Chapter Eight

The dom observed all this with interest. He was studying his subject extremely carefully, aware from his time in military intelligence that breaking a prisoner required a carefully psychologically attuned balance of punishment and reward. Rafe had been both repelled and fascinated to observe and record his buddy’s interrogation of the beautiful Iraqi bomber—how judicious infliction of pain and erotic humiliation alternating with pleasure eventually produced a state of total infatuation in the mind of the captive under interrogation. The Foreman suspected that this model had the best chance of turning around Nicole’s disastrous course, especially with the addition of frequent and intense sexual pleasure and orgasmic release (means not available in the military intelligence context). He was fascinated that the Iraqi captive could fall in love with her interrogator when the only pleasure he gave her was relief from starvation and thirst or unpleasant positions. How much more persuasive could a program be in which the subject was bonded to the interrogator by the powerful force of sexual climax and all the hormones it released? Rafe and Nicole were in the process of finding out the answer to this question.

The culminating scene in which the Iraqi bomber cracked and gave up all of her controllers and collaborators still stuck in Rafe’s mind after observing it vie video feed and participating by checking her information at each step on his database. The lovely, apparently implacably hostile Leyla, in her early twenties, was brought blindfolded into the interrogation room, having been sleep deprived for days and neither fed nor watered for the past twenty-four hours. He would have felt guilty about her mistreatment if he had not witnessed several bombing scenes like she had hoped to create when she has placed her IED to be triggered her cell phone while under surveillance. Over 30 Sunni children would have been slaughtered by the blast, as well as another dozen civilian adults and two Iraqi government officials with their bodyguards. She had not only shown no remorse when caught before she could set off the device, but had rather contemptuously proclaimed her joy in the outcome, at least at the outset of her interrogation a week earlier. By this day, she was far more subdued, though still sullenly defiant. Throughout the week, she had remained clothed in the standard red prison jumpsuit reserved for murder suspects, though it had grown quite dirty over the many hours of sweaty encounters with Rafe’s buddy screaming at her as she was bound in a chair bolted to the floor.

The interrogator judged that the time had come to take things to the next level. This time, his blindfolded prisoner was surprised not to be slammed into the chair by her two female guards as she had each time she’d been brought into this room. Instead, she was led to a spot a few feet in front of the chair, her legs kicked apart until she was in a wide straddle. Leather cuffs were fitted around her ankles and attached to bolts sunk into the concrete floor. She trembled a bit, sensing correctly that something far more challenging was coming her way. This suspicion was confirmed when her captor ordered the two female MPs who had chaperoned her sessions on every occasion to leave. He then leaned in and spoke to her in his fluent Arabic: ‘The time has come for you to pay for your crimes…if you tell me what I need to know, that punishment will not fall so heavily…if not, I’m afraid you are in for a great deal of screaming, though not nearly as much as your intended victims would have. There is no one to protect you now from anything I want to do, and no one will ever know what happens to you in here.’

The captive had been more feisty earlier in the week, routinely cursing and spitting at her interrogator. This time, she kept her face stony and only her tremors revealed how frightened she was. These increased as Rafe’s buddy lowered ropes from the ceiling and attached to her wrists identical leather cuffs to the ones binding her ankles. Then he drew the ropes taut, pulling her slender body into a fierce spread-eagle. Her breasts pressed flagrantly against the red fabric in this position, which also gave a clear outline of her hips. They were, as Rafe had discovered, characteristic of Iraqi woman in being disproportionately generous in comparison to her otherwise thin frame. He suspected, knowing his friend, that he was soon to see a lot more of them, and probably not maintaining their current stillness.

The interrogator stepped up to his captive’s ear, leaning in close to her closely-prison-shorn black hair as he murmured: ‘Now there is no part of you that you can protect, no private region that I cannot do with exactly as I want. We will begin by dispensing with this ugly piece of clothing, which has gotten so disgustingly filthy, so I can get a better idea of what sort of body I have to work with.’ The prisoner was a true member of her culture, including the innate modesty that had been enforced since earliest childhood. So the thought of being stripped even to her underwear was horrifying to her, as evidenced by her increased trembling as her captor took up a pair of very sharp surgical scissors. He had not yet touched her, and she jerked at the sudden sensation of cool stainless steel against the outside of her left ankle. But the bonds held true, and even that violent movement didn’t shift her leg more than a millimeter or two, as she discovered more about how truly helpless she was.

