Warriors by Ted Bell

the beginning, in the first few months, they’d allowed her regular contact with them. In the later years, none at all. She had no idea if either of her kids were still alive. Much less her husband.
    Since the night long ago, the night of her goddamn fortieth birthday, when they’d all been snatched off that foggy street in Georgetown, she really knew nothing of her family. Since they’d been bundled into a black van by Chinese thugs, drugged, and secreted out of the country . . . her family had ceased to exist for her.
    She’d see pictures of the two children, every so often, grainy black-and-whites, shot in a camp that very well could have been this one. They did that, she supposed, kept Milo and Sarah alive, only to force compliance with their demands. The pictures were almost worse than nothing. She hardly recognized her children anymore. Thin, hollow-eyed ghosts . . .
    A few years ago, she’d managed to steal a picture of Bill from a desktop while she was being interrogated. No idea when it had been taken, but he had more grey hair than the night they’d been abducted. His stomach more paunch than washboard.
    He stood out on the deck of an aircraft carrier at sea, demonstrating something or other, surrounded by Chinese naval officers who were laughing at something he’d said. She’d lost fifty pounds. But Bill hadn’t changed. If anything, he looked healthier than when he’d been working himself to death back home in Washington.
    A thought so horrible it made her sick came unbidden into her mind.
    Had her husband defected to China? Had he known about the black limo waiting outside the restaurant the night of her birthday? The van?
    She shoved the notion aside for the delusions caused by malnutrition, physical and psychological abuse, and the simple paranoid insanity that it was. And then she blessed her beloved family, each one of them, one at a time, in her heart, and said her final good-byes.
    She was tied to the stake, her arms and feet bound behind her. One of the guards pried her jaws apart while another stuffed her mouth full of pebbles from the Yalu River. This was in the revered tradition of preventing the condemned from cursing the state that was about to take her life.
    Her head was covered with a filthy burlap sack that still stunk of rotted hay and the human feces they used for manure in the fields . . .
    KATHLEEN CHASE HAD SPENT THE last eleven months of her five-year imprisonment in a space reserved for the lowest of the low. An underground prison within the prison. Her stinking windowless room with no table, no chair, no toilet. This was her “punishment” for refusing to admit to her crimes against the state. Admit that she was an American spy. An agent for the CIA come to sow discredit on the government and engineer revolution against the Dear Leader.
    The underground prisons were built to blindfold the prying eyes of American satellites. But not hers. She’d kept her eyes open just in case she ever managed to escape. She memorized the guards who tormented her, their names, their faces, their habits.
    She’d learned that for all the prisoners publicly executed in these prisons each year, thousands more were simply tortured to death or secretly murdered by guards in the underground facility where she lived. Rape was a given at any time of day or night. Most prisoners were simply worked to death. Mining coal, farming, sewing military uniforms, or making cement. All the while subsisting on a near-starvation diet of watery corn soup, sour cabbage, and salt.
    Issued a set of clothes once a year, prisoners worked and slept in filthy rags. There was no soap in her cell, no socks, no gloves, underclothes, or even toilet paper. Twelve- to fifteen-hour days were mandatory until death.
    Over time, if they live long enough, prisoners lose their teeth, their gums turn black, their bones weaken. All this by the age of forty, and none had a life expectancy beyond the age of fifty.
    In December, she