Black Jack

BLACK JACK

Rani Manicka

Black Jack

Published by Rani Manicka
First published in paperback 2013

Copyright © 2013 by Rani Manicka

Cover Design by Spiffing Covers

The right of Rani Manicka to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the copyright, designs and patent act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

All characters in this publication are fictitious, any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental

ISBN: 978-0-9576812-0-0

Other Novels by Rani Manicka

The Rice Mother
Touching Earth
The Japanese Lover

Rani Manicka is an economics graduate and the prize-winning author of the international bestseller, The Rice Mother. Her works have been translated into 26 languages. She currently divides her time between Malaysia and the United Kingdom, and lives with the two loves of her life, Rick and an indescribably naughty German shepherd puppy called Tyron. Find her at http://www.ranimanicka.com

Previous Praise For Rani Manicka

The Rice Mother

‘You'll struggle to find a more powerful, moving read this year.’
GLAMOUR

‘Powerful.’
SUNDAY MIRROR 

‘Emotionally satisfying, complex books like this are hard to find.’
HEAT

‘You'll love Rani Manicka's first novel.’
NEW WOMAN

Touching Earth

‘Woven with the beautiful intricacy of a spider creating its web, Touching Earth uses exquisite, lyrical writing to present us with the harsh realities of heroin addiction, prostitution and innocence lost.’
HEAT

‘High on atmosphere and tension, this is another powerful novel from the author of The Rice Mother.’
WOMAN & HOME 

The Japanese Lover

‘A seductive tale of forbidden love'
STYLIST

‘This unconventional love story is told with great imagination. Vivid, complex and full of color, it's a fabulous read.'
CHOICE 

For my beloved Ty,
‘Run free, my love. One day we’ll meet again.’

For our struggle is not against [human beings], but against the rulers, against the powers, against the world forces of this darkness, against the spiritual [dark forces] of wickedness in outer space."

- Ephesians 6:12 [the uncensored citation translated from Greek]

ANNUIT
COEPTIS

(He looks favorably upon our work)

Schooner Klaus stood with his nose slightly raised: a bi-pedal wolf sniffing for prey. Yet, his was no wolf brain fighting for survival in the wilderness; inextricably bound by the dark, sweet call of warm blood. Dressed in high-ranking military uniform and shaven-skulled, he stood in the control room of one of America’s top secret military bases. His thickly muscled, hulking form appeared curiously immobile in the bluish glow emanating from the wall of soundless television screens. A green light on the console flashed.

‘Yes.’ His voice was unexpectedly silky, hypnotic almost.

‘They’re ready for you, Dr. Klaus,’ a disembodied voice informed.

Only his eyes, gray and cruel, shifted. To the largest screen on the wall. To the image of a naked, gagged child secured to a metal table in a metal room. Her fair hair was plastered to her head, and her thin body covered in cuts, bruises, and burns. There was an IV in her left arm, a leather strap across her forehead, audio phones over her ears, and electrodes attached to her fingers. Her terrified, pleading eyes were darting desperately around the six men who had arranged themselves on either side of her.

But staring straight ahead the men displayed the only objective they had ever made known to her, day after day, week after week. To subject her to excruciating pain. And to this effect they used jellied acid, long needles, electrified probes, and other unspeakably horrible instruments that they found on the shelf underneath the table she lay upon. Every session ended with the substitution of the leather headband for a metal one so that the electroshock torture could commence and continue until blessed blackness came for her.

She awakened inside a metal cage too small to stand or lie in, with a blinding headache from the electroshock treatment, and her body hurting so bad she felt certain she was dying.

‘Mommy. I want my mommy,’ she had begged in the beginning.

She may as well have been invisible. Not one uttered a word. Food pellets and water were shoved through a slot, the portions barely enough to keep her alive. There was no toilet: she had to urinate and defecate in her pitiful position, and afterwards sleep in her own mess. Hardly had she slept when the door opened and men wearing rubber gloves yanked her out by the arms and dragged her down a corridor to a room with a concrete floor. There a cold-water hose was directed at her cowering body. No soap. A rough towel.

Then it was back to the metal table.

One day they threw an armless teddy bear into her cage. It stank of excrement, but in the freezing darkness she reached for it. ‘It’s all right,’ she whispered to the helpless thing. ‘I’ll be your friend. My name is Dakota. What’s yours?’ She hugged the silent bear tightly, but when she was awakened it was gone. The loss was so traumatic, she did not even gasp when the icy water struck her body.

Being only seven, she could not understand any of it. But her nakedness, the lack of sanitation, the constant cold, the disturbed sleep, the mutilated bear, and the complete lack of human interaction were all aspects of a carefully controlled, extreme trauma program. Even the meager food portions were not chance cruelty. Sugar and protein deprivation starved any rebellious tendency, and the severe limiting of her water intake increased her brain temperature, which disorientated her, and induced hallucinations.

