Chapter Twenty-One.
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The heavy boot bore down, grinding chips of glass and gravel into the back of his neck. Sherlock pressed his face closer to the floor of the cell, hoping to escape the pressure but, as the boot carried the weight of a thirty-stone corporal, it was a futile endeavour. He had long-since ceased thrashing, but even so, his arm was wrenched behind his back by meaty hands and held there as the jumpsuit was stripped forcibly from his shoulders. The meaty hands twisted at the skin of his wrist before they released it, a bit of pettiness that irritated him far more than it should have, under the circumstances. The fact that it stung like all hell in no way made up for the fact that it was a tactic more commonly found in the arsenal of eight-year-old schoolgirls.
It was only when the jumpsuit was tugged lower that Sherlock began to be seriously concerned. Men whistled and stamped their feet as his lower body was revealed, and he shuddered as a dozen hands pawed crudely at his exposed buttocks. One particularly fat and sweaty pair lingered overlong on either side of his arse crack, and he mentally singled out their owner for an exceptionally violent death.
The first blast of water from the cold hose came as more of a relief than he would have liked to admit. The soldiers that surrounded him sprang back with shouts of laughter, and the boot, mercifully, was removed from his neck. The force of the hose was considerable, and Sherlock winced as he felt the water insinuating itself into places where cold water was never intended to go. A fresh round of catcalls greeted his obvious discomfort, but on the whole, Sherlock was relieved. This was just the regular hazing meted out to newly-transferred prisoners; a friendly greeting from the folks in Camp X.
So far, his cover was intact.
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The battered truck, emblazoned with the letters U.S. ARMY, crawled to a dawdling stop at the northwest entrance to Guantanamo Bay Detention Centre. Strictly speaking, the road was closed to traffic, the facility off-limits to the local populace, just as the Cuban countryside was off-limits to military personnel. In practice, however, the gate was conduit to a thin but steady trickle of commerce. It wasn't much. A bottle; a handful of dollars; contraband music or pornography. Men left through it, seeking women softer and more sensual than those provided by the American army. Packages entered by it; cigars and opium and Cuban cocaine.
Responsibility for the gate's security fell to Tyler Davis, an Acting Corporal of twenty-six, with nine years of near-blameless service to his record. On this particular evening, Corporal Davis was entertaining his new girlfriend in the northwest gatehouse, trying and failing to comprehend his own luck. Gate duty itself had fallen to Private Kenny Mitchell Junior, a pimply eighteen-year-old from Brooklyn City. The rest of their squad were absent, their evening's duty being occupied by the search for a broken circuit in the boundary fence.
Corporal Davis being otherwise occupied, it was to Private Mitchell that the duty of vehicle inspection fell. The driver's side window rolled down as he approached, revealing a slight, blue-eyed man in khaki fatigues, with a rumpled face and greying, military-cut hair. There were half a dozen others in the truck with him, but Private Mitchell had spent long enough on the northwest gate to know better than to question it.
The driver of the truck presented a swipe card that identified him as Captain Tobias March, M.D. He waited patiently while Private Mitchell ran the card through a handheld reader. The credentials checked out. He saluted, opened the gate, and stepped smartly aside.
"Ta, chum," said the driver.
Private Mitchell frowned. The accent was unfamiliar, and it took him a moment to place it.
"You English?" he asked, confusion colouring his tone.
The small, cuddly-looking officer smiled, and extended an arm containing a semi-automatic pistol out of the window.
"Are you English, Sir?" he corrected, pleasantly – and clobbered him.
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"Really, John," Irene huffed. "Did you have to hit him so hard?"
"He pulled back at the last minute. Smacked himself right into it."
"So what do we do with him now?" Greg asked. "Bit noticeable, innit?"
"Put him in here with mine," Irene said, motioning to the open door of the gatehouse.
Greg took the Private under the arms while John grabbed his legs. Puffing and swearing, they manoeuvred him though the doorway and dumped him on the floor. Greg snorted.
"Nice," he said. "Artistic."
Irene's erstwhile boyfriend lay naked and unconscious across a largeish desk. Each wrist was secured to one of the table legs with a pair of padded handcuffs, and there were pink lashes across his pale backside. Across his shoulders, in lipstick, the words 'Give it to me good' were scrawled in curly handwriting.
Irene smirked. "I thought so."
Greg had imagined that getting the young Private out of his uniform would be difficult, but he had reckoned without Irene's clear expertise. Within five minutes she had stripped him, given him a top-up shot of something that she assured them would keep him out for a couple of hours, and positioned him carefully in a chair. When she toppled him forward, his nose came to rest gently in between his colleague's buttocks. John snorted with laughter.
"It's a beautiful picture 'n' all, but I'm afraid I'm going to have to pull rank. Can't let the kid suffocate."
