The Undaunted (Book 2 of The Undesirables)

Chapter 16: The Choir Boy

Bobby hadn't slept in three days. He'd caught a few minutes of shut eye here and there, but he hadn't gotten any real, deep, sleep. The Russians wouldn't let him.

At first, they disrupted his sleep with bright lights, turning them and off at seemingly random intervals. That kept Bobby awake in his cell for the first twenty-four hours. But then his body and brain had acclimated to the uncomfortable effect. He was so tired that when the bright beams clicked on, he didn't even notice them.

So, the Russians switched to music. Loud, cacophonic music. It started sweet...Glen Millar or Artie Shaw. That always caught Bobby's attention. But then before he could drift off to the sweet horns the music would transform into discordant, blaring noise that tore his ears apart.

But after forty-eight hours Bobby became desensitized to even that. No matter how loud it was he began to slumber through it.

So, the guards came in and began spraying Bobby with a hose. That was the worst, because the water was cold, and the drenching always left him shivering.

Occasionally they'd drag him out of the cell into an interrogation room. A man with wire-rim spectacles wearing a Soviet NKVD uniform asked him questions. "Why did you come to the Soviet Union," he always began.

"To defect," Bobby always answered.

"Why do you want to defect?" came the inevitable response.

"To flee the United States."

"And why do you need to flee the United States?"

"Because I'm wanted for treason."

"Then why did they release you from prison?"

"They didn't. I escaped."

"And how did you escape?"

"I beat the man who was questioning me." The first time Bobby gave that response he derived great satisfaction from it. It was threatening, in a way, threatening to the bespectacled Russian who always questioned him. After all, if he had beaten an American interrogator, might he not beat this Russian interrogator?

That satisfaction did not last, because Bobby quickly became weak from both hunger and sleep deprivation. By the third time he was questioned, it was obvious to both him and the Russian in the spectacles that he was in no condition to beat anyone. So, the interrogation continued.

"Why didn't you flee somewhere else? To Mexico, perhaps?"

"Because I still want to fight. I want to kill Germans."

The questions were always the same. It was a test, Bobby knew. They were trying to catch him in a lie. They knew as sleep deprivation kicked in Bobby would have a harder and harder time remembering the lie. They knew that eventually Bobby's answers would change. Eventually fatigue would overcome his will to deceive. Eventually Bobby would be too tired to remember; he'd simply forget to tell anything but the truth.

Unless, of course, Bobby wasn't lying. And in fact, Bobby didn't think he was lying. He couldn't concentrate anymore, and he had begun to believe his own story. Dr. Parsons, it turned out, had been right. It may have been simpler for him to have released Bobby from Leavenworth, but if he had, the Russians would have found out by now, just through their interrogation. Bobby had to escape because he had to remember the escape. The only reason he hadn't yet broken under torture was because he could no longer remember what was real and what was fake. He had escaped, hadn't he?

Or had he just dreamed the whole thing?

No, he hadn't, it had all been terribly real. Every time they sprayed him with the hose, he could feel the cold river water. Every time they brought him into the interrogation room, he could see Dr. Parsons lying unconscious in a pool of his own blood. Unconscious? Or maybe dead? Had Bobby killed the former history professor? Bobby couldn't remember.