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could improvise, find his way based on shadows, foliage, intuition. He knew
how to protect himself from the sun, to keep from walking in circles-somehow a
common malady for people who had lost any sense of direction.
But being left in a dark room without so much as the sound of one other person
breathing, no muffled sounds outside of officers or fellow recruits gossiping
about how long he'd been there, that had been true torture. Though he had
quickly freed himself from the bindings, he could not free his hands from each
other. But he was able to stand and walk, getting a measure of the room,
helping time pass by remembering songs and poems and birth dates and special
occasions.
But when he ran out of all that and began losing count after two hours, he had
been tempted to call out, to tell his fellow GIs that he had had enough, that
he got the point, that it was time to return him to normal. But who did that,
other than the weaklings, the washouts? He had to face that he too wanted to
cry, to scream, to beg and plead, to kick at the wall, to ask if they hadn't
forgotten him. He had succumbed to the temptation at long last to make noise
so at least if he had been forgotten, they would be reminded and could save
face by pretending it was all part of the drill.
He remembered what it was like to be hungry and thirsty and desperate, but
there had always been that fail-safe. Deep in the recesses of his
fast-unraveling mind had been the knowledge that this was training, this
wasn't real, there was no real threat to his life and health and mind. No one
was going to inflict permanent injury, no one would threaten his new bride,
nothing would happen to his parents.
His superiors had trained the men in basic transcendental meditation, which
most of them passed off as something for weirdos, druggies, and holy men from
the East. Yet George had seen some benefit to thinking beyond his
consciousness, or at least trying to. Even back then, even before becoming a
believer in Christ, he didn't want anything to do with any religious aspects
of meditation. But he did long to transcend this life, to reach a point beyond
himself, to be able to park his senses and emotions on a plane where they
would be safe from the threat of mere mortals.
It hadn't worked long then, and that was what he feared now. This was the real
thing. While he regulated his breathing and told himself not to think about
his hunger and thirst, they were things he could not blot from his mind. The
more he tried, the worse they invaded.
He was nudged along in the night-no light whatever peeked through his
blindfold-by the butt of a rifle, and as much as he tried to catalog all the
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information he could remember since the girl had clumsily frisked him and he
had been jumped, his overriding emotion was shame.
No, he had not been the one who got the teenagers caught-along with anyone
helping them. But while the assignment excited him, he had not treated it like
a military operation. Back in the Negev, that was war, pure and simple-except
when they had been surrounded by superior firepower and it went from armed
conflict to no fair. It had done his soul good to see what happened to anyone
who thumbed his nose at God. Our general is better than your general, he
thought, so game over. That almost made him smile. Why should he worry about
the people who held him now when Michael the archangel could step in and make
them faint dead away-if they were lucky?
He was held up briefly, then heard two doors open. He was nudged inside and
sensed a light come on. A few more steps, another door, a musty smell, a shove
from behind, steps leading down, but how many? He started carefully, feeling
with his foot, but he was bumped again, rushed his feet hoping he would come
to the bottom before he lost balance, and failed.
George didn't know how far he might tumble down these wood stairs. The best he
could do was tuck his chin to his chest, clamp his eyes shut as tightly as
possible, and draw his knees up to his chest. He counted two, three, four
stairs, then hard-packed dirt. His momentum carried him a couple of rolls, and
the whole way down, he expected to hit a wall or who-knows-what with some part
of his body.
When he finally came to rest on his right side, he could hear from their
footsteps that his feet faced his captors. He kept his knees drawn up and
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