He repositioned the Private so that his face was tilted sideways, airway open, and held snugly in position by his comrade's thighs.
"Ah, look at 'em," Greg said. "Cheek to cheek, so to speak."
John snorted.
"Alright, come on, we need to get out of here. You're enjoying this way too much."
"Just thinking about what I could accomplish if I get Dimmock drunk enough at the Christmas Party."
"Didn't know you swung that way."
"Oi!"
"Just sayin'… Also, getting your workmates drunk so you can handcuff them naked to a table is the sort of thing that goes down badly with Chief Commissioners."
"Alright, not Dimmock. Sherlock."
"Mate, I'd drug him and deliver him myself."
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John checked his gun for the dozenth time in as many minutes and eased his way around the corner of the external staircase and onto the third-floor landing. Irene touched a hand to the small of his back and nodded. Praying that it would work, John drew the stolen swipe card from his pocket and pressed it against the sensor. An LED winked green.
There was no reason it shouldn't have worked, of course. The swipe cards had been stolen by Irene and doctored by Mary, who had hacked the CIA mainframe to upgrade their status to access-all-areas. Even if the tampering were discovered, it was a dozen miscellaneous soldiers who would bear the brunt, and Mycroft was confident that there was no way it could be traced back to Mary. Still, John wasn't comfortable. The hacking of high-level security agencies was not his area, and he distrusted any tool whose fitness for the job he couldn't be certain of on sight.
The break-in itself had been relatively straightforward. In John's experience, they usually were. (Human Error, Sherlock's voice whispered in the back of his mind).
John leaned against the door handle and felt it yield to his touch. "Keep your hands off your gun unless you plan on using it," he grunted to Irene. She didn't dignify it with a response.
"Northwest entrance secured," she murmured into her headset. "We're going in. Tailor, over and out."
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The codenames had been Irene's idea of a joke.
"We're doing Tinker Tailor," she'd informed them all, a glimmer in her eyes. "Order of seniority. Mycroft's 'Tinker', I'm 'Tailor' –"
"I don't much like that," John had interjected. "Wasn't Tailor the spy?"
"Ah, you just spoiled the movie for me!"
Mycroft snorted. "The novel to which you refer, Gregory, was a highly fictionalised account of an incident that occurred during the first War. The spy in question was in fact named Douglas. It was not a movie."
"No, there was definitely a movie…"
"Tinker dear, do pipe down," Irene said sweetly. Mycroft pursed his mouth in distaste.
"I'm Tailor," Irene reiterated, "Mrs Watson is 'Soldier'; John's 'Sailor' –"
John scowled. Trust Irene never to pass up a gay joke at his expense.
"Inspector Lestrade is 'Richman' –"
Greg snorted. "In what universe?"
"Molly is 'Poorman'; Sherlock is 'Beggarman' –"
"As in, 'he's a stupid bloody beggar'?"
"And Knight, should we chance to find him, is 'Thief'," Mycroft rounded off. "Your wit, as ever, is scintillating."
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And now here they were. And John, much to his displeasure, was stuck with Irene Adler as a partner-in-crime. Mycroft's reasoning, typically enough, had been unflattering:
"Each team requires at least one person who can think and at least one who can hold a gun," he had drawled, looking down his beaky nose at them. Greg, who by Mycroft's estimation apparently fitted neither category, was with Mary. Mycroft, humble as only a Holmes could be, was a team all on his own.
John shouldered the door open softly and slid in through the gap, mindful of the silhouette he presented against the evening sky. He felt Irene slip through behind him and heard the snick of the door, but he had no attention to spare for either. An armed guard stood a dozen feet away, already turning in their direction, head tilted enquiringly. The momentary impulse to seek clarification was his undoing. John drew and fired with simple economy of movement, and the dart took him in the shoulder. The soldier brought his weapon to bear, but John was on him before he could fire it, and a solid blow to the crook of the man's elbow sent the rifle crashing to the ground. John pulled back, readying a second blow, but he scarcely needed it. The man sank to his knees, shaking his head and blinking, before keeling over backwards completely as the tranquiliser did its job. John caught him under the armpits before he hit the ground, and lowered him softly down.
"Why, Captain Watson... I had no idea you were so forceful."
John grunted. "I'm going to take that as 'nice job'."
Irene shot him a flirty smile. "Well, it was."
"Cheers. Pity about the racket. Stupid kid. Who tries to use a rifle in a three-foot corridor?"
Irene shrugged.
"What, no comments about letting me use my rifle in your corridor any day?"
"Oh, I think you should save that weapon for Sherlock, don't you?"
John groaned. "You know, you'd gone at least twenty minutes without mentioning how much you'd like to see me giving it to my posh-boy flatmate."
Irene smirked.
"What?"
"Oh, nothing…. Just – 'Posh-Boy'?"
