"A doctor?" Well, counter my expectations! So much for the little old peasant woman. But why was a full colonel doctor a.s.signed to a small band of guerrillas?

"Yes, and as to what is to become of you, that is up to you. We have communicated your presence and have received word that you are to be taken to a top-security facility for further processing. You should feel honored. Normally only quite important war criminals are a.s.signed there. Part of the reason for this is that the facility is very isolated and can be reached only by a hazardous journey, difficult even for seasoned mountaineers."

"Can't we just fly?"

"I'm afraid not-for various security reasons. No, the only way is on foot."

"And it's a steep climb?"

She nodded once, briefly.

"I'll never make it," I said. I wasn't trying to be difficult. I didn't want to die. But one thing the academic life teaches you is your limits. Mine have always been severe when it concerns athletic physical activity. "I'm having trouble enough breathing just sitting here talking to you. Much as I hate to say so, you might as well go ahead and shoot me."

"Drink your tea," she said. "You will have ample opportunity to die later if you wish, but for now, I can help you. You have studied psychology, you said?"

"Yes," I replied cautiously.

"Then you are naturally acquainted with hypnosis, its benefits and purported limitations. You realize that a hypnotist cannot make you behave in a way that would be unacceptable to you if you were not hypnotized?"

"You can't really make me a Manchurian Candidate then?" I asked, risking a smile.

"I beg your pardon?"

"A film I viewed in the archives on mid-twentieth-century propaganda. About a man captured by the Chinese and Russians and turned into first a killer, then a presidential candidate while under hypnotic control."

The corners of her eyes and mouth tightened, the crow's-feet deepening. "And have you political ambitions?"

"No, ma'am," I said. "Except, perhaps, to change allies, as I told whatsisname ...""Very pragmatic. But at this time, the only sensible thing for you to do is to cooperate while I prepare you to reach your destination. Finish your tea."

Despite the feeling that she was using the same tone the would-be fairest-in-the-land used to tell Snow White to eat the apple, it was good for her, I finished the tea. What was she going to do, poison me? Still, I felt a moment of panic when I realized that, yep, there was something in that cup besides high-cholesterol tea. She watched me as if there was a microscope between us, her hemat.i.te eyes glinting. When she spoke, her voice was gentle and her accented English took on a persuasive lilt. "The journey you are about to take is long and perilous," she began and I thought she sounded ridiculously like a parody of a Gypsy fortune-teller. "But you are a wonderful traveler. You love heights. Your body is very strong and you delight in movement. The cold invigorates you and the rarefied atmosphere lightens your step. You will be able to breathe deeply ..."

That is as much as I recall. The next thing I knew I was standing and slipping into a stiff heavy coat.

My tea cup was stacked with hers beside the plastic bottle and the old woman was boarding the helicopter. I left the cave to watch as it took off. The man with whom she had been arguing walked toward me carrying a rope and I thought, now that she's gone, maybe they mean to hang me, but he indicated that I should pa.s.s the rope around my waist and secure myself between him and another man.

Everyone but me carried a box or bundle of some sort on his or her back but the doctor had apparently taken my lousy condition into account and granted me dispensation from being a packhorse.

Or-more likely-she and the others were afraid I'd fall into the first available creva.s.se and lose valuable supplies along with my relatively worthless warmongering carca.s.s...

DAY 3.

AFTERNOON, THROUGH DAY?.

The Trek.

My watch had stopped, probably broken from the impact of my jump, so keeping track of the time of day other than in a general sense has been impossible. The combination of whatever "medicine" the good doctor used to spike my tea and the strength of the hypnotic suggestions disoriented me and I have no clear idea about the length of our little stroll across the mountains.

When we first set out from the drop-off point, even the first steep climb up the first pa.s.s seemed incredibly high above my head, ludicrously beyond my capabilities, but once on the trail I astonished myself by doing exceptionally well.

Of course, I was yoked to experienced mountaineers, but the trails were such that had I been exclusively under my own power I would no doubt have managed to drag all of us off the side of the mountain.

