“All right,” Hunter agreed. It was probably best to be safe, since he had no idea how he was going to react once they got started.
The thigh cuffs were also made of black leather, but they were wider and longer than the wrist and ankle restraints, and they weren’t lined. Once they were fastened, however, they did help with both security and stability.
“Time for the blindfold.” Payne approached with a black neoprene blindfold in his hand, and he dragged a low stool over to the cross with his foot. “Any last questions or comments? Once this goes on, we start.”
Hunter looked at the blindfold, then at Payne. He saw the seriousness of Payne’s expression, and yet there was something reassuring about it. Even though his heart was still beating faster than usual, and he knew Payne could do anything he liked and Hunter wouldn’t be able to stop him now, Hunter nodded. “I trust you,” he said, then closed his eyes.
Payne slid the blindfold over his head and settled it into place. The elastic band allowed it to stretch to fit him, and the neoprene was soft enough that it didn’t chafe.
“From this point on, you will not speak except to answer my questions.” Payne’s voice was deeper and harder, containing a note of authority. It was a voice accustomed to being obeyed. “The only exception to this rule is if your color goes yellow or red. You will tell me when that happens. Do you understand?” Payne asked, and Hunter heard as well as felt the swoosh of the rattan cane cutting the air somewhere close to his bare skin.
“Yes,” Hunter said, sounding a bit breathless even to his own ears. The blindfold made things much darker than closing his eyes would have, feeling almost as though his vision had been severed. He couldn’t even remove it if he’d wanted to, and the sensation of standing, bound, exposed, and with only his skin and ears to tell him what was happening was disorienting. He strained to hear where Payne was, trying to visualize Payne pacing behind him.
“Yes, what?” The words were punctuated with a sharp blow from the cane across his ass.
Even though they hadn’t discussed this, Hunter had read enough to know what Payne was expecting, and he was annoyed with himself for forgetting. His skin stung from the contact of the cane, and he told himself not to forget again. “Yes, sir.”
“Very good.” Payne’s warm hand caressed his stinging skin. “You’re a quick learner. Now I’m going to ask you some questions, and you’re going to answer me honestly. Do I need to explain what will happen if you aren’t honest with me?”
Hunter swallowed hard. “No, sir,” he said.
“Good.” Payne rested the tip of the cane at the base of Hunter’s skull and drew it slowly down the length of Hunter’s spine as he spoke. “Tell me what happened the day your partner died. Start with explaining your mission. I want to know where you were and why you were there.”
“Yes, sir.” Hunter squirmed slightly at the slide of the cane down his back, not expecting non-painful contact. Fortunately, their mission hadn’t been classified, so he didn’t have to lie or talk around it. “I was part of a Lawson and Greer company deployed to guard some of the military advisors the government had sent to help out the Iraqi army,” he said softly. With the blindfold cutting off sight, he found it easy to picture the expanse of desert where they’d been encamped with canvas tents for their billets, circled by the Hummers and Bradleys they’d used for transport. “We were near Fallujah, and the damned terrorists had IEDs seeded all over the desert. That was what Stack and I did. We ferreted out IEDs and disarmed them and dealt with any unexploded ordinance left after the snipers took out the suicide bombers they sent against us. Sir.”
“Very good.” Payne moved close enough Hunter could feel his presence, warm and close but not quite touching, and he rested his hand on Hunter’s ass. “Tell me about your camp. Describe it for me,” he said, kneading Hunter’s ass firmly.
He found it difficult to concentrate on what had happened months before with Payne standing so close and touching him intimately. But part of Hunter’s job required him to put aside distractions, so he made himself focus on the question.
