Pines (29 page)

He holds up his left.

“I wrote this,” he says, showing the tattoo he carved into his palm with the tip of the ballpoint pen—dark blue and
sloppy, his hand still bleeding in places. But given the time constraints and the circumstance, it was the best he could do. He says, “I know that soon I will be screaming. In terrible pain. Every time you wonder what I’m thinking, even though I may not be able to speak, you can just look at my hand and take those two words to heart. It’s an American saying. I trust you understand its full meaning?”

“You have no idea,” Aashif whispers, and for the first time, Ethan registers unchecked emotion in the man’s eyes. Through the fear, he makes himself catalog the satisfaction of having broken this monster’s cool, knowing it may be his only moment of victory in this brutal transaction.

“Actually, I do,” Ethan says. “You will torture me, break me, and eventually murder me. I know exactly what’s coming. I just have one request.”

This elicits a subtle smile.

“What?”

“Quit telling me how much of a stud you are, you piece of shit. Whip it out and show me.”

* * *

All day, Aashif shows him.

* * *

Some hours later, Ethan snaps back to consciousness.

Aashif sets the bottle of smelling salts on the table beside the knives.

“Welcome back. Have you seen yourself?” the man asks him.

Ethan has lost all concept of how long he’s been down here in the brown-walled room without windows that smells of death and rancid blood.

“Look at your leg.” Aashif’s face is beaded with sweat. “I said look at your leg.”

When Ethan refuses, Aashif reaches his bloody fingers into an earthenware vessel, comes out with a handful of salt.

He flings it at Ethan’s leg.

Screams through the ball gag.

Agony.

Unconsciousness.

* * *

“Do you understand how completely I own you now, Ethan? How I will always own you? Do you hear me?”

Truer words.

* * *

Ethan has placed himself in another world, trying to follow a line of thought that leads to his wife, to her giving birth to their firstborn, and him in the hospital with her, but the pain keeps dragging him back into now.

* * *

“I can make it end,” Aashif purrs into his ear. “I can also keep you alive for days. Whatever I want. I know it hurts. I know you’re in more pain than you even knew a person was capable of experiencing. But consider that I’ve only been working on one leg. And I’m very good at this. I will not allow you to bleed to death. You will only die when it pleases me.”

* * *

There is undeniable intimacy between them.

Aashif cutting.

Ethan screaming.

At first, Ethan hadn’t watched, but now he can’t tear his eyes away.

Aashif forces him to drink water and shovels lukewarm beans into his mouth, all the while talking to him in the most casual tone, as if he were merely a barber and Ethan had popped in for a trim.

* * *

Later, Aashif sits in the corner drinking water and watching Ethan, studying his handiwork with a mix of amusement and pride.

He wipes his brow and rises to his feet, the hem of his dishdasha dripping Ethan’s blood.

“Tomorrow morning first thing, I will castrate you, cauterize the wound with a blow torch, and then go to work on your upper body. Think about what you want for breakfast.”

He turns off the light on his way out of the room.

* * *

All night, Ethan hangs in darkness.

Waiting.

Sometimes he hears footsteps stop outside the door, but it never opens.

The pain is titanic but he manages to think clearly about his wife and the child he will never know.

He whispers to Theresa from this dungeon and wonders if she can hear him.

He moans and he cries.

Trying to come to grips with the idea that he is meeting
this
end.

Even years later, it will be this moment—hanging alone in the dark with nothing but the pain and his thoughts and the waiting for tomorrow—that will haunt him.

Always waiting for Aashif’s return.

Always wondering what his son or daughter will look like.

What their name will be.

Always wondering how Theresa will get on without him.

She will even say to him four months later, sitting at the breakfast table in their kitchen in Seattle as the rain falls, “It’s like you never came back to me, Ethan.”

And he will say, “I know,” as the cries of his son come through the baby monitor, thinking,
Aashif didn’t just take physical pieces out of me
.

* * *

And then the door finally opens, razor blades of light streaming in, bringing Ethan back to consciousness, back to the pain.

