Chapter Five

The White Room

I looked around.  There wasn’t much to see.  It was a small, cramped, white room.  There were no windows, no two-way mirrors, just the rough painted surface of the blank white cinderblock walls.  There was a white table bolted to the floor, and two plastic white chairs, one on either side.

For a minute or two, I just stood there, staring stupidly at all that whiteness.  I was still a little messed up in my head.  The memories from my attack still clung to me.  The scene had been so real, it was so much as if I were there, right there.  It hurt to be back here again, back in this prison.  Anyplace would have been better.

I heard the lock on the white door snap again.  The door opened.

I turned and saw Detective Rose step into the room.

Man, I can’t tell you what that was like.  At the sight of him, I felt my sore, battered body go weak with relief.  I couldn’t remember the last time I was so happy to see anyone.

“Rose!” I blurted out.  “Dude!  Oh, man, it’s about time you showed up!”

Rose didn’t answer.  His face was blank, expressionless. But then he never was much in the expressing-himself department.  He was a black guy with a round face and flat features, a thin moustache and smart, steady eyes.  He rarely smiled.  He rarely even grimaced.  Even his suits seemed to have no particular color.  He was always all business.

I saw his eyes go over me, pausing on the cuts and bruises.  But all he said was, “Sit down, Charlie.”

I lowered myself painfully into one of the white chairs.  Rose didn’t sit down in the other one.  He put his foot  up on its seat.  He rested his arm on his raised knee.  He looked down at me—studied me—for a long time.

“What happened to you?”

“I fell down,” I said.

He snorted.  “You fell down, huh.”

“I fell down on a sadistic guard.”

“That was clumsy of you.”

“Tell me about it.”  I looked up at him, searching his eyes for something, some kind of hope.  I couldn’t stand the suspense.  “So,” I said to him.  “Are you gonna get me out of here or what?”

“What’s the matter, Charlie?  Don’t you like prison?”

I wanted to come up with a snappy answer, but I wasn’t feeling very snappy.  “It’s bad,” I admitted.  “I’m trying to stay strong in here, you know?  But I’ll tell you the truth, Rose:  it’s really, really bad.”

I thought I saw a trace of sympathy rise in Rose’s eyes, but it was tough to tell.  He just nodded.  “That’s the way it works, Charlie.  You put a lot of bad guys together in the same place, you end up with a pretty bad place.”

“Are you talking about the inmates or the guards?  Because in here, it’s tough to tell the difference.”

The faintest trace of a smile appeared at one corner of Rose’s mouth.  “The guards wear the blue shirts.”

I tried to laugh.  I tried to sound hard and cool the way Rose did.  But even I could hear the desperation in my own voice and I’m sure Rose could hear it too.  The truth was I didn’t know how much more Abingdon I could take.

“So?” I said again, my voice shaking a little.  “What’s the deal:  Are you gonna get me out of here?”

Rose let out a breath.  Something about the way he did it made  my stomach churn.  I could feel the bad news coming.

He took his foot off the chair.  He sat down across from me.  He leaned forward, his elbows on the table, his eyes steady on mine.

“Here’s what’s been happening since they put you away in here,” he said.  “The Homelanders organization has been broken.  The men we arrested at your friend Margaret’s house?  They talked.  They led us to their headquarters…”

“That crazy-looking mansion?”

“The crazy mansion, yeah.  We’ve still got it under guard.  They had computers there, papers, names, locations.  Those led us to the training camp, the place you escaped from.  A series of safe houses.  We’ve rounded up almost all of them.  The Homelanders are over.  They’re done.”

He let that sit for a minute between us, gave me time to take it in.

“So… that’s good news, right?” I said finally.  “The operation was a success.  I did what you wanted me to do.  Hooray, right?  America is safe.  You get a promotion.  Waterman can rest in peace.  And, listen, as far as I’m concerned, you can forget my parade and the medals and all that.  Just get me out of here and let me go home, okay?”

There was another moment of silence.  Then Rose said the words that made my breath catch with fear.

