Down In The Valley: An Arch Patton Adventure (Arch Patton Adventures Book 1)

by James Strauss

  Arch sat with his back pressed against the hard wood of the severely angled Adirondack. He thought about what had taken place on the mission, which was not supposed to be a mission, until he’d come to arrive in the chair. He hadn’t been truly angry before but he was rapidly becoming so. Possibly, he’d passed on his only chance to break free by not taking advantage of the amateur taping job of his captors. He realized that but no longer care. He’d become enraged to the point of not caring. In all of his years as a successful field agent he’d never been in such a personally compromising situation. That he was, and that it seemed at the hands of his own people, was humiliating and more than enraging. The door opened. A sliver of light penetrated through the crack at the bottom of his left eye. Arch could make out the clapboard floor of the shack.

  “Hello,” a friendly male voice said from a position just to his right side. The tone caused a small shiver of fear to run up and down Arch’s back. Aggressiveness was an understood quality in the business he’d been in. Calm delivery, such as what he was hearing, was the sign of a very serious, professional, and quite probably at least a mildly sociopathic player. Arch didn’t reply.

  “We have some questions. And we need some immediate answers. I’m not going to ask any questions just yet. I need you to understand how serious we are.”

  A lancing bright pain caused Arch to flinch as a needle was punched into his thigh, right through his light twill trousers.

  “You’re going to grow quite violently ill for about fifteen minutes. I’ll return and give you another shot that’ll make you feel okay again. We have all night to go through this however many times you feel comfortable with.” The door opened and closed. The light went out. And then the nausea hit.

  Waves of sickness swept through him, like ever increasing ocean waves in a set, but the set never stopped. Projectile vomiting every ten seconds fouled his pants and shoes as he leaned as far forward as he could to keep from choking on vomit, until there was no more vomit. And then the sickness got worse. His stomach heaved into spasms that he could not stop. The pain of the spasms was almost too much to bear. Arch went back to Vietnam. The shots that had pierced his torso had caused the same pain. He’d withstood that pain without medication for five hours by controlling only those things he could. He slowed his breathing between the waves of pain. He imagined his heart and worked to slow that, while also thinking about and working on his blood pressure. An age later the door opened and lights were again thrown on. Another sharp pain, this time in his right shoulder, brought Arch out of his concentration. He gasped. The door closed, but this time the light remained. The nausea began to fade. The speed of its departure induced euphoria, as the sickness and pain passed to the point where it seemed, except for the wetness and stink of his vomit, as if it’d never occurred at all.

  The door opened and closed again. “Hello,” came from the player standing in front of him, although far enough away to be outside the radius of the mess Arch had made. “I do so hope you are going to go along with me on this.”

  “Okay,” Arch rasped out. Whatever the men wanted to know simply was not worth the suffering. Torture, physical torture, always worked Arch knew from his long experience. At some point of applying terrible the subject always came to decision point. The worth of the information requested, when weighed against the ever-increasing terror and pain, overwhelmed the decision-making process. Arch had been shot, whipped, poisoned and knifed, but he’d never been deliberately restrained and tortured before. His understanding of surrendering in the face of real visceral experience was new although his decision was analytical. He just didn’t give a damn about the mission, the Agency or even Virginia anymore.

  “Oh good. I do so hate the detestable mess we end up with using this process. Blood is easier to bear, but I do have the instructions I must follow. I’m sure you understand,” the man finished and waited. His tone and the way in which he expressed himself scared Arch even through his rage. For the first time he wondered if he was going to survive the questioning. The only hopeful note in the man’s delivery had been about his having ‘instructions.’ The fact that blood had apparently been ruled out seemed to weigh in Arch’s favor, but he was anything but certain.

  “Exactly what do those crazy Hawaiians have in weaponry and pyrotechnics on Manana Island?” the man asked.

