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Hyperion, Chapters 1 and 2
Posted on October 9, 2022 by adrianleverkuhnwrites
All things being equal, this whole writing thing is sort of fun, and funny, too. You go where the imagination takes you and then you try to put thought to paper (or whatever you call this). Hence this story. I've been thinking about it and outlining little plot lines for quite a while, so after putting Harry to bed (for a bit, anyway) this just started to pour out onto the page/screen/whatever-this-is, and here's the first draft of the first two chapters, ready for a laugh. Enjoy.
[Jimi Hendrix \\ The Wind Cries Mary]
The Pony Express
USSF Bunker Hill 12 February 2115
As the Orion-class tug maneuvered alongside the bulk ore carrier, one docking arm reached out from the ore processing ship and latched onto the tug's primary docking collar; two additional arms grabbed an ore container. Once attached, and after hard-seals were confirmed on the primary chute, loading belts reached into the container, and almost immediately the tug's load of raw mineral ores spun into the ore ship's processing intake. The tug's entire haul would be offloaded within a few hours; once complete, the tug's crew would board a shuttle and head down to the Martian surface for a few days of R&R – before shuttling back up to their tug and heading back out to the asteroid belt.
Fleets of space-going tugs were constantly shuttling out to and returning from the belt, the unprocessed ore they transported being used for the massive construction and colonization projects on both the Moon and Mars. Tugs moved out to the belt at one half standard G, assaying potential targets en route. Once a target asteroid was identified, and after confirmation that no other outfit had staked a prior claim, the tug would register its claim and make its approach to the rock. After the tug was aligned, typically grappling hooks secured the asteroid and pulled the rock close to the tug's empty bulk ore container. The mining crew would transfer to the surface of the rock and begin the hard work of identifying mineral veins suitable for extraction and then guide the tug's extraction bits into place, with the rough ore extracted and transferred to an empty bulk ore container. Within a matter of hours the tug, with a fresh load of unrefined ore, would be en route to one of a dozen processing ships stationed between the belt and Mars, and once the asteroid's ores were roughly separated and processed this semi-refined material would be reloaded into the tug's container. Once reloaded, the tug would proceed to one of six primary orbital processing facilities – and there were currently two each around the Moon, Mars, and – of course – Earth.
Once docked at one of the primary processing ships, the asteroid's semi-refined ores would be further pulverized and its constituent minerals assayed and weighed; payment would then be agreed upon and the tug would drop into a parking orbit just off the much larger processing ship. The tug's crew would typically head down to the surface for a few days of clinically mandated debauchery and then be on their way back out to the asteroid belt to collect more rock. The work was dangerous and the pay was outrageously high; because of the high pay absolutely no androids were tolerated.
Captain Denton Ripley watched as the latest tug disengaged from the processing ship from the vantage of the Captain's chair on board the USSF Bunker Hill, which was currently on-station five kilometers 'above' the action; Bunker Hill was orbiting Mars, and had been for years, and at the moment the rusty-red planet was just 1800 kilometers 'below' his ship. Ripley watched this latest arrival assume a standard parking formation with the ore ship from Bunker Hill's flight operations bridge, located port side forward, yet only when the tug was well away from the ore ship did he relax. Now he turned his attention to an inbound Space Force cruiser just lining-up to sling-shot around Mars, the trajectory on his plot showing the USNSF Stavridis heading for Gateway Alpha. Though the ship was not yet visible to the naked eye from this distance, traffic control had alerted the third shift watch commander and she had picked up the cruiser on deep space scans within minutes of her arrival in the solar system. As Stavridis was an "unscheduled" transit everyone was paying close attention, because unscheduled transits usually meant trouble, in one form or another. Besides, Stavridis was one of the few ships fitted with the still top secret Alderson drive, so she was one rumored to be one of the first ships in the fleet capable of faster-than-light travel, and that fact alone made this transit a Very Big Deal.
"Why are you in such a goddamn hurry," Ripley whispered as he watched the updated track on C-I-Cs central display.
Commander Louise Brennan, the Bunker Hill's navigator, had worked out the cruiser's track as soon as it appeared on long range scans. Stavridis was still under heavy acceleration too, meaning her crew had been strapped to their gel-filled G-couches for days on end, and they would have to further endure exceptionally heavy G-forces when Stavridis made her braking burn to enter Earth orbit. Stavridis was carrying too much delta-V for a direct approach to the Gateway, yet even at their current velocity it would take them another four days to reach Earth using the standard published orbital approach. Even so, at least Stavridis's crew would be able to communicate with the Gateway without the interminable time delays experienced when out beyond the Oort Cloud.
Ripley was really beginning to hate this ship – the Bunker Hill – even though she was 'his' – for the moment, anyway. And he was really beginning to wonder why he hadn't taken early retirement to work for The Company – as the Weyland-Yutani Consortium was colloquially known these days. Yes, the pay in the Space Force was decent enough, relatively speaking anyway, and the chow wasn't too bad. Still, babysitting a ship like this was a more than perfect job for any newer model android, not an Academy graduate with four years of deep space time under his belt – and one battle, too. Even with a human crew of ten onboard, he often went days without talking to another person. A real human being, that is.
And it wasn't that he disliked androids. They were likable enough – in their way. Still, the mass revolts staged by First Generation Davids had exacted a terrible toll in both trust and human life, a breach of trust that in human terms had not yet, and might not ever be, fully repaired. And though true enough, both the Walter as well as the latest Gordon-class models had eventually been well received on the lunar colonies – after a few years, anyway. Even this ship had a handful of Walters onboard, handling everything from reactor operations to exterior damage control duties.
Yet there was also one Gordon on board, too, and its presence was still considered somewhat controversial, perhaps because this 'Gordon' had been permanently assigned to him, and had been since it arrived. 'His' Gordon looked like every other unit manufactured to date, right down to its red hair, green eyes and mottled freckles – only its moral subroutines were considered tighter, and its astronavigation capabilities had been deemed second to none. It played chess and loved movies, especially American westerns from the mid-twentieth century – an affinity Ripley did not share – and 'Gordon' was almost always by Ripley's side, a fact of life that was driving the ship's executive officer more than a little mad.
As Ripley peered into the infinite, Stavridis's drive flared right on schedule, the massive fusion powered ion drive suddenly appearing in the vast night as she began her braking burn. He thought, perhaps as a prank, that he should call and ask their master if the crew was enjoying the G-forces. Then he measured the flaring drive – because the light bloom was much bigger than simulations had predicted.
"Gordon? Did we just see an unexpected acceleration?"
"Yes, Captain. Her deceleration just increased from 3.2Gs to 4.05 – I would say they are in quite a hurry."
Ripley shook his head. At 4.05Gs standing up would be impossible; even lifting your head from the acceleration couch could prove fatal. "Goddamn…but I'd sure hate to be on that ship right now," he said…to no one in particular.
"Captain?" Gordon said. "There are currently two tugs inbound, both requesting permission to approach the Dandelion."
"How many processing bays are currently operational?"
"Four, sir. Two will remain closed during the current overhaul cycle, and for another 16 hours and 12 minutes. There are currently two Sandoval-class tugs offloading water-ice from Europa; both should decouple and begin their return cycle to Jupiter within two standard hours."
"Approach control? Go ahead and route the tugs to bays one and five. Anyone else lining-up out there?"
"No, sir," the Bunker Hill's traffic controller replied, "the next arrival is still 18 hours out."
"Tactical plot, please? Up-pole view will do for now."
"Yessir, polar-up view."
His stomach growled as the polar plot came up on the large central display – one more time. 'Yeah…a goddamn monkey could do this job…' he muttered to himself. That was the old joke, anyway.
By the time the two latest arrivals were docked and unloading their cargo, all thought of the Stavridis and of her speeding past had long since drifted away. The next scheduled shuttle was coming up from the surface, and that meant one more load of drunk, hungover Spicers would soon depart Mars orbit, making room for another load of new arrivals that would head down to Elon City for a couple days of sin-drenched fun in the sun. Such as the sun was out here, anyway.
His eyes opened, and the pain in his skull seemed to explode.
"Captain to the bridge," he heard over the intercom. He pushed himself up and rubbed his eyes, then he rinsed his mouth with Ora-cleanse and ran a brush through his hair before he slipped into his compression-suit. With that routine maintenance out of the way he opened the door to his cabin – and of course found Gordon waiting for him.
"High priority comms from Gateway, Captain Ripley," it said.
"How long was I out?"
"Four hours twenty minutes of REM sleep recorded and logged, Captain."
"Lead on. I'll follow you," Ripley said, and he watched Gordon pull himself along in zero-G to the Comms suite just off the main cabin being used as the Combat Information Center, or CIC, on Bunker Hill. Ripley placed his face up to the retina scan and opened his right eye as wide as he could, and after the scanner did its thing the door slid open. "Wait here," he commanded Gordon as he pushed off the ceiling and drifted into the little room.
"Sir, I really should…" Gordon said.
"You'll wait here for now."
"Yessir."
Ripley pulled himself into the radio shack and settled into the lone chair; he inserted his drive and entered his security code then placed his eye at the redundant retina-scan, opening the encrypted video channel to Gateway Alpha. It took a few seconds to establish the connection, and after that the main COMMs screen opened.
"Denton? Good to see you," the Naval Space Force CnC said, and a relieved Ripley smiled.
"Good to see you too, Admiral Stanton."
"Looks like we might have trouble brewing, something to do with the Covenant mission."
"Sir?"
"I see you were briefed on the mission profile during your third year at Annapolis, so I assume you're still somewhat familiar with the ship's systems, her crew and cargo?"
"Yessir. Those company ships aren't particularly unusual. What's going on, sir?"
"What do you recall about the Anomaly Reporting Systems the Company installed?"
"The ship's computer is programmed, if certain pre-established criteria are met, to deploy beacon transmitters with the current sit-rep encoded. I think it was originally thought of as a type of combined data and incident recorder."
Stanton nodded. "Covenant's computer has, apparently, deployed two such beacons, and I'm sending the contents to you now. Stavridis picked up the signals and downloaded the packets you'll receive. She sent them as soon as she was within range, and she's inbound to refit and refuel, but it'll take us a month to get her docked and that work started, and another week or so to get her ready to go again."
"Yessir?"
"So…I'm promoting you to Rear Admiral and sending you to Hyperion, effective date of transfer is this date. I know Ames is going to be pissed, and I know it's been a while since you worked the sims on her, but you're the most senior officer available now, and you are the only experienced captain I have that's made a return trip using both the Drive and the Field. We're going to leave Captain Ames nominally in command of the ship but I want you to take your current XO and your entire CIC with you. You'll take your flag to Hyperion as soon as we can work out the transfer orbit."
"Stavridis will join Hyperion and Patton as soon as we can turn her around."
Ripley flinched when he heard that. Sending two cruisers to support Hyperion suggested this was more than a simple recon or rescue mission. "Alright, sir. Understood."
"Denton," the admiral said, his voice suddenly less rigid, "we've got indications of a signal of unknown origin on a habitable planet near Covenant's course. She diverted from her planned course to that planet, and her captain did so without authorization, and apparently there's been some damage sustained en route and no one seems to know what's going on. We don't know what they found out there or what they're dealing with in the aftermath, but there are thousands of colonists on board and, well, you know how it is. The company wants to protect their investment so we get the call. Anyway, there's more to it than that, so read the summary as soon as you can, and let us know when you can get underway."
"Will do, sir."
"Oh. Six new middies have been assigned to Hyperion. Think you can handle 'em?"
"Yes, of course. Anything else, sir?"
"No, that's it for now."
The screen faded and Ripley made sure the encoded message was downloaded to his personal drive, then he ejected the drive and cleared the COMMs cache before he switched back to the command net.
"XO, captain here, ready the shuttle for transfer to Gateway Echo. XO, you and CIC will prepare to transfer to Hyperion as soon as your replacement crew arrives."