When his eyes adjust to the onslaught of daylight, it isn’t the silhouette of Aashif he sees but the bulky profile of a SEAL in full gear holding an M-4 with an ACOG whose barrel gives off wisps of smoke.

He shines a light on Ethan and says with a thick, west-Texas drawl, “Jesus.”

* * *

Theresa thinks the leg wounds are from the crash.

* * *

The SEAL is a sergeant, last name Brooks, and he carries Ethan on his back up a narrow flight of stairs, out of the basement dungeon into a kitchen where pieces of meat are burning on a skillet.

Breakfast interruptus.

Three Arab men lie dead in the hall, and five members of the SEAL team occupy the cramped kitchen, one of them kneeling down beside Aashif, tying a strip of cloth around his left leg above the knee, which bleeds from a gunshot wound.

Brooks lowers Ethan into a chair and growls at his medic, “Get away from him.” He stares down at Aashif. “Who cut up this soldier?”

Aashif responds to the question with something in Arabic.

“Me no hablo whatever the fuck you just said.”

“It’s him,” Ethan says. “He did this to me.”

For a moment, there is nothing in the kitchen but the stench of burning meat and the gunpowder from the firefight.

“We’ll have air in two minutes,” Brooks says to Ethan. “This is the only cocksucker left and there’s no one in this room gonna say shit about what you do.”

A soldier standing by the stove and holding a sniper rifle says, “Fuckin-a.”

“Can you stand me up?” Ethan asks.

Brooks hauls Ethan out of his seat, Ethan groaning as he inches his way across the kitchen toward Aashif.

When they’re standing over him, the SEAL unholsters a SIG.

Ethan takes it out of his hand, checks the load.

It will occur to him months from now that if this had been a movie, he wouldn’t have done it. Wouldn’t have sunk to the level of this monster. But the ugly truth is it never even crosses Ethan’s mind
not
to do it. And though he will continually dream about the crash, about all the things Aashif did to him,
this moment will never haunt him. He will only wish it could have lasted longer.

Ethan is naked, on his feet only with the support of Brooks, his legs like something that belongs in a butcher shop.

He tells Aashif to look at him.

In the distance, he can hear the distinctive
whop-whop
of the approaching Black Hawk.

Beyond that, it is as quiet as mass out on the street.

The torturer and the tortured hold eye contact for a long second.

Aashif says, “You’re still mine, you know.”

As he smiles, Ethan shoots him through the face.

* * *

The next time he comes to consciousness, he’s leaning against the window of the Black Hawk, staring three hundred feet down at the streets of Fallujah, morphine gliding through his system and Brooks’s voice screaming in his ear that he’s safe, that he’s going home, and that two days ago, his wife gave birth to a healthy baby boy.

Ethan opened his eyes.

His head leaned against a window and he was staring down at mountainous terrain scrolling past at a hundred and fifty miles per hour. Cruising, if he had to guess, at twenty-five hundred feet AGL. He’d flown an air ambulance for six months after returning from Iraq and before applying to the Secret Service, and he recognized not only the voice of the Lycoming turbines roaring above his head but the dimensions of the BK117 airframe. He’d flown this model with Flight for Life.

Raising his head off the glass, he moved to scratch an itch on the side of his nose, but found his hands cuffed behind his back.

The passenger cabin had been arranged in a standard configuration—four seats divided between two facing rows, and a cargo space in the rear of the fuselage, hidden behind a curtain.

Jenkins and Sheriff Pope sat across, and Ethan felt pleased to see the lawman’s nose still bandaged.

Nurse Pam—having traded her classic nurse’s uniform for black cargo pants, a long-sleeved black T, BDUs, and an H&K tactical shotgun—sat beside him, a half-moon trail of sutures curving from a shaved portion of her skull, across her temple, and midway down her cheek. Beverly had been responsible for that, and Ethan noted a flicker of rage at the memory of what had been done to that poor woman.