  Arch knew the man was talking about Rabbit Island. Manana was the formal name for the place, located just off of Bellows Beach and known to so many Americans simply because it was in almost every backdrop of Robin’s Nest in the T.V. show Magnum P.I. The locals had renamed the place many years. Rabbits had been raised there for butchering at one time in the distant past, hence the name. Tourists thought the island was named rabbit because it looked like a laying rabbit, which amazingly, it did.

  Arch blabbed everything he knew about what Matisse had told him, even adding some grenades and rockets to make it sound the more believable.

  “Good, good, you’re doing fine,” the smarmy dangerous player intoned, as if he was encouraging some fourth grader to snitch on his companions.

  “About this nuclear detection stuff, crazy as it seems. Do they have a scintillation counter over there, or has one been used?”

  Arch began a long uncontrolled inhalation of his breath. He focused the lens of his left eye to peer beyond his spray of vomit to the feet of the man before him. Brightly shined shoes with white socks. A glint of light sparkled off the man’s regulation shoes. Scintillation. The word last used only hours before by Virginia, now repeated by one of the men who’d stood talking back to her on the lanai of Room 217.

  “I’ve never heard of a scintillation counter and I don’t think they have either,” he replied, truthfully. “These locals aren’t technologically savvy at all. I think Matisse has an old WWII surplus Geiger counter, but that’s it. I don’t think it’s very accurate either, as I passed it over my watch hands and it went crazy,” Arch lied. He had no idea where or what Matisse’s Geiger counter was and his Breguet chronometer used Lumi-Nova hands, not the old radium things that’d been radioactive.

  “Stay here,” the spit-shined shoe man said, using more of his strange stupid humor. “I must consult with my associates.”

  Arch worked his left hand back out of his sleeve under the tape, but his timing proved terrible. The door opened and a man wearing loafers appeared and grabbed Arch’s arm before he could do anything.

  “Ah, our prisoner thinks he’s leaving, eh? Not just yet he’s not. I’ve been waiting to use this for a long time on some asshole like you,” the man’s deep voiced whisper penetrated to Arch’s very soul. His imagination ran wild with whatever device the man could be talking about. Suddenly, the deadly evil of the shoe-shined man was preferable to what was in front of him.

  The man worked with something he’d taken from a shelf nearby. Soft metal on metal sounds permeated the inside of the shack, and then the movement of a metallic action. Arch heard two hard but quiet ‘swishes’ before cold metal pressed down hard on his left hand to the flat wooden chair handle. Three louder bangs cause Arch to grunt and curl himself inward in extreme pain. He would have screamed but nothing would come out except a pitiful mewling sound.

  “What was that,” the soft-sounding sounding player asked, obviously from just outside the door.

  “I just nailed this Haole to his chair. He was trying to escape. I love this God damned automatic nailer thing,” the raspy man replied. The sound of three more bangs in quick succession took place, with resulting impacts against one of the wooden walls nearby.

  “Put that thing down. No blood. Our instructions were clear. Are you a complete idiot?”

  “No blood,” the raspy-voiced man replied. “Look. Clean as a whistle. He’ll be some time getting out of that chair.”

  “Jesus Christ. Take that thing out of here. Leave him. We’re done here,” the shoe-shined man instructed. After a few minutes of what sounded like preparations to leave the man leaned back through the door. “S
orry about him. I’m sure you’ll be fine. Just needed some data. Sure you can understand.”

  Arch listened to the men depart. The door was left gaping open with the light on. Arch’s left hand was aflame in pain. Through the crack under the tape he could see the heads of three nails, neatly appearing in a row behind the knuckles and between the bones on the surface of his splayed out left hand. The nailing man had not lied. There was no blood at all. But the man had made a mistake. The great force of the driven nails had split the vertical arm support into several failing pieces. Arch breathed in and out, gathering his strength and endurance. The pain in his head, and the pain from the sickening shot, and even the pain of the nails sticking through his hand were nothing to pain in his heart.

  “Virginia,” he screamed in whisper, in agony of body and mind. Arch tore the handle from the chair, blood flowing amongst the other fluids he’d expelled.

