6
I was dragged past another vehicle, across a stretch of wet grass strewn with rocks and scree.
The night wind chilled me to the bone; my skin was like a freshly plucked chicken’s.
We stopped and I heard the sound of a heavy kick on wood. A door swung open and I was pulled through it into what felt like a sauna. The air was heavy with the odour of damp and bottled gas.
I stumbled forward a few paces then felt pressure on my shoulders. My arse connected with a plastic chair. Above me, I could hear the gentle hiss of burning gas. I leaned forward, clenching my teeth, waiting for them to give me the good news. I expected to get yanked upright any second, but they let me stay as I was.
Then, even more surprisingly, they pulled off the sack.
I kept my head down but my eyes went into overdrive. I was in a small room with rough stone walls and a compacted earth floor. In front of me was a blue plastic collapsible picnic table with metal legs, which looked as though it had come straight out of an Argos catalogue. Two hurricane lamps sat at either end of it, their shadows dancing across the walls. My passport and Charlie’s lay in between them.
The driver and his mate were behind me, breathing heavily after the exertion of frog-marching me from the car.
A pair of US desert boots appeared on the other side of the table. The chinos above them looked as though they’d been inflated by a high-pressure hose. A thin-barrelled .22 semi-automatic was pointing straight at my forehead, held rock-steady in a latex-gloved hand.
When I saw who it belonged to, the Georgian secret police suddenly seemed like the soft option.
My luck had finally run out.
Towering over me was at least 250 pounds of fat, topped off by an all-too-familiar whitewall haircut.
I didn’t like the way he was holding the weapon, but it didn’t look nearly as scary as he did.
Jim D. ‘Call Me Buster’ Bastendorf, the man we’d rechristened Bastard at Waco, had hardly changed a bit in the twelve years since I’d last seen him.