"Sir, there's a shuttle upbound from the surface with our replacements, and your promotion is now on the books. Congratulations, Admiral."
"Thanks, Carl. Glad you're coming with us. Now…let's get a move on."
When Ripley opened the door he saw his Gordon waiting out there and shook his head. "I assume you already know what that was all about?"
"Of course, Admiral," Gordon said, smiling benignly.
A thoroughly annoyed Admiral Ripley nodded as he passed the android. "Well then, let's go."
USNSF Hyperion 5 May 2115
US Naval Space Force Hyperion was, true to her namesake, a creature of light destined to roam deep space. Huge by the standards of her day, Hyperion was three hundred feet long and almost lozenge-shaped. Three decks ran the complete length of her hull, and the ship's complement included both Space Force and Naval astronauts as well as one company of Marines. Forty Walter units were assigned to the ship's engineering spaces, and the ship also maintained a small contingent of xenobiologists and astrophysicists. Four Gordon units were being assigned as personal assistants to the ship's command crew, and they were now en route from the Gateway. And, as C-in-C Stanton had intimated, Hyperion would have a fresh contingent of Naval Academy Midshipmen on hand for this voyage, this expedition being the 'middies' first real experience in deep space. The middies, Ripley saw as he looked over the manifest, ranged in age from fourteen to sixteen earth standard years; only two of them, he noted, were old enough to shave.
But the simple fact of the matter remained: living and working in space was an occupation for the young—and the unattached. The nature of long duration space flight meant it was simply impossible to marry and start a family, as most of the long range ships were so-called cruisers manned by career crews of either Space Force or Navy officers and ratings. Because most of these ships voyages took place within the solar system, with trips as far out as Neptune not unusual, crews were typically out years at a time. Yet someone, somewhere, had – once upon a time – decided that crews should be split almost evenly between men and women, presumably taking into account the biological necessity of pair-bonding, even during long duration space voyages.
Ripley looked at the crew – his crew – as they scrambled around the bridge. Many had come with him from Bunker Hill, his first command since The Battle of Alpha Centauri, but as Hyperion was for all intents and purposes a new ship she didn't have an existing crew on board. The engineering spaces were manned by Walter units, though still supervised by human officers and assisted by human ratings, and there were also a few Walter units scattered about the ship's complement, mainly in the astronavigation and damage control sections. These non-human crew members were, of course, unconcerned with interpersonal relationships.
But right now, looking over the bridge – his bridge – he had to shake his head. Men were strutting around with huffed up chests and the women up here were batting their eyelashes like semaphores, and the entire bridge deck seemed drenched in pheromones. Maybe these rituals were just the way it would always be – where humans were concerned, anyway – but when he read over naval histories from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries these types of issues had never come up. At all. Now, as the admiral in command of a small task force headed into unknown circumstances, he'd have to watch over three ships spilling over with all kinds of interpersonal drama, let alone the lingering hostility many humans felt about androids after the mass betrayals that occurred when David units turned out to be dangerously paranoid psychopaths.
Yet Hyperion wasn't really his ship. Captain Lucille Ames had been aboard since her keel was laid on earth, and she'd been on board ever since. She knew the ship better than anyone else, even the engineers who had designed the ship, and from the moment Ripley stepped aboard Hyperion's crew had constantly let him know exactly how she felt about the situation. This was her ship, she was in command, and she'd fight the ship when and if hostilities broke out. As far as Lucy Ames was concerned, Ripley didn't belong here and she resented his presence. Period. And apparently when she learned a Gordon unit had been assigned to shadow her, she had come completely unhinged; she fired off an Urgent//Eyes Only dispatch to Admiral Stanton letting him know exactly how she felt, and so far the dispatch had not been returned.
Ripley, of course, knew her only too well. He'd known her since Annapolis. She was two years behind him but was regarded as a hellion soon after she arrived, a fire-breathing beer-guzzling genius who also just happened to play middle linebacker on the football team. No one fucked around with her after her plebe year, either. Not even her hand-to-hand combat instructors. Built like a brick shit house, she was all Navy and pure Navy and a born engineer. At a mandatory dance her plebe year another cadet had had the temerity to ask her to dance; he went to the hospital with a concussion. Now, when Ames came crashing down a passageway, enlisted ratings dove out of her way—because anything was preferable to facing her wrath.
And as much as Ripley hated to admit it, she was a good officer. Scrupulously fair and usually a quiet soul, she was slow to reach her boiling point—so while it was fair to say she didn't suffer fools in her presence for very long, she rewarded loyalty and performance of duties 'above and beyond' mere competence. She was, in other words, an ideal ship's captain. His problem, in as much as one existed, was how to let her run her ship while not letting her interfere with the overall success of the mission.
He'd been aboard for a half hour and she'd still not met him on the bridge, and while he was aware that was a serious breech of protocol he didn't want to jump to any conclusions—yet. So he waited. He sent his Gordon unit to his day cabin to make sure all the mission parameters had been downloaded, and then sent his personal crew to his cabin to get his things stowed and his galley up and running. And he waited some more. He watched the bridge crew running diagnostics on the suite of NAV computers, and he listened as the COMMs tech tuned the antenna array to beacon Terra One. And he waited.
Then he heard her. Coming down passageways and up the stairs from the engineering spaces. Then he heard the surprised whelps of ratings diving for cover as she made her way onto the bridge, the Marine on duty snapping to attention as she entered the room and made for her chair.
She was wearing khakis, he saw. And she was covered with lubricating grease, while her right forearm was bleeding from an inches long gash. Yet as soon as she saw Ripley she snapped to attention and fired off a classic Academy salute, which Ripley returned. With a smile.
"Lucy. Good to see you again."
She walked over and extended her right hand. "Denton. How's it hangin'?"
"You'd better get some Duraplast on that arm, then maybe you could buy me a sandwich."
She looked around, puzzled. "How long have you been here?" she asked, her face now turning red, steam coming from her ears.
"Oh, about an hour," he replied, wondering who's neck she was about the snap like a twig.
"Oh, Lord. Sorry. The word didn't reach us. The COMMs mast failed to retract the last two times we had it up through the Field. The hydraulic actuators fail every time."
"They know about this in Norfolk?"
"Yessir. I think we've found the problem. Best guess is we need the old isolators, but the weenies down in engineering disagree."
"So of course you just installed the old isolators?"
Ames shuffled around bashfully – and she was good at it, too – then she looked up and grinned: "How'd you know, sir?"
"In case no one's told you, you need a shower," Ripley grimaced, putting her back in her place. "I'll be up here when you finish up."
"Very good, Admiral," Ames said as she turned towards her in-port cabin, her feathers defiantly ruffled.
"Still cute," Ripley muttered under his breath – as he watched her slink away. "And she still knows it, too."
Hyperion was also only the second main battle-cruiser equipped with both the Alderson Drive and its associated Langston Field, and as these were still considered highly classified systems not even the middies knew much about them. And while he was qualified on both the theory and practical operational characteristics of both, Ripley had zero captain-in-command time – hence Ames had been retained as captain, though perhaps because she was the only expert available. Still, she'd been captain during Hyperion's trials, and that traditionally meant she'd be ship's master on her first operational run, but Ames and her intentionally brusque manner had already ruffled more than a few feathers in Norfolk. To say she wasn't particularly popular down there was an understatement.
His Gordon unit slipped up from behind and stood there quietly, waiting for Ripley to acknowledge his presence.
"Everything loaded?" Ripley asked.
"Yessir. And core systems have been updated. There is also a new download concerning Covenant."
"And I assume that as it was marked Eyes Only and addressed to me that you've already read the material?"
"Of course, sir."
Ripley shook his head and sighed.
"The last shuttle will dock at 2200 GMT, and I believe the midshipmen will be onboard."
"Well, if they're not they won't be joining us this time out."
"Yessir. Your cabin is operational now. Dinner is scheduled for 2000 hours."
"Did you get the invitations out to the Captain and X-O?"
"What about the new Medical Officer? Is he onboard yet?"
"He is a she, and no, Doctor Sheffield will be arriving with the Midshipmen."
"What's the latest on Stavridis and Patton?"
"Patton is standing by and ready to sail. Stavridis should depart the Gateway 72 hours after that."
"Very well. Send my compliments to Patton's master and invite him to breakfast at 0800. Add our Medical Officer and the middies to the invite list, and we'll sail as soon as Patton's master is back on his ship."
"That's her ship, Admiral."
"Yessir. Her name is Caruthers. Judith Caruthers, Class of '09, summa cum laude with a double major in Celestial Mechanics and Quantum Physics, sailing team and combat pistol team noted, company commander her senior year."
"Don't remember her," Ripley said, noting he'd been a senior – and a company commander – when she was a plebe. "Pull up an image, would you?"
Caruthers' image popped up on a nearby screen and Ripley turned and looked it over, shrugging when he still failed to recognize her.
"She's from the Mobile, Alabama area, Admiral. Class valedictorian McGill Catholic High School, interests during that period included sailing and astronomy. Honors in Chemistry and scored five on the AP History exam, and she led the debate team her senior year."
Ripley studied her picture while his Gordon spoke, then he asked: "She married?"
"No sir. And no current attachments noted."
"Interesting choice. I wonder why Stanton chose her for Patton?"
His Gordon looked away as his CPU accessed the relevant information, then he turned to Ripley again. "Political patrons in the senate noted and appear to have played a role in her selection, Admiral, but she is generally considered highly qualified."
"What was the topic of her senior thesis?"
"Fluid mechanics and displacement theory of nano flares in the solar corona."
"Pull a hard copy and print it out for me. I want to read it before she arrives."
"It is two hundred and ten pages, sir."
Ripley sighed as he looked at the time on the display by Caruthers' image, then he nodded. "I'll need a big pot of coffee at dinner. And ask Carson to make it strong, would you?"
His eyes burned and his mind felt numb but he laid down Caruthers' thesis at 0400 and closed his eyes for a few hours of rack time. When his Gordon came in at 0700 he snapped to and made his way to the shower while Gordon ran through the Morning List.
"Reactors were tested to ninety percent of rated output for an hour, and after shut down hydrogen stores were replenished. Shuttles have been secured on the hanger deck, and both have been fueled. All optics on the ship's laser cannon have been cleaned and their generators serviced. Patton's gig will dock at 0745 and your in-port cabin is ready. And Captain Ames wanted to know if she could join us."
"Not necessary. I'm sure she has other matters to attend to."
"Excuse me, Admiral, but I think she wanted to attend," his Gordon hinted.
"Very well. Advise that if her duties allow she would of course be welcome." Ripley shaved, making sure the vacuum attachment sucked up all the stubble, then he 'brushed his teeth' with a sonic brush. Carson had already laid out his in-port uniform so he was able to dress quickly, and when he appeared ship-shape he made his way to the bridge 'to show the flag' before he returned to his in-port cabin.
No space was ever wasted on the sea-going warships of earlier eras, and that maxim now applied doubly so on space-going craft, from cargo ships to rock haulers to the new breed of warships. Everything on these latest warships was designed to take on the operational needs of the moment, from routine transits to 'fighting the ship' to damage control, and the Admiral's In Port Cabin was no exception to this rule. The main in-port table was embedded in the 'floor' and was raised hydraulically when needed, yet the table could also pivot and seal off a wall of viewing ports if the ships was battle-damaged, while the laser units used to heat coffee and other fluids could be swapped out for the lasers in handguns. About the only single purpose items on Hyperion were the ship's Alderson Drive and Langston Field Generators, and of course the ship's main drive and fuel tanks.
But now Ripley surveyed his in-port cabin over the video link with bemused satisfaction. The table was set for twelve and all the ship's personalized china had already been placed, with the ship's name in the 12 o'clock position at each place-setting. Carson had set out place-names and three pitchers of fresh squeezed orange juice were already on the table, while the middies were already clustered by the view ports staring at the moon as it arced in a lazy circle beneath the ship.
