Fortune Favors

INTERLUDE

Pain.

Higgins floated in and out of consciousness, but it was nearly impossible to distinguish the difference.

His chest was burning. Ribs, he thought in one of his brief lucid moments. Separated, maybe broken. A whimper escaped his lips, but even the breath drawn to replace that agonized exhalation cost him dearly, and he slipped once more into blackness.

Another blossom of torment brought him back, this time not just from his injured torso. His right arm felt like it had been stabbed through with shards of broken glass, and the pain intensified as the limb moved — was moved, without his intention or permission — and then his entire body was wracked with white hot fire.

Abruptly, he felt the ground fall away beneath him. His shoulders screamed as his weight fell against them. The pain in his wounded arm threatened to send him back into oblivion, but the need to gain even the smallest measure of relief anchored him to consciousness. Instinctively, he flexed his left arm, trying to ease some of the burden, but this merely served to further inflame his injured ribs.

Even screaming was unendurable.

“Wake up.”

The command barely reached him, but the ability to comply or resist had long since been torn away.

Nevertheless, he tried to open his eyes. His right eyelid parted, only just, but his left did not so much as twitch.

Through the sliver-thin opening he, beheld the face of his tormentor only a few inches away. The olive-skinned man with jet-black hair wore a camouflage uniform, but Higgins couldn’t make out any insignia or badges of rank.

Higgins lips moved but he made no utterance. He couldn’t breathe.

He had been hung by his arms, stretched out so that, even absent the damage to his chest, the simple act of drawing a breath would have been exhausting. His toes scraped the floor beneath him, close enough to touch, but too far to permit him to gain purchase and relieve some of the strain.

His torturer glanced away and said something incomprehensible, another language, Arabic perhaps. A moment later, the bonds holding Higgins by the wrists shuddered as he dropped a few inches. The pain was transcendent, but he felt the floor grow solid against the balls of his feet. He pushed up, and managed a shallow inhalation.

“You are American?”

Higgins answered with a whimper.

“You are alone now. The man captured with you died while I was interrogating him.” There was a long pause, perhaps to let the gravity of that simple declaration draw the captive deeper into despair. “But you can spare yourself that fate. He told me a great deal about your mission before he expired, and all I require now is confirmation.

“You are badly injured my friend. You need medical attention, and I will see that you get it. Our countries are at war, but we are civilized men, are we not? You will receive the best medical care we can provide. In a way, you are very fortunate. Our forces will soon scatter the carcasses of your countrymen on the sand as a feast for the birds, but you will live. You will be treated with respect, and one day, when your cowardly leader grovels in defeat, we may deign to return you to your home…to your loved ones.

“Or perhaps not. That is for you to decide. It is a decision you must make now.”

Another whimper trickled from Higgins’ lips.

The man spoke again in Arabic, and the ropes holding Higgins went slack, dropping him to his knees. Already at his threshold of endurance, Higgins savored the small measure of relief that followed.

“I believe it’s customary to begin with your name and rank.”

He grasped at the question like a lifeline, but the words that slipped from his mouth were garbled. His tongue was thick in his mouth; his lips were split and swollen from the beating he’d received when captured.

“Sergeant, is it? Not American, though. British, I should say.” The man sneered contemptuously. “America’s lap dog. Your countrymen would do well to abandon the sinking ship of your former colony. But we are soldiers, are we not? Sent off to fight and die at the whim of our imperial leaders.”

Another pause.

“And why is it that the Americans sent you to die here tonight? Were you to reconnoiter our missile emplacements? Gauge our troop strength?”

“Don’t know,” Higgins mumbled.

That was the tragedy of it.

Like any other soldier, Higgins had long known of the possibility that an enemy might capture him, imprison and torture him. And as easy as it was to contemplate such eventualities from the safety of the barracks or over a pint with his mates, no man could know how they might respond when tested, what his personal breaking point might be.

But that was moot, right now. It was not within his power to answer or refuse to answer because he simply didn’t know.

Random bits of information flashed in his head like the pieces of a shattered stained glass window. The American officer…Kismet…dead bodies, strewn about on the floor of a half-buried ruin…a car, erupting in flames…his fellow Gurkhas, ripped apart…See you in the next life.

“Don’t…know.”

The interrogators face drew into a frown, then he spoke in Arabic again.

Higgins felt the rope go taut and before he could draw a breath, his arms were wrenched upward again. There was a bright flash of pain, and then the darkness took him.

The pain was still there when he awoke again, but tolerable now. The strain on his shoulder was gone; he could even feel a throbbing in his fingertips as his circulation was restored.

“Don’t know,” he mumbled.

“It speaks.” The voice was soft, reaching through the layers of his misery with a promise of comfort, a promise that he couldn’t bring himself to trust. But there was something familiar there; it didn’t sound like his tormentor.

“Lef…Kis…?” His good eye opened a crack and he glimpsed the face of the American with the improbable name. The man bore little resemblance to the lieutenant who had accompanied Higgins’ squad on the nighttime infiltration. Kismet’s combat uniform had been stripped away, and his face and shoulders were a mass of bruises and weeping abrasions.

“Yeah, it’s me. Don’t try to talk. And try not to scream.”

