It was a scary sound, not musical exactly but reminiscent of the background to a horror film, as the undead begin to clamber out of their coffins. Nor was he the only one who heard it. Up on the beach a pirate who had flung himself to the sand, panting with the exertion of getting there, sat up and looked wonderingly around. So did another pirate, and a couple of the crew, all sitting or standing and trying to see where the sound had come from.
Then Ranjit saw them, a string of distant aircraft coming toward them from the sea. Helicopters. At least a dozen of them, and every one fitted with curious soup plate–like disks, all rotating with every shift in the choppers’ course to remain pointed at the people on the beach…and the sound grew louder….
And kept on growing louder and louder.
For all the rest of his very long life Ranjit Subramanian never managed to forget that day on the beach. True, there were even worse days that followed it, but those terrifying and degrading moments under the acoustic barrage from the helicopters were bad enough for anyone. Ranjit had never before been exposed to the sublethal armorarium of a modern assault force. He had not known what it would mean for the sound to bypass the brain. It was the belly that caught the worst of its effects, the bowels loosened, the vomiting profuse, the sick pain remorseless.
Nor was the attack entirely sublethal. At least two of the pirates managed to fight back the miseries of their bodies long enough to fire a few rounds at the helicopters from their assault rifles. (Unfortunately for Ranjit, this included Kirthis Kanakaratnam.) That was a mistake. Each of the choppers contained two open doorways, one occupied by a machine gunner, the other by an equally death-dealing man with a grenade launcher, and neither pirate survived firing his weapon by more than a minute.
And as to those other watchers from the skies…
They found this incident puzzling, even the ones called the Nine-Limbeds.
Oh, the Nine-Limbeds had seen human firefights before. The Nine-Limbeds were the only client race the Grand Galactics encouraged to be linguists, and their main mission was to tell their masters what these humans said to one another—but you couldn’t spy on humans for very long without encountering violence. The Nine-Limbeds had thought they knew what was coming this time. When they had identified a surface craft abristle with chemical explosive weapons lurking in slow-motion pursuit of another that was apparently unarmed, they had supposed the outcome would be another human bloodbath. They had even wondered if it was worth their while to stick around to observe just one more example of human mass murder.
It was a surprise to them that so few of the humans on the beach were put to death as a result of having their integuments penetrated by the projectile weapons from the aircraft.
They recognized the nature of the choppers’ primary weapons—the compression air device, the ring vortex cannon, and all the others—because they had seen their like before. After all, there were few weapons employed by the human race that had not been employed, over and over, by other races at other places and times in the galaxy. And the Nine-Limbeds well understood, from the histories of other species who had employed similar weapons in the long galactic past, what unpleasant and debilitating effects such weaponry might have on an undefendable animal body.
The puzzle for the Nine-Limbeds was this: Why would these primitives employ such weapons in preference to their usual armorarium of explosively propelled penetrants, which produced even more destructive effects on organic bodies?
When the encounter on the surface was over, the decision makers among the Nine-Limbed crew debated for many minutes before deciding whether to report what they had seen.
In the long run they did. They reported it exactly and in detail, letting the Grand Galactics make of it what they would, although the Nine-Limbeds did attempt to give themselves a little wiggle room by the title they gave the report: “An Example of an Anomalous Encounter.”
12
JUDGMENT
Ranjit didn’t see much of the actual bloodshed, being totally absorbed by his own humiliatingly nasty problems. Apart from the fact that he felt as though a herd of mad swine had been stampeding through his digestive system, the subsonics had, as they were programmed to do, caused him voluminously to foul himself. He had not done anything like that since early childhood, and he had forgotten how repulsive a process it was.
He managed to strip off the soiled garments and stagger back into the warm wavelets, using the least filthy of his own clothing to scrub himself nearly clean. After that he had a plan. He looted the bag of George Kanakaratnam’s clothing that Dot had given him. There were no shoes in the bag, and Ranjit chose not to put on another man’s underwear, but all the rest was there: slacks, and pullover shirts, and thick woolly socks that Ranjit hoped might protect his feet from the sharp-edged pebbles of the beach. Then he stepped out of concealment to take stock of the situation.