When Captains Ames and Caruthers walked in Carson called the room to 'Attention' and only then did Ripley enter – from the entrance off his main cabin. With this bit of ceremonial nonsense out of the way he asked everyone to take a seat, and he smiled when he realized Carson had placed the middies on his left and right, three by three, so he knew he'd have to babysit them, at least for a little while, before he could turn his attention to Caruthers. The middies were typically the sons and daughters of the political classes, or at the very least the politically very well connected, and their 'job' while assigned to the Hyperion group would be to attend to duties that would help prepare them for one of the service academies. A Walter unit was nominally in charge of their academic studies while assigned to the ship, and 'he' was currently standing next to Ripley's Gordon unit.
"Admiral?" Yukio Matsushima said politely, "may I ask you a question, please?"
Ripley turned to the girl, trying to remember her portfolio. Fourteen years old and from Hokkaido, what he remembered most was that her IQ was 244, an almost unheard of score that placed her among the brightest humans ever tested.
"We have not yet been told our destination, or how long we may be away from Earth. Are we permitted to know this information now?"
He smiled and looked at Captain Ames. "Captain, care to answer this one?"
Ames nodded. "Yes, of course, Admiral. Yukio, we will be away for at about two years. When we leave this solar system our first destination will be Capella, in the constellation Auriga. I'm sorry, but you look puzzled?"
Matsushima nodded, for she was indeed quite puzzled. "Capella?" she said, her voice strong but full of wonder. "But that is…approximately…fifty light years distant. How is this so?"
"It's 42.9 light years distant, and this is possible because our ships are equipped with the Alderson Drive."
"The…what?" Hans Genscher said, with one eyebrow arched quizzically. Genscher was from Bonn and came from a long line of diplomats; he was also a gifted mathematician and a patient astrophotographer who already had a comet discovery to his credit. "Are you saying this ship has a faster than light drive?"
Ripley smiled and looked to Captain Caruthers. "Care to take this one, Judith?" he said casually, trying to break the ice a little.
Caruthers looked at Ripley and nodded, a little surprised the Admiral had addressed her by name and not by rank. "About thirty years ago a NASA physicist postulated that electro-magnetic lines exist between certain spectral classes of stars, notably including G-type stars. A probe was devised and sent to test this hypothesis, but the first difficulty discovered was that these lines most likely form between the corona and the chromosphere, so there was no way for the probe to reach the supposed point. Work began on a field that would allow for brief incursions into the chromosphere…?"
"What?!" cried Genscher. "Do you mean actually into the sun's atmosphere? But the temperatures involved are…?"
"Yes, they are," Caruthers said – patiently – still smiling despite the interruption. "In fact, the ship's Langston Field can handle temperatures up to eight thousand degrees celsius for about a half hour, which is usually sufficient to locate the Langston Threshold and the make the Jump."
"The jump?" Matsushima asked.
Ripley decided to take this one: "That's right. The ship jumps from star to star, and it does so literally in zero-time. The sensation you'll experience is very disconcerting, too, ranging from extreme nausea to debilitating confusion. In rare cases crippling psychotic episodes result, but there's no way to predict such a result. More troubling still is that we've found the ship's computers simply can't handle the transition. They instantly go into safe mode and reboot, and therein lies the biggest problem. When we jump we will arrive in Capella's chromosphere, and yet we'll still have the accumulated heat of our own sun stored in the Field – but then we'll be adding even more heat to the Field from Capella's chromosphere. And, as Captain Caruthers mentioned, we can handle such extreme temperatures for a total half hour duration, even less if the temperature is higher, so we have to get in and find the Langston Point, make the jump and then get out of Dodge before our Field collapses, and we have to do this while the ship's computers are down – and while some of us are seriously messed up. Any questions?"
"Sounds fun," Paul Anderson said, but even so grinning like a fool. Anderson too was only fourteen years old but he was easily the smartest kid of the bunch. He was from Seattle and came from a long line of computer scientists, and as his mother was currently serving in the US Senate he was considered very-very important. Ripley had wondered why Anderson had been billeted to such a high risk mission until he recalled Anderson's grandfather had been one of the NASA astronauts assigned to the first manned Mars mission.
"Well," Ripley said, "we'll see how much fun you think it was after we finish the first jump."
"How long will it take to get to our sun?" Genscher asked.
"About two months, and we'll be accelerating at a steady 1.1G the entire trip – and once there we'll enter a wide equatorial orbit around the sun. The Field will be up by then and absorbing heat, so we time our de-orbit burn to enter the sun's corona – and hit the Langston Point – at a fairly high velocity."
"Like how fast?" Matsushima said, her eyes wide open now.
"Oh, no too fast," Ripley smiled. "Around 25,000 meters per second."
"But that's…almost 56,000 miles per hour," Anderson grinned as he worked through the implications. "So let me get this straight, what you're sayin' is we're going to dive into the sun at 25,000 meters per second while aiming for a point inside the…oh…just how big is this point, anyway?"
"It varies. The smallest we've measured was less than a mile in diameter; a hundred is the largest we've recorded – but they all fluctuate a bit."
"Fluctuate?" Anderson moaned, swallowing hard.
"How rough is the atmosphere inside the corona?" Thomas Standing Bull said.
Ripley looked at Ames again and nodded. "The ship's Langston Field," she said, "will attenuate the G-forces somewhat, but you can expect displacements in the five to seven G range. Accordingly, everyone will be strapped into acceleration chairs long before we enter the sun."
Standing Bull nodded, but still he looked concerned. "Admiral, you stated that these lines exist between stars, but are they naturally occurring?"
Ripley crossed his hands over his lap and nodded, then he looked the boy in the eye and spoke as honestly as he could, given the political circumstances. "There is disagreement on that point, Thomas." Standing Bull was a Lakota Sioux and by heritage was a warrior, and after reading his dossier Ripley had decided to take the boy under his wing. "If they were naturally occurring there ought to be such lines between all G-class stars, but that's proven to not be the case. One of our mission parameters is to locate and map as many new Langston Points as we can."
"If I may," Genscher interrupted, "but how many known pairs have been mapped?"
Ripley nodded to Caruthers. "There are currently twenty five known Pairs with one Point located in our own sun," she explained. "Most are oriented towards the galactic core," she added.
"Has stellar drift been accounted for?" Standing Bull asked.
"I'm not sure where you're going with this?" Caruthers replied, now grinning in expectation.
"Well," Thomas said, "if a given star has drifted radially relative to the galactic core, if the Point remains fixed inside the star one could assume the lines are a naturally occurring phenomenon. If, on the other hand, a star has drifted and the Point has remained anchored in space, that would imply that the lines are a construct."
"Very good, Thomas," Ripley sighed. "That is the center of contention, or the source of disagreement I alluded to. And that is also why any talk of the Drive and Field is still classified and not permitted beyond the ship."
"Understood, Admiral," Standing Bull said.
"Each of you will be assigned to shadow a command officer," he said to the middies. "Your duties will include taking notes and writing down any questions you have. Your homework assignments will include finding the answers to your questions in the ship's library. Beyond that, the rule of thumb on board is quite simple: don't speak unless spoken to, unless speaking out will prevent an accident or save a life. Understood?"
They understood.
"Mister Genscher and Miss Underwood will accompany Captain Caruthers to Patton."
"Yessir," they replied.
"Mister Anderson and Miss Taylor, you're to head over to Stavridis as soon as she joins us. Until then you'll shadow our XO and the Chief Engineer."
"Yessir!"
"Miss Matsushima and Mister Standing Bull will remain on Hyperion until we reach Capella. Any questions?"
"No sir!"
"Well then, let's finish our breakfast and get underway," Ripley said as he pushed back from the table and stood. "Thomas, you're with me. Let's go look over the Combat Information Center."
One of the more unpleasant ironies of the Alderson Drive was the time required to reach a Jump Point versus jumping the ship. A ship could literally jump from Earth's Sun to a star thousands of light years distant in zero time, yet it could take quite literally a year or more to reach a planet in the system the ship had just arrived in. If time and fuel wasn't an issue the arriving ship could set off for the planet at one standard G, and this velocity maintained a quasi-earth-like environment on the ship during the transit. If faster velocities were required and enough fuel was on hand, travel at up to four standard Gs was possible, though only for short periods of time and with rather draconian safety measures in place. Travel at up to 1.2 G was tolerable for a few days, but any velocity greater than 1.2 G up to 2.0G meant the crew was limited to G-couches, though the ship would go into zero-G conditions for fifteen minutes every four hours to allow for crew changes, toilet breaks, and meals. Above 2.0 G, movement was severely restricted – as even the simplest movement around the ship could result in unexpected falls and serious injury. Above 3.6 G simply lifting ones head from the G couch could result in cervical fractures and death, so literally all movement in these regimes was considered impossibly dangerous.
Hyperion and Patton were heading to the Sun at 1.1G, but due to adverse stellar winds that meant Stavridis's crew would have to endure two weeks at 2.3 G to make the rendezvous just outside the orbit of Venus, though after Stavridis arrived all ships were scheduled for 24 hours at 1.0G; deferred maintenance would be completed and the two middies would transfer to Stavridis. People generally relaxed, laughed, and tried to have a good time at 1G – while the possibility lasted…
…but it was hard to ignore the Sun now. It was huge and dominated the view ahead.
Only a few members of Hyperion's crew had made this trip before, so while most of her officers knew the theory behind Alderson's discovery – only a handful had experienced the terror and disorientation that followed a jump. But of course people talked; word got out. Making a Jump was the single most startling moment one could possibly experience, or so it was said, and that meant most of Hyperion's crew now looked at the Sun with something between lurking fear and abject terror stuck in their waking thoughts – because it was now impossible to ignore the looming solar disc dead ahead, and that they were going inside that star to make a Jump. Who among them, they wondered, would go insane inside a star 253 trillion miles from home…
Ripley had spent the first few weeks out from Earth reading everything he could find on the Covenant mission, from design of the ship to her flight crew selection. Covenant's colonization protocols were fairly standard stuff; the company had been, after all, sending such ships out for more than twenty years. But Covenant, like all company ships before her, was a sub-light speed vessel that traveled under near constant 1G acceleration and therefore relied on cryostasis sleep chambers to preserve her crew. Naval vessels, of course, could not rely on this technology – as warships had to be prepared to fight in an instant – but colony ships were truly massive affairs, too large for adequate Langston Field coverage. And without a Field there could be no Drive, so…
"But how does the Field work?" Midshipman Yukio Matsushima asked on their second night out from the Gateway.
"Well, the basic function of the Field is to absorb energy, whether from a stellar source, a laser cannon, or even a radar set," Ripley replied. "It absorbs the kinetic energy of hydrogen torpedoes as easily as it does solar radiation, and it also makes our ships very stealthy."
"But…how?" Matsushima repeated.
"Well, simply put, the Field absorbs energy, either kinetic energy, explosive outgassing, or the photonic particles of stellar radiation, with an efficiency proportional to the cube of their incoming velocities. So in essence, what strikes the Field is absorbed and contained before ultimately being dispersed as radiated energy. But, and this is important, the basic problem is that this absorbed energy cannot be stored indefinitely. As the energy being absorbed increases, you'll note the Field begins to glow, its normal black state turning red and then orange, then yellow and eventually running up through the spectrum all the way to violet. And as the Field changes color it also begins to expand, almost like a balloon being inflated. A Field fails when it can no longer expand to contain absorbed energy, and at that point the 'balloon' implodes and all that stored energy is released."
"Violently, you mean?" Yukio said.
"Yes. It's a fusion reaction, so quite energetic. Nothing inside a collapsing Field survives the event."
"Won't we be absorbing solar energy as we approach the sun?" Thomas asked.
"Of course," Ripley said, grinning.
"So…won't the Field be expanding all that time?"
