Black Market by James Patterson Page B

huddle on an uncomfortable metal seat. As always, he was wearing clothes no one would look at twice. Uninteresting clothes that created a street camouflage of drab gray and lifeless brown. He realized it wasn't a very successful disguise because people had looked at him, anyway. Their probing eyes invariably discovered the missing arm, the empty flap of his coat.
    Hot-and-cold flashes coursed through his body as the train dutifully hurled itself north. He was drifting in and out of the present, remembering, trying to accurately replicate long hours spent at a Vietnam firebase perimeter listening post… Every one of his senses had been at its sharpest back then. Head cocked-listening, watching, trusting no one but himself… He needed exactly the same kind of brilliant clarity right now, the same kind of absolute self-reliance-which was probably the greatest high he'd known in his lifetime.
    From Fourteenth Street, where he'd boarded the inhospitable subway train, up past Thirty-fourth, Forty-second, and Fifty-ninth streets, Hudson objectively contemplated the first days of his capture in Vietnam. An old Doors song, “ Moonlight Drive,” drifted through his mind. A period piece.
    He was vividly remembering the La Hoc Noh prison now. Above all else, Colonel David Hudson was remembering the one known as the Lizard Man…
    La Hoc Noh Prison, North Vietnam: July 1971
    Captain David Hudson, his nervous system a mass of fire, felt each bruising, jarring bump, even the smallest stones underfoot, as four prison guards half carried, half dragged him toward the central thatch-roofed hut at the La Hoc Noh compound.
    Through the flat white glare of the Asian sun, which resembled a bleached penny, he squinted at the pathetic hootch, with its tattered North Vietnamese flag and sagging bamboo walls.
    The command post.
    What an incredible, existential joke this all was. What a cruel joke his life had recently become.
    Well muscled once, clean-cut and always so perfectly erect, so proper, the young U.S. Army officer was pitiful to behold now. His skin was wrinkled and sallow, almost yellow; his blond hair looked as if it has been pulled out in great, diseased clumps.
    He understood and accepted the fact that he was dying. He weighed less than a hundred and fifteen pounds; he'd had the dreaded yellow shits literally for months without end. He'd gone beyond mere exhaustion; he lived in a shifting, hallucinatory world where he doubted even his own sensations and ordinary perceptions.
    All Captain Hudson possessed now was his dignity. He refused to give that up, too.
    He would die with at least some essential part of himself intact, that secret place deep inside that nobody could torture out of him.
    The SNR officer, the one they had called Lizard Man, was waiting expressly for him inside the dread command hootch.
    The North Vietnamese leader sat in awful silence, crouched like some feral animal, behind a low, lopsided table.
    He almost seemed to be posing for a photo beneath a twirling bamboo fan that barely stirred the hundred-and-five degree air.
    North Vietnamese cooking smells-green chili, garlic, litchi, durian, and spoiled river prawn-made David Hudson suddenly gag. He clutched violently at his mouth. He felt himself begin to faint. But he wouldn't allow that. No! Honor and dignity! That was everything. Honor and dignity kept him alive.
    He stopped at his own mental command, drawing on the scant resources, the human spirit, that remained in him.
    The North Vietnamese guards held him up. He collapsed, a weightless puppet in their tangle of bony arms. A guard punched David Hudson's jaw with a hard bare fist. Hot blood filled his mouth, and he gagged repeatedly.
    “
You Cap-tan, ah Hud-son!
” the senior officer suddenly screeched, cawing like a heat-crazed jungle bird. He peered at the wrinkled notepad he always carried. His fingers struck hard into the page to emphasize certain words.
    “Ho-Ho. Twen-six yea-ah old. Veetnam, Lah-ose