It looked bad and smelled worse. The choppers had landed and positioned themselves in orderly ranks, and now they disgorged at least a hundred armed troops—probably either Indian or Pakistani, Ranjit guessed, though he was not familiar enough with either to guess which. Whoever they were, they had efficiently separated the former cruise ship population into four clusters. Two were made up of the former passengers, one group for men, one for women, and what the clusters amounted to were enclosures made up of hastily strung-up sheets along the water’s edge. Half a dozen soldiers were handing out towels and blankets to the passengers who had cleaned themselves as much as they intended to. Ranjit noted that the soldiers helping the female passengers were female themselves; in the uniforms, wielding their weapons, they had all looked interchangeably sexless.
A couple of dozen meters down the shore twenty or thirty men and women, unguarded, were doing their best to clean themselves as well. They didn’t have anyone to hand them towels, but a stack of the things was available for the taking on the beach. Ranjit could identify them as rescued crew by the few he recognized…but he actually would have known who they were anyway, by the rapturous looks of relief these saved-at-the-last-minute souls wore on their faces.
There was one other cluster. These had not been allowed to clean themselves or change their clothes. They lay flat on their faces, fingers locked atop their heads, and they were guarded by three or four of the soldiers, weapons at the ready.
There was no doubt which group they represented. Ranjit scanned the prostrate forms, but if any of the Kanakaratnams were there, he could not recognize them from their backs. None looked small enough to be any of the younger children, either.
One of the soldiers guarding them was taking an interest in Ranjit, shouting something Ranjit could not make out and waving his rifle meaningfully.
It seemed to Ranjit that walking around on his own made the soldiers suspicious. “Right,” he called to the soldier, hoping he knew what he was agreeing to, and looked around at his options.
Which group Ranjit actually belonged to was hard to say. Still, there was no doubt that the former passengers were getting the best treatment, so he flipped a soft salute to the soldier and then strolled over to those waiting for fresh clothing at the men’s side and attached himself to the line, nodding pleasantly to the oldster just ahead of him.
Who didn’t nod back. Instead he scowled at Ranjit for a moment and then opened his mouth and let out a yell for the soldiers. When a couple of them came running, the man was shouting, “This one’s no passenger! He’s one of them! He’s the one who was trying to get me to tell how much my kids would pay to ransom me!”
Which is why, a moment later, Ranjit wound up lying facedown, his hands on his head, between a pair of the largest and—because they had been given no chance to clean themselves up—smelliest of the pirates.
He kept on lying there, for hours.
Those hours were not totally without anything happening, because in the first of them Ranjit learned two important lessons. The first was that he shouldn’t try to lift his head enough to try to look for the Kanakarat
nams, because when he did, he was hit with a stick just above his left ear, while whoever was wielding the stick yelled, “Lie still!” The pain of the strike was like a lightning bolt. The second was that he shouldn’t try whispering to his neighbors for information. That got him a serious kick right about where his lowest right-hand rib was. The pain from the kick was indescribable. And the kicker was a soldier, all right, because he was definitely wearing steel-braced army shoes.
After about two hours—when the tropical sun had mounted high in the sky and Ranjit was beginning to feel as though he were being baked alive—something did happen. A new fleet of helicopters arrived, bigger and a good deal more comfortable-looking than the first, and immediately boarded all the passengers—and all those passengers’ reclaimed possessions—to take them to what no doubt would be a nicer place than this. An hour or so more and there was a sound of heavy-duty engines from the brush, and a couple of flatbed trucks pushed their way onto the sand to take the rescued crew away. And later still—much later, when the sun had done its best to parboil the helpless pirates, Ranjit included—it was their turn. It was helicopters again this time, big ones that didn’t look comfortable at all. The man in charge was identifiable by the amount of metallic embroidery on his uniform and cap and by the facts that he arrived in his own helicopter and that before he got out of it, other soldiers had immediately prepared a chair and a table—well, an upended box, to be more accurate—for him to sit at as he dispensed judgment.
