How to Archer (8 page)

And that’s your
child.
I mean, obviously they’re not still a child when they get brusquely introduced to sex by a stranger they just met in a bar like, an hour ago; they’re a young adult. A young adult with his or her underpants around his or her ankles, hunched over a bong in the back of this guy’s pick-up, and the only even remotely non-appalling thing about the whole situation is the truck has a camper top, the windows of which are illegally—yet mercifully—over-tinted. Because there is a
grammar
school right across the
street,
for God’s sake.

Hang on—I lost my thread a little bit. What are we doing? Oh, right. Torture. Yes.

Torture is one of those things that Americans constantly whine about (e.g., the inhumane treatment of cows), but then they go out and exhibit the exact behavior (e.g., gobbling down a big platter of delicious sliders) that perpetuates the necessity of that thing in the first place.

Americans are repelled by the very thought of their government’s sanctioning torture, and yet they demand to not be blown up by terrorists. But it’s the exact same principle. Except that the cows are now terrorists—a chilling thought in and of itself—and national security is now a steaming plate of hot, juicy mini-burgers. And you can’t have your sliders and eat ’em too, folks.

Also, they don’t actually torture the cows: they just pack them in feedlots, knee-deep in their own excrement, until it’s time to blow a hole in their foreheads with a pneumatic bolt, slam a big steel hook into their hind leg, yank them up into the air, slice them into various steaks, chops, ribs, butts, and rounds, and then macerate whatever’s left over into ground chuck, which is then formed into delicious little patties, grilled with a bit of Vidalia onion and topped with a small slice of cheese and a bread-and-butter pickle, slipped into a tiny steamed bun, and then carried to your table by a smiling, apple-cheeked waitress who’s working her way through college so that one day, God willing, she can become a veterinarian. And thus continues the circle of life.

My point is, I personally don’t torture people.
⁶⁰

The key to resisting interrogation techniques is, as with many things,
mental preparation.

Because have you ever broken a fingernail, way down past the quick? Or gotten an electric shock while using two forks to get a pre-buttered English muffin out of the toaster? Or stubbed your pinky toe
really
badly on the metal leg of your bed frame?
⁶¹

Great. Now imagine a guy using a pair of Vise-Grips to actually pull your fingernails
out,
one at a time. Then imagine being stripped naked, lashed to a set of metal bedsprings, doused with water, and that same guy running a set of jumper cables from a 4000-watt generator directly to your testicles, Then imagine a second guy—the first guy, having just lit a cigarette off your still-smoldering scrotum, is taking a smoke break—using a ball-peen hammer to smash each and every one of your toes into amorphous, pulpy little bloblets.

And those are just things I made up just now. I don’t torture people for a living. But torturers do—hence the name—and they have
countless
ways of inflicting the most unimaginable pain that you could ever possibly imagine. If it were even imaginable. So I don’t care who you are, sooner or later you’re going to tell your torturers
everything
they want to know, whether it’s true or not. And when you do, you won’t care that you’re betraying your friends and colleagues and countrymen. Because you’ll be too busy trying not to look at—with your one remaining eyeball—your other, non-remaining eyeball. Which is staring up at you from the gore-spattered floor.

You are going to talk.

And your torturer—if he’s good at his job, which he probably is; there’s probably tons of competition—will make this very clear to you at the very beginning. As he removes his woolen tunic, rolls up his shirtsleeves, and hands the assistant torturer his wristwatch:

You are going to talk.

He will repeat this fact a few moments later. As he lays all the various and horrifying tools of his black trade on a rolling cart built for the express purpose of torture-tool-holding:

You are going to talk.

He will repeat this fact a few moments later. As he lights a cigarette with a hammer-and-sickle-embossed Zippo. Which he then snaps shut for dramatic effect and tells you, once again:

You. Are going. To talk.

And he is absolutely right. So why go through all that blinding, soul-destroying pain from which you will never recover—physically, let alone mentally—when you’re just going to blab your head off anyway? Just go ahead and tell him whatever the hell he wants to know.
Now,
before he slides a rectal thermometer up your urethra and smashes your dick with a tire iron, filling your now-ruined penis with a thousand tiny shards of glass and a shitload of mercury.

Because
now
is when that
mental preparation
will prove itself so invaluable. Because if your torturers don’t shoot you in the back of the skull when it’s over (which they probably will, which is even less reason to sweat all this stuff), you’re going to have to deal with a
ton
of guilt for being responsible for the deaths of so many of your friends and colleagues and countrymen. But because you have
mentally prepared
yourself for the weight of this crushing guilt, you will be able to walk out of that torture chamber with your head held high. You will walk out like a man.

