Invisible Armies Read online

  “No,” she repeats. “That’s not right. That isn’t mine.” She looks at the little man with a gun and begins to feel angry. She feels like she is taking part in a miniature morality play illustrating what is most wrong with India. “This is ridiculous. You think I’m going to pay you? No way. Absolutely not.”

  “You come with us now.”

  She glares into his expressionless eyes for a moment before realizing that of course she is going to pay a bribe. Better that than be jailed. “Let me guess,” she says. “I can pay a fine to you right now, right? And then you’ll let me go? How much? Ten dollars?” She immediately kicks herself for having been the first to name a price.

  “No,” the man says. “We don’t want money.”

  This is so unexpected it takes her a moment to absorb, and causes her anger to flicker and dissipate. This is not simple bribery. Something else is happening here. Something very wrong, she can feel it, see it in their body language, the way they look at her. “Then what do you want?”

  “We want you. Danielle Leaf.” He speaks her name softly, like a lover.

  Danielle stares at him. The other men are all around her again.

  “You come now.” The leader takes her arm, firmly, and leads her to the Jeep. Danielle lets him. She does not know what else to do. Her head whirls with confusion.

  “You can’t do this,” she says, her voice so feeble and breathless she is not even sure he hears her. “I’m an American. You can’t do this.”

  He pays no notice. She wonders dazedly if she should try to run, but she knows she cannot get away from them, and now it is too late anyhow, she is in the back of the Jeep, between two of the men, and the leader has started the engine, they are driving towards the mine complex. No. Not the mine. The Jeep turns and bounces offroad, up the same little track Danielle had intended to follow, the track that was meant to take her to Jayalitha, whose passport Danielle carries. They are not going to the mine, where at least she would find organization, Western management, some kind of accountability. They are taking her somewhere else. Somewhere private, isolated. When she realizes this, her gut clenches into an icy knot. She feels like she is falling from a great height. The word abducted flashes into her mind. Danielle tries to think of something she can do, some means of escape, but it is too late for that. All she can do is sit and wait, heart thudding, her whole body damp with sweat, until they reach their destination and whatever awaits her there.

  Chapter 3

  The concrete hut that serves as Danielle’s cell is about ten feet square. The corrugated aluminum ceiling slants upwards, six feet high at one end and nine at the other, attached to rusted prongs of rebar that protrude every eight inches or so from the rough concrete tops of the walls. The wall on the shorter side has a window about a foot square, barred by an iron cross. Opposite the window is a door, exterior-hinged, locked by an iron bolt that thunked loudly into place after Danielle allowed herself to be pushed inside. Being locked in had almost been a relief. When you are a woman captured by six armed men of unknown allegiance and motivations, solitary confinement is far from the worst available option.

  Red sunlight spills into the hut from the window, the uneven gaps between the aluminum roof and the concrete walls, the cracks around the door. A wooden bench and two metal buckets, one empty and one full of water, are the only furnishings. She can tell by the smell that the empty one has been used as a latrine. Thankfully the hut is well ventilated. An iron ring is set into each side wall. Danielle doesn’t like the look of them. And there is a thick lace of dark stains on the walls, floor, and bench. Stains that might be blood.

  The hut stands like a sentinel near the lip of a high westward-facing bluff, and through the barred window she can see the sun set over the jumbled boulders of the alien landscape. She sees no other buildings. To get up here, the Jeep had had to turn off the dirt track into one that was virtually nonexistent, then fight its way up five minutes of brain-rattling trail. After she was put in the hut, the Jeep drove away. She knows they have left men on guard outside to watch her, she can hear their low voices, footsteps, the rasp of matches when they smoke.

  They’re just trying to scare you, she tells herself, trying to stay calm. Nothing terrible is going to happen or it would have happened already. She forces her hoarse breath under control, puts pranayama lessons from yoga classes to use. She sits down on the bench, but her fear produces too much nervous energy; after a moment she gets back up and paces, despite the hut’s oven-like heat that soaks her in sweat. It is the not knowing that is worst. Who these men are, what they want, who or what they are waiting for, and why they took her to this godforsaken outlook rather than a real prison. Right now, prison would be a relief.

