While Time Can Wait

by J.J. Mainor

  Chapter H-4

  They took me that afternoon. After they took our injured to medical, they started to process the rest of us. Two of the guards tapped me on the shoulder and almost dragged me through the gate and into one of the smaller buildings on the other side.

  The first thing you noticed was the heat. After spending all day and all night in thirty below weather, the heated room was almost too hot for me. I noticed the three heaters spaced around the wall, and immediately thought about what Yeorgi said to me.

  My mind instantly went to thoughts of those heaters – those precious, lifesaving heaters! I tried to remember how many guards I passed at the gate, figuring my chances of taking them down. I counted the steps in my head between here and there, trying to imagine how quickly I could run through their space. I didn’t imagine this building having much security at night…or what we consider night. As they shoved me into the chair across from Sergeant Fournier, all I could think about was how easy it looked to come back here and steal one of those so we wouldn’t freeze to death in our sleep.

  That was until that Sergeant cleared his throat and stole me from my happy dream.

  The Major kept court by another table in the corner, watching over our Con Tabs. After I gave Fournier my name, rank, and serial number, the Major found my Tab and gave it to his Sergeant.

  I remembered what Lieutenant Johnson told us all that morning when they came and took the first of our people.

  “I hope you all remember the briefing you received before you deployed out here. You are required to give them your name, rank, and serial number. Do not think you need to play hero and keep your identity a secret. However you are not required to say anything else. In fact, standing orders are that you do not say anything more unless you require medical assistance.”

  Sure, we all remembered that briefing. Most of us didn’t pay much attention, though. There isn’t a soldier in uniform who thought they could be taken alive. I guess just like everyone else, I always thought I would go down fighting on the battlefield. Or if I was captured, I’d be the one to sneak out in the middle of the night and escape back to my own lines.

  I don’t think reality is ever what you think it will be.

  There was the story of one corporal captured by the Russians earlier that year. He didn’t think he’d crack under pressure, but once the Russians started the torture, he sung. He told them everything he knew, including the location of his Forward Operating Base.

  Command never takes kindly to squealers (unless they’re squealing on their buddies to their sergeant), and the story was they fined him half his pay for two months, and busted him down to private. Of course a lot of us doubted it ever happened. None of us had heard of the Russians returning prisoners, so the first question was how did he get out to face the court-martial.

  But like all the stories we heard in those health and safety talks, it didn’t have to be true. Fact was the enemy could put your head in a vice and force you to talk, and the brass would fault you for cowardice in the face of the enemy. It didn’t matter if it ever happened, all we knew was that it would if it was us.

  Fournier tapped away on my Con Tab while he chewed over what little I told him.

  “I know all about you lance corporals,” he told me with a smile a mile wide. “You hide in the background, avoiding duty while pretending you don’t know anything. But I know better. I know you are the ones that hear everything that goes on around base. After all, how do you avoid your seniors if you do not know where they are and what they are up to at all times? We both know you have more information than your sergeant, and you hear about orders before they pass to him, Oui?”

  “I’m glad you think so highly of me,” I told him, or something to that effect. I guess if I was back home and he said that to me, I might be afraid that my sergeant also knew that. Shit, if he found out my hiding places whenever he needed those bodies for the working parties, I’d never catch a break!

  “I also know they do not promote you. They do not pay you what you deserve.” Then he looked down to something on my Tab. “It says here you commanded one of those DB-60 anti-aircraft guns before we took you. Is that not the role of one of your corporals?”

  “If you say so.” I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of a straight answer. Even if I wouldn’t get in trouble for answering, I just didn’t feel like it.

  “Did they make you command one of those guns without rank, or do you just like blowing up our drones?”

  “I just follow orders.”

  He smiled again and went back to my Con Tab, playing with the screen before showing me what had him so interested.

  The bastard found my porn collection! I was looking at a still of the world-famous porn star, Cherry Blossom. Her juicy tits hung out all over the screen, and her lips was puckered as if telling me to give it to her right then and there! I think my dick stirred for the first time in days.

  “Are these the orders you follow?”

