Without warning

She tried to lash out with a feeble kick but only scraped more skin off her legs. Another punch on the back of her neck stunned her and she came to understand just how weakened she was by weeks of torture and illness. His hands clawed at her hips, dragging her towards him, confirming the worst.

* * * *

When Caitlin was a girl, maybe nine or ten years old, her family had travelled to California for a holiday, driving all the way from Charleston AFB in South Carolina, where her daddy had been stationed with an airlift squadron. They did all of the family things you do in California – visiting Disneyland, Hollywood, the beaches. But for her the standout memory had been climbing the bell tower on the Berkeley campus, just before the clock struck ten in the morning. The pealing of the bells was frighteningly loud, much louder than she had imagined it would be. She not only heard the thunderous clanging, she felt it, inside her chest and stomach, reverberating right down through her feet. The sensation, which was entirely unpleasant, remained with her ever after.

The rape lasted only a few minutes, but she was still shaking hours later.

Lying on her slab, under a harsh, flat white light in her cell at Noisy-le-Sec, she felt a powerful psychic echo of that same deep body shock.

Her limbs quivered and shook, sometimes so violently that she resembled a victim of late-stage Parkinson’s disease, but it was inside that she felt herself being torn apart by a quaking, shuddering violence that was entirely psychological.

Nobody had entered the room since her violation. In her rational, calculating mind, the cold, mechanical killer’s mind that had been honed to such a dangerous edge, she knew that was just part of ‘the tactical questioning phase’. But she could not rid herself of the burning shame and humiliation she felt. As hard as she tried to control herself, the awful, nauseating tremors reminded her of that day in the bell tower, which naturally led to thoughts of her family, especially her father, and with them came more unutterable shame.

She tried to focus on something simple, some goal she might start working towards – like driving a stiffened sword hand-strike into Baumer’s throat at the first opportunity. But that only reminded her of how weak and unable to resist him she had been in the first place.

She was curled into a tight, shivering foetal ball when the lights went out.

It was so unexpected that Caitlin suffered a moment of total disorientation. She had been kept for so long in this cell flooded with bright, artificial light that the sudden fall of darkness was terrifying, as though her eyes had been put out. She squirmed far back into the corner of her cell, without being consciously aware she had done so. And then she heard something so familiar, but, like the sudden inky darkness, so unexpected it made her mind seize up for an instant.

Gunfire.

It was muted at first, far off in the distance somewhere in the underground maze of Noisy-le-Sec’s interrogation cells. But it soon grew louder, and with it came other sounds. Boots running. Men cursing. More gunfire, the ripping snarl of automatic weapons and the crash of large-bore, single-shot rifles and pistols. A grenade exploded with a deafening roar in one of the enclosed tunnels outside her cell. She could see the flashes in the dark now and pick out individual voices; none of them familiar, all of them French.

Men ran past the heavy iron cage door that locked her in. One stopped, briefly, and fired in through the bars. A short wild burst that largely missed her, although a ricochet did rake a painful burning graze along one hip. She groaned and rolled off the slab, letting herself fall as a deadweight to the floor. In the pitch-blackness of the cell, nobody could see her, and whoever had stopped to finish her off rushed on. Muzzle flashes soon accompanied the crash and zip of bullets, which reached a crescendo as more men rushed past her cell, carrying their fight deeper into the prison complex.

In the darkness, Caitlin crawled into a blind corner, where she just might avoid getting shot, if she was lucky. She huddled there, naked, bleeding, and all alone, for what felt like a long time.

* * * *

36 PACOM HQ, PEARL HARBOR, HAWAII

‘My God, it looks like the seventh level of hell down there.’