Enzan: The Far Mountain (9 page)

I paused, rubbing my temples to ease the strain of translation. I paced the room in the thick hush of the monastery. There was a window opening onto the hills, but the night was dark and overcast: there was no hint of moon or stars to offer a respite from the blackness. I sighed and turned with dread back to the book, knowing I had to finish it all. Mori had much more to tell.

Sometime in the silent darkness before dawn I dropped into sleep. In the dim twilight of approaching day, faint chanting from the main hall murmured its way into my consciousness. For a moment, I was half-asleep, lost in Mori’s story and its implications. I peered around, slumped in the chair, confused.

Then the sound of the chanting brought me into full wakefulness and the sounds made sense.
Dai zai geda puku
: The
great robe of liberation. The opening lines of the Robe Sutra, chanted as the
roshi
and his monks ritually donned their clerical robes to begin another day.

I wiped my mouth with my sleeve and fumbled for the journal, which had tumbled to the floor. In the cold half-light I gathered my wits and collected my things. Time was short. I had three days to find Chie Miyazaki. Because once he had read Mori’s journal, there would be no stopping Yamashita. He’d find her or die trying. It might have been selfish of me, but I wasn’t ready to let him do that.

So I padded downstairs in my stocking feet. The monastery was a place with few doors and no locks. I slipped into the roshi’s office and left the journal on his desk with a short note. I thanked him and promised to return.

But I was silent as to my plans. I wasn’t so sure what I was about to do would meet with the roshi’s approval. Or Yamashita’s. But I was comforted by the sutra I had heard that morning, that spoke of a great liberation and the need to save all beings.

Chapter 9

Big irony: I’ve spent countless hours training to make my body and mind almost inseparable, but as the men who had taken me held me down, I was wishing it were otherwise. Because no matter how hard I tried to keep focused on the knowledge that they weren’t going to drown me, my body was on fire with the conviction that they were, and the animal panic overwhelmed me. The brain was gone and it was body sense alone that gripped me. There was no reason, no analysis, no control, only the darkness and then choking and the curious fire of water as it smothered me and pushed its way down into my lungs.

I’d gotten back to Brooklyn that morning, my hands stiff from the tension of gripping the steering wheel of the car. It wasn’t the stop and go of a typical rush hour that bothered me; it was the urgency of new knowledge that made me tense my muscles and wish I could clear the other drivers out of my way by force of will. But the commute into Manhattan is as implacable and unheeding as any force of nature. I was swept along in its own good time, one of thousands of cars carried along like flotsam in a torrent.

A very slow-moving torrent.

I reached my house in Sunset Park too late to participate in the morning parking ritual familiar to most New Yorkers: alternate side of the street parking. When I got home, the tidal shift from one side of the street to another had already occurred. I shrugged, double-parked, and went inside. The people whose car I had trapped against the curb would honk if they needed me.

There was a phone message from Owen Collins. Email from Ann. Both wanted to meet. They had some important information I needed to see. In retrospect, I should have picked up the phone then and there. Instead, I grabbed my gear bag and headed to the dojo in Red Hook to teach the morning’s lesson. It was, after all, what I did.

And they knew that as well.

They were waiting in a van idling near the dojo entrance. There was enough street traffic that I didn’t really notice anything special. There were deliveries being made to shops all along the street. Guys drove trucks that were scarred and crumpled like a washed-up boxer after his most recent battering. The van near the dojo entrance was no different from half a dozen I had seen that morning. It had been sideswiped a few times. Some kids had tagged it with graffiti. White exhaust ghosted out from the tailpipe, accompanied by a slow drip of water. Nobody was coming in or out of the vehicle, but that fact didn’t register with me; I had other things on my mind. Students wouldn’t be arriving for an hour and the building was locked and empty. I fumbled with my keys at the door and that was when they came at me.

I heard the grumble of the van door as it slid open and I sensed the air pressure shift, churned by their scramble toward me. I spun around, hands coming up, but it was too late. I had time to get an image of three men, black hair and sunglasses. Then one of them ground the prongs into my neck. The thing sparked and I was down.

Tasers. You use them right and the current flashes through the nervous system, shorting out the pulse of muscle coordination. It’s not just pain; it’s the complete loss of control as the command system of the body is hijacked, spiked with static, and overwhelmed. They hit me more than a few times—these guys were not taking any chances. I collapsed. By the time I started to recover, I had been tossed into the van, where they had duct taped me and pulled a bag over my head. I rolled around slightly as the vehicle accelerated and hit a turn. Somebody grunted and planted a foot on my back to keep me still. Big foot. Hard-soled shoe. It wasn’t a friendly gesture. Nobody spoke. All I heard was the distant murmur of traffic and the engine noise of the van.

