“Oh God please let me keep what little pride I still have left and make my legs work!” I whispered into the darkness, as I tried to move again. I got the same result as before. I was old and feeble, ready for the old folk’s home at Happy Level Acres or something.
Not even the anger I felt at that conclusion of thought was enough to budge my legs into action. My head sank down onto my shoulder and after a sigh of defeat I pressed the com button at my ear. I had insisted on radio silence until my signal.
“Ring?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m going to need your help to get out of this crate.”
There was a telling pause before he responded, “Got it.”
I heard the sounds of him breaking free of his crate dimly in the background. I shook my head in self anguish. My task was to break out of a hellish Soviet era gulag sinkhole in the middle of Siberia and I couldn’t even find my way out of a stupid wooden crate!
I heard prying sounds and soon Trent had the side of the crate off. He half pulled me out and when I was clear I grasped the edge of the crate and pulled myself upward. I winced with agony, as blood and feeling came back to my pinched off nerves. My face felt hot with the shame that I felt and as Trent angled around to face my front I angled my head away. His hand closed down firmly on my shoulder and I forced myself to meet his gaze in the gloomy interior of the storage bay.
“I’m over 30 years younger than you and I feel like…. Like not good.” He finished lamely in lieu of the earthy vocabulary terminology that he knew I didn’t approve of.
“Truth is I about called over to you to ask for help to get out of my crate.” Trent added.
I straightened up a bit feeling and hearing my back pop and crackle alarmingly so, when I did.
“Typically you move around pretty good for a dude, who will be pushing seventy in a few years.”
“You should’ve shut up, while you were ahead.” I muttered out unkindly.
“Thanks for getting me out of the crate. As you know I don’t like swearing, but there’s something else I don’t like too, which is lying. I heard how easily you broke out of your crate.”
He shrugged, “Made you feel better for a moment.”
I squeezed his shoulder, as I began to take in our murky surroundings, “Yeah it did, until you blew it.”
Trent whistled softly under his breath, “Speaking of blowing things up!” He exclaimed softly.
I turned to see what he was looking at. Not twenty feet from us was a wide vat that reached almost all the way up to the high ceiling of the storage bay. It had gas marked on it in Russian.
“Here help me push the crates over against it.”
Trent helped me, but I could see the question in his eyes. “You know that when this blows the whole place will go up in flames right?”
I nodded. I didn’t want to go down the moral rights and wrongs of that road just yet. This place was full of people being tortured to death, but that didn’t mean that they wanted their tortured existences mercifully ended by being blown up.
It was a tough call and one I wished that I didn’t have to make. Grabbing our packs we headed off into the inner reaches of the prison. It soon became apparent that security was no big priority here. There weren’t even surveillance cameras to have to dodge.
The place reminded one of a medieval dungeon, with a few outdated light bulbs swinging in the cobwebs. The smell of the place was horrible and only getting worse. That smell said everything that we’d heard about this place was true.
We dodged to either side of a walkway, as voices sounded nearby. The guards came closer and rounded the corner. I shoved one up against the wall my hand over his mouth, as my other hand buried a knife deeply into him. At the same moment, as I attacked, Trent’s muscular arm came around the throat of the other man and dragged him backwards, as he buried a knife in his man’s side.
We dragged our lifeless victims back out of the way and continued on down the hall. We were passing cells now. Some were empty. Some had rotting bodies in them. Some were occupied yet by the living.
Trent and I looked at each other in the feeble light. We were in hell and going through it as we imagined Deshavi in this place of horror. Trent glanced away into a cell, as we both had to keep doing, as we didn’t know where Deshavi might be. Something he saw made him lose it. He bent over hacking hard.
Not wanting to see the sight that he had, but in fear that it might be Deshavi I looked. It wasn’t Deshavi, but the sight of such foul torture was enough to jar one’s sanity.
The images of these suffering people would haunt me to my grave. I put an arm around Trent, as he reverted to just dry heaves. I pulled him along, until he straightened and broke my hold.
“I’ll kill every last one of them!” He said vehemently.
I shook my head at his words, “They make new ones every day Trent. This world is filled with bad people, who do terrible things. You could kill all day and get nowhere. Believe me I’ve tried. There’s no correcting the errant paths of humanity other than the transforming grace of God’s merciful Holy Spirit. No one in this life is going to get away with anything that they’ve done.”
“How do you explain away what you did to those Russians? That was torture.”
I cringed inwardly, because I had set such a bad example. “I guess the best that I can say about that is that I let the pain I was feeling in the moment act too much on my behalf. I should have just put a bullet in their heads and let God’s judgment suffice for revenge’s sake. Don’t be like me Trent.”
“Is that why you retired from being an agent, because it was becoming too easy to do terrible things?”
He was a perceptive one. “Partly.”
“What’s the other part?”
“I lost my son. I wasn’t good enough to get to him before the enemy finished him off.”
I was going through that same hell now. Was it already too late to rescue Deshavi?
“My mom thinks I retired, because of the strain it caused her for me to be in danger’s way and partly that was it. But most of my reason for quitting was that I was beginning to like my job too much. Killing was becoming easier than it should be.”