The interrogator slowly, almost lovingly, cut the side of the red jumpsuit up the leg, across the hip, and up the armpit, ending up going the length of her arm until the parted sleeve fell away to her slender dark shoulder. Then the same stroke was repeated on the opposite side, and the neatly halved jumpsuit dropped away to the floor to reveal a surprisingly lovely young body, its café au lait skin vivid against the stained white of her underclothing. She moaned at the thought of his eyes on her, even though her breasts and hips were still covered by dingy cotton prison-issue underwear. And now it started in earnest, as her captor stepped close and said: ‘Now is your first chance to change your fate. If you confess that you did plant and intend to trigger the bomb, I will let you keep your underwear for the time being. If not, I will soon get a chance to see those very promising breasts, and, of course, to do anything with them that my perverted infidel heart desires.’

The young bomber had been waiting for this moment ever since her training for the mission. She knew in her brain that any promise that was made to her was very unlikely to be kept, but the thought of holding on to any vestige of control over her degradation was unimaginably tempting after a week of relentless interrogation. She already suspected the truth, that she had been caught on a security camera planting the bomb, and that her cell-phone signal to trigger its explosion had been confirmed electronically. Her teaching had been to give up information she suspected was already compromised in drips and drabs, holding out the really critical things that would compromise other operations as long as possible. So she could justify giving this up, couldn’t she?

‘Yes, as you well know, I did.’

This sudden admission surprised her interrogator. Based on the bomber’s stiff resistance to psychological measures so far, he had suspected that physical methods were his best hope of cracking the stubborn enemy. But it seemed that sexual modesty was perhaps more of an issue, and therefore afforded more leverage, than Rafe’s buddy had thought. So he went on: ‘Very well, then, I guess you get to keep your brassiere for the time being. But these panties will have to come off unless I get an answer to my next question: how did your mother punish you when you were naughty as a little girl?’

This seemed totally out of left field to the confused captive. She had a hard time imagining how such information could be used against her, since it couldn’t possibly have any relevance to her mission. Given that having her dingy cotton bikini bottoms removed was much more horrifying than being bared from the waist up, she decided to cooperate: ‘She spanked us on our bottoms with a switch.’

Her captor followed up: ‘Did she spank you on your bare bottom or through clothes?’ His subject hesitated, and he slipped the back of the surgical scissors under the lower hem of the garment in question.

She rushed to say: ‘Yes…she made us pull them down and bend over the sofa to take our punishment!’

This was important information for the interrogator, as it helped him sculpt the course he was going to take by providing a psychological linch-pin for his strategy. But it was still important for him to keep his word as yet, so he withdrew the scissors to a visible sigh of relief from his spread-eagled captive. Of course, she was to be allowed only brief respites, so the scissors went back under the edge of her dingy brassiere as he asked: ‘Now, in order to keep this garment, you’re going to have to do a little better. I need the address where you built the bomb.’

She could not help herself and wailed: ‘But you promised! I will never tell you that, so go to hell!’

A few snips later, and the smelly garment fell away, allowing the very attractive young breasts it contained to spring from their confinement. Rafe admired them through the HD video feed—quite firm for their generous C cup size, with large dark aureoles over an inch in diameter and nipples that were the size of the tip of his little finger, and quite erect (from fear, not arousal, he suspected).

The interrogator remarked less-than-kindly: ‘Aren’t these lovely…and I suspect they are very sensitive as well…unless their naughty owner decides to change her tune, I'm afraid they will be in for some challenging times before we’re through here…’ As he was saying this, he ran the edge of the scissors over the subjects of his remarks, as the captive flinched and moaned at the sudden intimate touch. As he suspected, she had never been with a man, and especially before her radicalization had wondered about sex and what it might feel like to be touched there. Of course, this sort of circumstance had not crossed her mind back then, before she had embraced martyrdom. And at this moment, she was beginning to question that embrace more than a little.

Her captor slipped the back of the scissors under the waistline of her panties, eliciting yet another moan of dismay. He intoned: ‘Last chance for very bad girls to keep their panties on…I need an address, or off they come!’