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Though he scarcely needed the confirmation, Mycroft glanced at his watch. 7.39pm. The lack of any kind of alarm was reassuring. It suggested that both of his teams had been able to enter the facility without challenge.
With a keen, sweeping glance around the darkened corridor, Mycroft withdrew the swipe card from his pocket and let himself through an unmarked door into a stairwell. Unless he was much mistaken, the most high-risk prisoners were housed on the floor below.
Time to find his brother.
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The corridor they'd entered by opened out into a long gallery that ran, mezzanine-style, around the perimeter of the floor below. Greg crouched in a thin shadow, trying to breathe as quietly as possible. Four feet away from him, Mary Watson was inserting a new sheaf of darts into her sniper rifle. Unhurriedly, she raised the weapon to her shoulder and swung it in a slow arc. It was so controlled that it took Greg a moment to realise that she was firing, scarcely impeded by the kickback, scarcely needing to aim. Guards dropped like skittles in her wake, the closest first. By the time the third man noticed, he was already dropping, the dart slipping in at the base of his neck. By the time the last in line managed to turn and face them, six of his colleagues lay slumped and twitching on the ground. There was no expression on Mary's face. She flicked the safety on and rose smoothly, eyes already scanning ahead. With a flick of her chin, she indicated that Greg should follow her. He staggered to his feet, feeling like a sixty-year-old.
So, this was Mary Watson. This was the woman John was married to.
"Under the stairs," she told him curtly, indicating the slumped figures.
There was a stairwell running down to join the gallery from the floor above. It was functional rather than aesthetic, just horizontal slabs of concrete bolted onto steel. It wasn't cover in the strictest sense. Anyone on the staircase would only have to look down between their feet to see the bodies beneath the stairs. But they didn't have time to find a better hiding place, not with who-knew-how-many more soldiers between them and the fifth-floor cell block. 'Do try to clean up after yourselves,' Mycroft had said. 'But don't dawdle over it, if you please. We haven't the time.'
That was the only reason they were shooting darts instead of bullets. Apparently, blood drew more attention.
'And we couldn't have that, could we?' Greg thought savagely, hefting the first body over his shoulder. The soldier was heavy with gym-sculpted muscle. Laying him down as gently as he could in the cramped space beneath the stairs, Greg caught sight of his face: round and babyish, with acne peeping from beneath his hairline. Still a bloody kid.
The second soldier was smaller and slighter, ginger-haired, with pale, freckled skin. The third had the body of a young athlete; the fourth reeked of the same brand of deodorant that his fifteen-year-old nephew favoured. The fifth was a woman, heavyset, but with hair that reminded him of Sally's.
'No blood, if you please' Mycroft's voice drawled inside his head. 'I should hate to draw attention.'
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It had taken him longer to find the high-security cells than he had anticipated. Mycroft felt a bead of sweat trickle from his hairline. They were not going to go unnoticed forever.
But this was the right place; it had to be. The lowest level, the deepest pit. Fluorescent bars blazed overhead, buzzing with electricity. The light bounced off the white floor, the whiter walls. Nothing could go unnoticed here, nothing unmarked.
It wasn't like the prisons he remembered from his time in the field. It wasn't foetid and sweltering like the jail in Kosovo where he'd once been confined, nor narrow and filthy like the dungeon he'd rescued Sherlock from in Serbia. It wasn't dark and frigid like the cell in Krasnodar where his agent had kissed him on the cheek and walked calmly to his fate. It wasn't like the stone-walled courtyard in Berlin where his brother had died.
No, the Americans liked their prisons clean.
To Mycroft's eyes though, the very walls told stories. A scrape against the tile here, where they had dragged a prisoner who fought and screamed. A rusty stain over there on the skirting board, where the blood had splashed when a boot was driven downwards onto a bare, unprotected arm. There were long black hairs on the white tiles, some broken, some torn out by the root. There were chips in the steel doorframe nearest him, chips made by broken or breaking teeth. There were smudged lines of ink low on the white-tiled wall, the kind left when the wet pages of a book were torn and scattered. Easily missed by a cleaner, considered irrelevant by prisoner or guard. Impossible, now, to tell what the printed words had said. Impossible to tell whether the characters were English or Arabic or Chinese, whether from a holy book, a novel, or merely cheap pornography.
A chain swung from the ceiling of the nearest cell. He knew at a glance that his fingertips would catch on the lowest link if he stood beneath it with arms raised. But then, Mycroft was taller than most men.
There were four soldiers in the corridor. Four soldiers, standing guard over a single occupied cell. Whoever they were keeping in there was a very valuable prisoner indeed. He drew a deep breath. Please, God, let it not be like Serbia.
If they'd tortured his baby brother… If they'd so much as damaged a hair of Sherlock's idiotic head… There would be a reckoning.
Four soldiers between him and his brother.
He almost felt sorry for them.
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A.N. Thanks so much for your continued comments. xx