The military truck finally came to a rattling stop after several hours of driving, giving off one more loud blast as the engine settled. The flap was opened almost immediately, to the immense relief of the group of sweating, air-starved soldiers trapped within it’s stifling confines. Rough hands hauled the human cargo from the back of the truck, forcing each member of the group face down into the scorching, sandy ground, hoods and bindings still securely in place.

Iraqi soldiers argued among themselves as Kael tried to follow the rapid conversation. Her body ached from the enforced confinement. Years of Marine training urged her to get up and crack some heads, if only to get the circulation going again. She resisted the temptation mightily, aware that her men were probably going through the same things. Being captured without a fight was not in the Marine Code. However, they had stopped being Marines as soon as they were captured. Had, in fact, stopped even being U.S. citizens. They were officially persona non grata to the U.S. government. Her orders were clear. “You get captured, we don’t know you.” Easy enough to remember, she supposed. After all, it wouldn’t do for it to come out that the United States of America sent in armed squads to blow up buildings of third world countries at taxpayer’s expense.

Kael smirked under her hood. They were officially on their own now. No black suited U.S. Embassy official would come knocking on the door of wherever they were, demanding their immediate release. ‘Well, Gunny. You got em into this mess. It’s up to you to get em out. Right?’ Right. Turning her stiff neck so she faced the rest of her group, Kael cleared her throat, speaking softly in a voice that did not carry up from ground level. “Ok, guys, you know the drill. We’re not at war, so the Geneva Convention’s out the window. Name, rank and serial number is just movie stuff. As far as these goons are concerned, we’re just a bunch of mercenaries from Outer Nonamia out blowing up buildings for kicks. Got me?”

Grunts of assent came from the rest of the group as they resisted their training and awaited their fate.

The rough hands came again, hauling the soldiers up from the ground and dragging them into some type of building. Kael concentrated on counting the steps from the entrance to wherever they were going to be held, noting that the floor curved steadily downward and the air became noticeably cooler and more humid with each step.

Their hoods were removed one by one and each soldier received only a glimpse of their surroundings before a rifle butt to the back of the skull sent each into darkness. Their unconscious bodies were dragged, still bound at the wrists, and dumped into two tiny, dank cells. Steel doors clanged shut with finality and retreating bootsteps went unheard by the group.

*******

Kael was the first to return to consciousness, pain pounding sickly in her temples. Her bound hands prevented her from rubbing the stinging knot on the back of her skull, and as she tried to sit up, a wave of dizziness convinced her that movement was not the best course of action at the present. Instead, she laid back down, her head pillowed on someone’s well muscled thigh. Staring up at a water-stained, crumbling ceiling, her eyes traced the path of several silken webs that ran from the corners of the small cell to the caged light which hung down from the ceiling on a rusty chain.

Movement from beneath her head caused her to sit up once again, rolling with the waves of dizziness as they washed over her. Blinking her eyes to clear her vision, she moved away from the figure beneath her, her back pressing against a chilled, damp wall. “Andrews, you ok?”

“Will be as soon as you give me the plate of the truck that mowed me down,” the young man mumbled, struggling to come to a seated position. Like Kael before him, he gave up the effort, crumpling back to the sodden ground and moaning. “Where the fuck are we anyway?”

“Holding cell of some sort,” Kael replied, looking around for the first time. The cell was a rough square, approximately ten feet by ten feet, barely large enough for its three occupants to sit without becoming tangled up in one another. The walls were made of crumbling cement, liberally smattered with mostly illegible graffiti. Water ran in continuous streams down the walls, pooling on the cement floor and running down into a large drain in the center. There were no beds, chairs or toilet facilities. The place stank of excrement, death and despair.

Andrews finally made it up to a seated position, looking around as well. “Reminds me of P.S. 62 in the Bronx,” he sneered. “What about Sleeping Ugly over there?” He gestured with his head toward the still unconscious Reingold, then groaned and leaned his aching skull back against the damp wall. “Fuck.”

As if hearing his name mentioned, Reingold struggled into awareness, the stench of the fetid water flowing into the drain beneath his head causing him to screw up his face in disgust. As he lifted his head from the floor, the others noticed a green slime had liberally coated his close cropped reddish blonde hair.

“Nice look for ya, Goldy,” Andrews sneered. “Green is definitely your color.”

“What the hell are you talking about, asshole?” Reingold asked, propelling his body out of the pool of water and scrabbling up to lean against the wall, rubbing his head against the crumbling cement to rid himself of the slimy mass clinging to his skull.

“Shut up. Both of you.” Lifting her head, Kael looked around the cramped quarters again. “Reg, Kelly, you guys alright?”

Soft moans came from the west end of the tiny cell. “Yeah Gunny, we’re alright in here,” PFC Bryon Kelly answered, his voice muffled behind the feet of thick cement separating the two cells. “How about you?”

“We’re ok,” Kael answered. Her piercing eyes lanced into the men sharing the cell with her and when she next spoke, her voice was raised just enough to capture the attention of her other two men in the adjoining cell. “Alright, guys. This isn’t gonna be fun, but we’ve been trained for this eventuality. Just remember to keep your heads on straight, don’t give ‘em any information, and try your best to hold on till we figure a way out of this. Understood?”

All the men voiced their consent bravely, promising they wouldn’t break under whatever tortures were going to be inflicted on them. Kael fixed Reingold and Andrews with a significant look. “I’m proud of you guys. Just trust in yourselves and each other and we’ll get out of here.”

