Transition

by Henry Charles Mishkoff

  “Come,” Karnaga says, leading G.W. into the hall. “This way.” He shakes his head, and G.W. thinks that he detects a trace of a sardonic smile. “I realize that you Americans have extraordinary faith in your abilities,” Karnaga says, with a hint of amusement. “And your powers of persuasion may well be formidable. But with all due respect, Mr. Kendal, although your motives may be commendable, your chances of succeeding in this… this ‘errand of mercy,’ shall we say, are simply non-existent.”

  What will I say? G.W. wonders. Should I appeal to her conscience? To her better instincts?

  Does she have any?

  “Will you translate for me?” he asks.

  “That won’t be necessary.” Karnaga flashes a wry smile. “As it happens,” he says, “the girl is fluent in English.”

  5.2.19: Tanami

  He’s in the interrogation room. He’s standing in front of the girl. She’s sitting on the edge of the table. Her arms are restrained behind her by the burly guard who had been removing his pants just moments before. She regards G.W. suspiciously through glassy eyes.

  “Are you alright?” he asks. It sounds ridiculous even as he says it. From up close, the girl looks much worse than she had from a distance. Her bruised face is covered with caked blood. One of her eyes is swollen so badly that it’s nearly closed. Her broken nose is bent at an obscene angle. Her upper lip is split and bloody. Several of her teeth are chipped, and at least one is missing.

  But despite her terrible appearance, G.W. realizes that she’s even younger than he thought she was. Eighteen, maybe nineteen. Younger than Jill. A mere child.

  His mission to put a halt to the brutality takes on a new urgency.

  The battered girl stares back at G.W. with no sign of comprehension. Karnaga must be mistaken, he thinks, this girl doesn’t understand a word I’m saying. “Do you speak English?”

  “Who are you?” She speaks dully. Her speech is slurred, and her accent is thick, but her words are perfectly understandable.

  Thank God, G.W. thinks, she does understand me.

  Now all I have to do is figure out what I’m going to say.

  “My daughter…” he begins, then he pauses and starts again. “My name is G.W. Kendal,” he says, by way of introduction, carefully watching her eyes for signs of comprehension. “My daughter, Jill, was kidnapped. These men…” – G.W. gestures vaguely to Karnaga and the others who stand with him “…these men believe that you know where she is. If you do know… If you will tell me where she is, I can get these men to stop… to stop hurting you. And I will personally hire a lawyer to see that you are treated fairly, the best lawyer in the whole country. As God is my witness.”

  What else? It all sounds so lame. But what else can he offer her?

  “Jill, my daughter, she’s just about your age, maybe a couple of years older. I… I love her very much, and I want her back. If you tell me where she is, I’ll give you anything you want. Anything. Money is no object.”

  From behind G.W., the other prisoner shouts something for a few seconds, then there’s a loud slap, and silence. He’s telling her not to talk, G.W. thinks, despairingly. But maybe not – it sounded more like a question than a warning. Maybe he was just asking for a translation.

  The girl responds with a flood of words that G.W. can’t understand. The male prisoner laughs, briefly, scornfully, before being silenced once more.

  This is not going well, G.W. thinks, helplessly. I thought I might have had her attention there for a minute. But now she’s got a mulish look in her eye.

  “Please,” G.W. says, desperately. “I beg you in the name of all that’s good and decent. My daughter’s a student. And an athlete. She just came over here to compete. In the Olympics. She’s in the triathlon.”

  I’m not making any sense at all, G.W. thinks, and he begins to sweat. And I’m not making the slightest impression on her. How can she be so stubborn after the terrible beating she’s taken?

  “My daughter’s done nothing to hurt you people,” he says. “She doesn’t really know anything about politics at all.”

  And, finally, the girl speaks.

  “My mother knew nothing of politics, either.” Although she speaks with difficulty, the scorn in her voice comes through clearly. Her eyes burn into G.W.’s. “My father was the mayor of my village, but my mother was just an ordinary housewife. I knew that my father’s life was in danger because he dared to stand up to The Butcher. Even though I was only twelve years old, I was not surprised when they dragged him out of our home in the middle of the night. I understood that I would never see him again. And I was foolish enough…”

  As she speaks, her voice grows increasingly dry and raspy, and now she begins to cough uncontrollably. Blood trickles from a corner of her mouth.

