Temporary Military Airfield
North of Birjanshah
Khorasahn Province, Iran
April 17, 1:25 A.M.
“Get the woman out of the van,” Kharzai said in loud, harsh Farsi. He motioned to Karl with a sweeping motion of his free hand.
Karl reached in through the side door. He pulled Esther across the seat by her arm, helping her to the ground while trying to look forceful. Keeping his grip on her upper arm, he pulled her along, behind Kharzai, as if she were a prisoner. Tiny, yet powerful tremors coursed through her body like an electrical current that seemed as though it would burn her up. A few steps from the van, they stood in front of the solitary door set in the face of the building. A single naked light bulb hung on a wire from a dented rusty metal lampshade suspended at the end of a piece of conduit pole protruding from the wall about a foot above the door. The light was so different than the rest of the building, and in such worse condition, that it seemed older than the rest of structure, as if it had grown out of the structure like a weed in the crack of a sidewalk.
Karl glanced towards the runway. An armed guard stood at the nose of each aircraft. Ten men for ten planes, maybe others behind the craft he couldn’t see. He wondered how the other men were going to get the explosives on them with all that security. One of the two fuel truck drivers was packing up his hose, apparently completed with the fueling task. The second truck driver attached his hose to the wing of the farthest of the MiG31s, perhaps the last plane awaiting the precious liquid fuel that would make it ready for the mission. The clock was ticking.
Kharzai pushed the door open, its hinges grinding with a sharp squeak like fingernails on a chalkboard scraping their ear drums as it cut through the howling wind that rushed between the metal buildings. Inside, they stepped into a long white hallway about three meters wide and extending thirty meters straight across to another door. That one presumably exited the other side of the building. The structure reminded Karl of the hastily built World War Two barracks and office buildings that were still occupied on some bases in the eighties when he was a Marine.
Their footfalls echoed down the length of the hallway as Kharzai led them into the corridor. It was lined with a half-dozen doors on either side, off-set in an irregular pattern so that no door was directly across from another. The Persian took them to an old, worn-looking wooden door that had been repainted several times. The poorly applied topmost layer of dark brown had bubbled up and chipped off in small flecks, revealing other drab colors underneath, giving the door an appearance like a smallpox-scarred face. Kharzai pulled the diseased-looking door open and led them into a room that had been designed and decorated with a specific purpose in mind, leaving no doubt as to its intended function. The large space was dimly illuminated by two bare bulbs suspended by cobwebbed wires that hung drearily out of holes six feet apart in the ceiling. Between the two lights, suspended from the center of the ceiling, a thick chain dark and deathly still awaited a victim. The chain terminated at a hook that dangled about two and a half meters off the ground. Just high enough to hang a man from bound hands so that their feet would barely touch the floor. Unidentifiable splatter marks stained the ceiling above the chain. Dark masses of what looked like dried blood were caked between several of the chain links. The wall to the rear of the room reflected back their images from several wide, full-length mirrors positioned for a victim to watch themselves being tortured. A wood table and a single chair were positioned in one corner. Indentations and scratches scarred its thick butcher-block surface. A pair of shackles attached to the wall just above it lay like coiled dragons waiting to grasp hold of someone.
An old, grungy-looking mattress lay in the center of the floor directly beneath the blood-crusted chain. Grotesque stains of yellow, red, and brown spattered and smudged its fabric. Extending from the side of the mattress was what looked like a spray of dried blood and the residue of other fluids that streaked across the floor like some morbid splash paint artist’s nightmare. A small pile of filthy linens and women’s clothes drooped in a miserable bundle against the far wall. The room reeked of sweat and pain and terror.
Almost as soon as the door closed behind them, the sound of several sets of boots clomped down the hall. Kharzai motioned to them to be quiet and wait. The door opened and a man peered in. He turned back, said something in Farsi, and walked in, seven other men behind him, all dressed in black flight suits and sporting white headbands covered in Arabic script tied around their heads. The man who had first looked in the door smiled widely, opening his arms to embrace Kharzai.
“Aahh! My brother, you have kept your word! What a comfort you are, to bring a special treat, the final dessert for us before we leave for our blessed martyrdom!”
Kharzai and the man grabbed each other’s shoulders and embraced, planting kisses on one another’s bearded cheeks and talking rapidly as if they were old friends enjoying a school reunion. The other pilots ran their eyes up and down Esther’s body, sneers and wicked grins spreading across their faces. They all ignored Karl.
“More than my word, I have brought you the prize of the province.” Kharzai grabbed the trembling, mortified young woman from Karl and pushed her into the midst of the pilots. “Esther the beautiful, just like her namesake, the wife of Artaxerxes. She is lovely to look at and I am sure has plenty of energy to please you all. She is a Christian infidel, so don’t worry about sin. You can do whatever you want to her and Allah will smile.”
Esther shrieked in terror. “No! No! You will pay for this!”
She spit at Kharzai as the pilots grabbed her, laughing hellishly.
“What the hell are you doing!” Karl shouted at Kharzai. He started raise his weapon and move forward to rescue Esther, but Kharzai had already leveled his AK at Karl’s chest and shook his head.
“Tsk, tsk, tsk...don’t interfere with the party, Astroboy. Just sit back and watch, my friend. Watch what happens to the infidel woman. She knew this was her destiny, and I had promises to keep.”
