Rebirth (John Taylor #1)

Chapter 2

Three Years Later

It was cold.

It's surprising how cold it gets in parts of the Middle East. Most people just think about the desert and the heat, but some of the mountains stay close to freezing in the winter months. It's even colder when you have a hodge-podge of thin rags for clothes, and your bed is a hard stone floor. Also, it didn't help that the guards had woken me up in the middle of the night by throwing a bucket of dirty water on me. From the smell, they had also used the bucket as a latrine at some point.

I was just assuming this was in the mountains, actually. It could be anywhere, at this point.

The last time I'd seen the outside of an enclosed room, was four months ago, give or take a week. Without a calendar, watch, or any kind of electronic device, it's hard to keep the days straight.

It was better now that they were holding me in some kind of house. The windows might have been shuttered, but they let enough light through that it was possible to tell night from day. That made keeping time a whole lot easier.

Before this house, I'd spent somewhere between six and eight months in a cave complex. The only lights were old mine lights, running off a generator. Sometimes the generator would break down, or run out of gas. I would be left in the dark, or with just a flashlight, for however long it took.

Other times the guards would shut off the lights, and then turn them on at irregular intervals. I think they liked to mess with my sense of time. They would randomly wish me merry Christmas or happy Fourth of July at weird intervals. Since they clearly didn't celebrate either of those holidays, the only point was to keep me on edge.

Of course, what was most surprising, was the fact that I was still alive! Generally, the Taliban, al Qaeda, and the half dozen other groups of insurgents operating in the Middle East only held western personnel long enough to pump them for information, and then they put on a big display of executing the soldier. Usually by an amateur who bungles a beheading.

I'd woken up in the desert three years ago, with my hands already bound, lying in the dirt. I was looking at the bodies of my friends, while the 'insurgents' searched for valuables and intel, in that order. I was certain that my life was on borrowed time. While I had been out, they had wiped out the rest of the convoy. The hillside was burning, so clearly our planes had made a pass, but it hadn't seemed to do any good. I was the only prisoner. The only reason I was still alive was that by the time they found me at the bottom of the slope below the road, whatever passed for leaders in the group had re-established enough order that they were able to keep the men from slitting my throat.

They had frog marched me up into the mountains, away from the ambush site. The first night we stayed in a village, I was hog tied and thrown into a storage room. The next day they sent me on to where I would spend the better part of six months. Dozens of men came through to interrogate me.

I would love to say I held out, that I made them kill me before I told them anything. But that is never the way it works. Everyone breaks, no matter how motivated. It's why terrorists around the world operated in separate cells, where information was extremely limited. And these were guys willing to blow themselves up for 'the cause'.

The army tries to give us the tools to resist as long as we can. Some of us, especially those like Special Forces that operate separately from the main body of the military much of the time, go to what is known as SERE school. It stands for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape. God, does the army love it's acronyms! They simulate capture, and train in techniques for resisting and staying sane in captivity. Having now experienced both the training and the real thing, I will say the training is only a shadow of what really happens.