“I’m not going to fight him!” Bernard shouted, quickly stepping backward.
Chant stopped, waited. “What’s the problem, Bernard?”
“Yes, Bernard,” Richard Krowl said, leaning forward in the chair, “what is the problem?”
“His problem,” one of the torturers, a Korean, said, “is that he’s about to shit in his pants.”
All of the torturers began to laugh, and smiles touched even the faces of the black-uniformed guards.
Now he had to fight, Bernard thought as his face grew fiery hot. He could not let them laugh at him. He would leap forward, aim a side kick at the wound on the other man’s belly, follow with a blow to the seared shoulder. The other man was just putting on a show; he was hurt, weak. Defeating him now would be easy, if only he could get himself to move.…
The other man would kill him, Bernard thought. For reasons he did not understand, he was absolutely certain of that. He did not want to die.
“Look at him!” Bernard shouted, pointing toward Chant’s stomach, feeling the others’ laughter washing over him like a physical force, a wave of boiling water. “The guy’s bleeding, and with that burn on his shoulder, he won’t even be able to lift his arm. I’m not going to have it be said about me that I was able to whip John Sinclair just because he was half-dead! I’ll wait until he’s stronger!”
As if in response, Chant swung his left arm in a complete circle.
“Bernard,” the torture doctor said with a sigh, “I think Mr. Sinclair is quite willing to fight you now. As you well know, it’s questionable whether the man will live much longer, much less get stronger. You said you wanted to fight this man so that you could show us what you could do. I suggest you take this opportunity; there may not be another.”
Bernard, his entire body trembling and his face crimson with rage and shame, wheeled and pushed his way through the circle.
“That’s too bad,” Krowl said. “I really did want to see a demonstration of Mr. Sinclair’s legendary martial arts skills.” He paused, looked up at the tall Japanese. “What about you? You and your men are all supposed to be martial arts experts. You people are costing me a small fortune. How about earning your pay? Will you fight Sinclair?”
“It’s not what I’m being paid for,” the Japanese replied simply. “You said nothing about giving exhibitions.”
“You’re paid to do what I ask you to.”
“We were hired to provide security. If he attacks you, I will shoot him in the legs—as you instructed.”
“Are you afraid of him?”
The other man did not reply.
It was to his advantage to fight, Chant thought. The more impressed and intrigued the torture doctor was by his physical skills, the less likely Krowl was to do anything that would cause him permanent physical damage.
“Will you fight me?” Chant asked in Japanese, addressing the tall, keen-eyed leader of the mercenaries.
“No, Sensei,” the Japanese replied in his own language.
“Do you know me?”
“I know of you. This man and his brother are assholes.”
Chant suppressed a smile. “Are you a torturer, like these others?”
“No, Sensei. And I am not a fool. I am good enough to know my limitations.”
“Then you must be very good, indeed.”
“I will not go up against you.”
“I would be honored to fight with you—but not to the death. I understand that the services of you and your men are contracted for, but in this case my interests and those of your employer are the same. Will you spar with me?”
“If this asshole wants.”
“Ask him. Then pick two others—your best.”
Richard Krowl, who had been listening to the two men converse in Japanese with an air of bemusement, now raised his machine pistol off his lap, looked at Chant, and raised his eyebrows slightly. “Que pasa, hombre?” There was more than a hint of nervousness in his voice.
“You wanted a fight,” Chant replied easily. “I’ve just arranged it.”
“Not to the death,” the Japanese said in English.
Krowl nodded. “Good. Death isn’t what I’m looking for at the moment. Sinclair, how many languages do you speak?”
“Enough to enable me to get around.”
“What else were the two of you talking about?”
“It takes a long time to arrange a fight in Japanese.”
“Give me your gun,” Krowl said to the Japanese, moving his own machine pistol ever so slightly in the man’s direction. The Japanese did as he was told, and Krowl grunted. “Could you kill this man in a no-holds-barred fight? He’s been through a lot in the past few days. He can’t be the same man he used to be.”
