The Tenth Circle of Hell
"Going to war is like opening a door to a dark room." (Adolph Hitler)
I.
Henry Daimler woke up in the corner of a cold concrete cell with no windows and a heavy metal door, which appeared to be locked. His hands were tied on his back with plastic strips. His feet were tied together in a similar manner.
After a few minutes, where he scoped out the room, measuring its dimensions – approximately 50 square feet – the door opened only a few minutes after he opened his eyes.
A man stepped into the room. He was a huge man, about 6' 10" tall with large pyramid-shaped trapezius muscles. He wore a vacuform mask with a black hood resembling that of the immortals depicted in the Hollywood movie 300.
“Welcome, Mr. Daimler”, the man said in English with a distinct Russian accent. “You can call me Sergei.”
In his last conscious moment before this he had been walking towards his car in Moyock, North Carolina, when a woman had approached him, asking him if he had seen a dog, a small white cocker spaniel. He had turned around, off guard, and the next moment a syringe had been administered into the back of his neck, causing him to collapse almost instantly.
The last he had heard was a report, likely given across a secure line: “Operation Dyer’s Eve completed.”
The brawny Russian had brought a collapsible chair upon which he sat down in front of Daimler, studying his prisoner through the peepholes in the mask.
“Why am I here?”
“You get right down to business. You do not even ask where you are”, Sergei said.
“What would be the point of that?”
“Exactly… This means you are smart. I like that. So let me tell you why you are here: You are here, because you have made a mistake.”
“What kind of mistake?”
“It is too early for me to tell you.”
“I see. What is going to happen to me?”
“The usual”, Sergei said. “You will go through Hell, and perhaps you will die. Perhaps you will be set free again. It is all up to our employer.”
Henry listened carefully to the nuances in the voice of the man who called himself Sergei. He listened for irony or insecurity or contempt, but found nothing but arctic resolve, perhaps mixed with a slight touch of sadism.
I'm in a bad way, Henry thought, discovering to his astonishment that his mind was searching for the words to a rosary. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee…
“Who are you people?”
“Who we are is irrelevant. We are ghosts. To you we are messengers of death.”
“Terrorism? Anti-terrorism? Intelligence?”
“None of all that. We do not play your little games. We play our own game. It is the big game. It is the game called business.”
“Business? I know nothing of strategic value. I am privately employed as a military consultant, and I don't exactly make a fortune. There's no ransom to be made on me.”
“Our employer has paid handsomely.”
“Who is your employer?”
Sergei shook his head and made smacked his tongue against the wall of his mouth in disapproval. Little clicking sound that, like the collapsible chair, seemed far too small for a man his size.
“Are you going to torture me?”
“Yes. Yes, we will do that.”
“But I know nothing.”
“I don’t care what you know or not. Our orders are to torture you, so we torture you. Now our conversation is over. I will go away, and someone else will come to take you to a special room. There you will suffer for a while. Then we take a break, and then you suffer some more.”
Henry opened his mouth to speak again, but Sergei raised his finger.
“No more questions!”
The giant man stood up, collapsed the chair and carried it out of the room. The door slammed behind him, and Henry could hear the clicking of several locks.
Someone will come to take you to a special room. Good God, have mercy. They are going to hurt me.
II.
Mechanically Henry went through the exercises they had taught him, widening his glance to encompass the entire room, breathing deeply, feeling the blood pumping through his arteries.
Desperation is no excuse for panic, he repeated to himself. Desperation is no excuse for panic. Every human makes mistakes. Every fortress has a weak point; every armor a joint that can be pierced. Wrap your mind around it. Uncover motive. Assess resources. Prepare counter-stratagem.
In spite of all disciplined attempts to regain mental control of the situation Henry Daimler felt himself slipping rapidly into depression. It happened much sooner than he would have thought. Hopelessness set in. He was focusing on the agony from his tied wrists and ankles; on the chill of the room and the hunger and thirst he was beginning to feel rather than establishing a platform for choice, for exploiting unexpected advantages.
There were none. Running through the entire conversation he realized that his only reliable knowledge was that this operation had been conducted by hardened professionals and would, if they had their way, be carried through to the bitter end, whatever it might be.
When facing superior force, feign incompetence to make the opponent lower his guards, he thought. Hell, that will be easy. Hands already shivering, and punishment hasn't even started yet.
Then they came to take him away. He made some feeble attempts to resist in order to give his capturers the impression of proper desperation.