A fresh wave of agony radiated from his right arm, but then almost immediately subsided into a dull ache.

Kismet spoke again. “I think I’ve set the bone, but hold still while I find something to splint it with.”

Higgins eye opened a little wider and his surroundings gradually came into focus. He was lying supine on the floor of a featureless concrete room. An incandescent bulb hung overhead, the only source of light, but there was little for it to illuminate. He saw that he, like Kismet, had been stripped naked, and as this visual message filtered through his brain, he felt the rough floor against his skin.

Kismet moved into view again, and bent over Higgins, ministering to his broken arm. “I hope you feel better than you look, my friend.”

“Said…dead…”

“You must mean Colonel Saeed. He told me you were dead, too.” Kismet made a rough noise, and it took Higgins a moment to realize that it was a chuckle. “I’d say he was half right. For both of us.”

“Where…?”

“He’s gone. They’re all gone.” Kismet glanced around furtively. “I don’t know what’s going on. I searched the whole building…hell, the entire compound. There’s no one here. It’s like they abandoned it. This is probably some elaborate ploy, but what choice do we have?”

Higgins felt a throb of discomfort as Kismet wrapped a length of cloth around his right forearm, but nothing like the agony he’d earlier experienced.

“There,” the American said. “That’s best I can do with what I’ve got. Any other serious injuries I should know about?”

Higgins impulsively shook his head and immediately regretted it.

“That’s what I thought,” Kismet replied, commiserating. “Come on, let’s get you on your feet.”

Kismet’s guarded enthusiasm was contagious. Tapping into a fresh vein of resolve, Higgins felt his strength returning and with only a little assistance from the American, was soon standing more or less on his own; Kismet kept a steadying hand on Higgins’ left biceps.

Kismet stopped abruptly before they reached the exit. “Well I’ll be damned. Look at that.”

Higgins strained to focus his good eye, and followed Kismet’s pointing finger to a tabletop just to the right of the door. Lying there, as casually as one might leave their coat draped over the back of a chair, were a pair of unsheathed kukri knives. Kismet scooped them up and pressed one into Higgins’ left hand.

As his fingers curled around the carved wooden hilt, he felt a strange mix of emotions: pride, that he would have yet another chance to die as hundreds of Gurkhas before him had, with his blade in hand; weary resentment, at the fact that circumstance had denied him relief from his suffering, and instead conspired to place him once more in harm’s way; and a singe grain of desperate hope. The blade was a symbol of all those things, but for practical purposes, it was next to useless. He couldn’t hold it in his dominant hand, and was nearly blind to boot… if fate brought them once more into contact with the enemy, it wouldn’t be much of a fight.

But as Kismet had indicated, the building in which they had been held captive was abandoned. They found a storeroom that contained, among other things, uniforms with the red triangle insignia of the Republican Guard sewn on the shoulders.

With no little help from Kismet, Higgins donned a uniform and even managed to stuff his feet into a pair of unlaced boots. As a disguise, it wouldn’t pass even the most cursory inspection, but he felt less vulnerable with his nakedness covered.

With Kismet leading the way, they ventured outside the building. Dawn had broken, but there was no activity whatsoever in close proximity to the structure. Look’s like something from a bleedin’ Mad Max movie, Higgins tried to say, but his cracked lips wouldn’t form the words.

Kismet nevertheless seemed to understand. “Yeah, I don’t like it either.” Hefting the kukri, he turned slowly, scanning in every direction for some indication that their captors were waiting to spring a trap. If they were there, they were well hidden.

A dust-streaked Toyota Land Cruiser was parked nearby and the two men headed for it. Kismet opened the door for Higgins and offered a steadying hand as the latter slid into the passenger seat, and then circled around to the driver’s side. The American searched all the usual places for a spare key, and finding none, shifted the transmission into neutral and popped the hood. He was away only a few moments before the engine turned over and rumbled to life.

“Handy trick,” Higgins managed to say.

Kismet nodded as he slid into the driver’s seat. He reached over the steering wheel and insinuated inserted the tip of his kukri into the gap between the wheel and the steering column. There was an audible click as the locking pin released, and the wheel moved in his hands. “Now we run the gauntlet.”

Higgins nodded weakly. There was no way this was going to work, but then there was also no reason for the Republican Guard to have abandoned their compound. Events were now so far beyond his control, the only reasonable course of action was to keep moving toward whatever was going to happen.

But nothing did happen.

Kismet wandered through the walled enclosure until he found an open gate leading out onto a paved road. The guardhouse beside the gate appeared empty as well, but beyond that, there was at least some evidence that the world had not come to an end without them. Kismet swung the Land Cruiser out onto the road and headed south, away from the city.

Much of what followed was a blur for Higgins. Several hours and perhaps hundreds of miles slipped by in a pain-induced fugue. He awakened from time to time, mostly when Kismet stopped to top off the petrol from the spare cans mounted to the vehicle’s bumper, but if anything more dramatic than that occurred, it escaped his notice.

In the years to come, Higgins would marvel at the miracle of their escape; it seemed like a religious mystery, something comforting that was meant to be accepted on faith, and which would only be diminished by too many questions.

It would be more than two decades before he would have reason to think about it differently.