“It’s not that simple.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, my voice rising.  “What do you mean it’s not simple?  Sure it’s simple.  It’s really simple.  You hold a…  whattaya call it…?  a press conference or something.  You hold a press conference and you say, ‘Hey, remember the whole Charlie-West-is-a-murderer thing?  Surprise, we were only kidding.  He helped us bust up this terrorist ring and now we’re gonna set him free so he can have his own reality TV show…’  I don’t care what you say, man.  Just get me out of Abingdon before I…”

Rose interrupted me, speaking in the same flat voice with the same expressionless expression on his face.  “I can’t.”

I was in the middle of a sentence when I felt the words turn to ashes in my mouth.  “What do you mean you can’t?”

“I’m sorry,” Rose said.

I swallowed, hard.  “You mean you can’t get me out of here?”

“No.”

“Not ever?”

His eyes flicked away from mine.  “Not yet.  Not now.”

I felt the strength go out of me.  I sagged against the chair.

Rose went on speaking, without emotion.  “You knew the risk when you signed on, Charlie.  Waterman’s operation—our operation—it was never strictly…  official.  We never really had approval from our superiors.  The government is happy to take the Homelanders into custody in a quiet way, but right now, they don’t want it to go any further than that.”

 “Any further than what?  These people are terrorists.  They’re at war with us.  Why should we tiptoe around about putting them in jail?”

Rose cupped his hands over his nose and mouth and closed his eyes, almost as if he were praying.  But I think he was just trying to gather his thoughts, trying to figure out how he was going to explain this to me.  I was pretty interested to hear what he’d come up with.

“Here’s the deal,” he said finally, dropping his hands.  “An organization like the Homelanders doesn’t just spring up out of nowhere.  People fund it, plan it, support it.  Powerful people in countries in the middle east.”

“So?”

“We need help from some of those countries.  Help with security.  Help with arms negotiations.  Help with oil.”
            “Oil.”

“Right now, it’s convenient for a lot of people in the government to pretend that the Homelanders were just a random bunch of crackpots.  And that you were just a troublemaker who got involved with them.  That way, there’s no pressure from the people, from the media, to go too high up the ladder, to embarrass the people we need to deal with…”

Suddenly I found myself on my feet.  The plastic chair toppled over in back of me, rattling against the floor.

“Embarrass them?” I shouted.  “Embarrass them?  They’re just going to leave me to rot in here so they won’t embarrass people in the countries where these killers came from?”

“It’s a sensitive moment, Charlie.  A very powerful faction in our government is to determined to believe the Homelanders didn’t really exist at all…”

But I silenced him with a raised hand.   I turned away from him.  Paced to the wall.  Braced my hands against it, my head hung down.  I could barely believe what I was hearing—and at the same time, I believed it too well.

Behind me, Rose said, “There’s something else you oughta know…”

I just stood there, head hanging, waiting for it.

“We didn’t get them all.”

Now I swung around, looked at him, eyes glaring.

“Prince escaped,” he said.

“Prince…”

“And some of his top operatives—some portion of his operation—we don’t know how much…”

“But Prince was the head guy.  He was the brains behind the whole deal…”

“I know that.”

“Well, do you have any idea where he is?”

Rose looked down at his hands clasped together on the surface of the desk.  He was silent for a long moment.  Then he raised his expressionless face and stared at me with eyes that said more than he could say aloud.  “The government is convinced he’s left the country.”

“Because they want to be convinced.  Because it’s convenient.”

He nodded.

“But what if he hasn’t?” I said.  “What if he hasn’t left?”

 “Well,” said Rose.  “If he hasn’t left…  you may not be safe.”

I let out a laugh—if you can call it a laugh.  “Oh really?  I’m not safe?  What a surprise.  I thought I was snug as a bug in a rug in here!  I mean, it’s not as if someone just tried to slice me to pieces.  It’s not like some guard just used me as a punching bag for half an hour.” 