Since they did not blindfold him he could occupy himself with taking note of every detail in the environment, which was scarce: He was pushed and dragged through a long concrete corridor with no visible monitoring and brought to a room similar to the one he had come from, except it contained an old-fashioned pillory of the kind you can see at a renaissance fair.
After the beating he was somewhat encouraged. Sure, it hurt, but it had been nothing like the kind of pain he had expected, and the torment did not involve obscenity or dismembering.
Only one guard brought him back to his cell, a younger and leaner man who spoke with a German accent.
“You shouldn’t act tough”, he said as he chained Henry to the wall by a collar around his neck. “It may seem admirable to you not to cry out, but it will only make it tougher on you.”
“Why would you care?”
The young man shrugged.
“I don’t.”
Alone in his cell Henry resumed his speculations. They were obviously adopting a gradual approach, possibly to evaluate his resistibility. The shouting and the hectoring, forcing him to run back and forth between the walls, had been tedious. He had been through worse in boot camp. They had tripped him a couple of times too, which left abrasions from his confrontation with the floor. The final beating was severe, but still cautious not to inflict internal bleeding. There had been no attempts at interrogation.
All in all, it was below the expected threshold if they had done a background check on him, which he was certain they would have. And the young soldier, the German, had revealed a weakness.
They are mercenaries all right, and they work well as a team. But individually they differ. That is the problem with mercenaries. They do not possess the zeal of a religious fanatic. They can be sidetracked.
Without any sense of time – day and night were the same in the poorly lit cell – he could not tell when the German brought him his food. He only knew it was evening later, because the sleep deprivation measures were activated. The halogen lights began blinking at varying frequencies, and he was forced to also listen to Metallica’s Kill ‘Em All album over and over.
All the time he thought about the few words he had exchanged with the German mercenary, who had told him to call him Gruber.
“We are a private company specializing in rendition. Some like to call us Vengeance Incorporated. We basically work for well paying customers”, Gruber had told him.
“Why am I a target?”
“I’m not supposed to even talk to you.”
“I have no information of value. I’m just a military consultant.”
“Yes, first sergeant, service in Iraq and Afghanistan, assigned to special overseas operations, expert in anti-terror interrogation. We know all that.”
“So what is the purpose of all this?”
“You are here because of a Tunisian professor. It is that simple.”
“What?”
“Mohammed Abu-Tabib was kidnapped in Zurich in 2006 and brought to a secret American prison facility on a base in Kogalniceanu. You supervised his torture.”
“I have interrogated a lot of terrorists, and I don’t regret that. Last time I checked both Germany and Russia had their own problems with Islamic bombers.”
“Not that it matters, but this man was innocent, it appears. He was released, but suffered severe depressions and faltering health. He committed suicide this fall. His wife has done a man’s work raising enough money to pay for this operation.”
“You are telling me names”, Henry sighed. “That means…”
“Yes, I don’t think you are not supposed to ever get out of here.”
III.
Days went by with increasingly agonizing treatment, dry bread and water for sustenance and repetitive exposure to cold, stressful noises – babies crying, dogs barking and the ever popular speed metal – and beatings and humiliation at random hours of the day.
Still, somewhere deep in the back of his mind, Henry Daimler nurtured a hope, a hope mainly based on the fact that Gruber had become increasingly susceptible to his attempts at inducing the Lima Syndrome. They both had German ancestors, and it gave them something in common besides military background.
Henry had told him about his grandfather, who was assigned to the Eastern Front in the late years of the Second World War, and how he had survived Gulag as one of three in an army of 25.000.
Franz Gruber had returned a living corpse, nearly a skeleton, and it had not been until Henry had become 25 the old man had broken his silence about what had taken place in the prison camp in Siberia.
Gruber, it appeared, did not know much about his origins. Both his parents had died in an early age, and when he enlisted he had realized that his only real talent was killing people.
He was a soldier without remorse, but also a sociopath with some strangely soldierly values, except to say he did not consider the Geneva Convention of much value, but Henry could not exactly claim to respect that himself.
On the fourth day or the fifth – any sense of time escaped him already – Gruber told him more about the sinister plan forged against Daimler.
“Tomorrow is going to be the hardest you have experienced so far. They will bring someone you know and try to make you kill him.”
“Who?”
“Do you remember your commanding officer in Romania? Captain Bergstrom is here as well.”
It came to pass as Gruber had warned him. After a couple of hours of uneasy sleep, when exhaustion overpowered all disturbances, Henry was pulled into yet another torture chamber, this time one furnished with a macabre apparatus consisting of two large chairs made of tick rough planks and placed opposite to each other.