  “Get her some water,” G.W. demands. And seconds later, a dirty, half-filled paper cup materializes in his hands. He holds it out to her, but the policeman holding her arms refuses to release them, despite G.W. protests. So he holds the cup to the girl’s mouth and tilts it back so that she can sip from it.

  “I was foolish enough,” the girl continues, after a few swallows, “to think that it was over. But the day after my father’s funeral, The Butcher’s men came again. They killed my baby brother, shot him in the head right before my eyes. They raped my mother, three of them, while I watched. Then me, while my mother screamed, begging them to leave me alone. Did I tell you that I was only twelve?”

  Does she expect an answer? G.W. moves his lips, but nothing comes out.

  “They grew tired of my mother’s screams, so they strangled her. While I watched. While they were raping me. And laughing. I’ll never forget that. They were laughing, joking. It was great fun for them, a sport.” Her voice grows eerily flat, her eyes distant. “I swore that day that I would get revenge. I made that promise to my mother as she lay gasping on the floor, even as those pigs grunted on top of me…” Her voice trails off.

  “When I went to the United States,” she continues, softly, “I knew that the Americans would help me. I knew that once I told my story, the Americans would be outraged, as all decent people would be. I learned your language as quickly as I could, so that your people would be able to understand me. Surely, the Americans would not continue to support The Butcher once they knew the truth. But no one believed me. They said that I was a communist.”

  She laughs, bitterly, but her laughter quickly dissolves into a spasm of coughing. G.W. holds the cup out to her, but she shakes her head violently.

  “And now you,” she continues, hoarsely, “you stand before me begging for the life of your precious daughter. You wouldn’t listen to me when I begged for your help, but now that your precious daughter is in trouble…”

  For a moment, G.W. thinks that the girl is accusing him personally of turning his back on her, and he tries to remember when and where they had met. “I didn’t know,” he protests, just as he realizes that the accusation is generic, that he stands accused as a symbol of an indifferent nation.

  And then, without warning, the girl spits in his face. And, as G.W. reaches up instinctively to wipe the spittle from his cheek, she swings her legs wildly, kicking him in the stomach. With a surprised grunt, G.W. doubles over. The girl’s legs continue to flail, striking him in the chest and head.

  In just a few short seconds, the scene in the room is reduced to chaos. The girl is screaming at him, but not in English, and the other prisoner is shouting, and Karnaga is barking orders, and his men are running around frantically. And then G.W. is being led from the room, and the girl’s derisive shouts are quickly turning to screams of pain.

  G.W. finds himself back in the viewing room, and now the girl is being raped, it’s as if he were watching the scene she had just described, but this time it isn’t her mother who watches but her fellow prisoner, who screams soundlessly through the thick glass.

  “Was that true?” G.W. demands, gasping, as his breath returns. “What the girl said, does that kind of thing reall
y happen here?” Of course it’s true, he thinks. It probably happens all the time. Business as usual. It’s happening now. Just take a look through the glass.

  Karnaga merely shrugs. “Do you wish to talk of politics?” he asks, pointedly. “Or do you wish to have your daughter back?”

  5.2.20: Tanami

  “They are lovers, you know.”

  “Who are lovers?”

  “These two.” Karnaga gestures through the glass. “That is why we used sexual interrogation techniques, the ones that you found to be so distressing.” His voice betrays a certain smugness that suggests that he’s finding some pleasure in G.W.’s discomfort.

  “You hoped,” G.W. says, “that he would talk to stop you from raping his girlfriend.”

  “Exactly.” Karnaga seems pleased that G.W. is catching on so quickly.

  “But you were mistaken.”

  Karnaga shrugs. “It was a slim chance, at best. He is Red October. It is not likely that he will talk at all.”

  “Red October?”

  “A gang of professional terrorists,” Karnaga explains. “Communists. Trained and financed by the Russians, decades ago.” He looks at G.W. thoughtfully. “Which indicates, of course,” he admits, “that your information about Dr. Petronovich may have been accurate after all.”