Many of the exact details of the trip are rather vague now, as if seen in a dream. This is no doubt because while my conscious mind was doing the sightseeing, it was actually my subconscious, still under the thrall of the hypnotist, propelling me over the trails on automatic pilot. But otherwise sheer terror would have prevented me from seeing, much less enjoying, views from the vantage point of the narrow paths where one could only place one foot at a time as one progressed toe to heel around steep clifffaces while freezing winds tried to sweep one into bottomless ravines. None of these obstacles daunted me. I seemed to sprint up the nearly perpendicular climbs and down the equally perpendicular descents as if I were not personally involved in the action but rather was watching it happen through tricky camera work. With no effort or fear, nor even a healthy amount of caution, I simply followed the man in front of me, putting my feet where his had been when his tracks were clear and blithely approximating otherwise, climbing one step at a time. The worst times were the walks through level spots and valleys in thigh-high snow. Without the necessity for absolute concentration, the posthypnotic spell was less powerful and I had to work much harder along such stretches than during steeper pa.s.sages, for even though my breath came easily and my feet and legs lifted lightly, the snow sucked me under with each step and I was still yoked to less giddy people hampered by heavy loads.

But the climbing and walking mostly pa.s.sed by in a daze and when we paused for a meal and calls of nature I gulped my tea, gnawed on the ball of grainy biscuit that was the sole sustenance at all meals, and paced on the end of my tether until we began walking again. The wind rose as the sky darkened and soon the blowing snow and the falling snow swirled into one ma.s.sive white-out-still we kept climbing.

Only when we stopped to sleep did my own reservations and fears fully return. My bulky clothing made it difficult for me to curl into a comfortable position and as I struggled to sleep, worries about frostbite caused me to compulsively keep touching and rubbing my hands and face, sure that the cold was damaging me even if I wasn't particularly aware of it most of the time. During these stops, the guards with whom I had been traveling all day frightened me by their laughter and the hard looks they sometimes cast my way, although they never mistreated me. Then too, as I tried to rest, I worried about where we were going, what would happen to me. And looking back toward the pa.s.ses and mountains we had crossed that day, I grew absolutely horrified that I had done such a thing and became absolutely convinced that nothing short of an explosive charge under my rear end could induce me to continue. Yet as soon as the camp showed signs of stirring, I was ready and even eager to climb again.

My mother would never have understood it. No toilet, no bed, no blanket except the coat I wore, huddled together with all those strange people and G.o.d-only-knew what diseases and parasites, subject to the storms in the mountains, the blowing snow, the continual creak and sigh of rock and moisture resettling itself, threatening to fall down upon our heads at any moment.

But then, sometimes, it grew quiet and the peaks seemed to rise like a benediction, sheltering us from the night-perhaps not exactly protectively, but they were so awesomely huge and silent then that I forgot to be afraid, my life seeming no more significant than an amoeba's under the grand everlastingness of those immense snowy sails. The silence was crisp and electric at those times, with the clarity of a snapping icicle. The stillness was overpowering-anything louder than a whisper seemed irreverent, and even some of the guards seemed uncomfortable with normal tones, not because of avalanches, I thought, but just because silence seemed appropriate. Easy to believe, in a place like that, that souls had wings.

Something inside you keeps wanting to fly free as a stringless kite, toward the pinnacles and the ragtag clouds, the blindingly bright stars. Easy to understand why such a land had been ruled by a theocracy, rather than some other form of government, for so long.

A blizzard caught us in the middle of one day and blew us into a premature night and on into yet another day and night. It slowed us down, but we made gradual progress. The snow sifted to a stop as we crossed a final plateau, then descended from the crest of the pa.s.s.

There we looked down into a great bowl, whose highest point was the horned peak I had glimpsed from the helicopter.

The last part of our journey was spent circling the bowl's rim. It took us all a day and part of thenight to spiral down into the valley, circ.u.mventing slides of snow and rock and huge, unstable boulders, areas where the cliff face has been gouged out by something that looked like a huge fist but was probably a bomb or a missile. By the time we reached the valley floor, I was feeling distinctly warm. I grew even warmer as we started to climb again, past an anemic pool half covered by thin ice and up a long rocky path.

As we climbed, my guards became more guardlike. Up until now they had pretty well ignored me, all of us being preoccupied by the task at hand. Now the one behind me gave me a little push once in a while and issued all kinds of useless commands I didn't understand. I ignored him. I had other things to worry about, because the closer we got to the prison, the slower I went. My heart and lungs were laboring as they had not since the beginning of the journey, and my legs and feet felt as if I was walking in casts of hot cement.

