Devil's Bargain. Don Pendleton

impossible to track time or grasp insight into mind games played by his tormentors, he concluded as he hacked out a strand of gummy blood, wincing when his tongue ran over the craters inside his mouth. Rage building, he felt the slime ooze down over his bare chest and stomach, pool to a warm slither against exposed genitals. Time was frozen, but his hatred felt as if it could last an eternity.

      How much more could he take? Daily he was hung upside down, pummeled by fists, flogged by a metal studded belt. A slice of moldy bread, a cup of tepid water a day—he was a withered sack of drooping flesh. For endless hours he sat naked and bleeding from his scalp to the soles of his feet in the blackness of a six-by-four concrete-block cell, breathing the stink of his own filth and fear; waiting for execution. Still, solitary confinement was respite from torture.

      He knew plenty about deprivation, suffering, cruelty—his people, after all, had been savaged by the Turks for eighty years—but even those who believed they carried the heart of a lion could long for death under such brutal conditions.

      Only they wouldn’t break him, he determined. No begging to be spared when the time came, no crack in the armor of his will. He would take what he knew about his fellow PKK freedom fighters with him to the grave. As leader, there was no other way, the warrior’s ego also dictating he stand an iron pillar, an example of unwavering defiance in the enemy’s face. With the imprisonment of Abdullah Ocalan, the disappearance of his younger brother, Osman—previous heir to power—he hadn’t climbed the ranks of the Workers Party of Kurdistan by showing mercy, either to friend or foe. Why expect anything now but the worst at the hands of a savage, hated enemy? He would die the way he had lived. At worst, he could take comfort not even his death would cripple the dream of a Kurdistan nation.

      Muhdal felt the pain dig needles of fire through every nerve ending. For some strange reason, agony seared to mind images of his wife and three children, murdered many years ago by Turk soldiers, leaving him to wonder how much they had suffered before they were beheaded, their bodies dumped in a mass grave with the other villagers. The ringing in his ears, his brain jellied and throbbing, smothered by darkness, and he found himself suddenly drifting away into warm darkness. Muffled by the steel door, the screams of other prisoners, whipped and beaten down the corridor, some of them, he knew, with testicles plugged into generators, echoing the cry of anger and hatred in his heart.

      Pain was good, he decided. So was hate.

      So was never forgetting.

      Focus, he told himself, perhaps the Turk was being truthful. Hold on.

      “Hope!” Escape first, then dip his hands in more enemy blood. Perhaps freedom was on the way, but at what price? he wondered. After all, the guards, like many Turks here, he knew, were Boz Kurt, members of a secret netherworld of militants, all of whom were hardly resigned to carry out the Ankara regime’s wishes without personal gain. Their treachery and brutal ways were legendary, even by Turk standards. The Gray Wolves—or so went the mythical nonsense, he knew, fighting to pull thoughts together inside the crucible of his skull—believed the first Turk was suckled by a wolf on the Central Asian steppe. Whether or not the milk of a wild beast spawned a bloodline of ferocious warriors, Muhdal only knew all Turks were devils in human skin. As for the Boz Kurt, they weren’t only considered terrorists by Ankara, but they were also drug traffickers.

      Which was why he and fifteen of his fighters had been arrested in the first place.

      Revolutions required money to purchase weapons, even loyalty. Briefly he thought back eight months, the Turks catching them asleep, but the question lingered as to how the Turks had found them, slipped so easily into the gorge. Of course, he never expected a trial, a just legal system all but an alien concept in Turkey. His crimes—so the Turks claimed—ranged from murder to drug trafficking, too many, in fact, to count.

      Killing the enemy, he believed, was acceptable in the eyes of Allah. So was stealing from Turk thieves and murderers, a holy decree, spoken directly to him from God in dreams, God telling him the spoils of war were to be used to gain an edge against the enemy. How could he, in all good conscience, have stood idly by anyway, watch the Turks use the southeast corner of the country to fatten their own coffers with truck caravans of heroin funneled from Afghanistan, hashish from Lebanon. And when the Ankara regime, faceless butchers who marched their killers out to Anatolia, had declared a campaign of genocide against them generations ago, and soon after the treacherous Brits reneged on their promise to give the Kurds their own country…?

      The groan echoing in his ears, he gnashed chipped, broken teeth, invisible flames racing down the long furrows in his back. It hurt to breathe.

      The first of several rumbles sounded from a great distance, but it was next to impossible to judge direction, much less clearly absorb sound through the chiming in his ears, windowless walls and door a barrier to whatever the source. He strained his ears, heart racing, then shuddered to his feet, hand on wall to brace himself. Tremors rippled underfoot next, the thunder pealing closer, nearly on top of his cell. This region, he knew, was notorious for earthquakes, ground splitting open without warning, hills crumbling down to consume tens of thousands within minutes. Images of being buried alive were jumping through his mind, then the bedlam beyond the darkness broke through the bells in his ears.

      Muhdal laughed, hope flaming as the racket of weapons fire, the screams of men being shot in the corridor seemed to pound the door, an invisible but living force shouting freedom was mere feet and seconds away.

      The murderous din, he thought, oh, but it was the singing of angels.

      Freedom! Salvation! Revenge!

      He made out the rattling of a key being inserted. Laughing, so giddy with relief, he wasn’t sure he could walk. But pain seemed to leak out of bruised and gashed flesh like water through a sieve right then. Waiting, he watched as the door swung out, light stabbing the dark, piercing his eyes, autofire and angry shouts blasting a wave of sense, shattering noise in his face.

      Squinting, he made out the stocky figure of the Boz Kurt guard. He was shoving himself off the wall when it happened.

      There was a wink of light in the doorway, a shadow rolling up behind the man, an armed wraith clad in black, from hood to boots. Muhdal looked from the bayonet fixed to the assault rifle, believed he heard tesekkurler, the hooded one thanking the guard in Turk. Then a pistol flew up in a gloved hand, the shadow jamming the muzzle against the Turk’s skull. Muhdal felt his knees buckle as the shot rang out and blood sprayed his lips.

      THE UNIDENTIFIED BOGEY blipped onto the screen, dropping from the sky, out of nowhere, it seemed. By the time he calculated numbers scrolling on the digital readout—speed, distance and rate of descent—Colonel Mustafa Gobruz knew it was too late. The hell with his men assuring him there was no evidence of malfunction. Whatever the object, it was sailing a bullet straight course for the compound, less than one minute out, he figured, falling to slam right on top of their heads.

      Gobruz felt the anxiety edge to panic in the room, his three-man radar team crunching numbers he already knew. “I can read!”

      The colonel then barked orders to scramble all hands, man the antiaircraft batteries, shoot down the bogey on sight. But even as he punched on the Klaxon to throw the compound into full battle alert, Gobruz feared the worst, doomsday numbers ticking down now to mere seconds. The sprawling compound might survive a direct hit from a missile or a crash landing by a crippled aircraft. The dread concern, however, was for the ammunition depots, fuel bins, choppers, motor pools, every machine in close proximity to the C and C, topped out with fuel and—

      One explosion, pounding through ordnance and thousands of gallons of high-octane fuel, he knew, and the base would erupt, a conflagration leaving behind a smoking crater on the east Anatolia steppe.

      Gobruz, snapping up field glasses, burst out the door, stared to the southeast. Baffling, frightening questions shot through his mind as he glanced at soldiers racing up behind the big guns, searchlights scissoring white beams over black sky, barracks spilling forth more troops.

      This was no accident, he knew. A deliberate attack, no question, but who was manning the craft, plunging it to the base, perhaps using it as a flying bomb? Or was it one of those