Dire Strait

Lee Ewing                                                                                                                                                                                       

1036 Ringlet Ct

Winnabow, NC 28479

lee.ewing@yahoo.co

2,300 words

Dire Strait

A short story

by

Lee Ewing

 Athens

Faint, erratic scratching sounds roused Daniel Pierce from an uneasy sleep. Pulse throbbing, he strained to listen. Someone quietly probing the door lock? Or just cats in the alley? In the distance he could hear the soothing Doppler thrum and hiss of traffic on the Athens-Kifissia Road, then, closer, rain pelting the tile roof and the sour mewing of the ever‑present cats.

The last time the cats scrambling about the trash cans awakened him he was momentarily paralyzed by a jolt of blood‑chilling terror until he realized he was not under attack. The years and miles that separated him from the battlefield had not dulled the cold, keen edge of fear.

Cats. Athens had more cats than people, he'd been told. Once, when he was walking down a black alley near the fish market, he'd been startled by a surreal image: a dozen pairs of golden cats' eyes floating in the darkness, flashing like slave lights triggered by a master strobe. The vision haunted him each time he awoke in the night to the mewling, strangled‑baby cries.

He longed for sleep, but his head throbbed, his tongue was a parched sponge. The Greek brandy, the only thing strong enough that he could afford right now, always punished him.  

 A loud metallic click, rustling footsteps, then a blinding light. As he raised his right arm to shade his eyes, someone clamped down on it hard and pinned his left wrist to the mattress.

Fueled by a burst of adrenalin, he tried to break free and was hurled back so violently he was left gasping. For a moment, he lay there quivering in the beam of light, listening to his own labored breathing and someone's asthmatic wheezing.

“Who is it?” he asked in his phrase‑book Greek

He could hear at least one person breathing, smell wet wool, sweat, tobacco and cloying hair oil. “What do you want? I have no money, for Christ's sake.”

 Someone snickered.

Reckless now with fear, he jerked his head aside, out of the flashlight's beam, and caught a glimpse of three black forms against the dove gray of the coming dawn before the harsh light again bore in on his bloated, stubbly face. Three. He had guessed two. In his shape, even one could be too many for him.

 “Don't struggle, ­Captain Pierce,” said the man at the foot of the bed who was holding the flashlight.

Captain. The word stopped his heart. No one had addressed him by his former rank in years.

 “We just want to talk with you, so don't be difficult,” the flashlight man said in flat, unaccented English.

 Somehow, he had to seize the initiative, take control. “Who in the hell are you and what are you doing in my apartment?” he shouted, hoping if nothing else to awaken the neighbors. One of the men grabbed his arms from behind while another clamped a calloused, salty hand over his mouth.

 “Hold it down,” the flashlight man said, and waited. “Got it?”

A reply apparently was in order. “I heard you,” he said, with what he hoped was a glimmer of defiance.

Finally, the flashlight man mumbled something in Greek. The one who had been gagging him stepped back into the darkness.

“Listen,” Pierce said, keeping his voice low this time but his tone as hard as he could manage, “I'm an American citizen. Am I under arrest? What are the charges?”

 The flashlight man sighed. “I told you. We just need to talk with you, but we had to be sure no one else was here.”

 “Look, is all this really necessary?” he said, squirming away from the guy who held his arms. “Buck naked in bed in the middle of the night and crippled by a hangover, I'm really a threat to you, right?”

 For a moment, there was silence.

 “Spiro, check him.”

Warm hands flitted with surprising delicacy over his bare body in practiced patterns until he recoiled into a fetal position.

 “Goddamn it, lay off. Where the hell would I hide a weapon? If I had one.”

 “Please not to lift the voice,” said the man in the shadows to his left, still unseen.

  Pierce squinted against the light. Now he could see that one of them was searching the bed. He slid his hands along the edge of the mattress, methodically checked both pillows, felt his way expertly through the sheet and blanket all the way to the foot of the bed, then chuckled.

 “What is it?” the flashlight man asked.

 “Nearly nothing,” the frisker said. He dangled a pair of skimpy pink panties in the light beam, and then let them flutter to the blanket.

 “Where is she?” the leader asked in a monotone.

 “Who?”

 “So now you're telling us you wear pink panties? The girl, Pierce, the girl.”

 “What girl?” he said, stalling, groping through his muddled mind for some explanation for all this. Stalling could spur them to get violent, but he didn't know what else to do. He needed time to clear his head, to think. “The islands,” he said. “She went to the islands.” He was sure Sarah had no connection with--whatever it was they wanted. At least she was safe on Hydra. Or Mykonos. He wished he’d paid closer attention when she’d told him her plans.

  Another sigh, clearly edged with exasperation.

 “I had hoped that it wouldn't have to be this way,” the flashlight man said. “Let's get this straight, right from the start: I don't have the time or the temperament for games. It's pointless. You know it. So, cut the crap.”

 There had been a time, during Ranger school, when his tenacity and confidence had enabled him to withstand almost anything. That time had long since passed.

  “Look, I told you the truth,” he began. “She took the ferry last night, with a girlfriend--”

  “Pierce, you’d better not be lying. Which island?”

  The three men waited in silence. He heard his neighbor's car door slam as he left for work at the hospital. Suburban Athens was coming to life. He shook his head to clear it.

 “I don’t know which island. Maybe Mykonos or Hydra.”

 A cell phone bleated, and the flashlight man, clearly the leader, stepped outside to take the call. Pierce strained to listen but could hear nothing intelligible. Abruptly, the bedroom door opened, and the leader returned.

 “We have the girl, Pierce.”