The prison was almost impossible to see until we were inside its walls.

A large part of the scooped-out mountain apparently landed at one time on the medium-sized mountain we climbed. The compound is camouflaged within this mountain, and is covered and surrounded by tremendous stones and piles of earth. It is further disguised by a snow-laden canopy netted across the tallest boulders. A stone wall surrounds the prison but its sides are irregular and blend with the rest of the rocky ground cover. The place must be virtually undetectable from the air.

Even within the compound, it is hard to tell how many people the prison holds, because all of the quarters and cells are contained in underground bunkers beneath the ruins. I first discovered this when my guards retreated through a door in a rock-covered mound and new guards, fresh, officious and rough, grabbed me and shoved me through another door, allowing me to tumble down a flight of stone steps into a pa.s.sage that seemed to be less a bunker than part of an underground tunnel network.

I fell, landing on my side on a cold stone floor. As I tried to rise, the first cramp hit me, and I realized that since I was now at my destination, some posthypnotic signal in my surroundings must be releasing me from the spell that had propelled me so far. Apparently the good doctor forgot to include the standard part you always hear about how I would feel well and refreshed, because before I could gain my feet again the most horrible pain I had ever suffered wrenched my deluded body into one burning spasm.

My arms, legs, hips, feet, hands, even my chest, heart, neck and jaws shrieked with agony. Muscles and nerves I never knew I possessed ground and crushed each other as if my whole body were a huge self-compressing, red-hot vise. I was screaming too, blood pouring salty and hot into my mouth as I bit my tongue and cracked lips. My eyes burned. The guards thundered down the stairs after me, rolled me out of the way and opened a huge door, shoving me inside with their feet. I think they were laughing.

Laughing! My G.o.d, at home I'd have been rushed to the nearest hospital and sedated for pain, even if I couldn't pay. Someone, Sammy maybe, would have covered the expense. I couldn't think of anyone who would have found watching me suffer amusing.

Someone grabbed me. "Get his G.o.dd.a.m.n boots off, come on, hustle," a voice said and someone else said, "It's okay, soldier, it's okay, we got you now, babe. Only don't scream. Got that? Cool it with the screaming. Somebody give this guy something to bite on."

What felt like a stick was shoved into my open mouth but I spat it out and screamed anyway, then swore and kicked and landed a couple of blows as unseen hands tugged my coat, boots and flight suit off over cramp-contorted limbs."Holy s.h.i.t, it's a girl," a new voice said.

"Get her right leg, Danielson. Marsh, you take the left. Colonel Merridew, sir, you and I'll get her arms." Even as he spoke, strong calloused fingers tore into the screeching pain, attacking it with swift, sure jabs that disintegrated its strongholds and sent it retreating to the right, the left, and straight through the limb where it met other relentless fingers.

"Okay, Danielson, now you start rubbin' them hands and feet, will you? Her G.o.dd.a.m.n boots weren't made for no mountain climbin'."

The hands that seemed to belong to the voice directing everything rubbed together above my nose and cupped it with pungent-smelling body heat. The hands weren't hot, but the warmth burned my face like a brand at first. As that pain faded, the hands worked their way along all my limbs to my shoulders, neck, hips and back. There was a little hesitation at chest level, then the voice said, "For medicinal purposes only, cher. Ol' Doc seen lotsa ladies, don't think nothin' of it, okay?"

"Fine," I whispered. My ears were still ringing from my own screaming, and everyone else's must have been too. My mouth tasted awful from the blood and I swallowed tears to dilute it, but the edge was off the pain.

"My back needs it worst now, I think," I whispered to the man, and rolled over onto my stomach so he'd lay off the ribs, which I thought might crack. He worked on my spine, shoulders, hips and upper thighs while the others continued ma.s.saging feet, legs and arms.

"Thanks," I managed finally. "I thought I was going to die. I didn't know prison camps featured ma.s.seurs these days."

"We had a little practice," Doc said. "I take it you didn't climb under your own steam? Fu Manchu's mother-in-law got to you, huh?"

"The doctor?"

"Uh-huh."