Reingold cracked a grin that lit up his whole face. “Don’t worry about us, Gunny. We’ll take whatever they can dish out and then some.”

“Good,” Kael grunted, trying to find a more comfortable position for her aching body. “Now let’s just stay calm and wait to see what they’ve got in store for us.”

Several hours later, the steel door to Kael’s cell blew open and two heavily armed guards stepped partially inside, looking menacingly around for a moment before reaching down and pulling Andrews up from the floor.

The brash young soldier’s eyes widened in fear and his dark skin paled for a moment before the customary smirk reappeared over his broad features. “Give it your best shot, coppers,” he said in his best James Cagney accent. “You’ll never get me to rat.”

The smart remark earned him a hard shot across the jaw, but Andrews refused to let his knees buckle. Turning his head toward his companions, he flashed them a brief, confident smile before he was dragged from the cell, leaving his two squad mates to stare at one another in silence.

The poke to the jaw did nothing to ease the pounding in his head, Andrews observed as he was dragged along through the twisting corridors of the underground structure. Adapt and overcome was one of the mottoes of the Corps and he tried to do both. He really did. It was, however, a bit difficult trying to adapt when one saw everything in quintuplicate. Overcoming was damn near impossible.

Instead, he just went along for the ride, spying everything through a fog of pain and nausea which clenched sickly at his belly as if it had grown roots and planned staying on awhile. He was thankful to whichever gods might have had pity on poor Marines when he was finally dragged through one last doorway and thrown into a hard, high-backed wooden chair. His cuffs were released, then his arms were bound in back of the chair, stretching the muscles in his shoulders to the point of protestation.

His pain calmed some as his vision eased back into sharp focus. Taking advantage of what was sure to be an all too brief respite, the soldier looked around at his new accommodations. It appeared he was in an office of some sort, quite Spartanly decorated. A desk filled much of the space and a large picture of Saddam Hussein hung behind it, bordered by the Iraqi flag on one side and the banner of the Republican Guard on the other. The floor was cheaply tiled and barren of any coverings. Andrews smirked internally. ‘It’s gotta be a bitch to get the blood out of Berber.’

Seated behind the desk, resplendent in his Guard uniform, was obviously the Commandant of this little pleasure camp, his black, close cropped hair gleaming in the mellow light. A luxuriant mustache sprouted beneath his nose and the man stroked it reflexively as he attended his paperwork, giving off the calculated air of a man much too busy to have time to deal with ruffians such as the one now seated before him.

After a long moment of silence, the man’s dark, cunning eyes lifted from the desktop, scanning the seated form of Andrews with as much fascination as one would spy a particularly interesting insect on the sidewalk. He looked at the guards bracketing Andrews like bookends, speaking rapidly to them. Both men nodded and grabbed their weapons to their chests, standing like statues.

Finally, the man looked back at Andrews, smiling slightly and stroking his moustache again. He fired off another rapid sentence, then sat back in the chair awaiting a response.

Unfortunately for the Marine, Andrews was a last minute addition to the squad, having been called up from a cushy job stateside when the original explosives expert came down with the flu. As such, his training in the local flora and fauna of Iraq left much to be desired. He neither spoke nor understood a word of Arabic.

Never one to allow such a minute detail disrupt his work, Andrews met the patiently waiting look from the Commandant with a challenging stare of his own. His effort was rewarded by a rifle butt to the stomach and he hunched over, gasping for air, suddenly thankful that he’d skipped breakfast that morning. Looking back up, Andrews shot another challenging glare toward his tormenter and was again rewarded with a blow to the stomach, leaving him breathless and coughing.

Getting his breathing back under control, the Marine gathered his wits and straightened slowly, trying to adopt a casual posture against the snakes of pain in his guts. “Listen, Colonel Klink,” he said in the strongest voice he could muster, “it should be obvious to you by now that I don’t understand a word you’re saying. You could jabber at me like a monkey on the rag till the next millennium and I still wouldn’t understand ya. So why don’t you just cut to the chase, beat the crap outta me like a good little thug and take me back to my buddies, huh?”

His breath came out in a gush and he swore he could feel the weapon’s stock against his spine as the next blow to his stomach came full force. The world around him greyed out for a moment, and when he came to, the Commandant was slowly getting up from behind his desk, meticulously straightening the creases in his uniform. He favored Andrews with a toothy smile. “You Americans are so predictable,” the man said in English so lightly accented that Andrews knew he had spent quite some time in the States. “All bluster and bravado, yet when it comes right down to it, softer than the belly of a pig.”

“You’re barkin’ up the wrong tree, m’man,” Andrews retorted. “I’m about as American as Mao T’se Tung.” Two rifle stocks jammed into the nerves of his shoulders, slamming the Marine back against the hard wood of the chair, a hiss of pain escaping through tightly pursed lips.

“You take me for a fool,” the man observed, coming around to the front of the desk and perching against it with one hip, casually studying his fingernails. “No matter. What you lack in bravery, you in no way make up for in civility. I, however, am a man of good breeding. I can be polite, even if my guests don’t understand the meaning of the word.” He pressed down the fabric of his uniform jacket, then braced his palms against the desk, leaning forward slightly. “My name is Kamran Al-Hassein and I am the commander of this Unit. And you, my American friend, were caught trespassing on my land. I would like to talk with you about this. Civilly. Why don’t we start with your name?” Al-Hassein smiled again, spreading his hands. “After all, you know mine.”