I nodded in response. I had surmised much the same for Trent’s abrupt departure from a life he’d been so ingrained in. The cells had been empty to either side of us for quite some time. Business must be bad these days.
I couldn’t get over the lack of security in the place. Just then up ahead of us and around the corner I heard the noises of a man approaching toward us.
“We need him alive!” I whispered, only loud enough for Trent to hear.
He nodded grimly and moved forward and as the guard rounded the corner he was snapped up by Trent in a choking hold and held upright virtually immobile. His eyes were flared wide in alarm at his capture. His gaze registered me in the murky light, as I stepped up close bringing a knife up to his face. His eyes went from the knife to me and I knew I had his attention.
“Now being in a place like this I imagine that you’ve seen just about every foul torture practiced and known to man.”
The man actually had the audacity to slightly nod.
“Having seen so much torture and suffering I’m sure that you can recognize the benefit of a quick and relatively painless death, as opposed to a tortured one.” I turned the blade of the knife to lay against the skin of his face.
The guard, who tortured for a living, had no stomach to face the same for himself. His eyes full of fear he asked, “What is it that you want to know?”
“Five days ago you received a crate with a young woman in it. Is she still alive?”
He nodded.
“Where is she?” I asked.
“Around the corner ten cells down on the left. I just came from giving her evening flogging to her.”
I glanced down at the man’s belt and was in time to see a drop of blood fall off the end of a strand of the whip
stashed there to land with a splat on the floor. I stared at the drop of blood on the floor, my Deshavi’s blood.
“It is fortunate that you have come to rescue her, for tomorrow, as ordered we were to dig her eyes out. They don’t last long after that.”
I looked up at the man feeling sick to my soul at the sight of him, “Why?”
It was all I could manage to say, desperate to understand how one could come to such a state of wretchedness.
He shrugged, “It’s a job.”
That was almost by rote the same excuse given by Nazi death camp guards. ‘It was a job’ or the classic ‘I was only following orders’.
I glanced past the man at Trent behind him. Thankfully Trent hadn’t understood a word of the conversation in Russian. I nodded and Trent snapped the man’s neck, as easy as he would a toothpick. The man slumped to the floor dead.
It wasn’t enough somehow. If I’d had the chance I’d of buried him in an ant mound right along with the others, even though I knew that was the wrong way to take a life. Did that make me as bad as him? Oh Lord I hoped not!
I stooped down and picked up the man’s keys and turned the corner. 10 cells down on the left. I stopped and pressed a surprised Trent up against the wall.
“I need you to stay here and cover us.”
He shook his head stubbornly and started to push back against me.
“Please Trent stay here! Our mission is to get her out of here. We can’t get lost in a mad desire to enact revenge and to that end I think it’s best if you let me handle this part!”
I stepped back and he stayed where he was, the muscles of his neck looking, as if every blood vessel was about to explode with the effort to stay where he was.
I stepped away and moved down the corridor toward the cell my feet heavy an alien feeling to my own perception of them. I reached the cell and opened the door relying more on rote memory of muscle action and the procedures of the past, in like circumstances, with people I hadn’t been close to. It was different with someone you loved and cared for, but I kept my emotions at bay, as best as I could, as I knelt down beside her and laid out a carry bag.
The overwhelming thought of ‘I have to get her out of here!’ guided my actions. She was poised on her knees hanging heavily from her wrists, from where they were suspended above her head tied off to a chain that came down from the ceiling. She was unconscious, but she was breathing.
I undid the heavy iron cuffs and she slumped against me. Gently I laid her over onto the carryout suit bag. She was so cold! In a panic I felt for her pulse again. It was there. Not strong, but still there.
The insulated bag would keep her secure and warm, while we moved through the night. I began to zip it up, as I found no major injuries that needed immediate attention. I tried to skip over the rest of the very evident abuse, but my mind couldn’t divorce it from my eyes. I hated all who had done this and the desire to kill was heavy upon me like a remembered bloodlust of my warrior heritage.
As I neared her head with the zipper I noticed that her eyes were open. “Grandpa?” She choked out roughly in question, as if she wasn’t sure of reality.
“Yes honey it’s me. We’re going to get you out of here! I promise!”
Her bruised face was emotionless, as she looked up at me and flatly said, “I want to die!”
I knelt over her face my fingers framing her bruised features tenderly my eyes not leaving her probing gaze. “I know you do honey, but that’s not going to happen. You’re going to live. I’m going to live. Trent’s going to live.”
Her eyes flashed at the mention of Trent. “He came!”
“Yes.”
“I don’t want to see him!” She whispered, as tears streaked down the sides of her face.
I wiped a tear away. “Now is that the truth honey?”
“No.” She whispered her lips quivering.
“He loves you and he’s walked into hell to rescue you.”
I finished zipping up the carry bag and whistled softly. Moments later Trent stepped into the cell and her eyes went to him. He slung his rifle behind him and knelt down on the other side of Deshavi. His arms scooped her up tenderly, as he held her close to him.