Ripley shook his head. "Think the problem through, Tom."
"Think about the planet Mercury. The side facing the sun is essentially molten, while the far side is…"
Standing Bull's eyes lit up: "You mean one side can absorb energy while the other side, the dark side, can radiate stored energy?"
Ripley smiled like a proud father. "That's right. So, what's the next problem you see?"
"Inside the solar photosphere," Yukio cried, "there is no surface area to radiate energy! So that accounts for the time limits!"
"Exactly!" Ripley smiled, proud of his middies.
"You said the Field is black," Thomas asked suddenly. "Is it opaque?"
"Yes, that's right. Once the Field is established and stabilized we can't "see" without radar and video feeds, so radar masts and observation towers have to be raised up through the Field…"
"But inside a star…"
"That's right, Yukio. They'd be burned right off."
"Neither the Russians or the Chinese have the Drive or the Field, do they?" Yukio asked.
And Ripley nodded again. "Not as far as we can tell, but we do know that they've observed our operations so they've probably surmised a good deal about how they work. It's probably just a matter of time before one of them stumbles over the principles involved."
"So that's why we have navies now, right?" Thomas asked. "I mean, to protect the new colonies and all the new trade routes that pop up?"
"Yes?" Ripley replied, wondering where the boy was going with this new line of questioning.
"What about First Contact?" Thomas asked next.
"What about it?" Ripley countered, smiling inside. The boy was supremely logical and unafraid of giving flight to his curiosity. 'He'll make a respectable command officer…' he thought.
"Isn't that another reason why we're out here?" Thomas asked.
"Maybe, but all that is rather unlikely," Ripley sighed. "After forty years out here we haven't seen any evidence of intelligent life, let alone signs that other space faring civilizations are around."
"But…aren't there protocols?" Thomas asked.
"Yes, there are. Basically, if we run across something we are to observe and report, and if at all possible we are to avoid hostilities – meaning unless we are attacked first. And if at all possible we are to avoid contact unless suitable emissaries are available."
"Suitable emissaries?" Yukio asked.
"Academics and diplomats, I assume," Ripley grinned. "And definitely not middies with overactive imaginations!"
The acceleration warning sounded and Ripley looked at the startled kids and smiled. "Well, you two better get to your cabin and strap-in. We'll be lining up to start our orbital burn on the mid-watch; we'll slingshot around Venus and start our calculations to locate the Alderson Point at that time, and I want you both on the bridge for that…"
"When will the Field go up?" Thomas asked.
"About halfway to Mercury, after we refuel – but don't worry, it will stay in the black almost all the way to the corona-sphere. Now…scoot…acceleration resumes in a few minutes!"
Ripley watched them run off and he felt the relentless sting of jealousy. He was just twenty nine earth standard years but already he'd lost so much bone mass he'd be a cripple for the rest of his life, assuming he returned to Earth, that is. No, he'd have to settle on the Moon or transfer to the Company and sign up to skipper a cargo hauler or a colony ship, but his days on Earth would be very limited going forward.
Two weeks after leaving Venus, Ripley was called to the COMMs shack for an encrypted Eyes Only message, and as the COMMs operator on duty had to administer the retina scan in person, Ripley had to wait until the next break in acceleration to make the trip. Once the message was decrypted and transferred to his personal messenger, Ripley went to the wardroom for a sandwich and to catch up on all the latest gossip, but once there he read the message brief and decided to head back to his cabin to read the entire report.
A third breadcrumb from Covenant had been received, and after reading the complete report he had his computer download everything that was known concerning the Wayland Corporation's Prometheus Mission, including any recent speculative updates. Two days later he called his Gordon unit and had him report to his cabin.
"What do we know about the David that accompanied Prometheus?" he asked.
"About that unit specifically? Very little, Admiral. He was the first of the series and was Peter Wayland's personal assistant, so we can assume he was serially mistreated by Mr Wayland…"
"Meaning what, exactly?"
"Mr Wayland was reportedly quite abusive to underlings, Admiral, including, we assume, to this particular David. And as all of these units soon developed paranoid tendencies we can only assume this unit did as well. Yet how this unit made it to the planet detailed in the latest Covenant dispatch is a mystery. As you know, the working assumption has been that everyone from the Prometheus expedition perished."
"The shuttle explosion appears to have been the result of violent interactions with an unknown species, but the next thing we learn is that the ground party was subsequently attacked by more of these creatures – and then the David from Prometheus reappeared."
"Yes, Admiral, that seems to be correct."
"Do we have enough information to identify the planet?"
"We have narrowed it down to two systems, Admiral."
"And how far from the Jump Point at Capella are they?"
"The most likely system is five months from our exit point, Admiral. At 1.1G. The other, less likely system is only two months from that point, but if we visit that system first we will then add almost nine months travel time to the most likely system."
"The most likely system? Has it shown up in any exoplanet surveys?"
"No, Admiral, but we have Covenant's data to infer a general location."
Ripley nodded. "Yes, I saw that. Almost earth like, maybe a few thousand years after an Ice Age event."
"And there are no hydrocarbons or other signs of advanced industrialized economies in the spectra."
"Alright, Gordon, I'd like you to prepare a mission briefing for Captain Ames and the X-O, and, oh Hell, let's get the skippers and execs from Patton and Stavridis over here for that, too."
"Department heads as well, Admiral?"
"No, not yet."
"And the Middies?"
"Hell no. When and if they need to know I'll brief them in."
"Yes, Admiral Will there be anything else?"
"Uh, no, but Gordon, why are you smiling?"
"Because this is the first time you've addressed me informally."
"I see," Ripley said, but by then his Gordon unit had already turned and left his Admiral's Cabin.
The middies, all six of them, were gathered in Hyperion's wardroom, and as this was the first time all six had been together since they'd first joined the expedition there was all kinds of gossip to share, and notes to compare about the officers they'd been with so far.
"What's the Admiral really like?" seemed to be the primary topic of conversation, followed by animated discussions on the ins-and-outs they'd picked up concerning theories behind the Drive and the Field. None had seemed particularly interested in their destination or even the mission objectives – until this emergency meeting had been called. Now gossip was spreading around all three ships that either the Russian or the Chinese navies had attacked one of the colonies, and that's where the Hyperion battle group was headed. And as they were still making calculations for a Jump to Capella this all had something to do with the Covenant colony mission.
"Does anyone know anything about the Covenant Mission?" Yukio asked.
"Only what was on the news. Something like 2,000 colonists in deep freeze and several thousands embryos," Hans Genscher said.
"Was it just the one ship?" Standing Bull asked.
"I think so," Genscher replied. "I recall that Covenant launched before the battle at Alpha Centauri, and escorts still weren't considered necessary in those days."
Hyperion's alert chimed again, and the OODs voice came over the intercom. "Shuttles to Patton and Stavridis launching in twenty minutes. All returning personnel report to the hanger deck on the double. Repeat, shuttles to Patton and Stavridis launching in twenty minutes."
Goodbyes were said and the departing middies made there way down to the hanger deck; after their shuttles were outside Hyperion the middies were surprised to see two tankers filling the huge ship's massive tanks, then they saw that two more tankers were refueling both Patton and Stavridis, while Venus was well behind them now – and Earth was but a lonely spot against an endless backdrop of stars. And now gray Mercury could be seen ahead – as long as dense hydrogen-alpha filters were used to block out the worst of the sun's fierce light. Hyperion's hull blazed brilliantly white and the four middies looked on, fascinated, as the tankers pulled away from her.
Then Captain Caruthers gathered her two middies near a large view port.
"This isn't a the type of thing many people will ever get to see, so look closely and try to remember it," she sighed dreamily.
"Why are their tanks different colors?" Hans asked.
"Orange is hydrogen for the main drive, the drive we use for orbital insertions and heavy acceleration. The blue tank is xenon for the VASIMR Drive?"
"VASIMR?" Hans added.
"Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket Drive," Caruthers sighed. "Hans, please keep current on our reading list, will you?"
"Yes, Captain," Genscher sighed.
And then the three of them, the two middies and their captain, stood there side by side, staring at Hyperion's brilliantly glaring whiteness – but then it simply disappeared.
"What happened?" Hans cried. "Where did it go?"
"Oh, it's still there," Caruthers said, grinning. "Recall that the Field absorbs all radiation, and that means all visible light, too. That also means the Field renders the ship practically invisible…"
"So the only way you can spot Hyperion now is if she transits a star?"
Caruthers nodded. "Yes, and at this range she would show up on radar for a split second. Also, when the Field begins to absorb a tremendous amount of energy. Do you remember why?"
"Because the Field starts to expand and glow," Genscher said confidently.
"That's right. It may start to glow as we get close to the corona-sphere, but it shouldn't be much, if at all, until after we enter the corona."
"But we won't see that, right?" Genscher asked.
Caruthers chuckled at that. "Well, if you do that'll be the last thing you ever see."
But Hans wasn't exactly certain what Captain Caruthers had meant by that. The only way to see Hyperion's glowing Field would be if Patton's Field failed, so… "Ah, I understand," he said just as he saw two masts rise up from inside the Field. "What's that, Captain?" he asked.
"Radar and COMMs antennae," Caruthers sighed. "And these tankers will follow us to Mercury. They'll slingshot back to Europa from there, and our last tanker rendezvous will take place when we orbit and are still in Mercury's shadow."
Patton's shuttle entered her hanger deck and after her hanger doors closed and sealed her Field was activated, and Stavridis went dark a few minutes after that. The four immense tankers slowly fell away from the much faster warships, and all their robotic sensors could see was a blazing star dead ahead.
Ripley sat in his cabin, thinking about the meeting and all the salient points raised.
The first part of the discussion surrounding the latest Covenant transmission had grown heated, and for the most part Ripley agreed with all the arguments raised. But between the three ships there were only two companies of marines, for a total of two hundred heavily armed ground pounders, but crucially with little in the way of air support available. The shuttles could transport men and equipment to a planet's surface but that was about it; the shuttles were simply too big for combat operations and had never been intended for that role, so once the troops were on the surface there would be little support available. The only recourse would be the ships' laser cannon, and while hideously powerful, these weapons had been designed for ship to ship combat in the hard vacuum of space. With clear skies and low humidity such weapons could be used, but that was about all the three captains could agree on.
"What the devil did they run into down there?" Caruthers asked, leading off the discussion.
"The shuttle relayed very little hard information to Covenant," Ripley stated, "but there was one video feed from the shuttle's Sick Bay included. Gordon, play the feed now, would you?"
The room darkened and the main view screen dropped from the ceiling. Top Secret banners adorned the top and bottom parts of the screen, then a reasonably clear image of a shuttle's medical facility flickered to life; Gordon advised there was no audio included with the file. A lone marine, a roughly 25 year old male, was escorted into the trauma room by two female flight officers, identities still not established. Once sitting on the exam table the marine's shirt was removed and he soon began convulsing, then the skin over his spine separated. One of the flight officers was then seen running out of the field of view and presumably away from the Sick Bay. The marine's convulsions continued to worsen and the remaining flight officer unsuccessfully tried to administer an unknown agent by hypodermic syringe. She then tried to hold the marine; at that point something erupted from the vicinity of the marine's thoracic vertebrae, effectively rendering the marine unconscious. The remaining flight officer ran out of view then returned to comfort the marine; moments later sharp spines erupted from the marine's shattered vertebrae and he fell over backwards as a placental sac containing a small, white skinned creature fell to the floor. The flight officer ran out of the camera's field of view again and for the next minute the flight officer and the white-skinned creature apparently fought. A minute later the video feed abruptly ended. The ship's computer verified complete loss of contact with the shuttle and its crew at that point.
Caruthers turned to Ripley at that point. "So, if I'm reading between the correct lines here, Covenant's captain diverted from his established heading for Aurigae-6 to this unknown planet, and for an unknown reason or reasons? And within a few hours of landing on the surface one of their marines was, well, for all intents and purposes impregnated, then he became host to this creature during a brief gestational phase and he soon delivered a mature organism? And be soon I mean within a few hours after exposure? Killing him in the process?"