  Like I already said, I won’t apologize. I told you how lonely it can get in the field. And war is nothing like what civilians think. We’re not spending every hour of every day in brutal combat. Most of the time is spent sitting in a trench by our DB-60 waiting for something to happen. There are only so many things you can talk about with your buddies, and so many shows and movies you can watch before you get bored. But porn! Porn never gets old.

  Just when I was starting to appreciate the beauty he put in front of me, he took it away and kept her for himself.

  “I know what you are thinking,” he teased me. He really didn’t know though. All I was concerned about at that moment was getting that tablet back somehow and reclaiming that juicy porn collection. “You think you will be a tough hero. You think this is some sort of game, and you will frustrate my efforts to get information.

  “But you should know information is overrated. Take your movies for example. Such trash, but for you it is more important than your rank – you don’t have to give me another snappy answer, I already know it to be true.”

  He showed me the screen once more. The menu was already opened over my directory with the “delete” option highlighted. Then with one touch, he erased my entire porn collection! Terabytes and terabytes of porn, collected over all the hours of downtime in the last six months vanished with the touch of a finger.

  There was hope I told myself. As long as he didn’t format the memory, I could retrieve all that porn from the abyss of garbage files. I would have to get my Tab back first, but there was a very good chance it wasn’t gone for good.

  Fournier stood from his chair. Then very slowly, he came around to my side of the table. He made sure I could see his shiny, polished boots. When he had my attention, he dropped my Con Tab to the floor and ground one of those boots into the screen, making sure there was nothing left to retrieve. I never been so mad before as I was at then.

  The Sergeant gave those pieces of my life one good kick across the room before returning to his chair.

  “Something else you should know, Lance Corporal Jackson Freebourne, Major Lavoie is not her to make sure I do not violate the Geneva Conventions. He is here to watch his interrogator work.”

  I think at that moment I swallowed hard, expecting the worst. It was also the first time since I got there, I took it all seriously. “What do you want from me?”

  “Nothing,” he smiled. “Nothing at all but your obedience. I did not bring you here only to learn your name and rank. I wanted you to see how much better we can make your stay here. If you and your friends are good prisoners, I can improve your situation. But step out of line and cause the Colonel any amount of trouble, and that tablet of yours will become you and your friends.”

  I didn’t like the way he said that. I didn’t like it at all. Something told me it wouldn’t be that easy, but it sounded so promising at that time. When we spent that first night freezing our nuts off, the thought of all that heat
made me believe there was truth to his promise. I should have known then it wasn’t going to be as easy as staying out of trouble, but then, I didn’t want to believe anything else.

  The guards painted a large spot across my forehead to tell them I was already counted. Then they took me back to our side of the camp, and back to those familiar faces.

  “What did you tell them,” Sergeant Lewis asked me before I was even across.

  “Just my name, rank, and serial number like you said. They didn’t ask me anything else, really.” In a sense it was true. I wasn’t about to tell him about them finding my porn. It wasn’t important to the Sergeant anyway, so I saw no sense in telling him.

  Lewis shook his head. From what the others was telling him, my experience was the same as theirs. It was like I thought going in, anything they really wanted to know was already taken from our Tabs.

  Some of the others who went before me didn’t take it so calmly like I did. Before I was done with the Sergeant, we heard a voice rise up from across the courtyard.

  “They have no right! It’s against the law!” I think he was Private Rankles, one of those white, privileged college students from Seattle. Probably no one in his family tree served the military for over two hundred years, and like a lot of these college kids I met up there, he thought it was beneath him. Funny thing about those kids, their parents made more money in a year than my mom saw in her lifetime, but they didn’t have the influence to get their kids out of their duty when the draft notices showed up.

  They was always the hardest to break in boot camp, but the DIs had the most fun doing it. As much as we bitched about those kinds of kids and found any way to make their lives more miserable, we liked having them around. All the NCOs had their hands full dealing with their attitudes. And thanks to their refusal to do most of the work, guys like me had it easier blending into the background than we might have had before.

  But this was not one of those times I looked forward to Private Rankles’ complaints. Johnson was already over there trying to calm him down, and the Sergeant ran from me to help.

  “What did they do?” Johnson asked him.

  “They’re keeping the heaters from us. They make us sleep in this cold just so they can torture us. That’s a war crime!”

