6

THE FORCE IS ONE, THE FORCE IS ALL

You lose track of day and night when it’s overcast all the time, especially when clouds like these move across the sky, stacked together and sweeping so very low across the earth. They seem to drag you along.

The guys from the Dingana base camp light fires to drive away the cold, but it helps very little. The cold creeps in everywhere. Your body’s extremities feel it the most: ears, fingers, toes, nose.

I roll my coarse woollen scarf tighter around my neck and over my mouth when it feels like even my breath would freeze.

The six of us are outside, among the tents, busy exploring the camp. Our eyes are finely tuned. We take it all in: the crates full of ammunition being offloaded from a RegiMog, unguarded missiles, shock grenades, and antipersonnel mines, the drums with fires burning, the pulsating generators, the other troops warming their hands while admitting their fears about the battle line to one another.

Still on our expedition, we make our way past the vehicles lined up with their noses to the Front for speedy mobilisation if the need arrives. The Charon 1 heavyweight armour-plated vehicles with 90-mm and 60-mm cannons. Lighter Charon 2s built for quick offensives, with 20-mm cannons mounted in the turret. Other smaller troop carriers, including the Gorgon four-by-fours for rough terrain, mounted with Cronus machine guns – .50 calibre, with an accurate striking distance of 1 800 metres.

Passing a further mass of tents, we reach the centre of the camp. A huge pool of stagnant water unexpectedly appears before us. Not even a ripple disturbs the black surface. A broad muddy embankment with dark foot- and vehicle prints stretches around the lake. A single dead tree stands askew in the water. The angular branches look like a crack in the landscape.

“No sodding way, what’s this?” Jethro asks. “The water gives me the chills.”

“It’s because it’s an evil place,” Cypher says. He crosses his arms over his body. Frowns deeply. I follow his eyes to the rusty signpost dangling from the tarred pole.

Lake of Tears.

“What do they use the water for, you reckon?” I ask.

“Drink it?” Victoria asks.

“Swimming?” Victor jokes.

“Diesel can’t swim,” Cypher says. He is right.

Diesel doesn’t like water. He’ll charge straight through a fire, and he has done so. But Diesel doesn’t really go near water. During our training – there were still about twenty-two of us around at that stage – we had a hard time getting him into a shower. That was until one evening, after we returned from a four-day survival course out in the country, when we tackled him with some scrubbing brushes.

No, that’s not entirely correct.

Torsten ordered us to scrub him down.

The images of that evening in the shower flash through my mind again: The cold-water tap was opened full force. Water everywhere. Like a catfish, naked and slippery, Diesel tried to wiggle out from under our hands. We scrubbed him down with the hard floor brush, but it wasn’t enough for Torsten. He pulled his shirt off. Rushed towards us.

“Let me show you pissies how it’s done,” he hissed through his teeth. “Hold tight!”

His fingers turned white around the wooden grip when he seized the brush. Muscles in his arms, shoulders, and back strained together in tense bundles as he gathered his strength.

For a moment, the long swollen scars on his back shocked me. Like whiplashes?

“No, please, Sarge!”

Diesel’s frantic cries dragged my attention back to Torsten’s hands. The first lashing with the hard brush already pushed deep into Diesel’s skin.

“Sarge, no! Please!” Diesel pleaded.

Torsten was oblivious to his cries. “Hold him down!” he ordered us.

“Please! Don’t!” Diesel stuttered desperately. His voice grew softer and softer as Torsten continued his torment. “Don’t, don’t, don’t.”

“Flip him over. On his stomach!” Torsten ordered.

“No.”

Torsten straddled Diesel’s back, pushing his head forcefully into the gutter, keeping it there. Water streamed over Diesel’s face. He swallowed, spat, choked.

It took ten guys to keep him down. Eleven, counting Torsten.

Torsten scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed Diesel, so brutally raw that blood began seeping through his skin.

And still, Torsten wasn’t satisfied. When Diesel finally lay motionless on the shower floor, tired from struggling and bleeding, Torsten ordered us to drag him to a toilet and close the cubicle off with an old cupboard door and sandbags. Make it watertight.

