parade ground, publicly displayed for all to see, the depraved Commandante’s piss drying on her face and body, and in her hair. The rank smell of urine invaded her nostrils, as the young woman lay with eyes closed, determined to endure even this humiliation, and whatever other indignities her degenerate captors could dish out. She would survive!

What they lacked was a supply of underwear, for under the summer-weight linen dresses, the captives would be naked because it was desired that female prisoners should always be readily available. Still, the smooth, opaque linen was sufficient to provide modest cover; only if a prisoner was made to hike up her skirt by one of the officers would her lack of panties become evident to any curious onlooker. Of course, the ubiquitous slave collars remained: 4-inch high collars, softly padded and made of soft, buttery leather, each with its own shiny numbered tag dangling on prominent display.

Even as they quickly slipped into their new uniforms, the girls were meeting their fellow captives who crowded around to greet the new arrivals. Greta was warm, gracious, and welcoming. A wiry and hard-bodied blonde with short straight hair: her tawny, small-breasted body had acquired a deep, all-over tan from months of exposure on the sunny mountaintop. Her small, rounded face, especially when she smiled and showed her strong white teeth, seemed eternally youthful. Greta, in her mid-forties, they learned, had been confined in the camp the longest, well over a year now.

She had been a German anthropologist, a Ph.D., doing fieldwork in Africa, when she had been taken. It seemed so long ago. She remembered the thrill the day she had been told that she would be privileged — the first white woman ever allowed to witness the secret initiation ceremony. She remembered the chanting and tribal dances, that went on and on into the small hours of the night; the strange brew she had been made to drink. After that, her memory came back only in disjointed fragments. She had a restless night that seemed to go on forever, tossing and turning in a mild delirium, until she finally woke up — and found herself a concubine in an army brothel on the Mountain of Love! The tawny blonde had been stripped, and collared with tag number “1” —
Numero Uno
. Somehow, it seemed appropriate for her, the first among many; she wore it well. Greta had become a sort of mother hen, looking after each new girl added to El Commandante’s growing collection. As the oldest, most experienced prisoner, the others naturally looked to her. Greta was someone who knew the ropes; a girlfriend and confidante — a woman to be trusted.

Linda was another girl who had strayed a bit too far while blithely embarked on a boat excursion, and had turned up in police records as a missing person. She was a plain, ordinary girl, with caramel-colored hair which she wore parted in the middle and swept back along each sides to be pinned behind her ears in a neat, youthful style. Though her face was unremarkable, she had nice legs and her breasts, softly rounded, ample handfuls, hung loose under the thin bodice, their plump and delectable weight causing them to have just the slightest sag. Quiet and introverted, Linda could easily have been a suburban housewife, which in fact she had been, before the divorce, and that ill-fated trip. Linda wore tag number “3”.

Number “4” belonged to the skinny blonde the newcomers had seen, publicly displayed, on their arrival in the camp. Lena’s boyish, close-cropped hair, was just now was growing back into a faint stubble; the Commandante had ordered every single hair be shaved off her long thin body. Like the others, she sported an all-over tan, which invited the admiring hand to caress those lean, spare loins, the fine, velvety-smooth skin, and the taut-skinned, hand-muscled butt that the girl liked to wiggle with such impudence before the eyes of her snarling guards. In fact, although she loudly complained about her treatment, Lena went out of her way to seek repeated punishment at the hands of her captors. The others could only shake their heads about incorrigible Lena.

Numbers “5” and ”6” were often mistaken for sisters although they were, in fact, mother and daughter. Roxanne, who everyone called “Annie” and her daughter, Sarah, had been assigned numbers 5 and 6 respectively. Annie had been an attractive stewardess who had risen to a management position of some prominence with British Airways. A brisk, competent businesswoman, self-assured, and charming, she had never considered the risk in taking her teenaged daughter with her on a holiday trip to the Far East — a trip from which neither mother nor daughter would return.

Mallory found the almost identical good looks uncanny; one a smaller version of the other. Both had the same china blue eyes, the small upturned nose, the high cheekbones, the same determined, pointed chin. Roxanne had the fully developed figure of a mature woman, while her daughter was a long-legged, willowy girl, almost flat chested, although the emergence of petite, young breasts held hopeful promise. The mother wore her short blonde hair in a smooth helmet that fell to her collar, while her daughter’s hair, paler, almost silvery, was pulled straight back and allowed to fall into a perky pony-tail. The startling resemblance of the English pair was not lost on the perverted Commandante, who spared no expense in having special clothing delivered to the mountaintop. In time, mother and daughter were required to present themselves before this madman dressed alike, in the traditional uniforms of English schoolgirls, donated by an exclusive girl’s school, in response to a modest request from a very generous, and quite anonymous, benefactor. As she looked around at the assembled group, Mallory remembered that someone had once remarked on the evil Commandant’s preference for blonde women.

Mickey, Number “7”, rounded out the crew — a cute girl with pixyish features, and a short mop of dusky brown hair. Spry and slightly built, there was a quickness, an eager alertness about the girl; she engaged the world with her big brown eyes from under a splay of elfin bangs. The Commandante called her “Mouse,” and the nickname stuck.

With the addition of the newcomers, there were now ten women in General Hernandez’s “stable” — or would have been, had number “2” remained in the harem. The newcomers learned that Number 2 was the girl that kept hope alive; she was the one who, quite impossibly, had escaped. Margaret Donnereau was a cunning, duplicitous woman with a reckless disregard of danger; she played games with the guards, and only pretended to submit. Then, she would taunt them. She even once had spit at El Commandante! And of course, she was always being disciplined for one infraction or another. She had tried to run away repeatedly, only to be caught and punished by the most diabolical means the that their debauched captors could devise. Then, one day, she was gone! The rumors swept the camp: a pale, Yankee woman had been found wandering alone in jungle by sympathetic rebels, who took her in and managed to get her through the coastal mountains and down to the coast. That was several months ago; Maggie was the only woman ever known to have escaped from the remote mountain fortress.