He could watch her stiffen her resolve, as she retorted: ‘Go ahead, you corrupt pervert!’ And a few snips later, the garment fluttered to the floor and Rafe and his buddy had their first full view of the lovely nakedness of their captive.

A week of near-starvation had taken any extra fat off the clean-limbed brown-skinned body splayed before them. In fact, her breasts and buttocks were the only fat visible on her otherwise reed-thin physique. The nether moons had kept their Iraqi fullness, but had not a jiggle or dimple on their smooth brown roundness. It was as pretty an ass as either of them had ever seen, and they were about to get to see quite a lot of it. Her pubic bush, never before glimpsed by a male in her cloistered existence, was coal black and quite curly, adhering closely to its underlying genitals, whose pink structures they barely concealed. Rafe felt a bit ashamed at his immediate erection in response to the lovely sight of the unhappy bomber, who was realizing that even worse times were sure to come if she stuck to her guns.

The interrogator went over to a satchel he had left on a table at the side of the room. He returned carrying a two foot green-stained bamboo switch, such as might be employed for staking up plants in an American garden. He stepped behind the terrified prisoner and declared: ‘In our country we too punish bad girls by spanking their bare bottoms with a switch. So I’m going to do that now, just as your Mother did, though I suspect I will be a bit more severe. You will receive a hundred strokes at least, but if you say you are sorry for being so bad I will stop then.’

The naked spread eagled captive thought contemptuously that this idiot American was even stupider than she had imagined if he thought some childish spanking was going to motivate her to abandon her principles. But this idea did not long outlive the first few minutes of her switching. Rafe’s buddy was a very well-schooled expert in the infliction of erotic pain, and he took the switch to the lovely pair of buttocks with a vengeance. His only limit was that he wanted to be certain not to leave permanent marks, which meant that no blood could be drawn. That aside, all of the other constraints of an erotic spanking were off the table, as there was no need to be concerned about eventual pleasure for this victim. He could allow his sadism full permission to express itself, and he did.

The captive tried to remain silent during her spanking, but by the tenth searing blow of the horribly painful switch, that dignity was out the door and her cries of pain echoed in the still air of the soundproof interrogation room. It had been almost a decade since the last time her mother had pulled her panties down to give her girlish buttocks a switching, so her memory of how that had been was faded. But whatever she dimly recalled of how painful that had been paled by an order of magnitude in comparison to the agony her poor clenching and trembling ass cheeks were undergoing at the cruel hands of her captor.

Each carefully placed spank from the switch didn’t just administer the immediate bolt of superficial agony. There was the horrible anticipation as the singing whoosh of the device through the air preceded each swipe. Next there was the delay of about a second from the sickening ‘snick’ as the hard bamboo bestowed its violent kiss on her never-before-seen-by-a-man buttocks before the pain registered on her increasingly frantic brain. And finally, a few seconds later, there was a second wave of duller anguish as the pain of the spank filtered down to deeper structures beneath the skin of her poor quivering nether moons.

Even though the wide straddle of her bondage had meant that there was no hope of limiting the degree to which her also-never-before-glimpsed-by-a-male pussy was displayed, the prisoner had taken some comfort that her robustly feminine buttocks could still be clenched to conceal her most secret passage of all. But this last vestige of a sense of control over her exposure was lost once the spanking began and she realized how involuntary was the reaction of her poor punished ass cheeks. Their frenzied attempts to somehow accommodate or in some slight way ameliorate their plight meant that the pale crevice between them was widely exposed on every spank, for glimpses revealing the tender brown rosette of her anus albeit less fully than her genitals had been put on display.

As her spanking proceeded and her inner and outer frenzies grew, all resolve began to flee the mind of the overwhelmed 21 year old bomber. Her Al Quaeda in Iraq training camp had subjected her to many extreme hardships, but nothing like this combination of unprecedented exposure of her most private places with severe pain being inflicted to one of those locales. By the fiftieth spank, the punished captive was horrified to hear the words of apology frantically spewing from her lips: ‘I’m sorry! Please, believe me, I’m so, so sorry! I know I was bad and I’ll do anything to make it up to you!’

