Free Heather Graham by Hold Close the Memory Page B

became more rancid, sweeter. He had one clear image before blacking out. Everything, including Jim, was burning.
    He came to in a makeshift stretcher. For a moment he believed he had been found by the Americans. Jim’s charred body was being carried along just as he was. He soon discovered he hadn’t even actually been taken by the North Vietnamese. Chou Lang was an independent agent. He was a jungle fighter, a law unto himself, and he kept captives in mined bamboo cages.
    “Sergeant Brian C. Trent, USAF, serial number—” Chou Lang had started laughing. Brian was sure he was insane and surely ignorant of the English language. But a Frenchman was held in the cage that bordered his—Jean Lateau. Jean had been held there since the French had been in the war….
    Brian couldn’t believe it. But it was thanks to Jean Lateau that he stayed sane. More than sane—alive. The Frenchman warned Brian about the mines in the bars. He made him write in the sand, made him talk, and made Brian realize that when he was sure he would ram the bars despite the mines, he could fall to the ground and do push-ups until he rolled over in exhaustion.
    And from Jean, a wizened little man with a marvelous Gallic wit, he learned what had made Chou Lang half-crazy. His family, his wife, his mother, and his three children had been killed in one of the first napalm bombing raids. So he didn’t kill his captives. He didn’t beat or maim them or resort to any of the physical horror stories Brian had heard about. He tortured them mentally.
    He barely spoke to Brian for four years, and then, one day, he came to him with a wide smile on his face. He showed Brian that he held his dog tags and started laughing. Then Brian knew why Chou Lang had so carefully brought back Jim Barnes’s pathetically charred body.
    Chou Lang threw Brian’s dog tags on the freshly dug-up corpse. “Who are you, Yankee jackal?”
    “Sergeant Brian C. Trent, USA—”
    A burst of shrieking laughter cut him off. “No, Yank, you no Trent. No more. You’re a dead man, Yank. You’re dead. You’re dead. You’re dead.”
    In the days that followed, Brian came to know that Chou Lang had an excellent command of the English language. He also had Brian’s wallet. “Your wife, Yank? No more, because you are a dead man. A dead man, no name. Pretty, pretty girl, no man. Not pretty. Beautiful. And do you know what she’s doing now, dead man?”
    Brian’s fingers tightened around the bamboo bars of his prison. His jaws clenched; his face whitened.
    With descriptive prowess Chou Lang went on to tell Brian in great detail just what his wife would be doing to another man’s body, just what another man could be doing to Kim, laughing intermittently as his words became more and more depraved. And Brian’s fingers tightened and tightened around the bars.
    “Come and get me, Yank, come and get me. I’d love to see it. Boom! No man, dead man, is no more. I can just imagine her, Yank. She’s got long, long legs, and—”
    Brian was cracking under the taunts. He had been behind the bars too long, let out only for a bath once a week, or to work fetid rice paddies under the nose of a scavenged U.S. machine gun. Chou Lang almost got his “boom.” But suddenly a song rang in the air: the “Marseillaise.” Jean Lateau, from his bamboo cage, sang his national anthem loudly and clearly. Chou Lang forgot his torturing of Brian as he turned to screech at his French victim.
    But the seeds had been sown. Brian spent his nights twisting and writhing in torture, helpless with rage and frustration, wanting to live, wanting to die. Dreaming of Kim. Knowing logically that her life would go on…Fighting logic. Believing that he would get out, that he would get back home…
    And now he was here. And he was making a disaster of it. She was still here, and she wasn’t remarried. She was sleeping with that guy. He realized suddenly that he was in a cold sweat, that his fists were knotted into tense