TEDDY Oberg stared at a steel chain inches from his eyes. It swayed and rattled. The metal floor beneath him, only thinly padded by shit- and piss-smeared straw, flexed and creaked as the bogies jolted slowly over a slanted roadbed.
“We’re sending you for remolding,” his final interrogator had said. “You are a war criminal, member of a criminal organization. Do you understand?”
“You mean … the U.S. Navy?”
“No, Oberg. I mean the SEALs. Do you understand why they are a criminal organization?”
“I understand now. Yes.”
“What are they?”
“Terrorists. Assassins. Murderers of children and women.”
“You deserve to die for your crimes. But perhaps you’re not beyond help.”
“Where?” he’d managed to whisper.
“You will see when you get there.”
When they were done, they had turned him over to the political police. Flown him off the island, to the mainland, he assumed, though there were no windows in the cargo bay of the transport. His sessions with State Security, carried out with more leisure than the military had displayed, had left him with what he judged were torn rotator cuffs in his shoulders. This was from being hoisting into the air and dropped with his arms cuffed behind his back. When they weren’t doing that, he was still pinioned, but in a way he’d never seen before. One arm was pulled up and over his shoulder, cuffed to the other, which was twisted up behind his back. Not only was it agonizing, it made it impossible to take a full breath. Along with no sleep, very little food, and the beatings.
Of course, the beatings. He’d blacked out several times during those weeks. Couldn’t remember much now. A lot seemed to have been erased. Just blank. Where he’d had memories was now just animal terror.
They loved shackles, that was for sure. He hadn’t spent half an hour without cuffs since Yongxing. The good news was that on the last pee-and-mush break, one of their car guards, a teenager with a round, pouch-cheeked face, had unlocked each prisoner, one at a time, as another guard stood aiming an AK. He’d locked the left or right cuff, depending on which side you lay on, to the chain. This left each prisoner with one hand free, so they didn’t have to piss in their pants now; they could piss into the straw. The first time Teddy did, he wasn’t surprised to find his urine was deep red with blood.
He was crammed into a boxcar with a hundred Vietnamese. The Viets, many wounded, had been captured during an action in the Paracels. A helicopter had strafed them after their ship went down, then been shot down in turn. Two crewmen had made it out of the crash. They hadn’t lasted long, when they hit the water in the midst of the surviving Vietnamese.
This was the only news he’d had of the war since he’d been captured.
He lay on his back in the shit- and pus-fouled straw as the train jolted along, creeping uphill. The car was too cold at night to sleep, but too hot during the day to do much more than sweat. Two long chains ran fore and aft, padlocked into welded staples at each end. The prisoners were shackled to the chains. In four days since loading, they’d left the car three times. The guards unlocked the chains at the ends, then shouted the prisoners out to relieve themselves beside the right-of-way. Always in thick forest, or on a deserted, gravelly mountainside looking out over a bleak plain. At the head of the train, a black locomotive panted, venting steam and smoke as it took aboard water and fresh coal. The prisoners had been given bowls of cold cornmeal mush and murky water from pails. Several of the Vietnamese had died, but were still shackled to the snaffle. Obviously, to make the count come out right when they got wherever they were going. Teddy had eyed the mush. Started to scoop out a bowl; then handed it to the guy next to him. Who’d goggled at him, before wolfing it down.
From the position of the sun during these breaks, he figured they were headed north. He observed this from habit only. His apathy would have scared him if he’d cared. He could spring that padlock. An old German design they’d covered in lock-picking class. But what would be the point? Plus, every move hurt. His leg and shoulders were minefields of agony. His foot hung twisted, limp. He could barely generate the will to prop himself on an elbow to catch the occasional whiff of fresh air that came in from the barred grating high up on the side of the car.
He closed his eyes in the jolting darkness.
Wouldn’t it be better just to die?
* * *
SOME interminable time later, iron wheels clanked to a halt. The train stood motionless and silent for a long while. Someone wailed, far away, and the muffled coughing from the other prisoners never stopped. The Vietnamese seemed to have a lot of lung trouble. Maybe from inhaling fuel. Plus, each succeeding night seemed to get colder, the air less substantial. They were climbing, gradually, to some high plateau.