  When she hears the growl of an approaching engine, she presses herself up against the door, trying to see through the cracks. Only a very narrow wedge of the world is visible, through which a Jeep passes before rumbling to a halt. A car door opens and shuts. Men exchange a few words in an Indian language. Footsteps approach. Danielle takes a step back, breathing heavily, her body trembling with tension.

  The bolt slides and the door swings open. The uniformed leader, the man who planted the drugs, stands next to another Indian man, this one taller and slightly pudgy, dressed in casual but expensive-for-India shirt and slacks. The other uniformed men cluster behind them. The taller man takes the uniformed leader’s lathi and walks into the hut. Danielle has to step back to avoid a collision. The door closes behind him.

  “Sit,” the man says.

  Danielle, eyeing the bamboo club in his hand, obeys.

  “You are in very great trouble, Danielle Leaf.” His English is accented but good.

  “They put that bag in my pack. It isn’t mine.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  She has already decided on her answer. “I’m visiting a friend.”

  “Who?”

  “Her name is Jayalitha.”

  The man frowns. “How do you know her?”

  “I don’t really. She’s a friend of a friend. Our mutual friend told me I should come see her if I was in the area.”

  “And who is your mutual friend?”

  “A man named Keiran. In London.”

  “Why are you in India? Are you with an NGO?”

  “NGO? No. I work here. In Bangalore. I’m a project manager for Infosys.” This is no longer true – she quit that job four months ago, after only six weeks – but she still has her Infosys ID card, and hopes to impress him with her invocation of her former employer, famous across India.

  “Remove your clothes.”

  He says it in the same distant tone in which he has carried on the rest of their conversation. She stares at him. “What?”

  “Remove your clothes. For the purposes of searching. You may retain your underclothing.”

  She decides it is time to draw a line in the sand. “No. Absolutely not. If you want to search me, have a woman do it, I won’t let you. You haven’t even told me who you are. Are you the police? I want to see some identification.”

  He looks at her for a moment, then shifts his grip on his lathi so he is holding the bamboo club like a paddle, his right hand folded over the leather handle and his left gripped around the middle, and then he stoops slightly and, moving from his hips, slams the free end into Danielle’s midsection.

  Danielle doubles over, clutching reflexively at her stomach, falls off the bench and onto the ground, her mind numb with pain and shock. She can’t breathe, the wind has been knocked out of her, her lungs and throat feel sealed shut. She thrashes and gags for air like a landed fish, unable to think of anything but her desperate need for oxygen. The world begins to go grey around the edges. Then her lungs open miraculously and she can breathe again, it hurts like fire but she sucks air in greedily, and for a moment she lies on the damp concrete floor and just breathes, curled into fetal position, moaning slightly on each exhale, unable to believe what just happened to her. She cannot remember the last t
ime she was physically struck by anyone or anything.

  “Get up,” the man says, prodding her forehead with his boot, his voice alive with excitement. Danielle cringes away from him, hisses with pain as she pulls herself up to her knees, looks up at the man who just hit her. His lips are parted, slightly, and his eyes are intent on her. He looks excited. She can tell he is holding himself back, what he really wants is to hit her again, and again after that, until she is bloody and broken.

  “I tell you one more time,” he says softly. “Remove your clothes.”

  Danielle wants to fight, but he has a club, and she is weak with shock and fear, and even if she somehow won this battle, there are more men outside, one of them with a gun. Slowly, painfully, she stands, takes her shoes off, begins to remove her clothes. She feels dizzy and has to lean against the wall behind her. A deep red mark is already forming on her stomach where the lathi struck her. She feels nauseous, feverish. She wonders if she has internal injuries. She doesn’t look at the man but knows he is watching her undress with fervent attention.

