>>> Interlude Two
>>> Six years and eight months ago
>>> Madagascar
There were fourteen of them in the exercise yard, eight men and six women, all listening to the drill instructor’s shouted directions. Flex at the knees. Extend the left arm with palm up and elbow slightly bent. Extend the right arm with the thumb side up and fingers straight until even with the left elbow. Shift your weight to the front leg. Don’t bend at the waist. Grab your imaginary opponent’s collar with your left hand and punch him in the nose with your right fist. Hear the crunch and see the blood spurt. Yank your right knee up into his groin. Loop your right arm around his neck from above, secure it with your left hand, lift up hard, and crush his throat. Watch him silently suffocate.
Krav Maga was an efficient way to kill. It wasn’t just for the Israeli Defense Force.
It was only one of the dozen or so ways they learned to kill hand-to-hand. They also learned to strangle a person with a man’s tie, either worn by the killer or taken from the victim, or with a woman’s scarf – again, worn or taken. A shoelace from a high-top sneaker worked well also, especially when each end was tied to a four-inch long three-quarter-inch diameter bolt. When looped once around the neck and yanked tight, it made an excellent garrote. There were also several techniques to crush the esophagus using one or both hands, a side or front kick, or dropping an elbow or knee on the exposed larynx.
Then there were the usual standbys: a rock or metal pipe to the temple or just behind the ear, a bag of heavy shotgun pellets to the bridge of the nose to drive the bone into the brain, disabling the victim and holding the nose and mouth shut as he or she asphyxiated, thumbs to gouge out the eyes and then push into the brain – the list was almost endless.
They learned how to kill using a knife, how to cut across the stomach or below the belt line to drop the intestines onto the ground, how to cut the throat, how to open the femoral artery on the inside of the thigh, how to slice the wrists to make the victim bleed out quicker, how to stab downward in the neck from behind to cut the brachial artery in the shoulder and at the same time silence the target, how to stab upward through the solar plexus into the heart, how to thrust upward under the jaw through the sinus cavities and into the brain.
And if you didn’t want to kill your opponent, just put him or her down, there were even more ways to do that. There was the stomp on the toes or the instep, a kick to the side of the knee so the leg would bend ninety degrees from the direction it was designed to bend, the always-useful groin kick, the kick to the top of the hamstring at the back of the thigh, a sharp blow to the side of the ribs where the kidneys were closest to the skin, the heel of the hand driven up from behind to the base of the skull, a knife-hand blow to either the carotid artery or the jugular vein, either of which could render the strongest man unconscious. But the last two were dangerous, because they could also kill.
Lois had a slight advantage over most of the rest of the group due to her training in Tai-Kwando, but she still fell onto her cot exhausted each night, just as the rest of the group did. They held their language lessons during the heat of the day and sometimes late into the night, learning conversational and technical French, Spanish, German, Farsi, and Russian. They pushed and drilled and drilled and pushed everyone to the point of breaking, then pushed and drilled even more. Not one of them had the time or energy to plan any kind of escape.
Only once did any of them men try to molest any of the women. The man leading that attempt was bruised and battered from head to knees the next morning and couldn’t stand up straight. The instructor only smiled at him and nodded to the women in the group, then muttered, “You are learning. Good.”
They were learning how to fight and how to kill. Whether or not she would ever utilize those new skills was a question Lois hoped she’d never face. At any rate, she had no time to plan her own escape, nor did she have the opportunity to feel out her fellow trainees for a cooperative venture.
And where would she go? Madagascar was a good-sized island somewhere off the east coast of Africa, but Lois didn’t know exactly where. She might have been able to swim to the mainland or to one of the small islands nearby – a very big maybe – but she didn’t know whether she could swim that distance through the unknown currents or if there were sharks or other predators between herself and safety. She wasn’t skilled enough to sail a boat that far by herself, and she couldn’t believe that any motorboats would be left where one might be stolen. She also didn’t know if there was anyone on the island who didn’t owe Rodolfo big time, who would either turn her in to her captors without a second thought – or perhaps just kill her and be done with her.