Her tormentor was highly gratified to hear these words from the beautiful mouth that had previously emitted only words of contempt. He was getting through to her, and he knew it. There was a good chance that this session would crack her wide open, but it needed to be conducted very carefully in order to prevent her defenses from re-establishing their control once the switching had stopped and her acute sense of emergency had lagged. So he continued her spanking as promised through the full hundred blows, her lovely rear end quite densely covered with red welts by the time the final searing swipe had fallen on the most sensitive undercurves of her quivering moons, where he had focused the last quarter of this dose. And she continued to babble her apology and desperate hope of relief throughout that entire time. As he laid down the last spank, he murmured: ‘Very well, then, since you’ve apologized so sincerely, we’ll stop your spanking and see if you’re more inclined to be cooperative.’

His victim gushed her gratitude: ‘Oh, thank you! Please don’t spank me any more!’ He replied: ‘If you give me the address I asked for, I will take the pain away...and if you won’t, I’m afraid I’ll have to administer a whole lot more...’ And before she even realized it, the frantic prisoner, her buttocks still ablaze with the throbbing pain of a severe switching, had babbled out the information he had demanded. Rafe was put right to work in checking it, and when there was a match to another source, the distressed young bomber had earned her reward.

The interrogator took out a bottle with a sponge applicator screwed onto its neck. It contained a mentholated solution with a small dose of a short-acting topical anesthetic. When he stepped behind the still-weeping prisoner and applied it to her inflamed bottom cheeks, the result was instantaneous and seemed miraculous to the naked young woman. Within seconds, her buttocks went from a throbbing mass of acute welts to virtually pain free. She once again was dismayed to find herself virtually gushing her gratitude to her captor, hating herself every second as the words of servile capitulation poured from her beautiful lips: ‘Oh, God, thank you! Thank you so much!’

Rafe’s buddy then leaned in again and murmured in his fluent Arabic: ‘Well, if you really want to thank me, you will need to tell me about the other members of your team...the ones who trained with you, the ones who helped you assemble the bomb, the ones who transported you...’

His subject wailed aloud, realizing that they were just at the beginning of a long process, and that much more information was to be asked of her if she was to stop the painful things she was quite certain would be done to her naked splayed body. But her sense of honor intervened, and she recovered her contemptuous tone as she spat back: ‘I’d sooner die than tell you those things!’

Her captor replied quite calmly: ‘Well, I can’t recall any of my subjects actually dying from receiving the sorts of attention I just paid your very attractive rear end, even when the focus was on even more vulnerable parts of their bodies...But I suppose you could be the first...We’ll just have to see, since until the anesthetic wears off, I’m afraid your bottom will need to be left alone. Let’s change our focus to those lovely breasts, and see how they respond to a good long switching...In fact, I’ll just keep on spanking them until you have a change of heart, or die, of course, as you said...’

Then a whole new level of display took place before Rafe’s fascinated eyes. His friend took the switch to the captive’s succulent mammaries, and the bound naked body reacted in a way that made her struggles during her first spanking look tame. There was not even a single moment of restraint, just a pure shriek of outraged pain with each kiss of the switch on its lovely round targets. The interrogator was just as methodical in this punishment as he had been in spanking her buttocks. He took pains to carefully place his blows and use the slender end of the switch rather than the full length that had been brought to bear across her fulsome bottom cheeks. Each ‘swoosh’ and ‘thwick’ of the terrible bamboo implement was followed by a shriek, accompanied by a most charming paroxysm of the lovely bound naked body of the bomber, now dripping sweat in addition to desperate tears.

The interrogator’s method was to lay down welts tangentially to the areole of each nipple, initially targeting the tender undercurves as he worked his way around each trembling orb. He went from side to side, alternating as he worked his way around each nipple, but sparing that ultimately sensitive target initially, to be saved for later. By the dozenth blow to each side, his captive was begging for relief between her sobs, until she finally screamed: ‘I’ll tell! Please, God, stop, and I’ll tell all!’

What followed was a series of names and methods of contact that had Rafe busy in his highly sophisticated data base looking for matches. It rapidly became clear that the names were random, and he gave the thumbs-down sign through the observation window to his compatriot in the room. This was not pleasing, though hardly surprising, to the interrogator. He sighed as he approached the blindfolded naked prisoner, whose tears had subsided during her respite, and said: ‘Such a naughty girl, trying to trick us into being nice to her…and now her poor innocent little titties are going to have to suffer much more, since I have saved the most sensitive part in case it was needed. This time, she’s going to need to beg for far longer before I relent, now that she’s figured out that we can check her answers quite easily. I’m sure her Mother taught her that girls who lie get punished much harder until they tell the truth!’