***

“
Prostituta Numero Nueve,”
nee Ms. Mallory Channing, was sitting on her bunk with her knees drawn up, heels planted on the edge of the mattress, carefully painting each toenail, while standing behind her, attending to her damp hair, the ubiquitous ”Mouse” watched the primping woman in the mirror. For some reason, the nickname “Mouse” had made the transition from captors to captives. And with her typical good humor, Mickey readily answered to her nickname. Publicly, in front of their guards, the women had to refer to themselves, and to each other, by their assigned numbers, or punishment was swift; but when they were alone together, they made a point of using their given names. It helped to maintain some shred of dignity.

And dignity was just about as rare a commodity as privacy in the open, Spartan barracks with its neat row of bunks down either side. Even the basic privacy of the bathroom, so often taken for granted, was denied to the female prisoners. The doors had been removed from the toilet stalls, and it was not uncommon for a girl in the midst of squat, to look up and find herself caught in the act of relieving herself by a wide-grinning soldier. In a like manner, the female prisoner was forced to perform her ablutions in the wide, open-bayed shower room before the appreciative eyes of the camp’s delighted officers, who gathered each day to enjoy the sight of a bevy of young women soaping and rinsing their healthy young bodies in the steamy warmth of the large circular bay.

Cleanliness was a fetish with the Commadante, who insisted on daily hygiene; frequent showers became social events as the women were paired off, and expected to wash thoroughly. Each girl was to attend to her own needs, and then those of her shower-mate, sending soapy hands and washrags to probe the most intimate curves and crevasses, all under the shouted encouragement of their amused captors. It took only few minutes of this spectacle before the flushed and excited officers tore off their uniforms. With monstrous erection bobbing and weaving, the naked soldiers rushed to join in. Thus, these daily showers inevitably ended up as communal free-for-alls.

El Commandante himself never participated in these barracks games; preferring to take his pleasures in the privacy on his mansion where any one of his women — or two, or three, or more, could be instantly ordered up for an evenings’ entertainment. It was the two younger officers, Lieutenants Noriega and Ramirez, along with the ubiquitous Major Guzman, who were the most frequent visitors to the women’s quarters. The one remaining member of the General’s staff, the strange Captain Alvarez, a bony-faced man with close-cropped hair and a permanent frown, never joined in on the communal fun, but preferred to watch from afar as the wild debauchery took place under his detached, cold gaze. Captain Alvarez was not well liked by the garrison, but he was loathed and feared by the female prisoners. A man of overweening pride, he treated them all with equal disdain, even Guzman, who was nominally his superior.

Alvarez preferred to meet his women one-to-one, on the sun-baked parade square, or alone in one of the “holding cells” where recalcitrant prisoners were sent to contemplate their fate, or in the punishment hut, where a woman, on her knees and pleading for mercy, would find herself entirely in the hands of Hernando Alvarez. Those were the moments he longed for, most enjoyed; meting out, at his leisure, the sort of slow, deliberate discipline that earned him his evil reputation. So far, Mallory was lucky enough to have escaped the camp sadist and his ‘private sessions’.

In fact, except for being subjected to the singular degradation she met upon their arrival, she, of all the girls, has been largely left alone. She regarded that as strange. After those first few hours that she had spent staked out, spread-eagled in the sun, she had been released, allowed to clean up, and given some time to recover from her initial ordeal. Still, she couldn’t help feeling unclean, the feeling lingered: the vivid memory of her public defilement at the hands of the smirking General Hernandez; the lingering stink of piss that had splattered her face and body and soaked her hair. Their first night in the camp, Kip and Meghan had been ordered to present themselves for the General’s pleasure, but Mallory had not been required to accompany them on that, their first visit to the “Casa”. Thus far, she had not been used sexually, nor had she been publicly humiliated, although she had been subjected to the daily indignities that were a woman’s lot in the masculine world on the mountaintop.

She was idly contemplating this strange turn of events as she finished off her toenails, and capped the little bottle of paint. She looked up into the mirror before her, and meeting the eyes of the Mouse, gave the girl a wry smile. In the camp, the girls were thrown on each other’s company for long hours at a time, and the Mouse seemed to have attached herself to Mallory, much to Kip’s annoyance.

Mallory knew it was only a matter of time before the General would want her. She clung to the slim hope that the two-bit dictator might come to his senses; even now, she might try to find a way to negotiate out of this mess. Surely he would not want to call down the weight of the American government on his head! By now he must have realized a terrible mistake had been made. This time his net had yielded two
American agents
who had fallen into his hands by accident!

Of course, he might just as easily have them killed, quietly, with no one to know. But Mallory felt, deep down, that neither end was likely. For she, like all the others, would be useful to the warlord of the hills…as long as they could serve as sex toys. When she no longer amused him, or his officers, she would be given to the soldiers’ barracks — a prize gringa to be kept there, used and abused, to be made to perform with the common whores and camp followers. It was too horrible to think about!

Each day a duty roster was posted listing the prisoner’s work assignments. Half the women would be assigned to household duties: cleaning the officer’s quarters, the latrines, doing laundry, making beds, and cooking the meals; but a few would always be held back, assigned to duties of a more personal nature in the officers’ bedrooms. And of course, one or more would inevitably be assigned to the Commandante’s lavish Casa. While Mallory sat on the bunk waiting for her toenails to dry, the Mouse ran with the others to check out the orders that had just been posted inside the barracks’s door. She rushed back with the news: all three of the newcomers: Numbers 8, 9, and 10, had been selected to serve El Commandante that afternoon.