"She looked more like Fu Manchu's grandma to me," I said. "Yeah, she told me it would keep me from dying on the trip. I guess she didn't guarantee what would happen when I got here."

"Seems to be a trick they use a lot," another man with a voice soft and soothing as b.u.t.tered rum said. "Other prisoners have fallen for it too. Different doctors, all female, but all hypnotists, promise to make the trek easier on people who would be a problem to the guards otherwise. I think it's a variation on an old Tibetan tantric discipline-except that instead of coming from your own training, which would prepare you for it, she induces it from the outside. They had another discipline that taught people how to keep themselves from freezing too but they seem to prefer to just bundle the prisoners up instead."

"Mr. Marsh here, he knows all these heathen things, dollin', but it ain't got him out of here no more than me or the others," Doc said.

"Only thing that's going to get us out of here is us and a few high-power weapons," another man grumbled.

"Sergeant Danielson, I'd take it kindly if you kept your opinions to yourself until after we've debriefed this lady." I didn't need Danielson's rather sheepish "Yes, sir" to know that it was the Colonelspeaking. All but Marsh had southern accents. Ordinarily that wouldn't mean much-most people in NACAF, especially the men, particularly the enlisted men, including some from Canada-side, had southern accents. One of my profs who was a military history buff was asked about this by a linguistics major. He ascribed the phenomenon to the traditional preoccupation American fighting men seemed to retain at some atavistic level with the War Between the States, and the reverence still held for the Rebel soldiers. The linguistics student, who was from Toronto, said that seemed odd since the South lost. Ah, said the professor, but they lost with great style. People knew how to conduct a war in those days.

Sergeant Danielson's accent struck me as being one of those generic military drawls, but Doc's sounded real and regional. The Colonel's was more cultured and slightly less noticeable-more like a ba.s.s fiddle than the hoedown fiddle Doc's resembled. Sid-dons had an accent that was, like Danielson's, an acquisition (the major grew up in Portland), but like the Colonel's featured a broader vocabulary less full of Anglo-Saxon terminology than the average enlisted man's.

The auditory information was essential to me then because it was all I had. I couldn't see in the darkness, though the men moved around easily, albeit within a tight pattern that suggested the cell was small enough for the five of us to const.i.tute a crowd. Danielson's remark indicated that the men were prisoners too, but I'd been fooled once and I was not about to wake up semi-clothed in a roomful of men to whom I'd bared my soul, so to speak; I'd already done that on an individual basis. This time I was the one who would ask the questions.

Doc gave my back a final pat and handed me my flight suit "You gonna need this, dollin'. Gets cold here nights."

I struggled to pull the thing on again, but I was still too stiff and in too much pain. "Could you help me please, Doctor?" I asked.

"Yes, ma'am."

"I've been meeting enough physicians lately to staff a hospital," I said.

"I ain't exactly a physician, ma'am," he said. I noticed with relief that I was "ma'am" now that I was putting my clothes back on. "Perish the thought. I'm a field medic."

With all the slyness in my inconveniently transparent nature I asked, "And in what field are you a medic?"

"Ma'am?"

"To which allies did you administer aid? What's your patch?"

"Come again?"

"I think she means your unit, Thibideaux," Danielson said.

The Colonel's voice, unmistakable in its a.s.sumption of command, said, "Thibideaux, put a lid on it.

You too, Danielson. I believe the time has come for some straight talk, don't you agree, Mr. Marsh?"

"Um-hmm."

"Now then, young lady, suppose you identify yourself.""No."

"What?"

"I said no. I've already been tricked once. This time I want to know who I'm talking to and what your affiliations are."

The Colonel sputtered for a few moments, then Marsh cleared his throat and suggested, "Colonel, we already know who each of us is and the enemy knows who we are. I think you can tell her."

The Colonel said nothing and I could just imagine him standing there tight-lipped and unbending.

Finally Marsh said, "Well, okay then. My name is Keith Marsh. I'm not military. I was taken prisoner illegally while on a mission for the World Peace Organization."

"Nice to meet you," I said. Period. After the snide way Buzz had used my name and rank, I didn't even want to tell them that right away. Not even after the ma.s.sage. Physical intimacy wasn't going to make an idiot of me this time.