“John Sinclair is a great sensei,” the Japanese replied simply. “A warrior … and sometimes a teacher.”
“That may be,” Krowl said, “but I’m the one paying you. I wouldn’t want that to slip your mind.”
“You purchased my skills and gun, and those of the men under my command. You didn’t buy my respect.”
“Hey, now—”
“The sensei has suggested that he spar against me and two of my men. Is this your wish?”
Krowl thought about it, nodded his head. “Go ahead,” he said, and pointed his own gun at Chant’s legs.
The Japanese motioned to two of his men, a black and a caucasian, and they handed their guns to other mercenaries before stepping out into the circle. The Japanese spoke to them. All three men bowed to Chant, who bowed back, then flexed his knees slightly as the men split and began to circle him.
The black and the Caucasian on his flanks attacked first, a split second apart, one throwing a high kick at his head and the other a roundhouse kick at his midsection. Chant spun counterclockwise, parrying the high kick with his forearm, avoiding the roundhouse, then catching the Japanese with a straight arm blow to the chest that would have killed the other man if it had been thrown with full force. He came back under a blow thrown by the black, flipped him in the air with a judo throw, then rolled at the white’s legs, knocking him off his feet. Instantly, Chant was back on his feet, crouched and ready.
There were grunts of surprise from the onlookers, and even Richard Krowl nodded his head slightly in appreciation Only Feather stood, as always, mute and unmoving—although her eyes were directed toward the men in the center of the ring.
Chant and his opponents bowed to each other once again, and the bout resumed—a graceful but incredibly quick ballet of violence with spinning and flying bodies that would have been marked by blood, broken bones, and death if the punches and kicks had not been pulled.
Even as Chant fought, his gaze would occasionally flick to the faces of the men in the circle. Suddenly Bernard, his face still flushed, appeared in the circle, shoving his way in between one of the broken people and a brown-uniformed guard. A large blade flashed in his right hand—and the burly man charged, pushing aside one of Chant’s black-uniformed opponents, who was just getting to his feet after being thrown.
Chant spun away from blows thrown by the Japanese and the black, who had not yet seen Bernard. Instead of coming back at the men with counterblows, Chant continued the momentum of his spin, then suddenly left his feet. His body whipped around in the air with almost blinding speed as he spun clockwise; halfway through the spin his right leg came out, and his bare heel smashed into Bernard’s face with crushing force. Blood and teeth sprayed over the faces of those onlookers closest to Bernard as the burly man slowly spun around, then sat down hard, his hands over the broken lower part of his face.
Silence.
Chant’s black-uniformed opponents bowed slightly, stepped back into the circle. Bernard, blood streaming through his cupped hands, began to softly moan in pain, shock, and disbelief. Chant stepped forward, gripped Bernard under the left elbow, brought him up to his feet. He effortlessly slung the man over his shoulders, then turned to his left and moved his head. Two torturers quickly moved aside, f
orming a break in the ring. Chant, with the moaning Bernard slung over his shoulders, stepped out of the ring and moved off down the walk to his right, heading for the shark lagoon.
A few seconds later Chant heard the soft, mechanical whisper of the wheelchair gaining on him. He did not stop or turn. Richard Krowl casually rode down the incline past him, used his hands to brake, then turn the chair to face Chant. The machine pistol came up, aimed at Chant’s thighs, and Chant stopped.
“That’s far enough, Sinclair,” the torture doctor said in a flat voice.
“I’m on garbage detail, Krowl—doing your dirty work for you. You want him dead, I’ll get him dead. I could have killed him back there instead of just knocking his teeth out. I prefer to feed him to the sharks.”
“Ah, yes, but it would look tacky if I let you do that Put him down—or I’ll put a bullet in your leg”
Chant abruptly shrugged Bernard off his shoulders, but he kept a steel grip on the man’s right wrist, holding it firmly in position as the man fell; the wrist snapped with an audible crack, and Bernard shrieked in agony.
