Free Operation Thunderhead by Kevin Dockery

of the enclosure was made up of large planks. One possible reason for stripping the prisoner was made clear when Dramesi looked about his new prison. Three walls were stacked floor to ceiling with boxes of ammunition and grenades. He was in an ammunition storage bunker. Without having any clothes, he was certainly not going to be able to hide anything to use against his captors later.
    Later in the morning, the roof of Dramesi’s prison was opened up as the guards removed some of the planks. This gave the prisoner some fresh air, and also gave the locals access to him. The village children circled the hole, taunting the prisoner within. Shouting insults in a language the prisoner didn’t understand wasn’t as satisfying to the kids as throwing rocks and other items at their target. Poking at the prisoner with sticks was fun until Dramesi grew tired of the situation and yanked the sticks out of the kids’ hands. Throwing some rocks back at his tormentors also convinced the children to go and find another game to play.
    The children moved on and left the prisoner to his own thoughts, all except one. As Dramesi sat in the hole, one much more aggressive child crept up to the hole with a knife in his hand. Unseen until the last moment, the child stood and threw the knife at the prisoner. Unlike what has been seen in the movies, a thrown knife is not a very good weapon. Ducking to the side, Dramesi avoided the flashing blade as it went past him. Striking the wall, the knife fell to the bottom of the hole and lay there. The simple weapon would not have done the man much good in his present situation and he had no way to hide it on his person. Dramesi left the blade untouched as the child ran away.
    Later in the morning the villagers began returning to their huts. Several of the locals stood about the hole leading down to Dramesi’s “holding” pit. One young man stood out from the others; he was wearing boots to all of the villagers’ sandals, and had Dramesi come up out of the hole and sit where everyone could see him.
    As the villagers started to gather in greater numbers, the young man started to play cheerleader, getting the people riled up and excited. The object of all of the attention was obvious: The young man hated Dramesi and he wanted everyone else in the village to do so as well. Now, Dramesi was starting to feel exposed, much more so than he was just by sitting there in his underwear.
    As the village women started to cry and the men got angrier and angrier, the young boot-wearing rabble-rouser may have become concerned himself. The villagers waved farming tools about in a threatening manner. If this was the reaction the young man wanted to get, he had succeeded. Before things got out of hand, Dramesi was put back in his hole and the crowd calmed down.
    It wasn’t long before Dramesi was once more brought up out of the hole. People were still standing around, but no one appeared particularly threatening. The prisoner was once again sat down on a plank, and a small bowl of rice covered with some green vegetable matter was handed to him.
    Along with the villagers, a small dog and swarm of flies kept the prisoner company while he ate. One of the rules Dramesi had been taught back in survival school was you had to eat when you and what you could. He knew that he would need the nourishment, and his captors hadn’t been very forthcoming when it came to food. The rice and vegetables weren’t much, but it was more than he’d had for several days now. The blob of some kind of matter on top of the rice and greens was something else again. What it was, Dramesi didn’t know, and he didn’t want to know. It moved, or at least distorted, when he picked it up with his chopsticks. It was easy enough to appear too clumsy with the sticks and the glob fell to the ground. Whatever it was, the dog seemed to think it was edible, as had the flies. The villagers simply looked on and smiled