“Look, I’m working on this,” said Rose.  “I am, it’s just…  They’ve closed Waterman’s operation down.  I have no official power base anymore.  I’m doing my best to go through channels, through friends…”

Angrily, I reached down, snapped up my chair.  “Channels!” I said.  “Friends!”  I plunked the chair down across the table from him.  I plunked myself down into it.  I was so mad I hardly felt the aches in my body anymore.  “Let me see if I’ve got this right.  Most of the Homelanders are in custody but the government doesn’t want to admit they were a highly funded organization taken down by an unofficial undercover organization.  Because of their negotiations in the middle east, it’s more convenient to pretend the whole thing is over—and to keep me in here, with everybody thinking I’m a murderer.  Meanwhile, Prince has escaped and wants me dead but you have no way to find him because the government prefers to believe he’s gone and you have no power base.  So not only am I stuck in this hellhole, I’m a sitting duck for anyone who wants to earn Prince’s favor by bumping me off.  Have I got all that right?”

For the first time, Rose showed some sign of strain.  He rubbed one eye wearily.  It was a quick gesture, over in a moment, but it revealed to me how tired he was, how hard he’d been working on all this.

“You need to try to be patient…”

“Patient?”  I slammed my fist down on the table.  “You don’t know what it’s like in here.”

“I understand but…”

“What if I call the newspapers?” I said.  “What if I tell them about Waterman?  About the Homelanders.  About what went down?  How it all happened?”

 “Who do you think people will believe?” Rose asked quietly.  “A convicted murderer telling people he’s secretly a hero who busted up a terrorist organization—or a lot of serious-looking officials in suits saying he’s just one of a bunch of troublemakers?”

I didn’t answer.  I knew he was right.  No one would believe me if I told the truth.  Even I could hardly believe it.  I buried my face in my hands.  I don’t think I’d ever felt so low, so helpless in all my life.

“Listen,” Rose went on, “I’m working on something, okay?”

It was another moment before I could look up.  “On what?”

“An appeal.  Through your lawyer.  In the courts.  We’ve got friends there, people who know the truth.  If they can arrange for the evidence against you to be declared tainted, your conviction could be overturned.”

“Overturned,” I said roughly.  The word would hardly come out.

“I know.   It’s not a complete vindication but…  at least it’d get you out of here.”

I looked at Rose—and again, his eyes flitted away.  He couldn’t meet my gaze.  He was ashamed of the position he was in, ashamed of what the government was doing to me.  I didn’t blame him.  On the other hand, when Waterman first recruited me for this job, he didn’t lie about it.  He told me I was risking everything.  Not just my life, but my reputation.  He told me he was operating outside the usual channels.  He told me I might not have the support of the fancy suits in government.  He told me they might pretend I didn’t exist and that the people I loved might go to their graves believing I was a traitor and even a killer.

I’d signed on, knowing all that.  And I’d won, too.  Me and Waterman and Rose and the others.  We’d done what we set out to do.  We’d broken up the Homelanders, stopped them, most of them anyway, before they could carry out their plans.  All except Prince and a few of his friends.

So I had nothing to complain about.  I’d known what I was getting into from the start.

I just hadn’t known about Abingdon.  How hard it would be.  How lonely and terrifying and suffocating.  That’s just not something you can know before you get there, before you experience it for yourself.

And now that I did know, I wasn’t sure I had the courage to stick it out.

“How long?” I asked Rose hoarsely.  “How long would an appeal take?”

“With our friends working on it,” he said.  “A couple of months maybe.  If all goes well, you’ll be out of here early in the New Year.”

I let out a long breath.  “Christmas in Abingdon,” I murmured.  “Just what I always dreamed of.”

“I’m sorry,” Rose said.  He still wouldn’t look at me.

Finally, after what seemed a long silence, his chair scraped against the floor as he pushed it back.  He stood up.  He hesitated, standing over me.

