It was coming on three itchy, stifling hours of hot and dull agony later when Gannon reared back at the sudden loud scuff of a boot by his face.
Then the hood was suddenly pulled.
Gannon winced and pinched his eyes shut tight at the scorch of the sudden bright light. It was a full minute later when he could hold them open long enough to take a look around.
And immediately felt like closing them again.
He was on a kind of plywood cot with no mattress in a small room with cracked plaster walls. A prison cell, he thought at first until he realized that bright daylight was flooding in through a window above him. Prison cells rarely had windows and this was a normal-looking one without any bars on it.
Not a prison then?
He turned the other way. Whoever had pulled his hood was gone, and there was an open door to his left that led out into a scoured stucco corridor. Ten feet into this narrow hallway along the wall was a cheap-looking industrial gray metal tray on wheels.
It was a hospital, he realized, staring at the cart’s rusty wheels. Some kind of rundown hellhole country hospital.
“Shit, shit, shit,” he said.
As he attempted to sit up fully on the cot, there was a loud metal clicking and clacking by his feet, and he looked down to where his ankle cuffs had been passed through a thick reddish iron chain.
A pulse of terror passed through him as he stared at the rusty links. They looked about a million years old, like slave block chains or something. Like something you’d see in a ye-olden-times Middle Ages dungeon.
He looked up as there were what sounded like car horn honks from outside the window. Then he turned at another scuff of a boot.
The figure who stepped in through the open doorway was about six feet tall and bodybuilder-jacked and was wearing camo military fatigues. Even with a black ski mask on, Gannon immediately recognized it was the muscled-up jackass who had taken him out of Alaska.
Gannon looked at the camo. It had little square digital dots in it, splotches of black and orange against light green. Not US military, Gannon thought. But he’d seen it before. Did the British SAS use it? No, it was some other NATO country. What was it called? Flecktarn, he remembered.
He definitely recognized the weapon in the guy’s thigh holster. It was a Colt M1911 .45 in a blackened finish. It was the government model. Big five-inch barrel. Eight in the magazine plus one in the pipe.
Gannon stared at the gun for another second then finally looked up at the guy staring back at him.
Like the .45, the guy’s eyes seemed to have a blackened finish to them as well. Like a doll’s. Button eyes, they called them when he was a kid.
NATO fatigues? Gannon thought again, trying to figure things out. Was he in Turkey?
As Gannon tried to rack his memory, he noticed how slow going it was. His mental acuity seemed blurry, wooden. It was the blow to the head he’d taken, he realized. Still some cobwebs. Concussions took a few days or sometimes even weeks to clear. Or was it the mystery injections?
“Hey, nice fatigues. Belgian?” was the first thing that Gannon could think to say after another few seconds.
Button Eyes wouldn’t say. He kept staring.
“French?” Gannon tried.
“A medic is on his way up here,” Button Eyes said in perfect unaccented American English as he bent and undid the handcuffs. “He’ll clean you up and get you dressed. You give him some trouble, you’re going to be carrying around your teeth in your pocket.”
“Got it,” Gannon said. “Could I just get a drink, man? I need some water. I’m dying of thirst.”
But Button Eyes had already turned, and the door of the closet-size room slammed shut hard enough to raise the dust.