  G.W. snorts. “What a surprise,” he says dryly.

  The sarcasm seems to be lost on Karnaga. “In any event,” he continues, “Red October initially recruited from the lower classes, the scum of Qen Phon. That is his background – Harakeem Anduwat, the slime who sits there in front of you. She, on the other hand, is the offspring of a middle-class family. Her name is Anna Q’Bara. Her father, Zolat Q’Bara, was killed when we stormed their hide-out. Zolat Q’Bara was Red October as well. Undoubtedly, it was he who did his daughter the favor of introducing him to her young man.”

  “You lost me,” G.W. says. “If her family is middle class, and he was her father, then his family was middle-class too, right? So how did he get hitched up with these Red October people?”

  Karnaga shrugs. “It was fashionable, for a time, for the children of the middle-class to play at being revolutionaries. Zolat Q’Bara may simply have taken it a step further than most. His uncle was one of the founders of the Freedom Party, so he may have been exposed to the influence of communists at an early age.”

  “Freedom Party? I’m afraid,” G.W. says, his head starting to swim, “that I don’t know much about your politics here.”

  “It is not important.”

  “No, tell me,” G.W. insists. “I want to understand.”

  Karnaga sighs, and then he begins to speak in a tone reminiscent of a teacher lecturing a particularly slow pupil. “The so-called Freedom Party was an organization headed by the late Mantu Siko, an ambitious politician. He claimed to represent what he liked to call the ‘down-trodden masses’ of Qen Phon.” Karnaga snorts derisively – as far as he’s concerned, the notion that even a single down-trodden mass exists in Qen Phon is obviously absurd.

  “Mantu Siko was a communist, of course,” Karnaga continues. “A rabble-rouser. His constant demands for so-called ‘reforms’ were thinly-disguised attempts to generate unrest and dissatisfaction among the people. The poor – the people whom he was supposedly attempting to ‘liberate’ – would have none of his rhetoric. Instead, he attracted intellectuals, college professors, students – the ungrateful, privileged children of the new middle-class.” Karnaga’s voice drips with contempt.

  The late Mantu Siko.

  “What happened to him?” G.W. asks. A few hours ago, he might have accepted Karnaga’s dismissal of Mantu Siko as a communist and rabble-rouser at face value. But now, after a first-hand behind-the-scenes look at police operations in Qen Phon, G.W. has become a skeptic. Perhaps the reforms that Mantu Siko sought were not so outrageous after all.

  “He was arrested for opposing General Tanami when he crushed the Red October movement. He was killed trying to escape arrest. A regrettable incident,” Karnaga adds, betraying not even a hint of regret.

  “I suspect,” G.W. observes, dryly, “that regrettable incidents happen all the time here.”

  “They did, at one time,” Karnaga admits. If he has noticed G.W.’s sarcasm, he does not acknowledge it. “However, in recent years, under intense international scrutiny, we have made a diligent effort to keep our prisoners alive.”

  But just barely, G.W. thinks, wincing as he watches the prisoners continue to absorb their brutal punishment. “So,” he says, “he is from the Red October movement, and she is a member of the Freedom Party. Right?” Somehow, it’s important to try to make some sense out of this senseless situation.

  “Those groups do not really exist anymore.” Karnaga dismisses them with a wave of his hand. “Not in any coherent form. Only a few scattered remnants remain. And they have joined forces for one final, desperate act under the leadership of Akaso Siko, the son of Mantu Siko.”

  “Akaso Siko?” G.W. frowns. “Where have I heard that name?”

  “So, here we are.” As he speaks, Karnaga begins to pace back and forth in the small room. “Harakeem Anduwat is Red October, so he will never talk. Anna Q’Bara, on the other hand, has seldom had to endure any pain or suffering. We should be able to break her. Yet we have not been able to.” He shakes his head with obvious disappointment.

  “Akaso Siko.” G.W. repeats the name. And again: “Akaso Siko.” He screws up his face, as if the effort will help him remember. “That name sounds so familiar…”

  Karnaga resumes his analysis. “I suspect,” he says, “that she is being strong for him. She is proving her loyalty – no, more than that, she is proving her love for him by refusing to cooperate with us. We should have kept them separated. But we did not know. We did not know.”

