SEAL Team Six Hunt the Falcon(60)

His gums bled, his head and ass hurt, and he felt sick and exhausted.

Smoke rising from Crocker’s body, the guards moved him back to the metal chair. The three interrogators reentered and asked him the same questions. Crocker repeated the same answers. He hated all three men, especially Alizadeh, on the left. The interrogators filed out and the guards hooked up the electricity again, this time applying it directly to his scrotum, nipples, and anus.

Another round of questions from the interrogators, then a session of waterboarding, which Crocker didn’t mind as much, since he’d trained himself to hold his breath for nearly three minutes. When they strapped him on a slanted board and pushed his head under water and held it there, he came up pretending to be suffering although he wasn’t.

Two more sessions of questioning and electricity, then Crocker was dragged back to his cell starving, exhausted, and barely conscious. He drank the greasy water, threw up, and defecated in the corner.

He knew in his heart that he would never give up information. They’d have to kill him. Maybe they would.





Chapter Fifteen


Today is victory over yourself of yesterday. Tomorrow is your victory over lesser men.

—Miyamoto Musashi



He fell asleep and woke up with an idea. Feeling around in the dark and locating the bones in the corner of the cell, he selected two strong, thin, short ones. Holding them in his teeth because his wrists were still handcuffed behind him, he dragged them along the rough concrete wall for hours, until his neck, teeth, and mouth were so sore and tired that he had to rest. Ten minutes later he resumed, scraping for hours until the bones had been honed down to sharp, lethal points that were short enough to hide in his palms.

He covered the tips of the bones with his shit, hid them in his hands, curled into a ball on the bare cement floor, and fell asleep. He dreamt that Ritchie was telling him about a vintage Indian Chief Roadmaster motorcycle he had just bought. He explained that it was an exact copy of one that had been owned by his father—cream colored and beautifully detailed, with an inline four-cylinder IOE engine and four-speed overdrive transmission.

“My dad had an Indian, too,” Crocker responded. “Once he lost control of it on some ice and slid under an oncoming truck. The big front prevented him from being crushed.”

As he said these words, he experienced them. He was under the truck, smelling the gasoline and feeling the hot engine.

Ritchie grabbed him by the wrists and started to drag him out, which at first Crocker welcomed. But when the back of his feet started to burn from the scraping, he shouted at Ritchie to stop. That’s when he opened his eyes and realized he’d been hallucinating and he was in the interrogation room again.

A guard slapped him so hard he saw stars. Opening his eyes, he registered the three men sitting behind the table. Blood dripped from his nose onto his bare chest.

Alizadeh said, “You keep this up and you’ll be useless to anyone soon, Mr. Crocker.”

“My name’s not Crocker. It’s Mr. Mansfield.”

Alizadeh pointed at the guard, who slapped him again. Crocker lost consciousness, but remembered to keep the bones clenched in his fists.

When he came to, his interrogators were gone and the two guards were unlocking the handcuffs around his wrists.

“Water,” he muttered. “I need water.”

“No water,” the taller of the two guards growled, putting him in a headlock and dragging him over to the bedsprings for another session of shocks. Crocker moved his fingers to make sure the sharpened bones were still in his hands. It’s now or never, said an authoritative voice in his head.

The voice was right, because when the guard let Crocker go his legs were so weak that he crumpled to the wet floor, hitting the side of his head. They laughed, then bent over on either side of him to pull him onto the bedsprings and chain him down.

His head still reeling, Crocker turned to the guard on his right, who was holding him by the back of the head, and focused on the guard’s neck. Locating the carotid artery, he cocked his arm at the elbow and drove the bone into the artery with all the strength he had left. The guard screamed, went into immediate toxic shock, and collapsed.

The second guard reached for his gun and hurried over to his colleague. Crocker moved quickly, grabbing him by the front of his uniform and pulling him to the ground. Then he shifted the second bone into his right hand. The guard saw the crude weapon coming and shielded himself with his arm, deflecting Crocker’s thrust just enough that the bone drove into his windpipe instead. He fell backward and shouted something in Spanish.

Hearing someone moving toward him, Crocker spun. On the floor he spotted the chain the guards were about to use, picked it up, and swung it wildly. It struck a third guard who had run into the room, momentarily stunning him. As Crocker scrambled to his feet, he saw the man who was doubled over reaching for the pistol in his holster, then realizing he wasn’t moving fast enough to stop the chain that hit him in the face with a loud crack. His right eye exploded and he screamed desperate pleas in Spanish that ended when Crocker wrapped the chain around his neck and tightened it until he stopped breathing.