  “Give me that,” the man says, pointing at the travel pouch made visible when she pulled down her jeans. Danielle obeys, standing as far away from him as possible, now wearing only underwear and socks, shivering despite the heat. He opens it, sees the credit cards, the three thousand cash rupees, and the Republic of India passport. Jayalitha’s passport. He takes it, reads through it, finds the dollars within.

  “You come to all this trouble for nothing,” the man says, pocketing the money and her travel pouch. “Of what use is a dead woman’s passport?”

  Danielle stares at him dully, trembling, dreading what comes next. The man raises his lathi, and she crouches, terrified but ready to try to fight: but he uses it only to rap twice on the door, which opens.

  “You stay here some time longer,” the man advises her. “I come again. I think we have many more subjects to discuss.” He smiles. “We shall talk and other things.”

  He leaves. The door shuts behind him. Danielle stares where she is, not moving except to breathe, for some time, long after the Jeep roars away, until twilight has faded to darkness.

  * * *

  It is past midnight before she accepts that escape is impossible. The roof will not peel off. The iron bars in the window will not be forced loose. The door will not open. She tried removing the laces from her shoes, tying them together, and dangling the resulting lasso through the crack between roof and wall, hoping to catch the end of the bolt that locks the door, but her laces aren’t long enough, and even if they were, even if she had all week, she doubts she could ever loop them around the bolt and pull it open, not working by feel in near-total darkness. She still has her wallet, in her jeans pocket, but there is nothing potentially useful therein, only a few hundred rupees and her Citibank ATM card.

  Danielle sits in the corner of the hut, knees to her chest, shivering despite India’s tropical heat. She feels exhausted but not tired, physically but not mentally drained. It is terror that keeps her alert. They can do anything to her, and probably will. If they are willing to hit her like that, then there is little, maybe nothing, they will not be willing to do. Including murder. She may die here in this hut. That is not dramatic hyperbole. That is a cold, hard, very real possibility. And if it comes true, it will be bloody and painful, by the time death comes she will likely be grateful for it.

  It is almost impossible to believe, that her life could actually end tomorrow, in this concrete box, at the hands of that man, that all the complex intertwined strands of herself could be suddenly guillotined, hopes and fears and memories extinguished like a snuffed candle. Surely it can’t really happen. Surely her story can’t end like this, none of the stories she has ever seen or heard end like this, abruptly and brutally in a concrete box, even the horror stories make more sense. But then most of those stories were fiction. This is real life. Real life doesn’t follow the rules of stories. Real life dives into dead ends and finishes without warning.

  She tries not to think about what they might do to her. She wants to think that she will fight them, defiant to the end, but remembering what happened to her when the man hit her with the lathi, how quickly she was reduced to cringing obedience, she doesn’t think such vows of courage mean much when they are set against real violence and pain. Almost everyone tells themselves they would be brave. Danielle suspects only a very few actually are.

  “It isn’t fair,” she whispers. She was doing a favour for a friend. She was doing the right thing.

  In a story she would be rescued. But there seems no hope of that. She will not be missed at the ashram for another two days, and the people there know only that she was going to Hampi. Keiran will be expecting some kind of email confirmation that his errand has been performed, but how long a silence will prompt him into some kind of action? Her best hope is the man in Hampi who rented her a motorcycle. But what will he do, and when? Nothing that will find her. Probably nothing at all, for a few days. Eventually he and the ashram and Keiran may gather their knowledge, eventually her route may be traced, but that will take weeks.

  She thinks of Keiran with fury. If he hadn’t sent her. He should have known. He obviously didn’t, he would never have deliberately sent her into danger, but now, because of his mistake, and her willingness to do a favour for a friend, Danielle might die, might actually die, tomorrow. Or whenever they grow sick of her. She tries not to think about how long they might keep her here, and what they might do to her while she lives. She has always felt contempt for women who live in fear, who refuse to walk city streets alone at night, who stay as far away from roadsides as possible for fear of men in cars who might swoop in and abduct them. Better half a life than a life half lived, she used to say. Now it seems she is going to pay for that boast, now she is in the midst of the worst nightmare of those women: abducted by a gang of violent men, imprisoned, helpless, knowing that no one will come to her aid.

