But the killers came for me first.

I was in the exercise yard. It was a large square of dying grass and broken asphalt. It was surrounded by a fence topped with barbed wire. The fence was surrounded by a high concrete wall. At the corners of the wall there were guard towers. In the towers there were men with rifles, watching our every move.

Here, below, on the grass and asphalt, the prisoners moved in their gray uniforms. Some were in shirtsleeves, but most wore gray overcoats and black woolen watch caps to ward off the snow-flecked cold. Each coat or shirt had a white strip with the prisoner’s number on it sewn over the left breast. Each had the prisoner’s name stenciled over the right breast. Other than that, they were all gray.

The men’s faces, on the other hand, were black and white and brown. Their eyes were hard and watchful. There was rage and meanness and fear etched into the tight lines of their cheeks and foreheads. They gathered around the benches and free weights on one corner of the asphalt or played basketball on the half-court, or played catch on the grass or just walked and talked or just sat and stared.

Guards moved among them, men in blue shirts and black pants. They carried no weapons, just heavy walkie-talkies hooked to their belts. The guards watched the prisoners, but the prisoners didn’t watch the guards. The prisoners watched one another. And some of them, I knew, were watching me, waiting for their chance to attack.

I was on one of the weight benches. I was doing presses with a light bar, not trying to bulk up or anything, just trying to keep the flexibility and speed I used in my karate training. The men all around me were going for the big-muscle stuff, lifting hundreds of pounds. They worked in grim silence.