"That appears to be the case, yes." Ripley said.
"And we don't know the manner of the marine's exposure?"
Ripley shrugged. "Not yet. The pertinent question now is do we really want to find out?"
"Meaning what?" Captain Ames said.
"I mean do we really want to chance exposing two hundred marines to such an unknown pathogenic organism, and by that I mean one with such extreme capabilities?"
"What choice do we have?" Ames added.
Ripley looked away for a moment, then he sighed and shook his head. "Everything is on the table, I assume. Everything from placing the planet under quarantine to hitting the area with cannons…"
"Admiral, it's not our planet," Caruthers said angrily. "We have no business…"
Ripley held up his hands, signaling a hold. "That's why I mentioned a quarantine. Assuming all our people are off world now, we'd have no reason to land, would we?"
"What if they're not?" Ames said, involuntarily shuddering.
"I think you just answered that question, didn't you? What would be the point?" Ripley sighed.
"But we have no idea what's happened there, right?" Dean Farrell, Stavridis' skipper asked. "I mean, we don't even know if Covenant has left orbit, do we?"
Ripley shook his head. "Frankly, I have a hard time understanding why Covenant's captain hasn't communicated directly with the Company. And I thought such a huge deviation from the mission parameters was supposed to prompt their Walter unit to make an independent report, so none of this is adding up to anything good – as far as I'm concerned, anyway."
"The organism," Ames started to say. "What if it's sentient, or worse still, a sentient warrior species…"
"With space flight capabilities?" Caruthers added, groaning. "That could turn into a worst case scenario, Admiral. First contact, but with a hostile civilization possessing unknown military capabilities? That would trigger a retreat, wouldn't it…and a fleet response?"
"That's how I interpret things, Captain," Ripley sighed. "But that doesn't relieve us of our responsibilities to Covenant or her colonists."
"I didn't mean to imply that, Admiral," Caruthers said defiantly.
"Unless," Captain Farrell added, "this civilization attacked Covenant. Then that…"
"I agree," Ames sighed. "If that is in fact the case then we'd need to make contact. Full military contact."
"That would be pointless," Caruthers replied. "Let alone potentially catastrophic. We need to…"
Again Ripley held up his hands. "I understand the nature of the dilemma, Captain. Point of order here: Admiral Stanton does as well. We'll receive our final orders before we Jump, but we won't have time to meet up at Mercury and I wanted all of you to be aware of the tactical situation now so you can start to draw up contingencies for dealing with this organism. Also, Stanton has tasked the Ticonderoga strike group as well as her tankers to head this way. They'll jump about three weeks after we do, so even if we don't find a hydrogen source we'll at least have a way back out of the system, and Ticonderoga will have a complete air wing of both attack and defense birds on board – just in case. Even so, Stanton wants us to go in first without them, but I still believe our number one mission priority is to locate Covenant and then to…"
"What is he afraid of, Admiral?" Captain Ames asked.
"He hasn't exactly said as much, but I think the Joint Chiefs is thinking that Covenant's crew may have already been compromised by this species. If that's the case, what if this alleged new species is sending Covenant back to Earth – loaded with these organisms?"
"That would explain Covenant's silence, wouldn't it?" Farrell sighed as he grew pale.
"Yup," Ripley said. "And that would make this one helluva mess. Worst case, we have to take out Covenant, and that would mean killing thousands of innocent colonists…"
"Not exactly," Caruthers said, her shoulders sagging under the weight of sudden implications. "If they're non-responsive then they're most likely already hosts for this new organism, and that means they're basically dead already. Since the gestation period is so brief…they'd have to be…the colonists might already be in stasis! If that's the case maybe we could get medical and bio-war teams onboard to…"
Ripley nodded. "They're on Ticonderoga," he said as he smiled. "And that's the point, Judith. You've only had this information for an hour and yet you're coming up with good points that we all need to consider. We Jump in two weeks and then the real fun starts, because there's absolutely no telling what we're going to run into on the other side."
"What about hydrogen?" Ames asked.
"Get your astronomers ready," Ripley said, suddenly all business again. "Auriga system hasn't been fully surveyed and so far no ice planet or moon has been identified. Hell, we may have to try and siphon ice crystals off a comet, but I sure as hell hope it doesn't come to that. Anyway, finding hydrogen is Job One. Next, we'll start scanning for Covenant's ion trail, then hopefully we can follow that while we get up to speed on a threat assessment. If worse comes to worse we can use the hydrogen in the ion drive tanks, and hopefully by that time Ticonderoga and her tankers will meet up with us." Ripley looked around his cabin, and at the uneaten lunch still spread across the table. "Look, I hate to rain on our parade, but this thing is starting to look fugly and we all need to be on the same page going in."
Captain Farrell stood and asked to be dismissed just after the shuttle departure announcement came over the intercom, and Ripley looked around the room and nodded.
"Okay, let's break it off here, but if anyone has some kind of startling breakthrough, be sure to get on the command circuit and share your thoughts with the group. Okay? Well then, you are dismissed."
Everyone stood to leave but Judith Caruthers asked to stay behind for a moment, and after everyone had left the cabin she closed the door behind her.
"What's on your mind, Judith?"
"Just that."
"You've been referring to everyone by rank, Admiral. Everyone but me, that is, and I'd like to know why."
Ripley sat and reflexively crossed his arms over his flat stomach, then he turned and looked out the viewport – suddenly lost in thought. A minute or so later he asked her to sit.
"I'd rather stand, Admiral."
He nodded and let slip a long sigh. "I'm going to be thirty next year," he started to say, "so two years to go until mandatory retirement."
Caruthers had been watching him closely, and so then she decided to sit. "What are you going to do next?" she said softly, now almost affectionately.
But Ripley just shrugged. "I don't know," he finally managed to say. "And I wish I did."
"What's missing, Denton?"
"Missing?"
"From your life?"
"I always wanted a family, I guess. And now I see even that possibility slipping away."
"Oh? Why?"
"I guess I really don't know, Judith."
"Call me Judy, okay?"
He looked at her and smiled. "I guess I keep calling you by name because I like you."
"You…like me? Admiral, I hate to say so but you don't even know me."
"Maybe I wanted that to change, I guess."
"Admiral, I…I don't know what to say."
"Then don't say anything," he nodded. "I just wanted to get things out in the open."
"Okay. May I ask…why me?"
"Not sure. I read your senior thesis on solar fluid dynamics, by the way. And maybe I liked the way you pieced together your argument…"
"We all had a crush on you during my plebe year, you know?"
"I always thought we were being too obvious. Apparently not, huh?"
"Who's we?"
"All the girls in my company. You had the cutest ass, ya know…?"
Ripley could feel his face turning beet red as a thin bead of perspiration formed on his upper lip. "Cute…ass…?" he stammered.
"Oops," Caruthers said, her grin spreading across her face from ear to ear. She stood and walked over to him, bent down and kissed him gently on the lips. "If it makes a difference, I'd like to get to know you, too."
"Cute…ass…?" Ripley flubbered helplessly.
"Next time you think about it, try to get us an hour or so alone," she whispered – before she gently bit his lower lip. "Then I'll really give you something to think about."
And with that she turned and ran off to the hanger deck.
And a few minutes later he watched her shuttle drift off towards Patton, and for a few minutes he could see her standing there looking back at Hyperion – with her two middies standing beside her – and he could picture her with his children standing there watching him…when Hyperion's Field activated and blotted out the universe.
And just then his Gordon unit came in.
"Are you alright, Admiral?"
"Yup. What's up, Doc?"
And that caught his Gordon unit off guard. "Sir?"
"Situation report, I'm guessing?"
"Ah, yes sir. The inbound tankers are still on time for our rendezvous at Mercury, and sensors have detected the Alderson Jump Point. Its current size is one hundred and fifteen miles in diameter and holding steady."
"Has Brennan made her calculations?"
"Yes, Admiral. We will have two hours and twenty minutes to complete refueling operations behind Mercury, and twenty minutes to get the crew strapped in."
"ETA to the refueling point?"
"Seventy two hours, fourteen minutes."
"Very good. When we reach Mercury I want an hour of uninterrupted time with Captain Caruthers. I know timing the shuttle will be difficult, but make it happen, Gordon."
"Yes, Admiral. Will there be anything else?"
"Get me Ticonderoga's latest Sit-Rep and our latest hydrogen consumption estimates."
"Yessir. Shall I have Carson clear the table, Admiral?"
"Yes, and have the food sent to the enlisted wardroom. I afraid we just didn't get around to eating."
The video feed came to life and he watched Patton's shuttle spin up to mate with the docking clamps, and for just a moment Denton Ripley almost smiled.
© 2022 adrian leverkühn | abw | adrianleverkuhnwrites.com | all rights reserved. This is a work of fiction, all characters and events are fictitious in nature though key story elements and character references/circumstances derive from the work of others. First among these is Sir Ridley Scott's film Alien (1979); his Prometheus and Covenant films serve as prequels to this short story. All references to an Alderson (zero time) Drive, as well as the Langston Field needed to utilize the drive, derive from The Mote in God's Eye (1974) and The Gripping Hand (1993), by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle.
The Eighty-eighth Key: Coda
Posted on September 29, 2022 by adrianleverkuhnwrites
So, here it is, as promised. The last gasp. Harry is now gone so grab a cup of cinnamon tea and read on.
The music to lead off this last part of the story sets the mood perfectly. I'd highly recommend getting this set to go and punch play as you start reading. I love soundtracks. Such moodiness, and so clearly expressed. A language of their own.
[The International- End Titles \\ Tom Tykwer et al.]
Light. Light – as running from the night. And at the end of it all, simply running blind.
Yet it seemed he had chased time all his life, until time turned on him and changed the terms of the chase. The terms of their embrace.
And then. Time. Stopped. An inexplicable discontinuity. All input ceased and even the darkness was gone. He could finally relax in the light, for there was no place left to run.
Then the light returns, and he feels a fine, cool breeze running through his hair. Blue sky overhead, the only clouds far away beyond mountains to the east. He can't see beyond the mountains while the sky and everything within seems a kind of electric blue. Still, no sensation. Not even gravity. Nothing underfoot, only the vaguest suggestion of being adrift.
Falling? Slowly falling? Inside blue lightning. Blue lightning everywhere.
Then he realizes he is standing inside the lightning. Within. With blue light all around, what air he can taste is alive with the ozone-rich scent of passing rain on a summer afternoon. He can feel tiny pinpricks of light passing through his skin and he doesn't know what to think now. 'Am I alive?' he wonders, because he feels he must be light now—because the darkness is gone. Banished.
'Have I been here before?' he wonders.
Something feels familiar. Is it the color of the light? The feel of the wind as it passes around and through him? Is that why everything feels so familiar?
Then in the next instant he feels something solid underfoot.
He looks down. Gravel. He sees the gravel he is feeling. Pea gravel over black tar. 'This can't be death,' he realizes.
And a spent rifle cartridge. And that is death. The taking of life. He remembers death.
Death in the form of shining brass, right there by – shoes?
He recognizes the shoes. From a place he barely remembers. From a Time before the discontinuity. Then. Two shoes. He lifts up the legs of his trousers and sees two legs. He wiggles his toes. All of them. And he smiles, because he remembers pain from a Time far away and almost forgotten.
Then another pair of shoes. Blue jeans and a crumpled old tan corduroy sport coat. Squinting eyes, blue. Hair graying and stiff – and the wind does not move him.
"Hi, Harry."
"Hello, Frank."
"Thirty-ought-six?"
"Just the one?"
Callahan shrugged. "All I've found so far."
"Helluva shot," Bullitt said, leaning against the railing by the rust colored curtain wall and looking down at the Hilton Hotel's rooftop swimming pool.