“I’ll tell you something, Charlie,” he said then.  “When you started this, you were a boy.  But you’re not a boy anymore.  You’re a man.  A man and an American.  And I don’t say either of those things lightly.  You’re getting a hard deal from some people who aren’t fit to tie your sneakers.  Government can be like that.  That’s one of the reasons we try not to have too much of it.”

He moved away from me.  He went to the white door in the white wall.  He rapped against it.  Then he looked back at me over his shoulder.

“You won’t be seeing me after this, Charlie.  I won’t be able to get in touch with you directly.  But believe me, I won’t forget you.  I’ll be working on getting you out of here any way I can.  And if there’s any news, I’ll find some way to let you know.”

The door opened.  I could see the guard standing in the hall outside.

“How can I reach you?” I asked him.

He shook his head.  “You can’t.”

“But…”  I stared after him desperately.  “Who do I call if I need help?”

 Another very slight trace of a smile touched the corner of his lips.  “You know how to pray, don’t you?” he said.

And he walked out.

Chapter Two

The Yard King 

What just happened?

In the terror of the moment, I couldn’t make sense of it.  Then I could.

One of the Nazi musclemen—one of the thugs who’d been with me by the free weights—was standing before me where the wolf-faced man had been.  His fist was raised, a stone was gripped in it.  He had stepped up behind the Islamist assassin and clubbed him in the back of the neck.

The next instant, the two men holding me were ripped away, as if they’d been caught up in a tornado or something.  Some Swastika-tatooed musclemen had grabbed them too, dragged them off me.  As the men fought back, more of the Islamists were running to the scene to join the fight and more of the Nazis too.  Another second and hate-filled men were battling other hate-filled men back and forth across the grass. There was the crack of fists on bone.  Blood flying through the air.  Grunted curses and ugly names.  Men down on the ground rolling over and over one another, trying to gouge one another’s eyes or clutch one another’s throats.

It all happened in a second.  I stood dazed at the center of the chaos.

I thought:  This is hell.  It must look just like this in hell.

Now the guards in their blue shirts seemed suddenly to reappear out of nowhere.  They rushed into the melee of gray uniforms, wrapping arms around prisoners’ throats to pull them apart, hammering at their heads with the edges of their walkie-talkies, kicking at them as they rolled around in the dirt and on the asphalt.

Shouting and striking out, the guards drove the Nazis and Islamists away from each other, forcing them into opposite areas of the yard.

It was all over as quickly as it began.  I hardly had time to register what had happened, to compute the fact that this prison feud had saved my life.  One hate group had fought off another hate group and somehow the result was that I was still standing, still alive.

Still alive—but my troubles were far from over.

Because, now, across the grass, the Yard King was coming.

That’s what they called him:  The Yard King.  His real name was Chuck Dunbar.  He was Corrections Officer in Charge of the Prisoner Recreation Area, the chief guard of the exercise  yard.  He wasn’t a big man but he packed a lot of nastiness into his thick, 5 foot seven frame.  He was squat and broad and had a face like the business end of a fist, all mean and knuckly.  His headquarters was a place the prisoners called The Outbuilding.  It was a grim, featureless cinderblock box that stood in the furthest corner of the yard.  Dunbar spent most of his time in there, doing whatever it was he did.  But when there was trouble—or when he wanted to start trouble—out he came.  The sight of him was always bad news for someone, because the Yard King was a man who liked hurting people.

And right now, he was coming straight at me.

He barreled forward fast with his peculiar rolling walk, his lips twisted in a snarl, his fists clenched by his sides.  His eyes were pale, almost colorless, but they seemed to burn as if they were lit with white flames.

Another second or two and he was standing in front of me.  The rest of the guards lined up on either side of him.  The Yard King glanced to his left and to his right.

“Get this con garbage back in their cells,” he growled.

Instantly, the guards started moving, started screaming at the prisoners, striking out at them and herding them toward the prison doors.  The men moved sullenly, their gray shoulders hunched.  They cast wicked glances at each other, muttering threats through the gaps between the guards.

I started moving too, figuring I was supposed to go back to my cell as well.

But Dunbar stepped in close to me, blocking my way.