It wasn’t a long ride. You hear stories of kidnap victims trying to remember each twist and turn of the ride as they sit, blindfolded, the mind racing with nightmare scenarios of what the future holds. The ones who don’t succumb completely to panic use all kinds of tricks to stay calm. Trying to figure out where they’re taking you is one of them. But in the dark, your ability to interpret movement is compromised. You have to try to remember the sequence of balance shifts as the vehicle turns while at the same time trying to link it to auditory signals from the engine and transmission that can give you a clue about relative speed. Maybe you also focus on the sound from the tires as they hum across different types of pavement. It’s probably something you can be trained to do. But I hadn’t been to secret agent school. I could understand it might help kidnap victims stay calm or help them gain some small sense of control—the psychological impact of abduction, with its violent disruption of routine and total loss of autonomy, can be devastating.

But I’ve been trained differently. Life is as unpredictable as the next opponent, as cruelly relentless as the blade of a sword as it arcs toward you. There’s no time for mind games or confidence-building tricks. You have to be fully focused on the here and now. If I spent all my energy on trying to create a mental map of the van’s journey, I’d arrive at wherever they were taking me no better prepared to deal with them than I had been at the start of the trip. So I lay there and worked as carefully as I could to test the strength of my bonds without alerting my captors. I controlled my breathing and tried to assess how much of my muscle control was coming back as I recovered from the Taser jolts. I worked the angles and assessed my options.

They were slim. The bonds were tight. The hood wasn’t budging. I could flail around on the floor and bang some shins. Maybe I could deliver a head butt if someone got close. But they weren’t going to get close, were they? They’d eventually dump me out somewhere and watch me squirm until it got boring or I got tired. Then they’d simply haul me up and do whatever they had planned to do.

I didn’t think they were going to kill me. At least not right away. They could have taken me out on the sidewalk in Red Hook without much problem. Someone goes to all this trouble—charging Tasers, getting the duct tape, finding something to use as a hood—it’s because they have something more complicated in mind than simple murder.

That was the angle I had to work with. I’d be moved. They’d have to lug me around. Maybe to make it easy on themselves they’d cut the tape around my legs and I’d be able to stand. If I could stand, I could kick. If they took the hood off to question me, I might be able to bite someone.

OK, not the greatest options, but this is how it’s done. You focus on the possibilities. You prepare plan A, then B, then C. And even at the very end, when the flash of the gun or the bite of the blade rides the leading edge of the oncoming wave of the Big Sleep, you die trying.

It’s bred into our DNA, a biological imperative that Yamashita has refined and strengthened in me over the years.
Hakka yoi
. Hang in there. Stay ready.

The ride ended. I was dragged out of the van and carried along. There were some terse directions I couldn’t make out, some grunting. I got banged down some stairs and then they dumped me on the floor. Hard and cool. I could smell the concrete. They left me alone but I could hear them moving around somewhere nearby. The thud of wood. More muffled directions. I squirmed around until I hit a wall, then worked my way up onto my knees. It was awkward with my arms pinned behind me, but I did it. Because I wasn’t going to simply lie there like a piece of luggage. I made my way into seiza, the formal seated position we use in the dojo, because that’s how I wanted to face whatever was coming.

It was probably as useful as trying to map the route they took while blindfolded. Probably as futile. I know. But we all get to choose our own coping mechanisms. This was mine.

I heard the scrape of approaching footsteps. More than one person. They got to either side of me and hooked my arms, pulling me upright. I got tilted forward and they dragged me across the space. My hips rammed into something hard and they bent me over it. A quick flurry of activity—a shot to my kidneys just for laughs and to keep me from making too much trouble, the bonds at my wrists and elbows cut. I was lifted off my feet and stretched out on the board. Someone tied my arms down at my side, the rope going around the surface I was lying on. They did the same for my feet. It was slanted and my feet were higher than my head.

When they pulled the hood off, I got the quick impression of a storeroom of some sort. Cardboard boxes were piled up on the periphery of my vision; there were rows of round lights protected by wire grids in the ceiling.

But then they put a towel over my face and I heard the water running.

My body jerked as the water started to flow across the surface of the towel, molding it to my face.
Waterboarding
.