I remember the fear in Diesel’s eyes when we shut him in there, locking the door. Torsten unrolled the fire hose. Threw it over the wall. Ordered us to switch off the bathroom light and open the water.

Who knows what dark fears took hold of Diesel inside that cubicle when the water level rose and rose and rose.

We heard him cry, but we couldn’t do anything for him.

Torsten sat on top of the wall, looking down at him. Even in the poor light, it seemed as if he derived a deep-rooted pleasure from the torture while he kicked Diesel back under the water with his boot every time he tried to surface.

How Diesel ever survived that night, I do not know. But when Torsten at last left with a manic smile, we flicked the bathroom light back on, dragged away the sandbags, and opened the toilet door.

Water and blood rushed from the cubicle like a wave, gushing over our feet.

It was one of those moments when you stop breathing and slip out of your body.

Diesel lay on the floor with his back turned towards us.

At first, I thought he was dead, but when Victoria touched him, he jerked away his naked shoulder. A sound like that of an animal escaped his throat.

Slowly, he sat upright. Turning his head, he glared at us from under his brows.

The dark look in his eyes sent a chill down my spine.

“Are you okay, dude?” Jethro dared.

Diesel didn’t answer. He simply rose to his feet steadily, slammed his arms around the toilet, and with a roar, wrenched it from the wall.

Days later, Diesel still walked around with the scabs covering his body. Nobody insisted that he shower any more.

We were probably scared of the scabs left in his mind after that evening.

Perhaps like Torsten’s?

Who knows how long it takes to heal?

On the way back to our tent in the base camp, while we’re collecting dry firewood, a military ambulance comes driving towards us, sliding around in the mud. The engine drones on courageously until the self-driving vehicle stops at the medical tent a distance away.

“It’s hauling back the injured from the Front,” Jethro says.

“Not the injured,” Victor corrected him. “The dead.”

We stand and watch medical orderlies offload the guys, zipped up in body bags.

Reality sets in at that very moment. It could’ve been you in that bag, Eliam.

Our eyes follow the bags as they are carried away and I suddenly wonder what they did with Torsten.

The thought is as cold as the breath in my lungs.

The night arrives. Cypher helps Diesel care for the knife wound in his foot. Afterwards, they join us at the fire in front of our tent where we huddle closer. Still, I sense the eyes all around, watching our every move. After the breakfast incident, the other troops keep their distance. It’s as if we’ve got some kind of disease.

We’re different from them. They ought to know that. We’re not here as volunteers. We were enlisted in the Programme. Our training was harder and more intense than the ordinary soldier’s. From parachuting to insurgency. Specialised fighting skills. Survival. Search and destroy. Small tactics. Fire and manoeuvre. Rock climbing and abseiling. Escaping and evading. Camouflaging. Medical emergency treatment.

It was drilled into us under extreme circumstances. We are conditioned to put up with hunger. We learnt to endure pain and exhaustion. To function without sleep.

Does it make us sick?

No. It only makes us ... dangerous.

Later, in the tent, silence lingers around us. We’re all lying in our sleeping bags on the stretchers. Thus far, nobody has said a further word about Torsten. It’s as if it never happened.

However, this thing lurks around in the back of my mind.

Torsten was attacked with a combat knife. Ten times or more. His eyes were gouged out. Only a bloody mass remained in his eye sockets.

One of us must have done it.

That’s the main reason why we keep quiet.

Thankfully, sleep finds me, and Torsten’s murder remains shrouded in the dark, but retaliation may be called for at any moment.

Through the haze of sleep, I hear footsteps approaching our tent. Whispering voices disturb the silence. Then somebody rips open our tent sail.

It all happens in the blink of an eye.

The Military Police descend like a pack of hyenas on Diesel near the tent door. Grab him. Drag him out of bed.

Victor is up first. In the dark, he searches for the light’s cord toggle near the tent pole. Manages to flick it on. The rest of us are on our feet in a flash, rifle in hand. Our minds switch to fight mode.

“You can relax,” the lieutenant says. “We came for him.”

Above our heads, the globe swings around on the cord, scattering our shadows across the floor and walls of the tent.

Diesel twists and turns in the grip of the Military Police. Quite a few of them are needed to carry him outside, their faces hidden under balaclavas, so we won’t recognise them later. Their arms clad with red bands emblazoned with the insignia of the dog.

