Do No Harm by Stargate

Author:Stargate
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781905586097
Publisher: Fandemonium Books
Published: 2008-05-12T04:00:00+00:00

Baghdad, February 19th, 1991

The French used to call them oubliettes. Small windowless dungeons into which men were thrown and left to rot.

Even that would've been better than his life right now.

Someone nearby was being beaten. He could hear the muffled screaming. Hear the torturers shout. Broken English, over and over: Tell us. Tell us. You know what we want. Tell us or you die. Tell us and we stop.

They'd been shouting the same thing at him for the past eleven days. Shouting. Hitting. Giving him hell.

Jesus Christ, Frank. What happened to nobody gets left behind?

The bullets that had dropped him seemed to come out of nowhere. He'd felt the blinding shock of them, heard the echoes of the two swift shots bounce around the shadowy Baghdad alley. Smelled the stink of rotting vegetables as he spun then slammed face-first to the ground. Felt the blood spring from his breached body. Shoulder, and scalp.

Someone called his name. "Jack! Jack!"

And then the world tilted sideways, and the next thing he knew he was lying trussed up in the back of a jouncing, speeding truck, listening to the excited gabbling of Saddam's Republican Guardsmen. Every third or fourth sentence one of them turned and hit with him with the butt of his weapon, right where one bullet had lodged near his collarbone. Crap. It really hurt.

And now he was here, in this little stone coffin. Naked. Bleeding. No bed. No blanket. No... amenities. There wasn't an inch of his body that didn't weep with pain. Jesus. Good thing there was Charlie, because if the Iraqis had their way he'd be singing soprano before this was over.

Charlie. Sarah. Oh God. Did they know he'd been captured? Or did they think he was dead?

How can I be captured? Frank, you promised...

The sound of a key in the cell door's lock whipped his head round. Oh, come on. They couldn't be serious, they'd only dragged him back here a few hours ago.

The door opened, revealing two brand new inquisitors. Jeez, where do they find them? Psycopaths R Us? Smiling, predatory, they dragged him from his dungeon. Took him to their special room. Strung him up, and hurt him.

Sarah. Sarah. Christ, Frank. I hate you.

And that was his life for a long, long time. Hurting. Hating. Staying alive.

At the end of April, Operation Desert Storm ended. Kuwait was free. The allies had won. Eventually, too slowly, the prisons of vanquished Baghdad vomited out their victims -broken and bloody, but some of them unbowed. Jack O'Neill was one of them.

The brass threw him in hospital. Fed him to the shrinks. Weeks passed. His body healed quickly. His mind took longer. Nightmares. Flashbacks. Cold sweats and hot rage.

Frank came to see him. He told his doctors: Get rid of him. He's persona non grata. You bastards keep Frank Cromwell away from me.

It was Sarah and Charlie who healed him in the end. After he was discharged from hospital and sent home to convalesce. Loving her. Holding him. Playing catch in the back yard.

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