-
Your next favorite book
is waiting.
Summary | Excerpt | Reviews | Beyond the Book | Readalikes | Genres & Themes | Author Bio
Book Reviewed by:
CHAPTER ONE
On the first day of his transition from captor to captive, Revere Falk stood
barefoot on a starlit lawn at 4 a.m., still naively confident of his place among
those who asked the questions and hoarded the secrets.
Falk was an old hand at concealment, trained from birth. The skill came in handy
when you were an FBI interrogator. Who better to pry loose the artifacts of
other lives than someone who knew all the hiding places? Better still, he spoke
Arabic.
Not that he was putting his talents to much use at Guantanamo. And at the moment
he was furious, having just returned from a botched session that summed up
everything he hated about this place: too few detainees of real value, too many
agencies tussling over the scraps, and too much heat—in every sense of the word.
Even at this hour, beads of sweat crawled across his scalp. By the time the sun
was up it would be another day for the black flag, which the Army hoisted
whenever the temperature rose beyond reason. An apt symbol, Falk thought, like
some rectangular hole in the sky that you might fall into, never to reappear. A
national banner for Camp Delta's Republic of Nobody, populated by 640 prisoners
from forty countries, none of whom had the slightest idea how long they would be
here. Then there were the 2,400 other new arrivals in the prison security force,
mostly Reservists and Guardsmen who would rather be elsewhere. Throw in Falk's
little subculture—120 or so interrogators, translators, and analysts from the
military and half the branches of the federal government—and you had the makings
of a massive psychological experiment on performing under stress at close
quarters.
Falk was from Maine, a lobsterman's son, and what he craved most right now was
dew and coolness, moss and fern, the balm of fogbound spruce. Failing that, he
would have preferred to be nuzzled against the perfumed neck of Pam Cobb, an
Army captain who was anything but stern once she agreed to terms of mutual
surrender.
He sighed and gazed skyward, a mariner counting stars, then pressed a beer
bottle to his forehead. Already warm, even though he had grabbed it from the
fridge only moments earlier, as soon as he reached the house. The air
conditioner was broken, so he had stripped off socks and shoes and sought refuge
on the lawn. But when he wiggled his toes the grass felt toasted, crunchy. Like
walking on burned coconut.
If he thought it would do any good, he would pray for rain. Almost every
afternoon big thunderheads boiled up along the green line of Castro's mountains
to the west, only to melt into the sunset without a drop. From up on this
scorched hillside you couldn't even hear the soothing whisper of the Caribbean.
Yet the sea was out there, he knew, just beyond the blackness of the southern
horizon. Falk sensed it as a submerged phosphorescence pooling beneath coral
bluffs, aglow like a candle in a locked closet. Or maybe his mind was playing
tricks on him, a garden-variety case of Guantánamo loco.
It wasn't his first outbreak. Twelve years ago he had been posted here as a
Marine, serving a three-year hitch. But he had almost forgotten how the
perimeter of the base could seem to shrink by the hour, its noose of fencelines
and humidity tightening by degrees. A Pentagon fact sheet for newcomers said
that Gitmo—the military's favorite slang for this outpost—covered forty-five
square miles. Like a lot of what the brass said, it was misleading. Much of the
acreage was water or swamp. Habitable territory was mostly confined to a flinty
wedge of six square miles. The plot marked out for Camp Delta and the barracks
of the security forces was smaller still, pushed against the sea on fewer than a
hundred acres.
Falk stood a few miles north of the camp. By daylight from his vantage point,
with a good pair of binoculars, you could pick out Cuban watchtowers in almost
every direction. They crouched along a no-man's-land of fences, minefields, wet
tangles of mangrove, and scrubby hills of gnarled cactus. The fauna was straight
out of a Charles Addams cartoon—vultures, boas, banana rats, scorpions, and
giant iguanas. Magazines and newspapers for sale at the Naval Exchange were
weeks old. Your cell phone was no good here, every landline was suspect, and
e-mail traffic was monitored. Anyone who stayed for long learned to operate
under the assumption that whatever you did could be seen or heard by their side
or yours. Even on the free soil of a civilian's billet such as Falk's you never
knew who might be eavesdropping, especially now that OPSEC—Operational
Security—had become the mantra for Camp Delta's cult of secrecy. It was all
enough to make Falk wish that Gitmo still went by its old Marine nickname—the
Rock. Like Alcatraz.
Excerpted from The Prisoner of Guantanamo by Dan Fesperman Copyright © 2006 by Dan Fesperman. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
 (1).gif)
We've heard that a million monkeys at a million keyboards could produce the complete works of Shakespeare...
Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!
Can you name the title?
Test your book knowledge with our daily trivia challenge!
Your guide toexceptional books
BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.