 “What?”

 “We have the girl. Islands, my ass. We picked her up a little while ago between here and Kolonaki Square. Don't try to be cute.”

  Pierce didn't understand. He really didn't get it. Sarah had said she was going to Hydra, or Mykonos, he couldn't be sure. But definitely, she’d said she was going to the islands. With Vicki.

If the goon was right, and they really had kidnapped her in Athens, why would they seize her?

 “Where is she? Is she all right?”

  “So far.”

 “If you hurt her--”

 “We wouldn't hurt a fly.”

 Slowly, He raised a hand to his forehead to wipe away the sweat. There had to be a way out of this.

Despite the ravaging effects of the intervening years, the months of airborne, Ranger, Special Forces and intelligence training had left their imprint. Escape and evade, he had been taught. How? If he could kick the flashlight away and break one arm free, he might be able to rush past them in the darkness.

Who was he kidding? Muscles had grown slack, movements slow, in the years of lassitude and self‑indulgence. Was it prudence that counseled caution? Or fear? If he tried to bolt, he would have a bullet hole in his head by the time he cleared the foot of the bed. And he’d have to play along until he could find Sarah.

He was getting nowhere. Round One lost, with who knows how many to follow.

With as much authority as he could muster, he said, “All right, we'll talk. But first tell your buddy to let go of me and get that goddamned light out of my eyes.”

To his surprise, someone turned on the overhead light. He blinked, jerked his arms free and rubbed his eyes. Now, for the first time, he could get a good look at them.

  No uniforms. He hadn't really expected that they would be uniformed, but he couldn't stop himself from hoping while the glare of the flashlight had masked reality. Police he could have handled. No such luck. Whatever this might be, it was not a simple police matter.

The lack of uniforms, together with their knowledge of his military service, told him he was dealing with spooks. They knew about his past, which meant they had access to the files. Already, they had shown that they knew more about him than Sarah had gleaned in six months of sharing his bed.

 Apparently sensing that he lacked the strength and the will to resist further, they let him pull on his worn jeans and an old blue T‑shirt. Dressed, he felt a little less vulnerable.

 “Sit down,” the leader ordered, directing him to the straight‑backed chair next to the wobbly red Formica dinette table in the space that served as both living room and dining room.

 He glared at the man but obeyed. He was doing a lousy job of acting defiant.

  The leader wore a dark brown leather jacket, green sweater, and khaki pants. His broad, bony face bore a scar above his left eye. But all this, together with his olive complexion and shiny dark hair, offered no clue to his identity, or even his ethnicity. While he waited, the leader shuffled through a sheaf of papers in a black leather satchel.

  The two men who had held him flopped down on the lumpy daybed and listlessly pawed their way through his pile of old magazines, mostly Newsweek, the odd copy of The Economist, and this week's issue of Time with a cover photo of the fiery devastation at the White House. He had thought vaguely of trying to cover some aspect of the growing terrorism crisis for the news services but couldn’t come up with a good local angle. Now, terrorism was the least of his worries.

 “No Playboy?” asked the shorter of the two. They were dressed almost identically: dark sweaters, black pants, watch caps--not exactly the height of fashion, but perfect for breaking into someone's apartment at night. The shorter one also wore a U.S. Navy pea jacket. The other, who appeared older as well as taller, had removed his worn leather jacket and slung it over the back of a chair. That didn't look promising. They were settling in, getting comfortable, as if they assumed that whatever was to come would take some time.

 Finally, he replied. “No Playboy, but you might get off on the underwear ads in Elle.”

 “Pierce,” the leader said, his face darkening a shade or two. “We have a great deal to talk about and damned little time to do it.”

 From his satchel he removed a brown envelope and extracted a dog‑eared manila file an inch thick. He held it with two fingers, as if it were a dead rat. If his intention had been to arouse Pierce's curiosity, he had succeeded.

 “Read this, and I think you'll see we can stop the games.”

 Mechanically, he reached for the folder as the leader slid it across the table. His hand halted in mid‑air when he saw the neatly typed label:

 Pierce, Daniel W. Capt. MI SSN: 134349251 PMOS: 39668 SMOS: 71542 CLEARANCE: TOP SECRET (SCI)

He slumped back in his chair without touching the folder. He didn't have to open it. This was no bluff. He recognized his field 201 file immediately, having hand‑carried it from post to post.

 “Open it, Pierce.”

 “I don't have to. I know what's--”

 “Open it.”

 He sat up and paged through the folder. It was all here: DD Form 398, listing every residence he'd ever had, every job he'd ever held before the Army, every organization from the Cub Scouts to the Civil Air Patrol, his schooling--all those elementary schools, Fairfax High, the University of Virginia, infantry officer basic at Benning, the intelligence officer school at Huachuca, jump school and Ranger school, followed by the Special Forces officer course. The file even included a sanitized summary of his Delta Force training and operations.

  Abruptly, his interrogator jerked the folder from his hands. Pierce's sphincter tightened, as if in anticipation of an incoming mortar round.

  “Seen enough?”

  “Yeah.” Enough to bring him back to a place he wished he had never been. The memory of that last mission in Afghanistan evoked a spurt of anguish that was overwhelming. It was as if someone had brutally ripped out all the sutures after open heart surgery.

  “What do you want?” he said quietly. “You've made your point. Now what in the name of God do you want?”

  Again, the sickening smile. “All I know is that my boss wants to talk with you. He didn’t say why, and I have learned not to ask. We were sent to bring you in. Grab your jacket, we’re leaving now.”

"When will I be back?"

As he feared, the answer was stony silence.

--