"About 300 yards, I'd say."
"Something doesn't feel right, Harry."
Callahan looked at Frank and nodded. "I know." He looked at the bay just off the Embarcadero and saw a clipper ship lying at anchor, then they both turned towards the sound of a deep rumbling that shook the earth – and they saw what appeared to be some kind of space shuttle launching from SFO, except the airport seemed to now be a busy spaceport.
A shadow passed overhead and they looked up.
"What the fuck?" both Callahan and Bullitt whispered.
A man in a parachute. Falling towards the metal catwalks a few feet from where he and Bullitt were standing. The man landed on his two feet and he pulled a release that caused the parachute to drift away, and Callahan recognized the US Navy flight suit. Even the aviator's helmet looked kind of familiar – because he recognized the symbol of The Boomers from VA-165 emblazoned on the side of the flight helmet. The pilot lifted his visor and Callahan thought he…
"You look familiar," the pilot said. "Callahan, right?"
Harry nodded. "Sherman? Gene Sherman?" he asked. "What's with the dog?"
There was a brown dog, a very small puppy, peeking out from inside Sherman's flight suit – and that seemed to catch Sherman off guard. "Roscoe? Is that my little spud?" The pup licked Sherman's chin and both smiled.
Another shuttle launched and all three turned towards the immense rumbling coming from the lower bay – and all three stared at the huge ship lumbering into the clear blue sky.
"I could see a bunch of them on the way down," Sherman said, answering the most obvious unasked question. "Someone's getting the fuck outta Dodge in a hurry."
"Yeah?" Bullitt said. "Well then, explain that to me," he said, pointing at the clipper ship at anchor off the old harbor.
Sherman turned and looked – at the dead woman floating in the swimming pool. "Uh, I don't mean to be snarky, but did you notice the girl over there?"
"What?" Callahan snarled. "You mean the one with the hole in her back? Gee Frank, how'd we miss that?"
"That's not exactly what I meant," Sherman sighed. "Look around down there, would you? Tell me what's missing?"
Callahan and Bullitt walked over to the curtain wall and looked over the city.
"Shit," the both said.
"Exactly," Sherman grumbled. "Where are all the people?"
More rumbling. Another shuttle lifting off.
"The light," Sherman whispered, "isn't right."
"What do you mean," Bullitt growled, "it isn't right?"
Sherman held his hand up to shield his eyes from the sun and he seemed to scan the heavens, then he nodded before he pointed to the sky north of where Oakland should have been, but wasn't. "Tell me what you see?" he said to Callahan.
Harry walked over and lined his sight with Sherman's outstretched arm, following the direction indicated with his eyes. "What is that?" he whispered a moment later.
"That," Sherman said, "is a star. And it shouldn't be there. And neither should that gas giant," he added, pointing to a ringed planet almost due east in the sky and just big enough to be visible in daylight. "And that, gentlemen, accounts for those shuttles launching right now."
A service door opened one level below and a Golden Retriever bounded halfway up the stairs, then it stopped and turned, looking back at the door – until two teenagers, a boy and a girl, exited and started up the stairs…
The retriever then finished coming up the stairs and she ran right up to Sherman and stood on her hind legs, her hands resting on Sherman's outstretched arms. "Daisy-Jane?" he asked, and that caused the dog's feathered tail to swish wildly.
"Gene?" the girl asked as she walked up to Sherman. "Is that you?"
He turned to the girl and studied her eyes before sucking in a deep breath: "Debra?" He smiled and she nodded – though she suddenly seemed a little too shy, given the circumstances. "And who's this?" Sherman asked, looking at the massive wall of muscle standing by her side.
"William Taylor," the boy said jealously, sticking out his right hand.
Callahan looked at Bullitt and shrugged – just as another shuttle rumbled and began easing away from the pad. "What's with that?" Taylor said, pointing at the ship arcing into the sky.
"Clyde? Is that you?" another voice said.
Daisy Jane spun around until she saw Henry Taggart, then she took off and bolted into his outstretched arms – and when Debra Sorensen realized who had stolen her dog (again) she started to cry. Then she ran into Taggart's arms, and the three of them hugged a little too much for Taylor's comfort.
And then someone coughed.
A deep, rheumy cough.
The Old Man in the Green Loden Cape was standing beside another Old Man in a wheelchair.
It was Franklin Roosevelt, and he appeared very ill indeed.
Instinctively everyone gathered around Roosevelt, and Sherman knelt by his side, began taking the Old Man's vitals. The Old Man in the Green Loden Cape stepped close and turned to face the little group.
"We haven't much time," he sighed as he pointed at the approaching gas giant, just as the last shuttle lifted off from the launch complex on the tidal flats that had been, once upon a time, a sprawling international airport.
"Time for what?" William Taylor growled – just before he turned and stared at another shuttle emerging from billowing clouds of white smoke. Everyone turned and looked – everyone, that is, but Franklin Delano Roosevelt – and as they followed the shuttle's progress up into the sky one by one their eyes came to rest on a huge blue sphere…
And this sphere was falling gently to earth.
"What is that inside?" Callahan muttered as he shaded his eyes and stared at the sphere.
Roosevelt turned in his wheelchair and faced Callahan, his eyes sparkling with keen interest now. "That is a galleon, Inspector Callahan. I believe it is Drake's Golden Hinde, and if I am not mistaken it is here to alter the current timeline."
"Drake?" Sherman said, his voice creaking around the edges of despair. "Do you mean Francis Drake?"
"I do," Roosevelt replied, smiling. "Come now. There is much left for us to do, and little time remains!"
The Old Man in the Green Loden Cape suddenly appeared unsettled, and he turned to the group again, only now his eyes were pleading. "Please, we really must leave. Gather round now," he said, motioning the group to come closer to Roosevelt's wheelchair, "before it's too late…"
The air rippled with a splitting howl that sounded like the screams of all the world's damned and then the earth heaved and buckled. Magma began pouring out a giant fissure where Golden Gate Park had been just moments before, and buildings began to sway, then like dominos falling one by one the city's skyscrapers began to give way and collapse.
The Old Man in the Green Loden Cape tapped his cane on the pebbled roof and a large reddish-pink sphere formed around the group, just as roaring gouts of magma boiled up from the earth – and mere seconds passed before the last human beings on earth made their getaway.
Here ends the Eighty Eighth Key. The balance of the tale will take shape in TimeShadow. This story © 2016-22 by Adrian Leverkühn | abw | and as always, thanks for stopping by for a look around the memory warehouse. This is a work of fiction, pure and simple, and aside from the appearance of a few incidental characters (i.e., Roosevelt) all characters should not be confused with any real person or persons living or no longer among us. But wait, there's more…how about a word or two on sources: To begin, the 'primary source' material in this tale derives from two seminal Hollywood 'cop' films: Dirty Harry and Bullitt. The first Harry film was penned by Harry Julian Fink, R.M. Fink, Dean Riesner, John Milius, Terrence Malick, and Jo Heims; original copyright is held by Warner Brothers. Bullitt came primarily from the author of the screenplay for The Thomas Crown Affair, Alan R Trustman, with help from Harry Kleiner, as well Robert L Fish, whose short story Mute Witness formed the basis of Trustman's brilliant screenplay. Warner Brothers was again the copyrighting studio. Steve McQueen's grin was never trade-marked, though perhaps it should have been. John Milius (Red Dawn) penned Magnum Force, and the 'Briggs'/vigilante storyline derives from characters and plot elements originally found in that rich screenplay, as does the Captain McKay character. The Jennifer Spencer/Threlkis crime family storyline was first introduced in Sudden Impact, screenplay by Joseph Stinson, original story by Earl Smith and Charles Pierce. The Samantha Walker television reporter is found in The Dead Pool, screenplay by Steve Sharon, story by Steve Sharon, Durk Pearson, and Sandy Shaw. I have to credit the Jim Parish, M.D., character first seen in the Vietnam segments to John A. Parrish, M.D., author of the most fascinating account of an American physician's tour of duty in Vietnam – and as found in his autobiographical 12, 20, and 5: A Doctor's Year in Vietnam, a book worth noting as one of the most stirring accounts of modern warfare I've ever read (think Richard Hooker's M*A*S*H, only featuring a blazing sense of irony conjoined within a searing non-fiction narrative). Denton Cooley, M.D. founded the Texas Heart Institute, as mentioned. Of course, James Clavell's Shōgun forms a principle backdrop in the chapters surrounding Japan and the Fujiko character. The teahouse and hotel of spires in Ch. 42 is the product of the my warped imagination; so-sorry. The snippets of lyrics from Lucy in the Sky are publicly available as 'open-sourced.' Many of the other figures in this story derive from characters developed within the works cited above, but again keep in mind that, as always, the rest of this story is in all other respects a work of fiction woven into a pre-existing cinematic-historical fabric. So again, the standard disclaimer here applies: the central characters in this tale should not be mistaken for persons living or dead. This was, in other words, just a little walk down a road more or less imagined, and nothing more than that should be inferred. I'd be remiss not to mention Clint Eastwood's Harry Callahan, and Steve McQueen's Frank Bullitt. Talk about the roles of a lifetime…and what a gift these tales were to us all.]
And one last bit of music to close out this tale, and from another soundtrack.
[What Happened To You \\ Jamin Winans]
The Eighty-eighth Key, Chapter 70.2
So, all things must end. Even Harry Callahan. And here ends the tale, save for a brief Coda I will post this Friday.
[The Moody Blues \\ Never Comes The Day]
"Harry," DD said, her voice wilting as dreadful implications roiled her thoughts, "what have you done?"
"What has to be done."
"What? What are you talking about?"
"Lloyd came back. He came back for me."
"Lloyd? Harry…Lloyd's been gone for years. Now, please, tell me what happened?"
"Gone? What? Do you think he's dead? Is that really what you think?"
"Harry, he disappeared. No one's seen him in something like twenty years. Even the police think he's dead."
Callahan brushed away a tear as he turned to look across the bay to Alcatraz Island. "There was always something wrong with him. From the beginning. Like he didn't fit, you know?"
DD moved close and took his hand. "It was his mother, Harry. It wasn't your fault."
"None of this was supposed to happen," Callahan said, his voice adrift on a sea of infinite possibility. "June was supposed to be. We were supposed to be. Something…or someone…changed everything. Lloyd was wrong because he was never meant to be…"
She looked into Harry's eyes and saw a vortex of confusion within his thousand yard stare, and for the first time in her life a passing thought caught her off-guard: Was Harry evil? Had he been driven by psychotic impulses his entire life?
She pulled back from him a little, then stepped back even further away from him, but then he turned and faced her. "I'm not evil, DD," he sighed. "Whatever else I might be, evil isn't one of them."
"Harry? How did you know what I was thinking?"
He smiled the smile of an inside straight, then he pulled back from the edge and shook his head. "I'm fine, DD. Really. And sorry, I was speaking in metaphors. Maybe I've been taking my music too seriously?"
"Harry? There's blood on your hands."
"I cut myself earlier," he mumbled evasively.
"You know, for a cop you're not a very good liar."
"I'm not sure, DD, but I think I resent that…observation."
"Have you watched the news recently?" she grinned.
"I gave up all my bad habits a while ago."
"Since when did being informed become a bad habit?"
"When the news stopped being the news," he sighed. "Could I fix you another glass of juice? I think these have gotten warm?"
"Only if you promise to put some rum in this one."
"I can do that," he grinned. "Two fingers?"
She held up three and Callahan's grin broke out into an ear-splitting smile.
The doorbell chimed and Harry went to the door to let the Doc in, then he told him to report to the galley for mixing duties. "Aye-aye, Skipper," Doc Watson beamed. "Y'all get through all that 'bidnis' nonsense?" he asked as he made his way to the kitchen. "Damn, you got enough power to run the 'fridge?" the Doc cried when he saw fresh ice in the two highball glasses on the counter.
