In The Hour Before Midnight aka The Sicilian Heritage

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I SUPPOSE HE must have died during the night, but I only became aware of it in the heat of the day.

Not that it made much difference, not even the stench of putrefaction. In that place everything died except me, Stacey Wyatt, the great survivor. There had been times when I would have greeted death as a friend, co-operated with him actively, but that was long ago – too long. Now, I waited in a limbo of my own devising, proof against all they could do to me.

I’d been in the Hole for three days now, which was what it was called by prisoner and guard alike – a place of darkness and furnace heat where you rotted in your own filth and died from lack of air.

It was the fourth time I’d been put down since they’d brought me to the labour camp at Fuad, each dose coinciding with one of Major Husseini’s inspections. In the June war he had been one of the thousands whipped in Sinai and left to stumble home through one of the worst deserts on earth. He had seen his command crumble, men die around him by the hundred from thirst and the sun had burned its way into his brain, starting a fire that could never be put out, leaving him with a hatred for Israel which had developed into a kind of paranoia.

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