Bergstrom was out of his senses. His eyes were panicky, and his feet dragged across the floor, as they pulled him through the room and strapped him to the chair in front of Henry.
“This is where you will sit. The metal plates on the seat and the back rest and the armrests will be graduately heated by an electrical current”, said the man who called himself Sergei, addressing only Daimler.
“You can stop this current, whenever it becomes too unbearable, by pressing the button on the right armrest. When you do so, however, you will tighten the rope around the neck of the man in front of you.”
To Bergstrom he gave another instruction:
“If you want to relieve your neck and get some air, you just press the button. This will restart the heating process in the other chair.”
Then, to the both of them, he said:
“We call the contraption Friendly Fire.”
Bergstrom died in agony, while Daimler only wore first degree burns on his body, when they took him back to his solitary confinement. Inside his mind a movie played, a movie in which the eyes of his former commanding officer grew ever larger, at first because Henry had found it impossible to abstract from the process of anxiety growing into full fledged despair, and by the end because the eyeballs were literally bulging out of the sockets, before Bergstrom gave up his spirit.
For the first time since his abduction Henry Daimler wept.
Some hours later Gruber came to give him his dry bread and lukewarm water. He also brought another gift, a matte black MK III combat knife.
“What happened just now…”
Gruber cleared his throat inside the mask.
“…it is not something I approve of. Unfortunately I don’t run this operation. I am under orders, like you were. All I can do is to offer you this way out.”
He tossed Henry the knife and left the room. Henry finished his meagre meal, before he picked it up. It was a gift from God, he knew, but even in his shattered condition he could not bring himself to use it. He tried to feel the blade against his wrist, cutting slowly upwards, until blood began to drip, but something inside him kept him from applying the necessary force – an unquenchable zest for life, the memory of his wife and daughters, the desire to sometime eat a hamburger again and drink an ice cold Heineken or simply walk down a suburban road and listen to birds singing.
He did have another option, one that would surely be lethal to him, but then at least his suffering would be done with, and one or, perhaps more of his assailants, would leave the world with him. The only real fear involved with such an exit strategy was, of course, that he would somehow survive and be kept alive for even more excruciating torture. Most of all the prospect of being amputated frightened Henry beyond measure.
One thing is to endure pain, another to die. These are the universal conditions of any soldier. But being slowly maimed and dissected by sadistic torturers. To watch my own body wrecked, grotesquely disfigured, and yet be kept alive for another round. Was it the Chinese who had once punished dissidents in this manner, removing life one limb at the time?
Then he realized something. It struck him like lightning. He was on his feet and on his way to the door, as far as the collar allowed. The distinct sound of locks clicking had been absent after this visit. Gruber had forgotten to lock the door.
The chain was certainly impossible to break with the bare hands, but studying ever link he finally found one where the weld was incomplete, allowing him to squeeze the stainless steel blade in between the two parts of the joint.
Working frantically at the weak spot he gave up worrying whether somebody was monitoring him. Eventually he was able to wrench apart the joint in the link in the chain.
Weak from malnourishment and the repetitive abuse he staggered hesitantly towards the door, dreading the moment he realized his senses had played a trick on him, and the door was fully sealed. In this case he was left with the dilemma: to end it right there, or conceal the knife and wait until somebody came.
Even if it was Gruber he would have to use the opportunity at hand. He could fix the chain so it looked like he was still confined to the corner of the room. There was no room for sentimentality. After all, the friendship of this mercenary only extended as far as to hand him the instrument of suicide.
IV.
But no, the door was open. He had not been mistaken.
Cautiously he opened it and snuck out into the hallway he already knew so well. His instinct and his inner compass and his memory in combination led him to believe that the direction they had taken him for the torture sessions was also the direction of the living quarters from where they ran the operation.
In the opposite direction the narrow hallway ended in another anonymously looking metal door, but to the right it continued into unknown territory, and this might be the way towards freedom.
Henry Daimler put his head out and looked around the corner. The light was different, and he sensed a breath of fresh air. The source of the slight aberration in the light appeared to be coming from the left side of a fork in the hallway. As he came closer the air was noticeably cooler, as if a door stood open somewhere, allowing a draft.
Peeking down to the left he saw the dark silhouette of a guard against the shadowy green foliage of brightly lit bushes, either illuminated by projectors or by unusually brilliant moonlight. He was in a semi-basement about 3 or 4 feet below ground level. The guard was light weight and immobile, resting against the wall facing the front door.
