2034: A Novel of the Next World War(18)

Wedge blinked his eyes. He inventoried the bare room. A single window with bars in one corner, which cast a square of light on the damp concrete floor. His chair. A metal table. And another chair where this man now sat. Based on his epaulettes, Wedge guessed he was a brigadier. In the far corner of the room was a pail, which Wedge assumed was his toilet. In the near corner was a mat, which he assumed was his bed. Above the mat a shackle with a chain was bolted into the wall. He realized they planned to restrain him while he slept—if they let him sleep. The room was medieval, except for a single camera. It was hung high in the center of the ceiling, a red light blinking at its base. It was recording everything.

Wedge felt a sinking sensation in the pit of his stomach. He found himself thinking of his great-grandfather, the stories of gunsights marked in grease pencil on his canopy, and Pappy Boyington, the greatest of Marine aces. Pappy had wound up as a prisoner too, finishing the war in a Japanese POW camp. He also thought of his grandfather slinging snake and nape up north in I Corps while kids back home smoked dope and burned their draft cards. Lastly, and in some ways most bitterly, he thought of his own dad. Wedge feared the old man might hold himself responsible if his son wound up rotting in this prison. Wedge had always wanted to be like his dad, even if it killed him. For the first time he entertained the idea that it might.

The brigadier asked him once again why he was there.

Wedge did what he’d been trained to do, what the Code of Conduct demanded: he answered the brigadier’s question by giving only his name, rank, and service number.

“That’s not what I asked you,” said the brigadier. “I asked why you are here.”

Wedge repeated himself.

The brigadier nodded, as if he understood. He circled the room until he stood behind Wedge. The brigadier rested both his hands on Wedge’s shoulders, allowing the three fingers of his mangled right hand to crawl crab-like toward the base of Wedge’s neck. “The only way we can resolve this situation is to work together, Major Mitchell. Whether you like it or not, you’ve trespassed. We have the right to know why you are here so we can resolve this. Nobody wants things to escalate further.”

Wedge glanced toward the camera in the center of the ceiling. He repeated himself for a third time.

“Would it help if I turned that off?” the brigadier asked, looking up at the camera. “You could tell just me. Everything doesn’t have to be recorded.”

Wedge knew from his survival training that the brigadier was trying to ingratiate himself and build trust, and then through that trust to elicit a confession. The goal of an interrogation wasn’t information but rather control—emotional control. Once that control was taken—preferably by building rapport, but just as often through intimidation, or even violence—the information would flow. But something didn’t add up with this brigadier: his rank (he was too senior to be a first-line interrogator), his scars (he had too many of them to have spent a career in intelligence), and his uniform (Wedge knew enough to recognize that he wasn’t standard Iranian military). What Wedge felt was nothing more than his intuition, but he was a pilot, reared from a long line of pilots, all of whom had been taught to trust their well-cultivated intuition, both in and out of the cockpit. And it was his trust in this intuition that led him to go on the offense, to make a desperate attempt to gain control of the situation.

The brigadier asked Wedge one more time why he’d come.

This time Wedge didn’t answer with his name, rank, and service number. Instead, he said, “I’ll tell you, if you tell me.”

The brigadier appeared surprised, as if his reason for being there was obvious. “I’m not sure that I understand.”

“Why are you here?” asked Wedge. “If you tell me, then I’ll tell you.”

The brigadier was no longer standing behind Wedge but had returned to his seat across from him. He leaned curiously toward his prisoner. “I’m here to question you,” the brigadier said tentatively, as if this fact embarrassed him in some way he didn’t recognize until the very words had escaped his mouth.

“Bullshit,” said Wedge.

The brigadier came out of his seat.

“You’re no interrogator,” continued Wedge. “With a face like that you want me to believe you’re some intel weenie?”

And that entire face, aside from the scar tissue, began to turn shamefully red.

“You should be out in the field, with your troops,” said Wedge, and he was smiling now, with a reckless grin. He’d taken a gamble and from the brigadier’s reaction he knew he’d been right. He knew he had control. “So why are you in here? Who’d you piss off to get stuck with this shit duty?”

The brigadier was towering over him. He swung back and struck Wedge so hard that he knocked his chair out of the floor where it had been bolted. Wedge toppled over. He hit the ground lifeless as a mannequin. As he lay on his side with his wrists still bound to the chair, the blows fell on him in quick succession. The video camera with its solid red light, high up in the center of the ceiling, was the last thing Wedge saw before he blacked out.



* * *





11:01 March 13, 2034 (GMT+8)

South China Sea

They charged out of the east, two silvery flashes on the horizon, and made an orbit around the badly wounded John Paul Jones. Nearly half the crew, more than one hundred sailors, had perished since that morning, either incinerated in the blast from the pair of successive torpedo impacts or entombed in the flooded compartments belowdecks that their shipmates had been forced to secure with them still trapped inside. There were very few wounded, mostly dead, as was usually the case in naval engagements, where there was no battlefield for the injured to rest upon, only the consuming sea.