“Not you, lowlife,” he said.  He had a voice like a rake on gravel.  It seemed to rattle inside his throat as it came out at me.  “You’re the one who started this.”

“Me?” I blurted out.  “I was just standing here.  That guy tried to kill me.  He had a knife.  He…”

Ther Yard King hit me in the face.  He used the back of his hand, snapping it fast at my cheek.  My head flew back, my thoughts rattled.

“Shut up,” Dunbar said.  “Don’t lie to me.”

I rubbed my bruised cheek.  It didn’t seem like a good idea to answer him, so I didn’t.

Dunbar smiled, his eyes flashing.  “How could anyone have a knife in the yard?” he asked me.  “If someone had a knife in the yard, that would mean they’d gotten it past one of my guards.  That would mean there was something wrong with the way I run this place.  You think there’s something wrong with the way I run this place, punk?”

I went on rubbing my cheek.  I went on not answering.  But that wasn’t good enough for the Yard King.

This time, when he struck out at me, my hand was in his way, and blocked the blow.  But I still felt the jar of it.

“I asked you a question, lowlife,” Dunbar said.  “You think I’m not doing my job right?  You want to file a complaint with the authorities?”

I tried to think of something to say.  But all I could think of was the way things used to be, the life I used to have.  I flashed back on how things were when I was at home.  I thought of the way my parents and pastors and teachers and my karate instructor Sensei Mike would always tell me to tell the truth no matter what.  It seemed like only yesterday I was back in that world, and yet it seemed like a million years ago.  Back there, back home, there weren’t any guys like Chuck Dunbar—or if there were, I didn’t know them and they didn’t have complete and total control over my life.  Back home, it was easy to say “Tell the truth no matter what,” when “no matter what” didn’t include a guy who would gladly break every bone in your body and never pay a price.

Still, I didn’t say anything.  I couldn’t think of anything to say.

Dunbar smiled again, a weird, dreamy smile full of cruelty and a sick pleasure in cruelty.  “Charlie West,” he said.  My name sounded pretty bad when he spoke it, like the name of some kind of slimy creature you wouldn’t want to find crawling on you.  “You think you’re pretty special, don’t you, Charlie West?  I watch you.  I know you.  You think you’re something better than the rest of us.”

“I don’t…”

He hit me again, not hard, just enough to make me shut up—and shut up is exactly what I did.

“You’re nothing,” Dunbar said, his pale eyes gleaming.  “You’re not even nothing.  You’re a piece of garbage blowing across the yard.  I’m going to teach you that, West.  I’m going to make it my special mission to teach you.  I’m going to make it my hobby, my pastime.  From now on, the slightest thing you do, the first wrong move, the first wrong word that comes out of your mouth, I’m taking you into the Outbuilding.”

I stood up straight when I heard that, my heart clutching with fear.  The Outbuilding.  Every prisoner in Abingdon knew what that meant.  The Outbuilding was where the Yard King took you when he wanted to teach you a lesson, when he wanted to work you over, hard, with his fists or with a club.  Tucked away in the shadow of the yard wall, the building was only partially visible from one of the guard towers.  Once you were inside, no one could see what was happening to you and no one would ever tell.  It was the heart of the Yard King’s sadistic kingdom.

“Now I asked you a question, garbage,” he said.  How could a con in this yard have a knife when I’m in charge of keeping the place safe?  You think I’m not doing my job, garbage?  You think I made a mistake?  Answer me.”

I know:  I should have answered him.  I should have just lied and said no.  I should have said, “No, sir.  You’re doing a great job.”  I should have said, “There was no knife, sir.  There couldn’t have been a knife, sir.  Because you don’t make mistakes, sir.”

That’s what I should have said.  But somehow…  as far away from home as I was…  somehow I just couldn’t forget what my Mom and Dad and Sensei Mike had taught me.  I couldn’t force the lie up out of my throat.  It stuck there, sour and disgusting.  All I could do was stand and stare into the fist-like face of this cruel, sick little man.