This is more like it, he thought, measuring the distance to the target and carefully planning every step of the assault. This is my game. This is what I have been trained to do. One clean kill and I am outside the building. Then the question is if it is a maximum security compound.
Listening more carefully he picked up a welcome sound, the distant rustling of traffic.
There is no sound of vehicles in the vicinity or footsteps. No dogs barking.
With his heart pounding so loudly it filled his ears and the combat knife hanging down the side of his thigh Henry Daimler sneaked up on the unsuspecting guard and proceeded to – in one uninterrupted motion – grab the throat, block the respiratory passage, pull the body backwards off balance and slice open the internal carotid artery.
He gently lowered the body of the guard. Then, as a measure against being discovered during his escape, he began undressing it.
First he picked up the already bloodied army cape. Then, as he proceeded to remove the hood, he noticed something startling: Around the ankle of the corpse a collar similar to the neck collar he still wore was attached to a band that ran all the way to a metal ring in the wall. In the same instance he noticed that the body beneath him, which had been so peculiarly light in his hands, almost weightless, belonged to a woman.
His hand reached forth to remove the mask, but he was unable to complete the action.
“No”, he whispered.
“Yes”, said the deep voice with the distinct Russian accent. It came from somewhere above him, but he did not get up or turn to look. Out of the corner of his eyes he could see boots and gun barrels pointing at him, but all he could see was the contours of the body he had just cut down.
“Remove the mask.”
“Alice”, he sobbed, even before the face was revealed.
He had dropped the knife. A boot kicked it away from him. Strong hands grabbed his arms and pulled him back on his feet.
Then the rest of the Hail Mary came to him, and he uttered the words as if there had been only a brief time gap between the first time he had tried to recollect them:
…blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.
Then he was outside. His feet had climbed the four steps in the stair that led to the door that led to the open air, where a gentle breeze caused the familiar and yet so exotic sound of autumn leaves rattling. Somehow he was carrying the body of his wife in his arms, like he had done on their wedding day. She wasn’t giggling.
They must have drugged her, he thought. The bastards. To drag her into this. This has nothing to do with her, or with the rest of my family. It’s not personal.
“Just get in the car”, someone said. A gun barrel was shoved into his kidney. He paid no attention to the pain. Two mercenaries stepped in, one on each side of him.
“Well, that’s it”, said Gruber from the front seat, where he was operating the vehicle.
“You’re not going to kill us?”
“No, where is the point in that. You are already dead. You just haven’t realized it yet. Besides, you have two daughters, who depend on you, remember?”
“Yes, that’s true. Amelia and… and…”
“Beatrice.”
“Yes, her name is Beatrice. And you haven’t harmed them…?”
“No, they are fine. But they are going to need their father. We’ve booked a ticket for you to the next plane out of this godforsaken place. Here, take it.”
“Thank you”, Henry Daimler stuttered.
“No reason”, Gruber said.
They drove in silence for a while.
“What about the client? The woman… you told me all of this was arranged by her.”
“Her name is Fatimah”, Gruber said. “There is no point looking for her. She shot herself when we told her the mission was completed. She didn’t even hang up.”
“Did she say anything?”
“Yes, actually she did. She asked me a strange question, a religious question.”
“What was it?”
“Let me see if I can remember. Yes, she said: Is there a circle in Hell for those who abuse their authority in the line of duty?”
“That’s all?”
“Yes, it is a reference to Dante.”
“I am aware of that.”
“Do you know the answer?”
Henry Daimler shook his head.
“No, but I don’t think so. There are nine circles, all in all: limbo, lust, gluttony, avarice… and… heresy… heresy, wrath… violence. Perhaps violence fits the description?”
“Maybe so.”
“Then there is fraud and eh, fraud and betrayal.”
“Betrayal fits a lot of deeds. It could also be Dante got it all wrong, and there is a tenth circle.”
“A tenth circle?”
“Don’t listen to me, man. I don’t have a clue what I’m talking about. I’m just an unemployed actor. The financial crisis got the better of me, so I had to accept alternative employment.”
Only then Henry noticed that the young boy spoke fluent American English without any accent.
“And the others…?”
“Oh, they’re for real. They’ve plundered and pillaged in Bosnia, Chechnya, you name it. I wouldn’t mess with those guys for the life of me.”
Henry lowered his head and put his face in his hands.
“What kind of a world is this? What has it all come to?”
“You tell me, brother. They say you’re the expert.”