There was a long silence, then the Colonel said, "Lady, I don't know if you're on the level or not but if you're a spy this is the oddest way of getting people to incriminate themselves I've encountered. What do you think, men? Shall we risk it?"

Thibideaux said, "Sir, I'm willing. She was in more legitimate physical distress than most spies would go through just to get us to say somethin' indiscreet. h.e.l.l, sir, we been here a c.o.o.n's age and rougher places than this before. I reckon they've about beat outa this poor boy anything I got to tell already.

Don't see what it can hurt to give her the basics."

"Danielson?"

"They haven't brought any ringers in on us here so far, sir. I'm inclined to think this place is too small and isolated for them to be able to shuffle people like that. She is new and she does appear to be an American. I say we take a chance and clue the little lady in. If she screws us over, we'll deal with it when we come to it."

"Marsh?"

"I guess I've already expressed my opinion."

Merridew put his face so close to mine I could almost see it even in the dark. I could smell his breath-a little toothpaste wouldn't hurt. "Okay, young lady, if my men are willing to put their a.s.ses on the line, so am I. I am going to a.s.sume that you are new to the enemy's penal system and give you a little short survival course. Here's the drill. We stick together. It's as simple as that. Each of us has been in and out of other prisons and in and out of other cell arrangements in this one-including years of solitary in some cases. The way the enemy gets to you is they break one person-often in what they call a struggle session or thamzing, they'll arbitrarily pick on one guy-maybe for instance me, since I'm the ranking officer, maybe you, because you're a woman, and beat the living s.h.i.t out of you, accusing you of all kinds of stuff, and make the other prisoners beat the living s.h.i.t out of you. Tell stuff on you. If you don't make up enough stories on the person getting beat, or if you don't beat hard enough, you're the next one that gets beat. Pretty soon, they got everybody spying on everybody else so no one can take a s.h.i.t without all his cellmates telling just exactly how much it stinks and what color it was. There is only one way to survive these very effective interrogation tactics. A, you pull your punches at the beatings ifyou're beating; B, you pretend to be hurt worse than you really are if you're getting beaten; and C, under no circ.u.mstances do you ever betray your cellmates. They ask their questions and all they get out of any of us is dead silence. Got it? You scream all you want to when they start to hurt you, you make up all kinds of outrageous s.h.i.t, but you never ever under any circ.u.mstances betray the rest of us and we give you the same courtesy.

"I know this seems rough, especially for a female, but I was never of the opinion females should be combat troops to begin with. And I want you to consider this, soldier. If you do betray us, we will at some point all betray each other and this place will be even more of a h.e.l.lhole than it is right now, with the worst they can do to any of us coming from the outside. It will be as if your own brain has been turned against you, as if your very heart and lungs cannot trust each other. Do I make myself clear?"

"Yes, sir," I said. "I understand. I just want to make sure before I promise anything that we are all on the same side. So with all due respect, sir, which side are you on?"

"We're Americans, of course," Danielson said.

"But who are you with?" I insisted.

"We've been here a spell," Thibideaux said. "Things may have changed some. There were some pretty strange new policies brewin' before Marsh and me were taken. Who's the U. S. helpin' now, ma'am?"

The U. S. ? G.o.d, maybe we were just having a little communication problem. "The U. S." was considered a separatist designation these days. "You first," I said, nevertheless.

"Never mind, Thibideaux, I made the command decision. I'll walk point on this. Besides, like Marsh says, the bra.s.s here in camp already know all this. So, young woman, I am the top ranking officer here, unless, of course, you outrank me. Merridew, George W., Colonel U.S. Air Force," and he rattled off a serial number at least six digits shorter than my own. "I was shot down several years ago during an airlift from Delhi to Srinagar when the Chinese had cut off northern India. Our official orders at the time were to lend no fire support to India, since the government was negotiating with Beijing, but we weren't about to let our people and our allies starve, so I was one of several officers who organized and carried out the lift. I've admitted that much already."

I didn't recall such an airlift, but then, as I've said, it sounded as if that mission had taken place somewhat before my time, and if the policy was somewhat questionable from an official viewpoint, NACAF wouldn't necessarily have reported it for the press or the history books to record. "You were allied with the Indians too, then?" I asked.

"That's what I said."