“You left.” She accused softly in the darkness of the cell.
“Never again!” He said deeply in response.
In this hellhole of a place I had a brief glimpse of a ray of hope that things could be good again, if the way they were speaking volumes of information between each other with just their eyes was anything to go by.
It was time to leave. I un-slung my rifle and headed out of the cell, as Trent followed with Deshavi. The corridor had gotten darker. It must be night outside now. On second thought I re-shouldered my rifle and pulled out my pistol with a silencer instead. Let’s see how long we could stretch out not alerting anyone to our presence.
I almost came out of my skin at the feeling of something touching my leg. My finger was tight on the trigger, as I took aim at the shadowy outline reaching out from the cell to weakly grasp at my leg. The voice that followed was but a rough whisper of sound, in the stillness of the cellblock, “Kill me.”
“Soon.” Was all I responded with and the grasp on my leg was released.
I stepped more toward the center of the aisle and continued on down the hall. I drilled the guard coming around a corner and later two more guards, as were they were lounging in an office type room. We were out of the cellblock and more into the administrative side of the prison. I opened a door and literally stepped out into the chill of the outside night air. I held the door for Trent, as I looked around. It couldn’t be this easy could it?
There was nothing wrong with having it easy, but it was almost never like this, which caused me to distrust how easy it had been to get Deshavi. We made our way down from the installations of the prison to the old pit floor of the copper mine uncontested.
We made our way down along the edge of the high wall in the darkness, as above us the last glimmer of twilight was fading fast. We passed a darker passageway in the high wall that let off a horrific stench. It was likely that they used the old tunnel for the disposal of bodies. Rounding a corner I could see the illuminated rode up out of the pit. It was heavily guarded.
It would be a firefight, if we tried to get out through that way and I wasn’t going to risk Deshavi like that. That meant that Plan B was in effect. I un-slung my heavy pack and unsnapped the grapple gun from it. I looked upwards to judge the height of the high wall. I placed it at about 60 feet high and I had 80 feet of rope to go with the grappling hook.
The hook would overshoot the edge by 10 feet or so leaving me with 5 to 10 feet of extra rope. It was enough, but way too close for comfort. One of us would have to climb up the rope and then secure it better. Then pull up Deshavi and toss the rope down to the remaining individual. It wouldn’t be easy, but it would work. I set the grapple gun firmly against the pit floor bottom and angled it upward.
Alarms rang out into the night echoing a dirge that I’d been expecting long before now. The entire pit lit up like a baseball park. They had work light display carriages parked intermittently all along the rim of the pit. The light shined down on us with a brilliant intensity.
We were sharply outlined against the dark rock; it would only be a matter of seconds before they spotted us. There was no time for all of us to climb up the rope, maybe not even enough time for any of us. We would have to fight our way out unless…..
I glanced up at a slight projection from the high wall above, where a steel pole stuck out at an angle. It had some kind of communication display on top of it. Slightly further along the edge was one of the light display carts, which looked relatively heavy.
“Come on!” I called to Trent, as I rushed across the pit to the side that had the steel pole.
He followed at a run. Each of our packs and assorted gear were pushing 100 pounds and he was caring Deshavi too, but as it was he still beat me to the oth
er side. I jammed the grapple gun down and took aim and shot it off. The grapple hook sailed up into the air and over the bent over steel pole to land, with a crash of broken glass, onto the light display cart.
I’d scored a direct hit!
I tugged on the rope, but it was secure. Adrenaline pumping through my veins I quickly secured Trent to the left over line of rope. He stared at me his face tight with anxiety for the woman he held safe within his arms. He gave me a look of surprise, as I unclipped the explosive round grenade gun from his pack. His eyes drifted upward.
“You’re crazy!” He boomed out in exclamation.
Maybe so, but it was the best idea I could come up with at the time. I brought the short gun up and fired. The explosive shell crashed into the bank of the edge of the pit right beneath the light cart poised on the edge above. Dirt fell away from the edge, even as bullets began to whine and ricochet off the rocks all around us. I stood steady and still; however, as I picked my target spots on the bank above.
At the impact of my last explosive shell a good bit of dirt caved into the pit. One of the cart tires fell in to the dip I had created. For a moment nothing happened and then I saw the cart teeter slightly. I dropped the gun and lunged for the end of the grapple rope my hands quickly snapping a rock climbing carabineer attached to my waist belt to the loop at the end of the rope.
The light cart toppled over the edge toward the pit floor below. The extra slack was jerked out of the rope and we were abruptly hauled up the pit side, as the grapple rope sawed around the base of the bent over steel pole. It was a classic dumb waiter system gone terribly wrong.
As the cart crashed to the pit floor below us there was a sharp jolt, as our rapid progress upward abruptly halted. All breath had been knocked out of me and I was light headed, as a result of it. In my disorientation I realized that I was head down and slowly I tried to write the situation. Pulling myself erect, as I hung in midair I glanced up to see Trent muscle himself and Deshavi up over the rim of the pit wall. Oh to be young again and be able to muscle your way out of a tight situation.
Agent out of Time (The Agents for Good) Page 9