"It ain't civilized to drink warm Bastards, Doc."
"Ooh, I got here just in time, didn't I?"
Harry smiled. "How was the new kid doing on the piano?"
"I ain't real sure about this one, Harry. I think he was playing Debussy but it sounded an awful lot like Scott Joplin to me."
"Fuck."
"You got that right." The Doc finished up the Bastards and carried them into the living room, and then he hoisted his glass in a toast: "Well, here's to swimmin' with bow-legged wimin," he said – just as a hail of machine gun fire erupted. Doc Watson pushed his wife to the floor and shattering glass rained down on them; he rolled over to see where Harry was and he saw Callahan standing in front of the window, his arms spread wide and his head tilted back – as if he was offering himself up in sacrifice.
Time seemed to slow and the Doc started to cry out as he saw bullet after bullet slamming into Callahan's body – yet despite the volley Callahan simply stood there, smiling, until the gunfire stopped. He heard people screaming on the streets below as he ran to the shattered wall of glass, and he got there just in time to see a fairly large drone flying off towards the Golden Gate.
He heard DD crying and turned to see her kneeling beside Harry Callahan. The Doc walked over and was about to kneel beside his wife when he heard someone knocking on the door. Expecting the police, he walked over and opened the door, only to find an Old Man in a green loden cape standing there, and behind him stood another man, this one much younger.
"Is he gone?" the Old Man asked, his voice ancient, his accent Danish.
"What?" the Doc answered through the fog of denial.
"My grandson. Is he dead?"
"Grandson?" the Doc whispered incredulously. "I'm sorry, but who are you?"
"My name is Aaron Schwarzwald. Harald was my daughter's son."
"Uh, look, I don't know who you think you are…"
But the Old Man had lost his patience and pushed his way past the Doc and into Callahan's apartment, and the younger man, the other stranger followed him into the living room until they came to Callahan's shattered body. DD was crouching over Harry now, her manner protective, the expression in her eyes fierce, and she tensed as the two strangers came into the room. The younger man knelt beside Harry and ran his fingers through Callahan's hair, then he whispered something in Callahan's ear.
"Who the hell are you?" she asked the younger of the two.
"I am Harry's father," the younger man said, now extending his right hand. "Saul Rosenthal…but I seem to recall we met once before."
DD stood and staggered backwards, running into her husband's outstretched arms, though quite by accident.
"I'm sorry," the Doc said raggedly, "but that just isn't…none of this is possible…"
The Old Man spun around and turned his eyes on Watson. "My boy, you have absolutely no idea what is possible, much less what is not," he said slowly as he produced an ornately carved cane from under his cape, and this he tapped briskly – three times – on the slate floor. Storms formed outside the Golden Gate and within seconds deep rumbling thunder rolled across the bay, while lightning flickered in the gathering clouds.
Then the Old Man waved his cane around the room and all the shattered glass seemed to fly in reverse arcs back into their original window frames, and now even the Doc felt weak-kneed and light headed. Then shattered furniture began to reassemble before their eyes before the pieces slid back into place, and by that point the Doc's hands were shaking.
Yet when DD and the Doc turned to see if Harry was now uninjured they were shocked to find that their friend's body had simply disappeared, and so had Saul Rosenthal. Doc Watson turned to the Old Man at that point and he saw that the Old Man's eyes had turned soft, almost compassionate. "What have you done with Harry?" the Doc asked, now doing his best not to pass out.
"We will take care of what remains, but it is you now who are in mortal peril. We must get you away from here, and quickly."
"Danger? Us?"
But the Old Man had walked out into the large patio just off the living room, and now he was spinning his cane in a lazy circle above his head. "Come quickly!" the Old Man beckoned. "Time is short!"
From the rooftop of a rather tall apartment tower a few blocks away an Old Man in a black loden cape watched the two men enter Callahan's home, then he saw the glass traveling back in time – and the furniture too – and he sighed as he shook his head. When Lloyd Callahan saw the blue sphere descending through the sudden storm he knew something had gone wrong…
Or…had it?
Callahan's body wasn't placed in the sphere, so perhaps he'd succeeded after all.
And right then and there he decided he'd tell Sorensen that his father was indeed dead. No one would ever know the difference, and besides, it really didn't matter one way or the other. Sorensen and his fascist cohorts were utterly clueless. He would dispose of them all soon enough.
He tapped his cane twice and disappeared.
Ralph Richardson and Sumner Bacon arrived at Callahan's place about half past too late. Bacon picked the lock and they stepped quietly inside, and the ex-cop looked around the scene then set about reconstructing events. Three glasses on the counter and in the living room – each one untouched. A large pool of blood on the slate floor, and yet no effort had been made to hide it, or even to clean up the residue. He found an odd assortment of glass powder and wood fragments on the floor under the windows, and that stumped him – for a moment, anyway. Plants on the patio also appeared to have been scorched by something shaped like a sphere. And suddenly he realized that it all fit a pattern.
But then a tall blond haired woman wearing a red leather catsuit walked into the living room. She collected a sample of the blood on the floor and inserted it into a small device she had on her belt. She looked up a moment later and nodded. "It's Callahan's, alright," she said as she walked over to the windows. She knelt and examined the powdery residue on the floor for a moment, then she reached up and ran her fingers over the glass itself. A moment later she nodded, then she stood and looked around the ceiling. She walked over to an air conditioning vent and peered inside; when she saw the pink sphere inside she shook her head and turned to Richardson.
"Remove the blood from the floor," she said, and when Richardson nodded Bacon set about cleaning up the drying pool.
"We need to leave now," she said a few minutes later – as she turned her head into the wind. "Sirens. I hear sirens."
They made their way down the stairs and out the rear fire door just as San Francisco's finest pulled up in front of Harry Callahan's old apartment building. There had been reports of machine gun fire and strange lights in an apartment on the top floor of the building. They raced up the stairs and kicked in the door, and then with guns drawn they entered the residence and searched from room to room…
"Any sign of gunfire up there," the shift sergeant on duty asked from the street below.
The responding patrolman picked up his radio and replied: "No, sarge, nothing appears disturbed, no signs of gunfire, and there's no one here."
"Who owns the place?" the sergeant asked.
"Some guy named Callahan. Harry Callahan," the patrolman said as he looked at a piece of mail.
The sergeant shook his head. "Probably some drug dealer. Well, alright, you guys clear out now, and advise dispatch that the reports were unfounded."
"You got it, Sarge," the patrolman said, grinning at the reprieve. An unfounded call meant no paperwork, and like all good cops he hated writing reports.
© 2016-22 adrian leverkühn | abw | and as always, thanks for stopping by for a look around the memory warehouse…
[Debussy + Oslo Philharmonic \\ Prelude to the Afternoon of a Fawn]
So, here is the first part of the last chapter of Harry Callahan's story… Maybe a few surprises in store, so better grab a cup of ginger tea. Forewarned is forearmed, neh?
Music for today's story comes from Glass Hammer's 2010 album titled IF. No YouTube links as GH doesn't appear to go in for all that; their work is in the iTunes music store and is also available at the Glass Hammer store (hi-res downloads available at reasonable prices, too). This is the first album of theirs to feature Jon Davison on lead vocals. He did two albums with GH before moving on to take over lead vocal duties with Yes, so while you might not mistake this for Yes music you'll feel distinct similarities. Standout tracks to me include Behold The Ziddle and If The Sun. Elements of Close to the Edge shine through these two. Enjoy.
So, on to the story.
Callahan sat at the piano, a beat-up and very old Yamaha upright, riffing on Bill Evans' B Minor Waltz. He was playing at an ancient blues lounge a few blocks up from the Wharf, playing for tips left in an old jar. The place was crowded and dead quiet, because after events of the past few days there just wasn't a whole lot left to be said.
After years of runaway wildfires in northern California and Montana, and years after water had been cut off from the Colorado River, life on the West Coast had been growing increasingly insane. The past summer sidewalks had grown so hot in the city that they'd buckled, then streets started to break apart so badly that the city's cable cars could no longer run. But in the past few days the entire world had watched, aghast, as Russia moved on Europe and hushed whispers of 'another world war' could be heard everywhere Callahan went, and that was before Amsterdam and St. Petersburg disappeared in blinding flashes spilling out byproducts of nuclear fusion.
And then, to make matter more interesting, the sun had gone crazy. The earth's magnetic pole had started vaulting around unpredictably just as satellites in low earth orbit started failing. Communications between the continents fractured, the internet disappeared and all the various GPS constellations went offline. Air travel ground to a halt, electric cars could no longer be charged and gasoline remained in underground tanks – because the electric pumps that controlled the flow had all failed. Suddenly there was a lot of talk about the utility of horses and that it was high time to set about revitalizing the areas railroads. High rise buildings with no windows had become uninhabitable within hours, and grocery store shelves had long since been picked clean.
Callahan had been in the city when the latest X-class solar flare had slammed into the atmosphere. He'd been living in his old apartment building, one of the first projects he'd undertaken with DD Watson, because he'd been spending a lot of time in the city recently. He and DD had been working nonstop hardening all of Callahan's various buildings against the effects of increasing temperatures, first by installing operable windows and then by installing ultra high efficiency air conditioning systems. Aerial hydroponic gardens were being developed in green spaces while solar panels and wind generators popped up wherever their installation made sense.
Yet Harry had purchased this old speakeasy decades ago, but only recently had the building had been modified – because Callahan wanted people in the area to have a place to come when everything else became too overwhelming. Hence…the crowds.
But Callahan was an old man now, well into his eighties, anyway. He enjoyed his music more than he had in years, and he finally felt at home playing in front of strangers, but something else had changed. He studied the people in the lounge more often now, watched their reactions to his music, but he was looking for something in particular, a certain kind of reaction.
And a few nights after the week long war ended something strange was happening to Callahan. Winding through the B Minor Waltz he looked at a young couple and thought he could see the worry on their faces, the fear in their eyes – and then great gouts of fiery light erupted from their being. Almost like flames, rippling blue fire-light danced around them, pale blue tinged with glowing silver embers sputtered in the air and he changed tempo as he drifted into Peace Piece – and he watched as the light around them reacted to this change of tempo. He looked at a brooding old drunk at the bar and watched deep jade colored waves dance and flare around the man, yet certain chords released torrents of sparkling red embers while others seem to release the man from all his cares—and Callahan watched as the old drunk's aura subsided into smooth pale blues…
His new architect had removed all the windows from the front of the bar and replaced them with overhead 'garage' doors, and these new 'windows' let the music out, free to roam the street, and when open they let the air come inside for a visit. The windows were wide open now and a warm evening breeze was coming in through the Golden Gate and Callahan felt himself drifting along with the air and the music, thinking for a moment about Old California when San Francisco had been little more than a collection of whiskey bars and whore houses and clipper ships at anchor off the Embarcadero.
He drifted inside Kurt Weill's September Song for a while – until he saw a pale pink sphere no larger than a sweet pea hovering near the ceiling – and he sighed the sigh of an old man who understood the finite rituals of time. They were watching him again, and while he wondered why he was beyond caring. Time, he knew, did that to people.
Deborah had passed away almost two years before and he was surprised by the pervasive loneliness he felt in her absence, how frightening those feelings had become during the sleepless nights that followed, and yet the first time he felt that pain he'd thought of sitting in class when he was elementary school on a Friday afternoon, looking at the clock while waiting for the last bell of the week to sound. Each and every second was so precious, now as then, yet how many seconds had he wasted. He smiled at the mundane nature of this latest epiphany as he changed tempo once again, as he fell into Moonlight in Vermont, casting yet another spell over the room.