Dunbar grinned.  “What are you waiting for, garbage?  You think someone’s gonna help you?  No one’s gonna help you.  Not in here.  In here, you’re all alone.”

I didn’t mean to talk back to him, so help me.  I meant to be smart and stay quiet.  But before I could stop myself, the words just sort of came out.

“I’m not alone,” I told him.  “I’m never alone.”

Dunbar’s face twisted in rage.  This time, when he lifted his hand, he was holding a stun gun.  I saw it only for an instant, then a teeth-jarring blast of agony went through me.  My brain turned to cotton.  My muscles turned to rubber.

 I felt myself falling and falling.

The Homelanders series is about a kid named Charlie West – a good kid, who goes to sleep in his own bed one night and wakes up strapped to a chair being tortured by Islamo-fascist terrorists.  He manages to make a run for it – only to find that he’s also wanted by the police for murder.  For the first three novels in the series, he’s been on the run from both the jihadis and the cops, trying to find out what happened to his life before someone kills him or puts him behind bars.

The Final Hour  is the fourth and last installment in the series.  As it begins, Charlie has got most of the answers he needs, but the police have got him.  He’s been thrown into a very tough prison called Abingdon, where it’s a toss-up whether Islamist thugs or Nazis are going to have the pleasure of killing him first…

 Chapter One

Abingdon 

Most people have to die to get to hell.  I took a shortcut.

I was in Abingdon State Prison.  Locked away for a murder I didn’t commit.  Waiting for the men who were coming to kill me.  With nowhere to run.

It was the worst thing that had ever happened to me.

I’d been there for two weeks.  Two weeks of smothering boredom and strangling fear.  When I was locked in my cell, the minutes seemed to lie like dead men, to decay like dead men—so slowly you could barely tell it was happening.  When I was out in the exercise yard or in the cafeteria or in the showers, there was just the fear, the waiting.  Waiting for the killers to make good their threat, the words one of them had whispered in my ear as I stood in the dinner line one night:

You’re already dead, West.  You just don’t know it yet.

Alone in my cell, I stared at the tan wall.  I felt a black despair surrounding me, closing in on me.  I did everything I could to fight it.  I did push-ups.  I read my Bible.  I prayed.  The prayer gave me some comfort, some relief.

But then the buzzer would sound, loud and startling.  The cell door would slide open.  A guard would shout from the end of the tier:

“Yard time!”

Then the waiting and the fear would begin again.

Where was Detective Rose? I wondered desperately.  I hadn’t seen him since he’d arrested me, since  he’d rescued me from the terrorist cell called the Homelanders and led me away in handcuffs.  Rose was the one official who knew who I was.  He knew I’d been planted in the Homelanders by Waterman and his agents.  He knew I’d let myself be framed for the murder of my friend Alex Hauser so the Homelanders would believe I was bitter and could be recruited.  Rose was one of Waterman’s agents too—at least, I thought he was.  I told myself he must be working behind the scenes to clear my name, to win my release.  I told myself he would come for me.  Any day now.  Any day.

But the killers came for me first.

I was in the exercise yard.  It was a large square of dying grass and broken asphalt.  It was surrounded by a fence topped with barbed wire.  The fence was surrounded by a high concrete wall.  At the corners of the wall there were guard towers.  In the towers there were men with rifles, watching our every move.

Here, below, on the grass and asphalt, the prisoners moved in their gray uniforms.  Some wore shirtsleeves, but most wore gray overcoats and black woolen watchcaps against the snow-flecked cold.  Each coat or shirt had a white strip with the prisoner’s number on it sewn over the left breast.  Each had the prisoner’s name stenciled over the right breast.  Other than that, they were all gray.

The men’s faces, on the other hand, were black and white and brown.  Their eyes were hard and watchful.  There was rage and meanness and fear etched into the tight lines of their cheeks and foreheads.  They gathered around the benches and free weights on one corner of the asphalt or played basketball on the half-court, or played catch on the grass or just walked and talked or just sat and stared.