Karl raised his hands as Kharzai motioned towards the back of the room with his weapon. He backed up slowly until he was against the wall, helplessly watching as the brutes mistreated the woman he had sworn he would protect. His mind raced, trying to find some way of rescuing Esther. Nothing came to him that did not end in a belly full of bullets.
The chief pilot slapped Esther on the cheek, knocking her to the floor. Blood spurted from the corner of her mouth. She struggled, hands still bound behind her back. Two of the other pilots yanked off her headscarf, grabbed her by her hair, and dragged her viciously across the floor onto the mattress in the center of the room. One man held open each of her legs as the chief pilot groped at her body. The other men greedily looked on, their backs to Karl and Kharzai. The men surrounded Esther like a pack of hyenas, drooling and laughing before a kill. Her screaming excited them even more. Soon, she was hoarse, her voice reduced to a whimper as she tried to resist her assailants, but they were strong, charged with a cruel demonic power that surged through their veins. Kharzai turned towards Karl, raised his weapon to chest height, looked him straight in the eyes, and winked.
The playful glimmer of mischief returned to the Persian’s face as he whispered to the astronaut, “Do you count eight of them?”
Kharzai made his intentions clear as he reached into his waistband and handed Karl a knife, his own K-Bar, that Kharzai had taken from the Nissan before he crashed it.
“You go left, I go right. We must get them all in here, in this room, as quickly and quietly as possible. Wait for my signal, then start at the back and work fast up the line. Throats and bellies...and mind that you don’t get the knife stuck in the ribs...it’s really hard to get out.”
The fiendish pack of rapists were running their hands all over her body. The top of her gown had been torn open and the chief had started to raise her skirts. He was moving tortuously slow, exaggerating his movements to achieve the maximum fear effect in the poor girl. Esther was crying hysterically, begging them to stop.
“No! Please, no!” she mumbled. “God, help me! Please, don’t!”
The men only laughed in response, mocking her pleas for mercy, taking great amounts of pleasure in the pain, both emotional and physical, being inflicted on her. The pilot chief ran his hands up her thighs, nearing the point where he would reveal her most private areas to the lustful eyes of his murderous thugs. She closed her eyes and screamed. They cheered her cries. Their chief reached down to open his own zipper.
Kharzai’s eyes glazed over with rage. He raised his own knife and whispered harshly to Karl:
“Now!”
The two men rushed headlong into the pack of distracted pilots. Karl’s knife came down swiftly on the side of the closest man’s neck, nearly beheading him in a single swipe of the razor-sharp blade. The first two went down almost simultaneously.
Before the bodies of those men hit the ground the next two felt the steel splitting their flesh as the rescuers swung the silent blades. They crumpled to the floor, grabbing at their throats as they struggled for the last bit of air. Blood sprayed in high-pressure jets from severed arteries that desperately tried to feed brains which were no longer connected to the heart’s supply.
The two beasts who were holding Esther’s legs looked up in time to see the glimmer of blood-soaked blades as they came down on their necks. Karl’s blade severed the spine of his victim. The man silently collapsed into a heap like a jellyfish washed up on a beach. His eyes rolled wildly side-to-side, but he made no sound as his central nervous system instantly shut down all bodily function.
The remaining two, the chief and one other pilot, who had been fully engrossed in their attempt to violate Esther’s sacred treasure, rose from the girl. They managed to get on their feet before Kharzai and Karl could strike at them.
The second pilot lunged at Karl. His face twisted in vile hatred, he looked more like an animal than a human. He rammed Karl in the chest, driving him back. The assailant kept pressing against him, growling and cursing through tightly clenched teeth until Karl’s back was against the wall.
The powerful blow took the wind out of Karl. It jolted him so hard he lost his grip on the long blackened-steel knife, sending it clattering to the floor. Fighting like a crazed demon, the pilot clutched his fingers around Karl’s throat and squeezed, muttering curses, spitting guttural words violently into Karl’s face.
The astronaut tried to break the attacker’s grip, only to find it incredibly tight, as if the man were possessed with some hellish superhuman strength. The man’s fingernails dug into Karl’s flesh as he struggled to breath. Eyes bulging against the pressure on this throat, Karl punched the man in the ribs with all his strength; the pilot’s grasp weakened at the blows. On the other side of the room the chief pilot thrust a sweeping kick out against Kharzai’s ankle, knocking his feet out from under him and sending the spy splaying out onto the floor. As the Persian fell, the other man ran for the door, shouting an alarm. Kharzai twisted himself upright and with a powerfully fast flick of the wrist, his knife soared across the room and buried itself between the man’s shoulder blades as his hand reached for the door handle.
The chief reached behind his back in a vain effort to retrieve the knife. He yelped in a sharp cry of pain. That cry drew the other pilot’s attention from Karl for an instant. That instant was all Karl needed. He smashed his hands up between his assailant’s arms, clasped his fingers together and came down with a crushing two-fisted hammer blow against the bridge of the man’s nose.
The pilot shrieked as Karl’s blow flattened his nose, spattering blood in every direction. The flesh around his eyes instantly swelled in reaction to the shattered bones in his face. He clapped his hands over the bloody mess where his nose used to stick out and rolled off to one side. Karl rose to his knees, grabbed his knife from the floor, and thrust it into the man’s chest, sliding the steel between the ribs and slicing through his heart. Karl pressed with all his weight until the cursed pilot’s body went limp beneath him. The room went nearly silent but for the sound of panting and their hearts beating a crazy rhythm against their ears.