So she concentrated on her lessons. It was easier than fighting back, easier than trying to get away, even easier than giving up and dying.
Besides, she was beginning to think that killing Rodolfo might not be a bad idea after all.
After eighteen days a black belt Aikido instructor arrived and began teaching them more ways to take down and immobilize another person. And it didn’t matter how big or how strong that person might be. The proper leverage against an elbow or a shoulder – or even a finger or two – would make the most aggressive man in the training group whimper like a whipped puppy. From the judo instructor, Lois and the others learned the skills the ancient Japanese foot soldiers had used against mounted samurai or other infantry, and she proved to be the quickest in the class in picking up these techniques.
She learned the arm bar, which could rip apart the opponent’s elbow or destroy a shoulder, depending on the leverage applied. She learned several wrist and hand grabs, any one of which would bring a champion weightlifter to his knees begging for release. She learned to freeze a man’s hand with a thumb applied to the pressure point just behind the elbow. She learned to shock her victim into silence with a finger strike against the side of the neck.
She learned even more ways to kill with her bare hands.
And with every technique she mastered, every hold the perfected, every throw she programmed into her muscle memory, every punch or kick she executed properly, she imagined using it against Rodolfo.
The last week, the instructors eased off on the physical training slightly and began emphasizing stealth, both in the city and outside it. Lois learned to set snares to trap unwary searchers, learned to dig holes with sharpened stakes in the bottom to disable anyone following her, to set traps to discourage or even cripple anyone pursuing her. She and the others learned to slip through a wooded area in silence, to follow a subject on a crowded city street without being spotted, and how to find clean water in the driest terrain. They learned what roots or berries they could safely eat and how to trap and cook small game.
None of these skills were applied to injuring or killing any of the other people in the group. But they did practice their throat-cutting lessons on a herd of domesticated pigs. Lois quickly learned to point the wound in the aorta away from her to keep from being sprayed by the spurting blood. A cut on the right side, while just as fatal, didn’t pulse the same way and took slightly longer for the pig to bleed out. Of course, a cut across the entire throat, while very messy, would slice open both major vessels and the airway and drop the blood pressure in the brain to almost nothing in scant seconds. There was no way to avoid a blood spray that wide.
Lois decided she wouldn’t mind wearing Rodolfo’s blood.
They also learned to defend themselves against such attacks, since it was unlikely that any of their targets would stand still and let himself be slaughtered by a sudden assault. In this, Lois shone again. Instead of earning her classmates’ admiration, however, she saw anger and jealousy in many of their eyes. She knew she’d have to watch her back every minute.
It was a good thing, too, because two days before they left, one of the men decided to take her out for real during a practice session. Lois managed to deflect his first attack and responded by breaking his nose and then his right elbow. The man sprawled on the ground, moaning and helpless, while the instructor shook his head and muttered, “Someone is learning.”
Then he spoke louder. “The woman who did this will not be punished. She only defended herself against her attacker. Had she been the aggressor, however, she would be the one punished.”
From behind him, one of the men called out, “What if you couldn’t tell who started it?”
The instructor turned to face the group. “Then both would be punished.” He turned to face Lois again. “You have done well.” He paused, then added, “This time.”
Lois didn’t smile. She wouldn’t smile until it was Rodolfo on the ground at her feet, his broken nose bleeding into the dirt, one arm ruined.
Maybe both arms ruined.
And one eye gouged out.
And a compound fracture of the tibia sticking out through the skin of his lower leg.
And a trail of ants crawling into and out of his ears and nose.
She shook her head. I’m getting bloodthirsty, she thought.
On reflection, though, it didn’t seem to be a bad thing. Not here. Not now. Not with the hate for Rodolfo she couldn’t help but feel churning in her belly.
He’d stolen her identity, her future, her life, nearly her entire self.
She wanted to return the favor.
Only thirteen of them left Madagascar. She never knew what happened to the man she’d clobbered.
She knew it should have bothered her that she didn’t much care, but she couldn’t generate the necessary energy. It took everything she had – plus a bit more – just to keep herself alive.
