Page 6 of Just Once

“But you do know all about me,” he countered, doing his best Jack Sparrow impression.. “I, on the other hand, know nothing about you so maybe nobody thought you were worth mentioning?”

A flushed, suet pudding of a man with thinning blonde hair and a face like a squashed bullfrog on her right slammed his fist on the table in outrage. “Don’t flatter yourself, Mr Walker. You are in the custody of the Bundesnachrichtendienst! The greatest intelligence organisation the world has ever seen.” This one was all Bavarian, with an accent thicker than his neck. “We have people everywhere. You are just an evolutionsbremse lustmolch.”

An evolutionary brake pleasure newt huh? Talk about losing something in the translation.

Terry snorted. “Size is no proof of quality Fritz.”

The bullfrog flushed, turning a shade of red-grey and swelled up with such rage that the buttons of his shirt would probably pop off at any moment. Then the storm passed, he deflated, then nodded.

It was only the slightest of movements, a subtle dip of his squashed head, but it was all that Himmler’s poster boy needed as he came round to tower over his victim.

Terry refused to let himself be cowed. He knew the score. They were pissed and he was the only one left alive to question, or blame.

He could take a beating. That was the easy part.

The hard part came later. When they started to ask questions. Questions he couldn’t answer because there were no answers.

Just the thought had fury burning hot and angry in his guts, but he forced it down, like bile. He needed to stay calm. Keep it together. If he started to lose it, then he’d be proper fucked.

He’d been trained for this.

No acts of bravado. Glory boys who tried to be Clint Eastwood or Arnold Schwarzenegger, were just fuckwits that only got a right filling in for their trouble. Just keep it together, be obedient, gather intel, and be ready…

Except, that had been when he was a serving soldier.

Now he was out of the service, out of the Regiment, and deep in the shit. Held by the German Federal Intelligence Service, and at the mercy of the infamous Teutonic hospitality.

They didn’t exist. This room didn’t exist. No one knew he was there, no one that cared anyway, and no one was coming to get him. He didn’t have HMG backing him. His rights were whatever the bunch of self-serving, arse covering prigs on the monitor said. And if they didn’t like what he had to say when the time came, they’d make him disappear.

No. He needed to make them see that what had happened wasn’t his fault. He and his team had been there to save the girl, to get her out. Not to shoot up half of fucking Berlin.

But first he needed to deal with their little messenger boy.

Better make this quick, let the bastards have their fun. Alright Jumbo, let’s see what you got…

Looking up to meet Poster Boy’s gaze, he pulled his best toothy, Roger Moore grin. “What’s it to be then sausage breath, heads down for the big bosh gangbang?”

The man didn’t laugh, but he did return the smile. A cruel twist that turned the corners of his fat pink lips to flash a hint of ivory. Guess the riveter hasn’t got around to this gorilla yet.

Instinctively Terry tensed, anticipating another crack to his head and gritting his teeth to protect his tongue.

Instead the brute swung low.

Agony exploded through his belly as the sucker punch smashed into his unprotected stomach hard enough to have him doubling over. “Ah…the good old warm German welcome, you can’t beat it.” Terry forced out through pain. “Well then why don’t we just break out the cut throats, stick ‘Stuck in the Middle with You’ on the high-fi, and just get on with it?”

“Enough!” the woman snapped. “You might find this amusing, Mr Walker. But this is Berlin. No one can help you now, and not even the almighty God knows where you will be tomorrow. You will tell us what we want to know and who you’re working for. In fact, before long, you will be begging to say more.”

Terry didn’t doubt it.

There was a certain knack to torture.

It was brutal and barbaric, a practice that had been officially outlawed by the United Nations in 1987, but when done right, there was nothing quite so effective at getting a man to spill his guts. So, the world’s security forces ran deniable black sites that were kept off the books and financed by their various slush funds to question suspects. Suspects who they later made disappear. Bribes, threats and intimidations had their uses, but dead men tell no tales.

Terry could take the pain. He was a regiment man, and Blades, even those that had been cashiered, had their reputation to consider. He’d been through worse than a beating. Much worse.

Part of SAS selection involved evading capture in the Welsh Brecon Beacons. No one ever escaped- that wasn’t the point of the exercise.

The purpose was to evaluate how an operative would act if captured, and tortured.

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