  She buries her face in her knees and tries to meditate, to breathe deeply and think of nothing, but every breath hurts, and her mind returns again and again to terrifying images of what the day may bring, and each time she gasps involuntarily and tenses up so powerfully that her abdominal muscles ache and the bruise hurts like fire. Eventually she starts to cry. She tries to prevent the tears, she knows they are useless, but they flow unstoppably.

  The heat wakes her. She is sprawled on the concrete floor, her shirt pillowed beneath her head, with no memory of falling asleep. It is only a little past dawn, but the sunbaked hut is already sweltering. She pulls herself stiffly to her feet. Most of her muscles ache, and every motion provokes agony from the dark, swollen bruise on her stomach that has grown to the size of a man’s fist, a halo of red around a dark core where the lathi hit. She uses the latrine bucket, and drinks water from the other. She doesn’t want to do either, but she is desperately thirsty and has more pressing concerns than dignity and illness.

  She wonders how she looks, smeared all over with dust and sweat. Like a refugee, no doubt. Like a victim. It will be hard to play the haughty untouchable white woman, but that is almost the only card she has, to try to intimidate them into sparing her. She doubts it will work. Whatever glamorous otherworldly aura she might have had was erased when the man struck her with the lathi and she fell gasping to the ground.

  There are men outside, at least two of them left here to watch her, she hears their low murmurs, the hiss of some kind of gas stove, a few metal clinks. They must be cooking food, or heating water for chai. She tries not to think of food. It has been a gruelling eighteen hours since she has eaten, and she is savagely hungry.

  Then she hears the Jeep’s approaching engine, and her heart begins to jackhammer in her chest, all thoughts of food forgotten.

  Chapter 4

  She decides she will wait until the door opens, then charge out right away, try to break through them, disappear into the brush. They will be expecting it. It won’t work. But she has to try.

  The Jeep pulls t
o a stop. A door opens. And Danielle hears an unexpected voice: male, with an accent she can’t place but definitely Western, growling “Get your fucking hands off me.”

  Then the voice of the man who hit Danielle: “You require education.”

  A thunking sound, followed by two lighter thuds, and then cries in an Indian language. Someone sprints around the hut. Danielle turns and looks out the barred window. A white man, heavily muscled and military-fit, tattooed, barefoot, wearing khaki slacks and no shirt, with a black eye and bruises on his chest, his wrists handcuffed behind his back, runs to the lip of the bluff. When he realizes there is no way down, he turns to face the five Indian men who pursue him wielding lathis. The man who hit her, and four others in uniform.

  At first it seems too unfair and one-sided to be called a confrontation. But then the handcuffed man pirouettes on one foot, moving with a dancer’s grace, and his other leg whips out, the heel catches one of the uniformed men on the jaw and knocks him sprawling with an audible clunk, bone on bone with only a little skin between, and the handcuffed man continues the movement, spins towards his pursuers, kicks with his other leg into the crotch of another uniformed man, and then he ducks under one lathi and sidesteps another, moving with extraordinary speed and fluidity, every motion flowing seamlessly into the next, and his next step takes him halfway past his three remaining attackers, and Danielle is beginning to dare to dream that he might escape or even defeat them, so cinematic are his motions, when a lathi cracks into the side of his head and all the fight drains out of him. He sags to one knee, like a boxer hit by a knockout punch, and then they are all on him, beating and kicking him, and by the time they drag him to the hut and force him inside with Danielle, his face and body are torn and bloody.

  The man lies groaning in the corner, wrists still cuffed behind him, as the Jeep pulls away, leaving three guards to watch them. Danielle stares at her unexpected visitor.