Suddenly the doors slid open, clanging and echoing. The guards’ shouts caromed around, along with a racket they liked to make whacking the steel walls with batons. “Du chulai! Du chulai! Pow, pow!” He wasn’t sure what that meant literally, but it seemed to be pretty much like the “raus, raus” you heard the SS shouting in movies. The Viets scrambled up, those who could, and edged toward the bluish evening light at the door. Those who couldn’t were hauled to their feet by their chainmates. Teddy’s two nearest mates got up slowly. Both older, maybe officers, he couldn’t be sure. One, Trinh, spoke some English. But Teddy didn’t want to know them any better. No point to that, either.
Outside, it was evening. A barren waste stretched around them, made more haunting by a stiff wind that kicked up dust and tumbleweeds. The rails stretched into the distance. A water tower, a pile of coal, a ramshackle shed. The perfect setting for a rice Western. An ancient Chinese sat propped against a rusty loader, backdropped by immense heaps of brown dirt. He nodded, smiling and clapping as the guards beat the prisoners out of the cars and unshackled them. “You mi bang,” the troops shouted, then louder, as if yelling harder would make them comprehend. “You mi bang! Mi bang!” They pushed, shoved, and clubbed them toward the piles.
Teddy figured it out. The stack of shovels. Seizing one, he was rewarded with a curt nod from a guard. Dragging the useless leg, he hobbled to the heap and dug in. Under the brown dust, black coal. A husky Vietnamese with bandaged hands grabbed a wheelbarrow, and Teddy and the other prisoners started filling it, those without shovels using cupped hands.
When he glanced up, Teddy was startled to find himself looking into another European face. The other flinched back too. Stick-thin, almost ghostlike, with a narrow, projecting chin, a brown scraggy beard. Were his own eyes that haunted? “Where the ’ell’d you come from?” the wraith muttered.
“U.S. Navy. What’re you … Australian?”
“Too right.” They couldn’t shake hands under the guards’ gazes, but traded a word each time they passed. The guy’s name was Pitchard, or Pritchard. “Mates call me Magpie.”
“Obie.”
“Guess their loader’s cactus. Truly back o’ Bourke here, eh?”
“Ass end of nowhere. You a pilot?”
“Radar-O. Shot down in the South Sea. You?”
“Diver.”
Pritchard cast an eye around them. “Fella could walk off right here.”
“If he could walk,” Teddy said. Pritchard eyed his foot, then turned away to hammer with the point of his shovel at an immense solid block of coal, breaking it into pieces small enough to haul. A guard screamed and they separated, but kept track of each other as they moved about.
Teddy began to detect an unwelcome sensation, as if his guts were about to drop out. He hadn’t had a bowel movement in a week. Why now? But it was undeniable. Immediate. He nodded to Pritchard and Trinh, and approached one of the guards.
The trooper eyed him as he neared, unslinging his AK. The old model with the wooden stock. Every SEAL trained with Kalashnikovs. If he could get his hands on it … He bowed. “Mister Honorable Guard, or whatever. Permission to take a crap.”
“Manwei bowgow.” The guard made a threatening gesture with his rifle.
Teddy cringed. “Take a crap.” He pointed to his ass.
The guard’s eyes widened. “Manwei bowgow,” he shouted, face contorting. “Manwei bowgow!”
Teddy got it that time. He bowed again, lower this time. Murmured, humbly, “Manwei bowgow, you officious cat turd.”
“Zhe shi gang heshi de! Ni zhang yao shenme?”
Teddy pointed to his ass again, then off to behind the coal piles. The guard shook his head, scowling. He nodded to the bare dirt by the rail line, where, Teddy saw, other prisoners had left their meager droppings.
As he trudged up the embankment, the first stars were coming out, low in the west. He blinked up at them, mind empty.
He was squatting, pants down, when shouting erupted. The guards were aiming at a distant figure. Arms pumping, it was shrinking into the desert. At a word of command, four shots popped in the stillness. The figure jerked, then toppled.
As Teddy had hoped, when it was time to reshackle, the guards didn’t bother to match up names. They just counted a hundred heads into each car, and resecured them. He and Magpie drifted together and got locked into the same snaffle. They started a low conversation as the train jolted back into motion. Rolling north.
Away from the sea.