  “Listen,” G.W. says. “I’ve heard that name before, but I just can’t place it. Help me out. Would he have been on the news or something?”

  “She does not believe that she may die,” Karnaga says. He continues to pace as he thinks out loud. “She is being strong for him, and she knows that we will not kill her.” He nods slowly to himself. The puzzle is starting to make sense. “She does not believe our threats. She knows that we would not risk that kind of unpleasantness during the games. So she tolerates the pain because of her love for him, and because she knows she will survive.

  “I have it!” Suddenly, Karnaga turns and stares at G.W. “I have thought of a way that we may be able to shatter her illusion of invulnerability,” he announces. He sounds triumphant, as if he has just solved a great mystery.

  But to G.W., Karnaga’s announcement strikes a false note. All of this pacing and ruminating was an act for my benefit, G.W. thinks. He’s known exactly what he was going to say from the minute he walked in.

  “Okay,” G.W. says, after a long pause. “I’ll bite. What’s the plan?”

  And so G.W. listens as Tanaqo Karnaga, Commander of the Home Guard, First Division, quickly outlines his plan for extracting the critical information from the prisoners.

  G.W. is stunned. Even after all the horrors he has witnessed from the viewing room, he nonetheless reacts with instinctive revulsion to Karnaga’s scheme. But because Karnaga is, somehow, his most powerful ally and should not be needlessly offended, G.W. hides his displeasure. “Are you sure that’ll work?” he asks.

  Karnaga shrugs. “One is never certain in this area.”

  “If it doesn’t work…”

  “Then we will not get a second chance, I know.” Karnaga nods somberly. “It is a gamble. It is like placing all of our money on a single throw of the dice. But it may be our only hope.”

  G.W. shakes his head. “It sounds like an act of desperation.”

  “We are desperate,” Karnaga points out. “Time is running out.”

  Why did Karnaga tell me this? G.W. wonders. Is he asking for my approval? My permission?

  G.W. sighs. “I don’t like it,” he says. “I really don’t like it, But if it’s the onl
y option we have…”

  “I believe it may be,” Karnaga says, and then rephrases it to make it stronger: “It is my considered opinion that this procedure may be our last chance to save the life of your daughter.”

  The life of my daughter. That’s what it gets down to, isn’t it? Do I ever want to see Jill alive again? That’s the bottom line here. This isn’t some philosophical exercise in ethics. This is literally a matter of life or death.

  And for some reason that I don’t quite understand, Karnaga is asking me to decide.

  “I’m surprised that you’d even consider doing that,” G.W. says, cautiously. “I didn’t think you could get away with it, given the current political climate, and the games, and all.”

  Karnaga shrugs. “It may involve some risk, yes. But not if it remains, shall we say, hidden. It becomes an embarrassment to us only if word of what we do reaches the wrong ears.”

  Which makes it all the more puzzling that you would tell me about it, G.W. thinks. There’s something going on here that I don’t quite understand, some game that Karnaga’s playing with me.

  And now he’s waiting for me to approve his plan so he can proceed.

  Why?

  And can I live with myself if I go along with his disgusting scheme?

  Or maybe the real question is: Can I live with myself if I don’t do everything possible to save Jill?

  5.2.21: Tanami

  At that exact instant, as if executing a perfect stage entrance, the door bursts open and J. Stanton Kennedy strides purposefully into the viewing room.

  “Thank heaven I’ve found you, G.W.,” Kennedy says, breathlessly. “I’ve had the very devil of a time making these people tell me where you were. I’ve been looking… Good heavens, man, are you quite alright? You look awful, if you don’t mind my…”

  And then his gaze drifts ever so slightly, perhaps attracted by a sudden movement in his peripheral vision. “Oh my God,” he says. He grows pale. “Oh my dear God.”

  In a split second, all of G.W.’s indecision vanishes. What has to be done, has to be done. And it can’t be done in front of J. Stanton Kennedy, the Executive Director of the United States Olympic Committee.