First Blood

'With a little encouragement I could arrange for you to spend another thirty-five days here. You wanted in damn bad enough. Now you're going through with the rest of it. Why don't you just give in and make things easy for the two of us? Galt, why don't you go up and get the scissors, shaving cream, and razor?'

'I'll only agree to the shower,' the kid said.

'That'll be fine for now. One thing at a time.'

As the kid walked slowly down to the shower stall, Teasle looked again at the lash marks on his back. It was almost six o'clock. The state police would be reporting soon.

Thinking about the time, he counted back to three o'clock in California, unsure now whether to call. If she had changed her mind, she would already have been in touch with him. So if he did phone, he would only be putting pressure on and driving her farther away.

All the same he had to try. Maybe later when he was done with the kid, he would call and just talk without mentioning the divorce.

Who are you fooling? The first thing you'll ask her is whether she's changed her mind.

Inside the stall the kid turned on the spray.

10

The hole was ten feet deep, barely wide enough for him to sit with his legs outstretched. In the evenings they sometimes came with flashlights to peer down at him through the bamboo grate. Shortly after each dawn they removed the grate and hoisted him up to do their chores. It was the same jungle camp they had tortured him in, the same thatched huts and rich green mountains. For a reason he did not at first understand, they had treated his wounds while he was unconscious: the slashes in his chest where the officer had repeatedly punctured him with a slender knife and drawn the blade across, grating against his ribs; the lacerations in his back where the officer had crept up behind, suddenly lashing. Lashing. His leg was badly infected, but when they had opened fire on his unit and captured him, no bone had been hit, only thigh muscle, and eventually he was able to limp around.

Now they did not question him anymore, did not threaten him, did not even talk to him. They always made gestures to show him his work: dumping slops, digging latrines, building cook-fires. He guessed their silence toward him was punishment for pretending not to understand their language. Still, at night in his hole, he heard their conversations dimly and from the scraps of words he was satisfied that even while unconscious he had not told them what they wanted to know. After the ambush and his capture, the rest of his unit must have gone on to its objective, because now he heard about the exploded factories and how this camp was one of many in the mountains watching for other American guerrillas.

Soon they had him doing more chores, heavier ones, feeding him less, making him work longer, sleep less. He came to understand. Too much time had gone by for him to know where his team would be. Since he could not give them information, they had fixed his wounds so they could play with him some more and find out how much work he could take before it killed him. Well, he would show them a long wait for that. There was not much they could do to him that his instructors had not already put him through. Special Forces school and the five mile runs they made him run before breakfast, the ten miles of running after breakfast, heaving up the meal as he ran but careful not to break ranks because the penalty was ten extra miles for anyone who broke ranks to be sick. Climbing high towers, shouting his roster number to the jumpmaster, leaping, legs together, feet braced, elbows tucked in, yelling 'One thousand, two thousand, three thousand, four thousand' as he dropped, stomach rising to his throat, spring-harness jerking him up just before the ground. Thirty pushups for every lapse in the routine, plus a pushup shouted 'For the Airborne!' Another thirty pushups if the shout was weak plus another one 'For the Airborne!' In the mess hall, on the toilet, everywhere, the officers waited, abruptly yelling 'Hit it,' and he would have to snap down in a jumping pose, shouting 'One thousand, two thousand, three thousand, four thousand,' snapping to attention till dismissed, then shouting 'Clear, sir,' running off shouting 'Airborne! Airborne! Airborne!' Day-jumps into forests. Night-jumps into swamps to live there for a week, his only equipment a knife. Classes in weapons, explosives, surveillance, interrogation, hand-to-hand combat. A field of cattle, he and the other students holding knives. Bowels and stomachs strewn across the field, animals still alive and screeching. Hollowed carcasses and the order to crawl in, to wrap the carcass around him, to wash himself in blood.