Since there were no windows or clocks there was no way for her to tell day from night. She began to imagine she had been in that terrible place for years. She used to dream of her father coming to her rescue and her return to her mother’s soft, yielding arms, but the memories of her previous life when she had worn mittens and a red coat and had run free in a snow covered field were leaving her fevered brain. A handful left, and even those were fading fast. She was already so weak she could hardly stand unaided, but with the instinct of an animal caught in a mangle, she understood; the men would never stop until she was dead.

So it would have surprised her greatly to know that Schooner Klaus, observing her from his concealed position, saw not a helpless child enduring a slow, torturous death in a steel trap, but an unbelievably dangerous and unpredictable creature - one capable of killing and injuring his team. Perhaps even him, in unimaginably bizarre ways, using nothing more than her mind.

Otherwise, she would not be on his table to learn the meaning of real fear.

Her journey to him had begun with a local newspaper story in Kansas. It claimed a child had stood at her bedroom window, and with psychic force alone held back a rabid Rottweiler from her pet, a wolf cub, until her father had arrived, shotgun in hand. A whole hour later! Even if he allowed fifty-five minutes for small town hot air it remained an astounding feat. Field operatives had been dispatched.

They had been casual in their approach, but not in their detailed report: Celtic ancestry, RH-negative blood group, able to finish other people’s sentences, and numerous accounts of shopkeepers who suddenly developed an irresistible urge to rush out with candy for her as she passed their shops. But most intriguing of all was her nickname - the Locator - an allusion to her uncanny ability to find lost things and people.

In truth, he had not needed the report. He had had only to look at the first long-range photograph of her, eyes gazing fearlessly out at the world, to know instantly: she was special. There would be no hanging about for months while she learned to psychically restrain hamsters dying of thirst from partaking of their water sprouts. That she might even be ‘the one.’ Her participation in the agency’s program had become a foregone conclusion.

Her disappearance had been easily accomplished. An unmarked vehicle. An empty swing. A lone, travelling pedophile, perhaps? He imagined the one-street town’s people, stupid rednecks, kicking the dust, shaking baffled heads and muttering, ‘Damn shame, what happened to the Locator, but why take the wolf cub?’

All the King’s horses and all the King’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty together again.

 - Humpty Dumpty

Dakota’s eyes rolled frantically from one implacable face to the next, begging and begging. How could she know that they had no say in her fate? That they were the most expandable of the twelve that made up her torture team. So many of them had left in body bags that they were nicknamed ‘targets’. In the event that a psychic child was capable of retaliation it was always one of them who suffered the consequences. Their orders were specific and ruthless. They were not to stop until they were given the signal, and they could never move away from the metal table no matter what the circumstances. If for any reason at all they disobeyed either of these two cardinal rules, they would be shot in the head by the Dead Man.

The Dead Man, a superb marksman, sat in a concealed booth to the right of the door. His instructions were chillingly simple: if anyone in the torture chamber moved away from his assigned post or behaved in any way out of the ordinary, he was to shoot them dead. The only person he was not authorized under any circumstances to eliminate was the psychic child. That task was the sole responsibility of the two armed guards located outside the chamber. Their orders, in the event that the small strobe light located on the wall just above the door flashed red, were to open the doors without entering it, and, no matter what they saw, regardless of what anyone else was doing, kill the child.

Unseen by her were also the ECT (electro-convulsive therapy) technician, responsible for controlling the electrical part of the torture, and a highly trained medical person who monitored her vital signs and accordingly administered the optimum dosage from a selection of psychoactive drugs. With subtle changes he could greatly enhance her pain or bring on impressions of confusion and extreme terror. He was also in charge of administering the nerve receptor blockers that made it impossible for her to faint or black out to escape the pain, no matter how horrific it became. At the end of each session he provided the ‘blackness’ by injecting a quick-acting sedative directly into her carotid artery by order of the Eye in the Sky.

Safely located in a separate room a short distance away, the Eye was the unquestioned leader of the team. He alone had access to the fail-safe button and absolute life and death rule over the child’s life. A trained psychologist, he monitored the chamber’s activity via closed-circuit TV, and the brain activity of the psychic child via remote EEG. His commands were issued through electronic reader boards. Schooner Klaus sat down, his movements precise and fluid, and into his voice activated console said, ‘Begin.’

On the screens above his head, his team came alive. The gag was removed from the child’s mouth, the biotech injected her with the necessary chemical cocktail, the ECT man turned his dials, the six targets reached for their specific instruments, and the girl began to scream. Schooner Klaus had a headache and he found it more unpleasant than usual to endure her hoarse screams, but it was as vital to her to experience her own reverberating screams, as was the sight of her spasmodically jerking body on the mirrored ceiling.

Fifteen minutes passed with the girl’s futile shrieks and moans, and Schooner Klaus staring at her impatiently. Fisting his right hand, he tapped it lightly against the rim of the table, a supremely aggressive gesture. Her brain was surely on fire with all the drugs and, yet, she lay there squirming and trying to outwrestle her steel manacles, as if she was without options.

‘Fight back, you little bitch,’ he urged softly.

His eyes drifted away from the screens. The clock told of the passage of another four minutes. His head throbbed. He switched the microphone off and slumped back. Why did she not strike back? If she did not retaliate soon she would die in the process like so many before her.