“Gee, I’m really sorry about that,” Chant said evenly, glancing back and forth between the torture doctor in the wheelchair and Bernard, who was continuing to wail and spray blood from his mouth as he writhed on the ground, cradling his shattered wrist to his chest. “I should have put him down more carefully.”
Krowl did not even glance at his brother as he got out of the chair, stepped well back, then motioned with the machine pistol for Chant to sit down.
“Take him back to his cell and chain him,” Krowl said to the two black-uniformed guards who had come up and now flanked Chant, the muzzles of their Uzis jammed into his ribs. “Take two other men with you. If he resists, shoot him in both kneecaps. Unless Mr. Sinclair changes his attitude very quickly, he’s not going to have any need of his legs anyway.”
NINETEEN
At sundown, the machinery behind the wall began to whine. The chains retracted, inexorably pulling Chant up on the cold stone, pinning him there.
Feather came to him an hour later.
A key rattled in the lock. The cell door swung open and Feather, silent as death, glided through the dim light cast by the overhead fixtures, stopping a yard away from him. She was dressed in jeans, sneakers, and a cotton blouse, and wore a green scarf wrapped around her head to partially hide her swollen face.
Slowly, her head tilted back and she looked directly into Chant’s face with her slightly out-of-focus eyes. She stood like that for what seemed a very long time to Chant, and he felt his stomach muscles tighten. A chill started at the base of his skull, flickered down his body.
She knew, Chant thought; she knew he had done the killing.
“Hello, Maria,” Chant said softly.
The olive-skinned woman with the huge, soulful, dark eyes slowly unbuttoned her blouse, shrugged it off her shoulders to the floor. She wore no bra, and her large, firm breasts glistened slightly with perspiration, although it was not warm in the cell. She reached behind her, withdrew from her jeans pocket a large, white feather with a shaft that was still stained with his blood.
She knew it had been him who had attacked her.
But she had not told Richard Krowl. He was also sure of that.
“You’re a healer, Doctor,” Chant continued in the same quiet voice. “At least, you were once. What you do here is evil. Certainly, some of us deserve the agony you bring us—but not all. Some of us are like you were when you were captured by the soldiers.”
Sweat formed high on her chest, rolled down the cleft between her breasts. Her hand came up, softly brushed his belly with the fronds of the feather. Chant’s flesh quivered.
“You were terribly, terribly hurt, Maria.” Already, his lungs were beginning to ache, and he drew in a deep breath. “You were hurt beyond what anyone else can imagine. In a very real sense, you died out in that jungle. Part of you was resurrected when you tortured to death the man who had tortured you. What you did then was just; what you do now, acting as house torturer for Krowl, is not.”
Slowly, the woman undid the rest of his coveralls to expose his genitals. She put her hand on him, hesitated, then began to stroke his penis.
“You have become your own enemy—ah!”
She had stabbed him in the belly with the shaft of the feather, just below his bite wound. Chant gasped for breath, swallowed hard. There had been something different about that particular strike, he thought; there had been emotion in it, as opposed to the calculated manner in which she had taken him apart before. She was angry with him—or wanted him to stop talking.
“You don’t have to hurt others to feel alive any longer, Maria,” Chant said through clenched teeth, feeling the fronds of the feather softly—menacingly—stroking the stiff shaft of his penis. Sweat had now begun to flow freely off both their bodies. “There can be an end to this nightmare—if you want an end—ah! Listen—ah!—to me. There are people who can help you. You can be healed all the way. Nobody can ever make up for what was done to you, but you can be whole again. There is reconstructive surgery that can erase the scars, open the passages that were burned shut. If you can’t have a child, then you can adopt one. You can know love again, feel good again …”
Chant paused and grimaced when she began to poke at his testicles and the tip of his penis with the shaft of the feather.