I’d known it at some level as soon as they strapped me to the board, head down. There had been enough discussion in the media, enough details. Probably most ten-year-old kids in America knew how it worked. Basically, it’s simulated drowning. It’s been used for centuries in one form or another, and for good reason. It’s an absolute nightmare. A government functionary somewhere cooked up a theory that it’s not really torture. Someday I’d like to hunt him down and have him ride the board for a while. Once he stopped weeping, maybe he’d reconsider.

The flow of water soaked me, filling my nostrils. I clamped my mouth shut and tried to turn my head to one side, but hands grabbed me like a vise and forced me into immobility. A jet of nausea, the urge to puke.
Don’t. You’ll choke
. Which was a big laugh. I was choking already.

It’s part of the technique. The gag reflex is immediate, automatic, and powerful. It tries to keep things out, but at the same time, the body is going into panic mode over the need for air. My body was quivering, burning with the need. Even with all that water, the desire was hot and overpowering. I gagged as the water surged into my mouth and down into my lungs. I retched and choked and the water kept coming.

I don’t know how long they did it to me. After a while, you grow hypoxic from the lack of oxygen and the buildup of carbon dioxide in the brain. And when that happens, most higher mental processing disappears. There’s simply confusion and anxiety, the crushing weight on your chest, the struggle for air and the smothering flow of water. You’re simply a thrashing, desperate animal.

The towel came off my face and I could move my head again. I retched and gasped, frantic with the need to breathe. The muscles in my arms and legs were throbbing from struggling against the bonds. My heart hammered in my chest.

A face floated into my blurry vision. I tried to squint the water out of my eyes to see more clearly.

“What are you doing?” The voice said. The accent was Asian. The face was pale, the hair dark. He was still wearing sunglasses.

I couldn’t speak yet. The air was rasping down my throat into lungs that were working simultaneously to get oxygen in and water out. He knew it, because it seemed as if he hadn’t really expected me to say anything right away. He was content to let me choke and gasp for a while.

“We know who you are, Burke.” The man seemed almost detached, his voice bored. He looked at me with all the same interest you might expend on the fish, stretched out, inert, on the crushed ice of a market showcase. He straightened up and I had to turn my head to keep him in sight. “Why were you in Lim’s apartment?”

Then I realized who they were.
The Koreans
.

“What do you mean?” I managed to choke out. Playing for time. Trying to get my brain working again.

His face floated above mine once more. He said nothing and watched me for a few seconds. Then he simply dropped the towel back over my face and it began again. The smooth, smothering flow of water. The burning and gasping. The helplessness. The terror.

When the towel came off again, I almost sobbed.

He let me lie there, quivering with greed for air. It was all I could think about for a time. There was a small, nagging voice inside my head trying to pierce the fog. The brain was still working somewhat.
They won’t kill you. That’s the point. They need you alive
.

It’s the point of interrogation, of course. You’re no good dead. That’s the good news. The bad news is that for thousands of years people have been perfecting ways to make every nerve ending in a victim’s body scream without actually killing him. The skilled torturer has learned to take his victim right to the edge of death if necessary. He has to convince the victim death is a real possibility. They don’t want you thinking you can hold out, that it’s just pain and you can get through it. They don’t want you thinking at all. The key to doing this lies in timing, in flooding the victim with suffering so intense it short-circuits most rational thought. There is simply agony. Then it’s gone. A question. More agony. Then it’s gone. Another question, and another, and another, each punctuated by more suffering. You start to yearn for the questions. Your torturer’s face floats in and out of your vision and you watch it hungrily, hoping the lips will part and there will be questions. You learn to love the face and the voice. You yearn to answer, because in those brief intervals there is freedom from the suffering. And you’ll do anything and say anything to make it stop.

In the end I didn’t tell them much, but it was only because I was still choking and retching from aspirating water. I’ve faced a few terrifying men, men with murder on their minds, men who were more than capable of carrying out that wish. I faced those ordeals and survived. But nothing has ever scared me as much as the man with the towel, and the pale, expressionless face that watched and questioned and, with a jerk of his head, had them cover my face and ply the hose again.

They were breaking me. For all my training, I wasn’t ready for them. I wasn’t ready for this. I’ve spent years pursuing an art that worships control. You meet danger with skill in the hope you will endure. But on the board, there was no skill I could use. There was no mercy there. No hope.

I don’t know what was worse: the physical effect of what they did to me, or the knowledge of how close they came to breaking me. Mostly, it was the sudden realization of the illusory nature of life and how tenuous our hold. Is this the far country that Yamashita was peering into? Old age is a slower process, perhaps, but the effect is the same: it grinds you down and strips you of all pretense and all illusion of control and dignity.