  “I know,” Johnson told him as sympathetically as he could. If that was my Sergeant (God rest his soul), he wouldn’t be so understanding. He’d just coldcocked the brat to teach him his place.

  I didn’t know the rules of war. I wasn’t up on the Geneva Convention and all two hundred years of amendments, revisions, and updates. If you asked me what we was allowed to do to an enemy and what we wasn’t allowed to do, all I could tell you was what our commanders told us before we deployed, and I can tell you treatment of prisoners was not something we needed to know in the artillery.

  I thought about what Yeorgi said about the UN not inspecting this camp. For all I knew, he made all that up just to scare me. I wouldn’t put it past him, hell I might have done the same to him if I had been there six months and he was the one who just got there. What I do know, is you can’t count on the rules protecting you when you’re actually in a war. Tempers can flare and anger can take over, and you’re not thinking about what some court might do to you if you get caught.

  I had no doubt with all the satellites flying around, one of them was on us at all times. You just couldn’t hide a facility like this, even if you put it underground. And hell, our own government might have been watching us at that very moment. They might be up there collecting all the evidence of those war crimes, and I’m sure Colonel Levesque knew it, but that was no help to us behind that fence. Until our government liberated that camp or secured our release, those laws could not stop these Canucks from doing what they wanted with us.

  Lieutenant Johnson knew that, and Sergeant Lewis was all too aware himself, but some of those kids still thought some piece of paper was going to keep them safe.

  “When I go for my interview,” the Lieutenant told them, “I promise you I will demand our rights under the Geneva Convention. I will demand they give us a heater for the barracks. I will demand they give us more food. And I will demand they give us water that isn’t frozen solid.”

  “Trust me, Private,” Lewis added, “you might be a college educated genius, but these officers know every loophole in those treaties. They know loopholes to those loopholes. If they want to make your life miserable in here, I promise you they have ways to do it that would make your own government stand up and applaud. You are doing yourself no favors right now. Your only job is to keep yourself alive until we’re released. You leave it to me and the Lieutenant here to worry about fighting for those rights.”

  You could tell Rankles wanted to argue, but everyone he riled up fell for their lines. I think people still didn’t know what to make of the pretty boy Lieutenant, but that Sergeant had a way of speaking that inspired. He might tell you he could raise the dead and you’d believe him. So when he said the two of them was going to fight for those men and women, everyone believed it.

  As those soldiers dispersed and the guards returned to trade one prisoner for another, Johnson marched up to them and stopped them.

  “Take me next. I need to see your CO.”

  The guards had orders otherwise, but they didn’t object. The officers would get their turns eventually, so it was easier for them to take our Lieutenant now.

  Our men only saw it as proof of what they was just told. Johnson said he was going to fight, and that was just what he was doing.

  As I watched the guards take him through that gate, I honestly didn’t know if I could do what he was doing. Sure, I gave that Sergeant a bit of attitude when it was my turn a half hour ago, but it never crossed my mind to complain to him about the cold. I never once thought about opening my mouth in that room and complaining about all those heaters they was wasting while ours was broken.

  Honestly, I don’t even know if Johnson was the kind of man who would take that stand if he didn’t have that silver bar forcing it upon him. Either way, he didn’t have a choice. That bar did force it on him. The only officer in that camp, he had nowhere to hide from the camp guards like the rest of us could.

  And it got me thinking that I could be in the same boat. Maybe I wasn’t technically an NCO, but my rank put me uncomfortably close to command and it put me too close to the spotlight for my liking. Later on that day, when I managed to get myself alone and away from everyone else, I tore my insignia from my jacket and the BDUs underneath. I figured on quick inspection, the guards would mistake me for one of the unimportant privates if Lewis and Johnson was both indisposed and they needed someone to act as our representative.

  But while I still wore that chevron and those crossed rifles, I had to watch our Lieutenant cross that yard with a Canuck on either side of him. He turned his head to us one last time as if to say everything was going to be all right, and in that moment we believed it. That was the moment we knew he was not some disconnected officer; he was one of us.

  I couldn’t take my eyes off of him. I followed them all the way to that small office where one of the guards opened the door and led him inside.

  That would be the last time I ever saw Lieutenant Johnson.

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