Jenkins’ voice crackled through the headset. “How you feeling, Ethan?”

Though he felt groggy from the meds, his head had already begun to clear.

But he didn’t answer.

Just stared.

“Apologies for the shock yesterday, but we couldn’t take any chances. You’ve proven you’re more than capable at handling yourself, and I didn’t want to risk any further loss of life. Yours or my men.”

“Loss of life, huh? That’s what you’re so worried about now?”

“We also took the liberty of rehydrating you, giving you some nourishment, new clothes. Seeing to your injuries. I have to say...you look much better.”

Ethan glanced out the window—endless pine forests streaming through valleys and over hills that occasionally climbed above the timberline into sheer rock escarpments.

“Where are you taking me?” Ethan asked.

“I’m keeping my word.”

“To whom?”

“You. I’m showing you what this is all about.”

“I don’t under—”

“You will. How much longer, Roger?”

The pilot broke in over the headset. “Have you on the ground in fifteen.”

* * *

It was a jaw-dropping sweep of backcountry.

No roads, no houses as far as Ethan could see.

Just forested hills and the occasional squiggle of water through the trees—glimpses of stream and river.

Soon, the pine forest fell away behind them and Ethan could tell by the pitch change of the twin-turbine that the pilot had initiated their descent.

* * *

They flew over brown, arid-looking foothills, which over the course of ten miles flowed down into a vast hardwood-conifer forest.

At two hundred feet AGL, the helicopter banked and circled the same square mile of real estate for several minutes while Pope studied the terrain through a pair of binoculars.

He finally spoke into his mike. “We’re looking good.”

* * *

They set down in a large clearing surrounded by towering oaks in full autumn color, the rotors stirring the grass in long wavelengths that expanded out from the helicopter in concentric circles.

Ethan gazed across the field while the engines powered down.

Jenkins said, “Would you join me for a little hike, Ethan?”

Pam reached over, unbuckled his lap belt and shoulder harness.

“Cuffs too?” she asked.

Jenkins looked at Ethan. “You’ll behave?”

“Sure.”

Ethan leaned forward so Pam could access the keyhole.

The bracelets popped open.

He stretched his arms out and massaged his wrists.

Jenkins looked at Pope, opened his hand, said, “You bring something for me like I asked?”

The sheriff filled it with a stainless-steel revolver that looked beefy enough to have been bored out for .357 Magnum cartridges.

Jenkins looked dubious.

“I’ve seen you shoot,” Pope said. “You’ll be fine. Anywhere near the heart, or better yet a head shot, and you’re golden.”

Pope reached back behind his seat and came up with an AK-47 outfitted with a hundred-round drum. Ethan watched him switch the mode from safety to three-round burst.

Jenkins pulled off his headset. Then he swept aside the curtain between the passenger cabin and the cockpit, said to the pilot, “We’ll be on channel four, and you’ll hear from us if we need to leave in a hurry.”

“I’ll keep my finger on the engine start.”

“You radio at the first sign of trouble.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Arnie left you a gun?”

“Two, in fact.”

“We won’t be long.”

Jenkins opened the cabin door and climbed out.

After Pope and Pam, Ethan followed, stepping down onto the skid and then into the soft, waist-high grass. He caught up with Jenkins, and the four of them moved quickly across the field, Pope out in front with the assault rifle, Pam bringing up the rear.

It was late in the day—a crisp, golden afternoon.

Everyone seemed twitchy and nervous, like they were out on a patrol.

Ethan said, “Ever since I came to Wayward Pines, you’ve done nothing but fuck with me. What are we doing out here in the goddamned wilderness? I want to know right now.”

They entered the woods, slogging their way through a riot of underbrush.

The noise of birds getting louder.

“But Ethan, this isn’t the wilderness.”

Ethan glimpsed something barely visible through the trees, realized he’d initially missed it because of all the vegetation. He quickened his pace, now clawing his way
through the bushes and saplings that comprised the forest understory, Jenkins following closely behind.