“Switch off the light and get some sleep,” the lieutenant orders before he disappears into the dark.

Diesel’s whimpers grow fainter as they carry him away.

The remaining five of us stare at each other. “Do you think it’s about that guy’s hand ... or over Torsten?” I ask.

“Both?” Victoria dares. She straightens her back. Revulsion flashes across her face.

“Why didn’t we help him?” Cypher asks. He lets his rifle slip from his shoulder, and through his fingers down to the floor. “You realise they’re going to come for every one of us.”

We can’t sleep. The other guys wander around outside. I stay in the tent and try to make sense of what happened. It feels like a limb has been cut off without Diesel. I pick his sleeping bag up off the floor, spread it open on his stretcher, and lie down on it. His scent still lingers in the quilted fabric.

As I’m lying there, a memory unties itself in me, taking me back to the Residence and Diesel distancing himself from us, sitting alone to one side in the class. Which subject was it again? I can’t seem to remember – History of the Force, people’s militia, chronicle and concordance, military geography, youth preparedness, safety and security. Nonetheless, it was one of the Order-9 subjects – the fourteen-year-olds. We had returned from physical training. And something was wrong with Diesel.

I could see it in his downcast eyes. It was as if a dark curtain had been drawn around him when he dribbled a sharp stone from his mouth, snatching it up with waiting fingers. He must have picked it up along the way back to the classroom. With a trembling hand, he aimed the stone at his face. To cut it.

“Master!” I called out.

Diesel was startled. Guiltily, he lowered the stone. But below the table, he wedged it into the palm of his hand. Into the fleshy part right next to the bulge of his thumb. When our master pulled out his hand, a stream of red ran down Diesel’s arm.

Master slapped him through the face hard. The blow echoed through the classroom. “Have you no shame? To disfigure your body in such a manner. Desecrating it! Are you a recreant? One of them?”

It wasn’t proper to think it, but it shocked me as well. Not the blood, not really Master’s blow either, but his words. He never did ask Diesel why he’d done it.

But I knew.

It was because of Hog-grubber.

We always knew there were other groups in the Residence as well. Some younger, some older. However, our contact with them was minimal. Our living areas were separate from each other. But that day, it was different. At the end of our physical training, another group of thirty guys and girls arrived at the gymnasium. Order-10s. A year older than us. They approached us, smirking. One of them – his pals called him Saul – shouldered Diesel in passing.

“Look where you’re going, hog-grubber,” Saul cried.

The others laughed. “Hog-grubber, hog-grubber!” a bunch of them teased.

“Shouldn’t you be on a leash?” Saul continued. “Wouldn’t want you biting somebody. Open your pie hole, let me see those teeth. Come on, hog-grubber.”

Cypher, Jethro, and I crowded around Diesel.

“Hog-grubber, hog-grubber!” the Order-10s kept on mocking.

Some of them made animal noises, trying to jostle Diesel out from between us. Victor intervened, sending Saul to the floor with one mighty punch. The joke had come to an end. But it was far from over for Diesel.

That day, we managed to protect him against the Order-10s, but not against himself.

Today, we couldn’t protect him against anybody.

“Are you okay?” Jethro asks when he enters the tent and finds me on Diesel’s bed.

“Why are we here?” I ask.

“It’s how it should be.”

“Yes, but why?”

Jethro raises his chin. “We don’t ask that question.”

“But why not?” I insist.

“Because it’s what the Book – true and sacred are the words – expect of you. You’re protecting your country against the unfaithful.”

I shake my head cynically. “You do what the Force requires of you. You sacrifice your life. You offer yourself up. Though the price might be high, the reward is higher.”

“That’s what they taught us, yes.”

“But is it right?”

“It is not for you to know, Eliam.”

I curse. “You sound just like them now.”

“I am them. You are too. We are them. The Force is one, the Force is all.”

“Do you really believe that?”

“Yes.” He seems more careful. “And you?”

I stare up at the tent ceiling and watch the globe swaying lightly on the electrical cord.

“And you?” Jethro says again.

“Yes ... of course I do.” He doesn’t have to know whether I’m lying or telling the truth. “The Force is one, the Force is all.”