Each of the pirates, one by one, was commanded to stand up and answer the officer’s questions. Ranjit couldn’t hear the questions or answers, but the verdicts were delivered clearly enough to be heard by all. “Rawalpindi, central jail,” the officer said to the first prisoner, and again, “Rawalpindi, central jail,” to the second and the third.
Ranjit was next to be summoned before the dispenser of justice. He took advantage of the few moments he had between getting to his feet and facing the officer to hastily look over the remaining pirates for a sign of the children, but if they were there, Ranjit could not identify them.
Then he was standing before the officer and did not dare look farther. His questioning was brief. The officer listened while another soldier spoke in his ear, then addressed Ranjit. “What is your name?” he asked—gratefully, in English.
“I am Ranjit Subramanian, son of Ganesh Subramanian, who is the high priest of the Tiru temple in Trincomalee in Sri Lanka. I was not one of the pirates—”
The officer stopped him. “Wait,” he said, and said something inaudible to his aide, who equally inaudibly replied. The officer mulled over that information in silence for a moment. Then he leaned forward, his head close to Ranjit, and inhaled deeply.
Then he nodded; Ranjit had passed the smell test and could therefore be tolerated as a traveling companion. “Interrogation,” he said. “Put him in my aircraft. Next!”
13
A CONVENIENT PLACE FOR QUESTIONING
Beginning to end, Ranjit was in the hands of the interrogators for just over two years, but it was only in the first six months that much actual interrogation went on. His stay, however, was not at any point comfortable.
Ranjit’s first inkling that this would be the case was when he was blindfolded, gagged, and handcuffed to a seat in the judging officer’s helo before it took off. Where he was then flown to he could not say, although it took less than an hour to get there. Then, still blindfolded, he was helped down the steps to some sort of paved surface and then was walked twenty or thirty meters to some other steps, these going up into some other aircraft. There he was cuffed once more to his seat, and then the new plane took off.
This one wasn’t a helicopter. Ranjit could feel the bumps in the runway as the aircraft gained speed, and then the sudden transition to bumpless free flight. It wasn’t a short flight, either, and it certainly wasn’t a sociable one. Ranjit could hear the aircrew talking to one another, though in what language he could not say, but when he tried calling out to let them know he needed to go to the bathroom, the answer he got was not in words. It was a sudden, hard blow to the side of his face, unexpected and unbraced-for.
Nevertheless they did, ultimately, let him use the plane’s little toilet, though still blindfolded and with the door kept open. They fed him, too—that is, they opened his seat’s tray and put something on it and ordered, “Eat!” By feel he determined that it was some kind of sandwich, possibly cheese of an unfamiliar variety, but by then it had been nearly twenty hours since Ranjit had had anything to eat and he devoured it, dry. He did take a chance to ask for water, and got a repeat of the blow to the side of the head.
How long they flew, Ranjit could not say because he drifted off to an uneasy sleep, waking only when the jittery bouncing of the aircraft told him they were landing, and on a much worse runway than before. He didn’t get the blindfold removed. He did get helped out of the plane and into some kind of vehicle, in which he was driven for more than an hour.
He wound up being led, still blindfolded, into some sort of building, down a hall, and into a room where his captors sat him down. Then one of them spoke to him in a gruff, accented English: “Hold out hands in front of you. No, with palms up!” And when he did, he was struck on the palms with something brutally heavy.
The pain was sharp. Ranjit couldn’t help crying out. Then the voice again: “Now you tell truth. What is name?”
That was the first question Ranjit was asked under duress, and the one asked most often of all. His questioners did not choose to believe the simple fact that he was Ranjit Subramanian, who chanced to be wearing some garments belonging to somebody else, whose name, as shown by the labels stitched to the garments, was Kirthis Kanakaratnam. Each time he gave the truthful answer, they exacted the penalty for lying.