“It was a typical temporary bivouac. We had ninety in our company, plus Blaze, our commander, and his XO Joker. Lawson and Greer doesn’t stint, but we’d been on deployment so long, the tents were faded and patched. The grunts had three big tents sleeping twenty each, and the officers, like Stack and me, were billeted in twos. There was a mess tent, a shower tent, and one for the latrines. We’d been in that spot for about two weeks, waiting for the Iraqis to get around to staging the next big push. Water was trucked in every couple of days. You know how encampments are, sir. Some smartass had put up a biohazard sign over the door of the latrines, and Blaze had painted the canvas around his door flap with flames and the words ‘Welcome to Hell’. There were probably a hundred or so civilians who had their own encampment nearby. We always had people following us, sometimes for protection, sometimes trying to earn money offering to sell us things. We kept them out of the perimeter as best we could, but they were always hanging around. That’s pretty much it, sir.”
“I can see it clearly,” Payne said. “I want you to see it clearly too. Keep the image in your mind and tell me about the day Stack died. When did it happen? Morning, afternoon, or evening?”
Hunter’s mind obediently conjured up the image Payne commanded him to see. Hunter felt like he was back in the military, reporting to his CO after a mission. “Early evening after chow, sir,” he said. “We were in our bunk. I was reading a spy novel, and Stack was watching a video his wife had sent him of his son, Jake.” Suddenly Hunter’s throat felt tight. “He was so happy, sir.”
“Why was he happy?” Payne asked. “Because of the video?”
“Yes, sir.” Hunter swallowed hard, unable to get the picture of Stack’s beaming face out of his mind. “He was proud to be a father. He hadn’t seen Jake in six months, so every time Jen sent him a new video, he was like a kid at Christmas, sir.”
“What happened next?”
“Blaze called for us,” Hunter said slowly. His mind didn’t want to move on from the memory of Stack’s proud smile, but he forced himself to go forward. “We jumped up and ran out, and so did a bunch of the others. Joker was ordering people to get out, and I saw why when I got to Blaze, sir.”
“What did you see?” Payne asked, pressing the cane lengthwise against Hunter’s ass as a reminder.
Hunter didn’t want to talk about it, and he knew what was coming: he had to relive the horror of Stack’s death. The detachment he’d had when talking to the shrinks deserted him. Somehow standing naked, bound, and blindfolded was making him as vulnerable mentally as he was physically, and his mind rebelled at treading the path of his nightmares without his emotional armor.
“A kid, sir,” he managed to grind out. “Just a kid, dirty and scared because someone had wired him up to enough fucking C4 to blow our whole camp to hell.”
“What did you do when you saw the little boy?”
Hunter’s heartbeat had sped up again, and he started to sweat. He closed his eyes despite the blindfold. “I told Blaze to get everyone out and sent Stack to get our gear, since he couldn’t speak the local dialect and I could. The kid said he didn’t want to die.” Hunter drew in a ragged breath, anger flowing over him. He couldn’t do anything to stop it. “He couldn’t have been more than seven. Of course he didn’t want to die!”
A blow landed on his ass, harder than the first one. “You’re forgetting who you’re talking to,” Payne said sternly. “Focus. Tell me what happened next.”
Hunter gasped at the blow, but the pain had the effect of helping him move past the anger. He realized he’d been in danger of getting lost in his fury, which was hotter now than it had been at the time. Payne’s voice helped to ground him as well, and he stood still breathing hard, pulling his attention back as he’d been commanded.
“Yes, sir,” he said, his voice hoarse. He forced himself to keep going. “I got the kid to tell me what he could remember about how they’d wired him up. When Stack got back, he was rigged up, and I put on my disposal suit. We started removing all the shit they’d loaded it with for anti-personnel effect. We were about to cut him out when Stack saw the fuckers had wired up the C4 in parallel rather than in series. The kid wasn’t wearing one bomb made of ten bricks of C4. He was wearing ten bombs, each of one brick, and disarming one still left all the others. Not only were these assholes evil, they were smart. If Stack hadn’t noticed what they’d done and we’d cut the wire, the whole thing would have blown me, Stack, and the kid all to hell. Sir.”