And then, just as promised, the interrogator delivered a shockingly more effective spanking to the writhing bomber's breasts, this time every swipe of the switch crossing a nipple directly, delivering more than twice as much pain as the first breast spanking. And soon the terrified young woman was truly howling, quickly disavowing the carefully memorized list of false names (which Rafe had checked against other fake lists from other captives and found many duplicates, surprised at the poor tradecraft of using the same names for multiple operatives). But this time, her torment continued for a good ten minutes past when she was initially swearing to tell the truth. By the time he relented, the floor beneath her was puddling with her sweat and tears.

And this time, the names were good, also cross-referencing with identities for which there was independent corroboration. Once Rafe gave the thumbs up, the magical soothing solution was applied to the sill sobbing captive’s poor punished breasts, providing the same immediate relief that it had to her buttocks. The interrogator spoke soothingly as he anointed her inflamed skin with the anesthetic: ‘There, there, now, poor little titties…when your owner is nice to us, she can see that we are always nice to her, just as we are severe when she is naughty…But now, we have some more questions, and these will be harder for her…we need to know about her training camp: where it was, who ran it, whether it was here or in Afghanistan or Pakistan or Iran or Yemen, what they taught there, and so forth. And if she is not immediately cooperative, I’m afraid yet another very private place on her, that one right between her legs, is going to have to be spanked, very, very hard.’

This prospect was terrifying to the desperate prisoner, but so was the thought of giving up all of her trainers and their deep indoctrination of her. She seemed to need to resist each step in her subornation, almost requiring that it be punished out of her as though a certain sense of honor required the torture to go on before she could crack. And so, even as she begged not to be switched between her legs, she did not reveal any information.

Her captor sighed and took up his switch, kneeling in front of her as he swung upward to target first the tender crevices between her thighs and groin. This took her pain to yet another level, as he moved side-to-side, gradually working his way inward onto her labia, until by the two-dozenth spank he was switching directly down the midline, stinging her clitoris and urethra and the unimaginably sensitive tissue of her vaginal vestibule. By this time, her howls were off the scale of intensity, and she was begging to be allowed to talk. But she was forced to take a final dozen right down that meridian until her tormentor relented and she babbled out a long tale that corroborated with other information the agency had accumulated about the training of agents. So once again, she was soothed by the amazing anesthetic liquid, her tears rapidly drying even though she knew that worse was probably to come.

And indeed, her interrogator then went for the most important information of all, the name and contact method for her commander. Yet again, she was unwilling to spare herself whatever agony he had in mind for her and just reveal the information without being made to suffer for it. And so, he proceeded to the last untouched erogenous zone on her lovely young body. This would be her rear cleavage, and because of her ample buttocks, some further measures would be required before it could be properly spanked. If he had an assistant, he would have had that person just hold her cheeks apart, though part of his method had been never to touch her skin directly with his hand. So he picked up a roll of duct tape and tore off a six inch strip. After her buttocks were dried off of sweat so the tape would adhere, one end of it was attached an inch to the side of her bottom crack and then it was pulled violently outward and taped to her hip. When the same movement was repeated on the other cheek, the two halves were severely parted to rudely display the tender and as yet untouched crevice between them.

The bound bomber moaned as she realized what was coming, begging hopelessly to be spared, but unwilling to achieve that by giving up the information. And so the switch went to work again, this time scalding that most private of regions and orifices, a place their owner had never even imagined would be seen or touched, let along switched so horrifyingly painfully. By the two dozenth spank to her unimaginably sensitive nether cleavage, the information came pouring out of her, and she named a known local commander, but gave up some new information on his movements and security protocols.

Once Rafe gave his affirmative, a final dose of the soothing solution was applied, and her ordeal was complete. The tape was removed, and she was sponged down with cool water before her bonds were released. She was then given clean underwear and a fresh jumpsuit and allowed to dress, and was at last allowed the privilege of vision as her blindfold was removed. By this point, both Rafe and his friend Jack were in the room, and she regarded them both with frank terror, not knowing who had been the author of which part of her breaking.