  IV

  Arch fought the chair, sounds of pain emanating from deep down in his chest. His left arm finally came loose but a three-foot section of wood remained attached to his hand by the hard driven nails. There would be no release from the wood or the pain until he got some kind help or proper tools. It took almost half an hour to work his other hand out of the duct tape. With that raw sticky hand he was able to peel the covering from his eyes. He wondered if he would have any eyebrows or lashes when he again looked at himself in a mirror.

  There was nothing usable in the shack. He stepped outside and took three darkened steps down to the beach, where gentle surf broke twenty yards further out in the night. The moon was almost full. Arch could make out a white line of surf, which extended for miles east along the curve of the elongated cove. He’d already decided not to go to the authorities. The mission had become the most personal of his life and he was going to keep it that way if at all possible.

  Even cradling the long chunk of wood with his good hand, moving through the deep sand caused him agonizing pain with every step. His head throbbed where he’d been sandbagged and his older contusion was inflamed by the spray from nearby breaking waves. Arch tried to walk between the surf and the dry sand, as the surface was harder, but the going was slow. There were three coves between the shack and the Turtle Bay resort. When it finally came into view, less than half mile away, he made a decision to stop. He had no idea what lay waiting there. Matisse would be along in his Sunday car to pick him up at six if he was lucky. Arch checked the Breguet. It was one in the morning. He huddled down in the warm sand, as far from the sea as he could get without being fully into the brush and trees beyond. He curled into a fetal ball, expecting to remain awake until near dawn, but in spite of the throbbing pain he was asleep in seconds.

  It was five when he awoke. He rolled over, forgetting about his pinned hand, and let out a stifled scream. In the pre-dawn light he could see that the hand was swollen to twice its normal size. The pain was even worse than before. Fighting tears Arch staggered into the trees, working east, going from one slanting horse path to another. The resort offered horse rides but nobody would be active before nine. By the time he could see the access road leading to the unmanned security gate into the resort he could also see the outlandish, but welcome, Pontiac. Matisse had pulled off Kam Highway to wait, somehow figuring that Arch would come out to him.

  “Brah, you look like shit. What happened?” Matisse asked, opening the rear door to help Arch crawl onto the seat. “You got chunk a wood stuck to your arm and your head looks like a Kahuku melon. We go hospital.”

  “No,” Arch countered. “We need some tools to get my hand loose. And I need a gun. Do you have a gun?” Arch laid flat atop the lengthy bench of the old Pontiac’s cavernous back seat. The wood attached to his hand rested across a raised hump containing the car’s drivetrain.

  “I got two guns,” Matisse answered, “both registered so I don’t get no trouble. I take you home. How you get the wood stucka your hand?”

  Arch sighed with his eyes closed, as wind began to blow over the edges of the open convertible. Matisse was afraid of gun registration trouble while he was attempting to lead his movement in seceding from the United States of America. He would have laughed if he hadn’t been in so much agony. For once he didn’t care that Matisse was racing along the precarious two-lane highway at well over the speed limit.

  Somewhere along the Haleiwa cutoff Matisse turned the car onto a dirt side road.

  Arch watched overhanging cane and coconut palms fly by above him for several minutes until the Pontiac skidded to a stop.

  “I get the tools. We need big pliers, maybe a saw and a hammer. I don’t know, but I get ‘em. My wife Gail here to help.” Matisse’s head disappeared from Arch’s view to be replaced by an angelically beautiful face.

  “Gail Kalauokalani,” the angelic woman said. “You don’t look good at all. Can you get up?”

  Arch knew he would not be able to pronounce the last name without practicing but he could handle the first. “Yeah, I can, and thank you Gail,” he answered, slowly rising up to sit in the back seat. A single ply stilt house sat not far away. Once it had been white but everything Arch looked at in and around the place was the same color. An awful brownish stained color of dried lava mud.