Guards moved among them, men in blue shirts and black pants.  They carried no weapons, just heavy walkie talkies hooked to their belts.  The guards watched the prisoners but the prisoners didn’t watch the guards.  The prisoners watched each other.  And some of them, I knew, were watching me, waiting for their chance to attack.

I was on one of the weight benches.  I was doing presses with a light bar, not trying to bulk up or anything, just trying to keep the flexibility and speed I used in my karate training.  The men all around me were going for the big muscle stuff, lifting hundreds of pounds.  They worked in grim silence.  Whenever I dared to steal a glance at one of them, they looked like pretty nasty pieces of work.  White guys with shaved heads and thick arms and chests.  They had Nazi swastikas tatooed on their biceps and on their foreheads.  A couple of them had Christian crosses tatooed on them too.  How they thought those two symbols could ever go together—a symbol of hatred and a symbol of love—I didn’t know.  I’ll tell you what else:  I wasn’t about to ask.  They didn’t look like the types of guys who would enjoy a good theological conversation.  They looked more like the types of guys who would enjoy punching me repeatedly in the face until I lost consciousness or died.  That sounded like it would be more fun for them than for me so I kept my mouth shut.

When I finished my workout, I moved away from them.  I wandered to the edge of the crumbling basketball court, glancing this way and that to make sure no one was coming after me.  I stood by the court and watched the game, feeling the cold air dry the workout sweat on my cheeks and neck.

The game was three against three.  They were good players.  Rough, fast, with accurate shots from anywhere near the key.  They swirled back and forth in front of me in a shouting gray cloud of motion.  They elbowed each other in the face, and jostled each other shoulder to chest as they fought for position under the board.

One guy broke through and went airborne, jamming a dunk through the hoop.  As the teams reset, I took another nervous glance over my shoulder at the yard behind me.  But this time, something made me pause.

The guards.  Suddenly I didn’t see any guards.  The blue shirts that usually passed among the gray uniforms had vanished.  I felt an instinctive clutch inside me, a flash of something like panic.  Where had they all gone?

The next moment, the killers struck.

There were three of them.  They were black men.  In prison, the Muslims were mostly black.  They weren’t your regular everyday Muslims either.  They were hate-filled radical Islamists.

The Islamists had heard about me on the grapevine and in the news.  The word was I’d betrayed the Homelanders, a group of Islamo-fascists who recruited disgruntled Americans to pull off terrorist attacks on our home soil.  The Abingdon prison Islamists had vowed they’d take vengeance on me.  They’d see to it that I was punished for trying to protect my country.  This was their time.

The first one came at me with a shiv—a knife he’d made by sharpening a piece of hard plastic he’d smuggled out of the cafeteria.  He strode up to me from the right and drove the point in low toward my side.

I caught the motion out of the corner of my eye.  I swung around fast, blocking with my forearm, blocking instinctively with the reflexes I’d developed during all those years of training at the dojo.  Those reflexes saved my life—for the moment anyway.

My forearm hit the killer’s arm.  The plastic shiv sliced in front of me, missing my mid-section by inches.  Off-balance, I managed a weak kick at the attackers leg.  It hit him high, above the knee and only knocked him back a step or two.

Then the others grabbed me from behind.

There were two of them.  Big, strong.  I never got a good look at them.  I just felt their breath on the sides of my face.  Each one grabbed one of my arms, wrapping their own arms around it, holding it fast.  They pressed their bodies hard against me, blocking off my legs with their legs so I couldn’t kick again.  I couldn’t move at all.  I was helpless.

The man with the shiv came back for me.

I got a good look at him now.  He was enormous, tall and broad-shouldered, with huge muscles that pressed through the prison grays.  He had a long, thin face that reminded me of a wolf’s face.  His eyes were bright with wolf-like hunger and bloodlust.

He grinned as his friends caught hold of me.

“Hold him,” he told them.  Then he said to me, “Now you die, traitor.”

I tried to pull my arms free, tried to kick out with my legs.  It was useless.  The men who held me were too strong.