This was different for each of the questioners. When it was the stubby, sweaty man named Bruno asking the questions, his favorite weapon for gaining truth was a length of electrical cable, four or five centimeters thick and capable of inflicting extreme pain wherever it was employed. Alternatively Bruno would give Ranjit a violent open-handed slap on his bare belly; this was not only painful, it made Ranjit wonder every time it was applied if it might not be rupturing his appendix or spleen. But there was something comforting about Bruno’s technique. No fingernails were extracted, no bones broken, no eyes gouged out; it seemed, hopefully, to Ranjit that they were not doing anything that would leave a permanent mark, and what that suggested to Ranjit was that they might ultimately be planning to let him go.
That hope, however, didn’t last. It vanished when, one day, Bruno exasperatedly threw his electrical cable across the room, grabbed up a short wooden club from the table of useful implements, and repeatedly smashed Ranjit across the face with it. That cost Ranjit a black eye and a knocked-out front tooth, as well as most of his tenuously held hope for ultimate release.
The other main torturer was an elderly man who never gave a name but had one eye always half-closed. (Ranjit thought of him as “Squinty.”) He seldom left a mark on Ranjit, and he was curiously reassuring in his conversation. On the very first day Ranjit met him, Ranjit held by two powerful assistants flat on his back, Squinty held up a square of cloth. “What we will do to you now,” he warned politely, “will make you think you are going to die. You won’t. I won’t let that happen. Only you must answer my questions truthfully.” And then he spread the cloth over Ranjit’s face and poured cold water over it from a metal pitcher.
Ranjit had never experienced anything quite like it. The effect wasn’t so much pain as brutalizing, incapacitating terror. Ranjit had not failed to hear and understand that Squinty had promised he wouldn’t die of this experience, but his body had understandings of its own. It knew that it was being terminally, lethally drowned, and it wanted the process stopped at once. “Help!” Ranjit cried, or tried to cry. “Stop! Let me up!” And all that came out was a bubbly, choky splatter of watery parts of sound, none of them like any English words—
The trickle of poured water stopped, the cloth was pulled off his face, and Ranjit was lifted to sitting position. “Now, what is your name?” Squinty asked politely.
Ranjit tried to stop coughing long enough to get the words out. “I’m Ranjit Sub—” he began, but he didn’t even finish saying his name before his shoulders were slammed back onto the floor, the cloth was over his face again, and the terrible pouring of water began once more.
Ranjit managed to hold out four times more before the heart was gone out of him, further resistance was impossible, and he gasped and managed to say, “I’m whoever you want me to be. Just stop!”
“Good,” said Squinty encouragingly. “We are making progress, Kirthis Kanakaratnam. So now tell me, what country were you working for?”
There were, of course, many other ways of making a subject become cooperative, but, of course, none of them produced any truthful confessions from Ranjit since he had no crimes to confess.
This exasperated his interrogators. The one he called Squinty complained. “You are making us look bad, Ranjit, or Kirthis, or whoever you are. Listen to me. It will go easier for you if you just stop denying you are Kirthis Kanakaratnam.”
Ranjit tried taking the advice. Then it did go easier, a little.
14
RENDITION TO THE HIGHEST BIDDER
Although Ranjit hadn’t known any part of it, quite a few things had been going on outside the walls of his place of detention. Cathedrals had been blown up, railroad trains derailed, office buildings poisoned with radioactive dust in their ventilation systems. And assassinations? Oh, yes, there had been plenty of assassinations, by throat-cutting or defenestration from an upper floor; by handgun, shotgun, and assault rifle; quite often by poisoning, administered in sometimes quite ingenious ways. Not to mention, in one case, assassination by dropping a piano on the victim’s head, and in another, by standing on the victim’s chest to hold him to the bottom of his bathtub as its taps filled it with lukewarm water. And, of course, there were the wars. Perhaps the most violent of the new ones revived an old plague spot as a Sunni incursion into Kurdish territory threatened to set off another round of the turmoil that characterized post-occupation Iraq.