  Matisse returned with a paper grocery sack full of tools. With an unwilling groan Arch moved to the driver’s side of the vehicle and raised his arm and the wood to rest upon the top edge of the back door. Matisse went to work with two over-size pliers, twisting and breaking off bits of wood. Every move caused Arch agony, but he worked to control himself. Gail returned with a kitchen towel filled with ice cubes. She gently eased it to the freshly damaged side of his head, and then patiently held it there. After ten minutes Matisse let out a celebratory exclamation.

  “Cowabunga!” he yelled. “I got da sucker off. Now we got da nails to deal with.”

  Arch peered down at his hand. Three nails at least four inches in length stuck between the fingers of his left hand. He could move the swollen fingers so he figured no bones were broken, but he had little feeling other than pain. Nerve damage might be a future problem.

  Matisse turned the damaged hand so the palm faced up. He took out his hammer.

  “No way to do this nice. Sorry Brudda,” Matisse said, and then struck one of the nails on its point.

  The pain was excruciating. Arch jerked, unable to stop himself, and cried out. Regaining control he stared at the offending nail. It had been driven half way out.

  Matisse repeated the process for the remaining nails, and then used his pliers to extract them completely. Arch almost passed out several times, only saved by the ice pack held to the side of his head and the Gail’s gently massaging hands.

  Matisse cut strips from a second washcloth to make bandages. “Man, you gotta get a Tetanus shot for that stuff. Why would someone nail your hand to a chunk of wood? You got some real crazy friends.”

  “Guns,” Arch stated, flatly. “You said you had guns. Get them, please.”

  Gail stepped back upon hearing Arch’s request. She took his good hand and showed him how to support the ice pack, then turned to follow her husband into the stilted house. Arch heard muffled arguing inside, but after a few minutes Matisse came out carrying a broken down cardboard shoebox. He set it on the seat beside Arch.

  “My wife’s worried. She thinks you might get me into big trouble. I told her not to worry. You have good judgment for a Haole. She doesn’t know about Rabbit Island or any of that.”

  “No kidding,” Arch said, clutching his bandaged hand to his stomach. He put the ice pack down and took the top off the shoebox with his good hand. Two guns, just as Matisse said, both covered in a single oily cloth. Arch unwrapped them. A Smith and Wesson four inch forty-four magnum. A fearsome hand weapon. It was empty, as was the forty-five Colt that accompanied it. The Colt was one of the older Mark IV models made of real steel, not the weaker alloys used later on. Six boxes of ammo were wedged into the container with the weapons. One box of ball for the forty-five and two
of hollow points. The magnum rounds were all hollow points except for half a box of shot shells. Arch examined the curious shot shells before loading both weapons. Two bird shot shells for the .44 and four hollow points. Two ball atop the .45 magazine and five hollow points further down.

  “What you gonna do, brah?” Matisse asked him.

  “Visit some interesting folks back at the resort,” Arch answered him, truthfully. “I need to borrow your car.”

  “No way,” Matisse responded. You not drive like that. Not my Bonneville. You look like Kilauea Volcano just after erupting. I drive. I’m your friend now. I make this visit with you.”

  Arch groaned. Matisse was not a player. He was a troubled and troublesome citizen. There was almost no doubt at all that the Hawaiian’s guns had never been fired at all, much less in anger or for any kind of operational mission. The man was a liability where Arch was going, but he had little choice. Arch’s eyes, stability, hand and head were a mess, and his psychology was bent at least ten degrees from top dead center he knew, as well.

  “Back to Turtle Bay,” Arch agreed, pointing his good hand east.

  Arch had Matisse drive right up to the security gate, which was manned for unknown reasons.

  “William Farrell, I’m a guest,” he told the woman at the gate, as the unlikely big Pontiac idled in front of the button controlled wooden bar in front of it.

  The woman checked her computer. “Got some I.D.?” she asked.

  Arch produced a California driver’s license, glad his ‘questioners’ had not taken any of his personal items. He carried three of his old identities at all times. Each identity came back to the same set of prints. The police had run his prints only once since he’d retired. Somehow one of the driver’s licenses had been suspended without his knowledge. It had taken hours before the local cops released him. Thy tried but never solved the mystery of how three identities could come back to the same set of prints.