Because your testicles are still attached your body.

Given the overall tone of my writing style, this may sound like I’m just being a dick:

Don’t get caught.

But it’s actually the first thing they tell you at the ISIS Escape and Evasion seminar. And it’s actually very sound advice: it is much, much easier to
avoid
capture than to escape once you
are
captured. And even though you planned ahead and inserted a tactical suppository into your pre-buttered rectum, in all likelihood, you won’t be able to rely on it. Because thirty seconds into your first torture session (see above), you’re probably going to fear-poop it out.

But sometimes, often through no real fault of his own, an intelligence agent simply cannot avoid capture. Strong winds may cause his parachute jump to miss his drop zone, for example. The smallest mistake in a regional accent of a foreign language, or perhaps even a tiny detail in the exquisite cut of his suit, may betray the agent’s true identity to an alert and well-trained enemy agent. Or he might just blab it out when he’s drunk in a bar somewhere.

The point is far better men than you have been exposed, captured, tortured, and summarily executed in a damp cellar by a fat, drunken NKVD noncom, whose bonus for putting a 7.62mm slug into their brain stem was a liter of lukewarm potato vodka. Far, far better men.

So if you are captured, try not to beat yourself up. Someone else will do it for you.

Oh, and no matter what anyone tells you, do
not
bury your parachute at the drop zone. Because—especially if you’ve parachuted behind the Iron Curtain, where even mundane items like soap or hot cabbage can be a luxury—do you have any idea how laid you can get with eighty yards of
silk?

The topic of wilderness survival could probably be a book unto itself. In fact, I bet it already has been. And since I pretty generally get to pick my assignments, and since I pretty generally pick assignments which require me to go somewhere non-wildernessy like Monte Carlo or Gstaad or the Netherlands Antilles, which means I pretty generally don’t spend a ton of time in the wilderness, why don’t we just leave this topic to one of those books? I’m sure anything with “wilderness” or “survival” or any combination of those two words in the title will be perfectly fine for what you’re trying to do. Which is apparently starve to death in a forest.

First and foremost, before we continue I’d like to make one thing perfectly clear: A martini is made with gin. If your martini is made with vodka, it is not, in fact, a martini. And odds are that you have a vagina.

There. Now we can move on. To the drinking. Of which many of you readers may think that I do too much, And I can’t honestly say that opinion is entirely unfair. But what many people fail to consider is that a large part of my drinking is done professionally, not socially. It’s a very real, very important part of my job description. (As the world’s greatest secret agent.)

Because I never know, for example, when I’ll be required to down shot after shot of pepper vodka with a smoke-and-body-odor-filled roomful of KGB agents while also remembering that I’m supposed to be speaking Russian.
⁶³
And so yes, I drink a lot. But only because I need to keep my alcohol tolerance at the highest level humanly possible.

And also because I’m pretty sure if I stopped drinking for even one day, the accumulated hangover would probably kill me.

And with that sobering thought in mind—if you will excuse the pun, in what up until now has been an incredible, if not life-changing, read—here’s a list of my favorite cocktail recipes.
⁶⁴

Please note that the following are
cocktail
recipes. You won’t find anything about wine in this section because, not to be-labor the point, I don’t have a vagina.

I mean, yes, obviously, I will drink wine if somebody hands me a glass full of it. Red, white, rosé, even the lowly white Zinfandel: it doesn’t matter, I will drink it. Sparkling wine: champagne, cava, or prosecco—yes, any and all that I can get my hands on. Sweet wine: no joke, a lot of times for lunch I will just go sit on a bench somewhere and drink an entire bottle of port.

I also didn’t include
highball
recipes, because a highball is technically just spirits and a mixer. And if you need a recipe for a scotch and soda, you probably shouldn’t be drinking anyway, because you’re severely developmentally disabled. And think these words are ants.

I also didn’t include recipes for my favorite
unmixed drinks
—I’m a pretty big fan of neat bourbon and scotch, for example—because even though by this point I’m really just trying to pad the word count, for those drinks you just pour them into a glass, Or your mouth. Or a high-heeled shoe. Or a woman’s navel. Or your navel. Really, the only limit is your imagination.

A final note about cocktails: You probably assume it’s important to use only the highest-quality spirits. In this assumption you would be absolutely correct. But it is
equally
important to use only the highest-quality mixers, ingredients, and assorted garnishes. Why use a thirty-year-old Garrafeira porto for a Porto flip, and then mix it with a nonorganic, non-cage-free egg yolk?