Wrists, the chain linking them draped across a meat hook suspended from
the ceiling. His ankles had been tied, then secured to an iron pin
embedded in a steel bucket full of concrete. He could twist against his
bonds, but he could move very little.
This was a warehouse of some kind. Stacked crates and boxes created a
labyrinth of walls within a large, high-ceilinged storeroom. A clock
just visible on the nearest wall read ten o’clock.
He was two hours overdue at the ship, but that didn’t mean very much,
not here, not now. No one could possibly know where he was.
As Tombstone’s head slowly cleared, he was able to focus on the ring of
men surrounding him, just inside the circle of light from the
tripod-mounted lamps. He was still naked. That and his helplessness
contributed to a growing and overwhelming sense of vulnerability.
“So! If you are ready, Commander Magruder, we will begin. I fear I am
in something of a hurry, so our methods will be, of necessity, somewhat
brutal and direct.”
The speaker stepped into the circle of light. He looked Chinese.
Glasses and gray hair gave him the look of a mild-mannered professor,
but there was a hard glitter in those black eyes which chilled. He wore
civilian clothing, a flower-print sports shirt and slacks. In his hand
he carried a black tube, something like a policeman’s billy club, but
made of metal and plastic instead of wood.
Tombstone licked his lips. His tongue felt thick and swollen, and his
mouth and lips were dry. He had difficulty forcing words out. “Who …
who th’hell are you?”
“My name is Hsiao Kuoping, though that is not important now. What is
important is this.”
Hsiao’s hand snapped up, smacking the end of the club he held into the
American’s belly. There was a crackling sound, and liquid fire seared
between Tombstone’s navel and his groin. Muscles spasmed, and he jerked
and twisted against the handcuff chain and the rope on his ankles. His
knees tried to flex, to curl his body into a tight ball, but the
cement-filled bucket kept him stretched rigid against the hook overhead.
Tombstone’s scream was as completely involuntary as it was unexpected,
yanked from his throat in an explosion of raw pain.
Hsiao withdrew the rod, fingering it. Tombstone, blinking back the
tears and the red-tinged haze which threatened to cloud his vision,
could see the electrodes in the thing’s business end, the red button on
the other. A cattle prod.
“Pain, Commander,” Hsiao continued. “Pain is soon going to become the
single most important aspect of your existence.” With deliberate
slowness, Hsiao reached out again, sliding the end of the prod between
Tombstone’s knees. Tombstone gasped at the touch … but the current
was off, the head of the prod only slightly warm. His interrogator
dragged the rod up … up …
up between his thighs until the electrodes nestled beneath his scrotum.
The terror Tombstone felt at that moment was far worse than anything
he’d ever known in his life. He could look into Hsiao’s eyes two feet
below his own and know, without a shadow of a doubt, that the man’s
thumb was about to come down on that red button set in the prod’s
plastic base. Anticipation and the searing memory of the pain he’d just
experienced made Tombstone’s stomach twist, and he was afraid he was
about to be sick.
Hsiao smiled at him. “I promise you, Commander, that you will come to
know pain very, very well in the next few hours … unless you tell me
exactly what I wish to know.”
By the clock on the wall, less than an hour passed, but it was an hour
which crawled through an eternity, endless questions punctuated by
seemingly random applications of the electric cattle prod. There were
five men besides Hsiao, a scarred civilian named Phreng and four others
who Tombstone thought might be soldiers, though they did not wear
uniforms. Once, Hsiao referred to those four as his “Burmese
assistants,” which did not explain for Tombstone what they were doing in
Bangkok. After the first few minutes, Hsiao turned the merely physical