The man with the shiv stepped toward me, the sharpened point aimed at my stomach.

I had only one more second—just enough time to realize I was about to die—just enough time for that information to flash red-hot through my brain.

Then the man’s wolf-like face filled my vision, blotted out everything else.  There was nothing but his grin and his eyes.

But all at once, his eyes flew up, went white, empty.  His grin vanished and his mouth dropped open, slack.  He staggered back away from me.  I saw his legs go wobbly.  I saw his knees buckle.

He collapsed onto the grass with a hollow thud.  The plastic shiv fell from his limp fingers.

—–

Klavan speaks at length about the importance of American ideas in great storytelling, the history of Western ideas and values in literature, the new blacklist, the brilliance of David Mamet as both a writer and thinker, the leftist marginalizing of Saul Bellow for political reasons, and the recent censoring of “Huckleberry Finn.”

Brilliant, fascinating, insightful  stuff — especially the segments on “Finn,”  how post-modern theory threatens intelligent storytelling, and how conservative voices are now being heard in the “great conversation” between Right and Left in the uniquely American search for truth.

FYI: In his email, Klavan told me he is now aware Angelina Jolie is not in the new “Atlas Shrugged” film, so no emails please. I assured him that after everyone hears his very last line about Oprah’s Book Club, all will be forgiven.

Klavan blogs here.

Good interview that touches on a number of subjects. And much of it explains why Hollywood currently has an approval rating of 33% — which is a disaster for any industry interested in selling a product to the public.

The blacklist discussion illuminates how insidious the whole thing works. There is no “list.” Nothing to fight. Nothing you can grasp. Like high school, it’s all cultural. If you want to sit at the cool kids’ table you better become one of the cool kids.

Andrew Klavan’s written a terrific piece for City Journal looking at Katherine Bigelow’s “Hurt Locker,” which tanked at the box office, is a frontrunner to win this year’s Best Picture Oscar and has generated debate among conservatives over whether the dynamic action-director’s visceral look at a U.S. Army Bomb Squad is just another Iraq War film or something a little more worthy.

It’s a good debate… Be sure to read the whole thing and then feel free to have at it in the comments…

City Journal:

[I]s The Hurt Locker yet another piece of idiot agit-prop that makes our soldiers’ jobs harder and our enemies’ lives easier? The filmmakers and the media are desperate to convince us otherwise. For weeks before Hurt Locker’s release, they loudly reassured the public that the movie was, in the words of Roger Ebert, “completely apolitical. It has no opinion on the war in Iraq, except that there is one.” Some conservative reviewers agreed. Mark Hemingway at National Review wrote that the film “is not a straight depiction of American heroism; but it is a revelatory examination of the experiences and motivations of U.S. soldiers.”

But John Nolte, the voice of reason who runs Andrew Breitbart’s indispensable Big Hollywood website, would have none of it. He condemned the film.

Nolte and I spent part of Christmas break in a friendly email argument over the matter. Nolte objected to the fact that the film’s protagonist, Staff Sergeant James, played by the excellent Jeremy Renner, is less a hero than an adrenaline junkie. He saw anti-military intent in the film’s two most ridiculous characters, a sadistic colonel played by David Morse and a ludicrous Army therapist who tells his patients that war “could be fun!” Hurt Locker, Nolte wrote to me, “says there are no heroes, no good men in the Military—only PTSD cases, lunatic Colonels, and those poor saps dragged along for the ride. A terrible depiction of who these men are.”

Nolte convinced me that there’s truth to some of this, but I still don’t think it’s the whole story. The Hurt Locker, unlike every other War on Terror film I’ve seen, exists in a moral universe that a sane man might recognize as our own. Insurgents murder without restraint, even enticing children into the blast area to kill as many as possible. U.S. soldiers are largely humane, trying their best to avoid violence and show mercy. That’s no more than an observation of the simple truth. Our culture is better than theirs and so, by and large, our people behave better.

Read the full article here.