“Help me,” Chant groaned through his agony. “Fight back, Maria. Krowl only gave back a part of you—the part that he wanted. You can take back the rest of you. This is a living nightmare you must will yourself to wake from. If you help me, I can help you; as ridiculous as that may sound, it’s true. Perhaps you know it’s true, for you were spared the other night. If you help me, if you don’t harm me anymore, I can take you to people who can heal the rest of you—body and mind. You are a beautiful woman, Maria. You can live again. You don’t have to hurt any longer. Stop. Be a healer again.”
Trying to speak while hanging from the wall was taking its toll, and Chant paused to gasp for breath. He sucked in a deep breath and steeled himself for agony when he saw the woman’s hand come up, shaft pointing forward, to strike him in the genitals. The hand froze, slowly dropping back to her side. With the other hand, she pushed back the scarf, then raised her face and looked at him. She looked directly into his eyes. For the first time, her own eyes were in focus.
Tears glistened in those eyes, rolled down her cheeks.
Dr. Maria Gonzalez picked up her blouse, turned, and walked across the cell. She paused, pressed a stone near the door. The machinery behind the wall began to whir, and the chains to loosen. The woman called Feather turned to look at him once again, then abruptly walked from the cell, leaving the door open.
A reprieve, Chant thought as he was lowered to the floor of the cell. But for how long? The woman was, to say the least, emotionally unstable, and an unpredictable ally. She could spare him pain, but she could not buy him the time he needed. Only he could do that. He needed one to two more days. Since Krowl had given every indication that virtually nothing would cause him to warn off the Russians, Chant knew that he had a greater range of options—or two options, really. He could stay in his cell and wait, hope that he would still be in one piece and able to think and function when the Petroffs were brought to the island.
Or he could attack—disrupt, confuse, distract. Again.
Within two minutes Chant was free of his shackles, out of the cell and standing at the swinging doors, peering through a crack. He had expected at least one guard to be posted outside the cellblock this time, but there was not; despite Krowl’s probing, the torture doctor had not taken seriously the suggestion that a shackled man inside a locked cell could be the marauder. Richard Krowl had obviously decided to concentrate all his forces around the main complex of buildings, and this could not have pleased Chant more.
Chant slipped out through the sliding doors. There was a full moon in a cloudless sky, and Chant took a circuitous route, hiding in the s
hadows of the cellblock building, then darting across a small open space behind the building to the safety of a stand of trees and low brush. He worked his way carefully and silently through the brush, around the perimeter of the cleared area. Twenty minutes later he had reached the main complex, and was crouched in the shadows of the radio shack, applying dirt to his hands, feet, and face.
One brown-uniformed guard who had been stationed in the brush near the helicopter pad lay dead back there, his neck broken and his body covered with dry leaves. Also, Chant knew just about where every other guard was; there was one on the roof, one at each of the entrances. That left Bernard, one brown-uniformed guard, and two of the mercenaries; and Chant was almost certain that one of them would be acting as Richard Krowl’s personal bodyguard. That left only two guards unaccounted for, and Chant could only hope they were not wandering the grounds, perhaps checking his cell.…
The huge radio antenna soared into the night sky close to the dormitory building, and this was the route Chant took to get to the roof, climbing hand over hand inside the skeleton shadows of the steel superstructure.
The guard on the roof was a mercenary—not marked for death by Chant. Chant waited, crouched on a cross girder inside the antenna superstructure three feet from the roof, until the man in the black uniform turned to light a cigarette, shielding the match from the wind blowing at his back. In an instant, Chant had leaped from the antenna to the roof and delivered a hard blow to the back of the man’s neck. Chant was already across the roof and through the maintenance access door in the center by the time the mercenary’s unconscious body had slumped to the pebbly, oiled surface.
Chant silently descended a short staircase, paused behind the door at the bottom and peered through a small window at the dimly lit corridor of the dormitory’s third floor. A mercenary, one of the men Chant had sparred with earlier in the day, was patrolling the corridor. The man paused at the opposite end of the corridor, and for a moment Chant thought the man would descend the stairs to the second floor. He did not. The man turned and headed back, stopping to listen with his ear to the door of each room.
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