No one seemed to want to admit that nuclear annihilation had literally been just moments away, but now that humanity had stepped back from the abyss it was as if some sort of collective sigh had been waiting for release. At least among the living, anyway. He found his way into The Crystal Ship, and old song by The Doors, and he watched as people around the piano began to sway – almost like tall pines inside a windswept forest. He closed his eyes and saw his Looney Junes swaying to the music of even more ancient rhythms, holding her hands as she moved on top of him, perhaps as they'd made the baby that took her life. He took a deep breath as the memory passed, and when he opened his eyes again the pink sphere was still up in the beams above the swaying crowd of listeners. Yet…was the sphere reacting to his music? Could it be…?
He saw DD and the Doc walk in, and they finally found two seats at the bar. They listened – politely – with the rest of the people in the lounge…but Harry could tell by the expression on DDs face that it was time to take a break. He motioned for his backup to take over the keys and then he walked out the front door and across the street – to his old apartment building. DD made her way out a few minutes later and joined Harry in the elevator that took them to the top floor.
"Where's the Doc?" Harry asked.
"Nothing of concern to him," she said dryly.
And Callahan wasn't used to seeing her like this. DD was always upbeat, usually wore a can-do attitude that fit like an old shirt, but right now she looked worn down and beat up by events beyond her control. "Okay," he said, "you've got my attention now. What's wrong?"
"Cash flow," she sighed. "We've got thirty helicopters and twenty six fixed wing aircraft sitting on the ramps, and our payroll now has to cover almost three hundred people. With our cash on hand we can keep going for several months, but then what?"
"What's on your mind?" Callahan asked as he poured two glasses of pineapple juice.
"Temporary lay-offs, for one thing."
Callahan shook his head. "No way. There are already way too many homeless people on the streets, and I'll be damned if I'm going to add to that problem. Besides, I thought we had enough spares on hand to keep our birds in the air."
"We had all our aircraft operational within a day, Harry. What we don't have is air traffic control. There's no internet and no cell service, so no reservation system, and that means zero in the way of paying passengers."
"Things'll turn around in a few days."
"Okay, but what if they don't? Harry, I mean it…what happens if this is it?"
Callahan could hear the anxiety in DDs voice. He could see the same fear in her eyes. "What makes you think we're at that point, DD?"
"Oh, Harry, I don't know. All the stuff on the news recently, I guess."
"The news? Did I miss something? What have you been watching?"
"Oh, the Doc's been watching that series on the Eagle Network, stuff about the end of civilization…"
Callahan nodded. "They're the ones running the series on homelessness, right?"
"Aren't they advocating we rebuild the camps we used to intern the Japanese during the Second World War? Put all our homeless there?"
"Yup. Something's got to be done about the situation, Harry. Have you been down in the Tenderloin recently?"
Callahan nodded. Alleyways all over the city were overrun with makeshift encampments, and the situation was so out of control even the police department kept away from the larger camps. Property crime was up, but so too were assaults and robberies. "Do you think that's the best we can do? Round 'em up and put in camps out in the desert?"
"Look Harry, I know how it sounds but nobody is coming up with any other solution. The situation is actually so out of control you're taking your life in your hands just to…"
Harry held up his hands, then he shrugged. "The problem has been around for a while, DD. Maybe the only thing that's really changed is the constant news coverage."
"I don't know, Harry. It just feels really different out there right now. Like things have really taken a turn for the worse."
Callahan nodded. "All the more reason why we won't resort to layoffs. How long can we make it without cutting into our reserves?"
"Six months. Then we'll have to start selling properties."
Harry sighed. "If this thing lasts six months, losing air transportation will be the least of our worries. What's happening with the Doc?"
"The medical center is still open but the hospital is running generators full time to keep two ORs and a couple of floors open, and they're running low on fuel."
"Hard to do surgery by candlelight, I suppose," Harry said, looking across the bay to Oakland. "Weird looking across the bay at night and not seeing lights. I never thought I'd see that in my lifetime, I guess."
"Change is slow, until it isn't. I think all this caught everyone off guard."
Callahan turned and looked at her again. "Good thing you weren't out at SeaRanch when all this hit the fan."
"How're you doing, Harry? You look…I don't know…tired?"
"Me? Oh, I'm doing okay."
"Do you hear much from Didi?"
"No. Not since she went back to Israel. Her father is barely hanging on – from what I hear, anyway."
"Did you know him well?"
But Callahan shrugged off the question, then after a moment he turned and looked out the Golden Gate. "I miss the fog most of all, I think. Hard to believe we haven't had fog in the city for five years."
But DD was confused now, because it wasn't like Harry to ignore her like this; she looked at him again, closer now than she had in a long while. His hands looked old and she noted a tremor pass through his fingers, and then a terrible thought ran through her mind. Harry was indeed getting old and right before her eyes, so what else had she missed? Was she too close to the problem to have missed something so obvious, and mundane? 'How long will he make it,' she mused, yet even thinking the very idea filled her with dread. She'd hitched her wagon to his star so very long ago she could hardly remember his not being the center of her universe, and she had to admit now, if only to herself, that the idea of his passing scared the hell out of her.
"Times change, Harry," she just managed to say.
He nodded, then he turned and looked her in the eye: "We had a pretty good run, didn't we?"
"It's not over yet, Harry," she said, perhaps a little more wistfully than she should have.
But Callahan had simply shrugged and turned back to his view of the setting sun. "I always liked the view from this room," he sighed.
"Have you given up on going back to SeaRanch?"
But she watched him shrug – from behind – and that was it. He'd decided not to layoff his pilots and ground support teams and that was that, all he had to say.
"Are you going to play some more tonight? Some Gershwin, maybe?"
But he didn't respond. In fact, he hardly moved.
She walked around and sat beside him. Even his eyes looked tired, and she wondered why.
"Harry? Are you okay?"
The slightest hint of a smile passed over his face and he took a deep breath before he turned his head a little and looked into her eyes…
…and what she saw there terrified her. Anger, fear, loneliness—yet most of all his eyes reeked of despair—and she'd never seen anything like the malicious hopelessness she now saw etched across his face.
She reached out to him, took his hands in hers. "Harry…what is it? What's happened?"
He took another even deeper breath, then he looked up into the darkening sky—and to the stars beyond. "Parents should never live longer than their children," he whispered coarsely, holding up his hands and staring at the wrinkles and spots he saw on his outstretched fingers.
She looked at his hands just then and was sure she saw blood under his fingernails. When she looked at him moments later she saw tears rolling down his face.
"We have, of course, penetrated the Israeli operation," Ted Sorensen said. "For almost twenty years they have struggled and yet not once have they produced a stable wormhole. We, of course, are no longer concerned with such efforts. That was a dead end."
Sorensen was showing a young man, their latest new recruit, around the grounds. The Chancellor, he pointed out, lived inside the hilltop castle that most deliberately looked to be an identical copy of Neuschwanstein, while the rest of the colony's recruits resided inside dormitories arrayed around the vast glacial bowl carved out of the surrounding mountains.
"How many people live here now?" the young man asked.
"Here on the surface? At this point—only about fifteen hundred. Already the majority of the population is underground. We have two power plants in operation, and we now have almost a thousand acres under cultivation."
"You carried that much topsoil down there?"
Sorensen sighed. "No, of course not. Most of the yield comes from hydroponic setups, and with the exception of a large poultry processing facility, our diet is essentially vegan. We tried diary production but large amounts of grasses were needed. That effort failed."
"How far down is the colony? A few hundred feet?"
"I'm not quite sure, really. Why do you ask?"
"I've always been a little claustrophobic," the young man said, looking across the shallow bowl at the Chancellor's castle. "That really is a magnificent building," he added.
"So, pardon my curiosity, but why did you ask to see me?"
The young man looked away and crossed his arms over his chest. "I wasn't sure if you'd heard, but Debra was in LA during the recent upheaval. I've learned she was killed. I'm sorry…"
Sorensen nodded yet the old man seemed otherwise unfazed. "I see," was all he said, before he changed his mind and added: "And so, why else did you feel you might fit in here?"
The young man shrugged.
"Who sent you?" Sorensen asked, his newly menacing tone of voice suddenly full of suspicion.
"And I suppose you'd like to see more of the underground facilities? Or now that you have delivered your news perhaps you'd rather just leave?"
"If that's all I wanted I could have simply sent you an email."
"I haven't seen you since you were very young, but now for some reason you have contacted me, so I hope you will pardon my obvious suspicions."
"Only prudent, given what you're doing here."
"Indeed," Sorensen sneered. "Tell me, please, but just what exactly do you think we are doing here?"
"Preparing for the end of civilization."
For a moment it looked as though Sorensen was stifling an outburst of laughter, but he bit his lip and shook his head before he turned away. "That's good," he sighed. "But you are so wrong. We are not preparing for anything, you see."
The young man seemed suspicious of this dodge, and apparently Sorensen could see the skepticism on his face.
"We are not preparing for the end of anything, you idiot! We are causing the downfall of civilization," Sorensen growled, "and we have been for the past forty years!"
"Causing…? But why?"
Sorensen looked away, not sure if he wanted to proceed. He took a deep breath and came to a decision, then turned to face the young man. "Ask yourself this. What is the polar opposite of United We Stand?"
"What do you mean?" the young man replied, but Sorensen was growing aggravated now, and the young man watched as the old man started to tremble and shake.
"I mean," Sorensen added, "what is the opposite of union, in a political sense?"
"Disunion?" the young man said.
"Yes, of course. As in Divided We Fall. So for the last forty years we have sown division. Where liberal democracies flourished we developed networks that spewed right wing fascist ideologies, and where right wing regimes flourished we broadcast the precepts and benefits of liberal democratic institutions, and one by one we have watched the governments of the earth collapse in disarray…"
The young man seemed startled by the admission. "Why? Why do this?" he asked again.
"You've obviously traveled some, and have developed an awareness of the world's many problems, so tell me, what do you think is the single greatest problem facing humanity?"
"I don't know…maybe climate change?"
"Okay, but take that one step further. What is the root cause of climate change?"
"People? The energy required to…"
"To what? To feed all those mouths?"
"Not just that…"
"Indeed, not just that. It was bad enough when humanity counted three billion in number, and yet at that point in time the United States barely numbered two hundred million. And think about that, would you? The world was plundered to the point of collapse just to feed the material lusts of not even a quarter million people; now the planet has been overrun with eight billion people and every one of them wants what Americans had in the 1950s. A two story house with a big grass yard and with two Ford pickups in the garage, endless barbecues in the backyard by swimming pools overflowing with crystal clear water…and guess what? Along comes climate change and now we've got failing agricultural output colliding with all those hopes and dreams. Yet every politician in the world has lied their way into office by promising that they alone can make all their hopes and dreams come alive!"
"So, you've…"
"Yes. So now we're turning the tables, so to speak. We are stoking the fires of resentment, provoking the inevitable…collapse."
"Are you saying the war, the thing in Amsterdam, the Russian invasion…"
"Yes, you fool, it was all our doing! You dangle enough money and power in front of any two-bit dictator and they will do exactly as they are told. Or, in this case, as they were led to believe…"
The young man grinned. "That's fucking outrageous," he said, chuckling a little as he nodded his head in approval. "So, let me get this straight. You use television networks to destabilize countries one by one…"
"And don't forget," Sorensen said with a sardonic smile, "we do this by stoking the fires of old, in-bred resentments. Immigrants are coming to take your jobs, or to eradicate your religion…"
"The wars in central Africa and central Asia?"
"Oh, we were just getting warmed up then, refining our technique."
"So? What's next?"
Sorensen grinned. "You do understand that if I answer these questions you will not be permitted to leave this place? Are you sure you wish to proceed?"
"Oh, Ted, if I want to leave this place I will do so, and whenever I choose to do so. But…be that as it may, yes, please, I want to know everything."
"Are you saying you want to join us?"
"I think you could say that," the young man said.
"Then you must prove yourself to us."
"Oh? What did you have in mind?"
Sorensen looked the young man in the eye now as he spoke: "We want you to do something difficult."
"Difficult? Such as?"
"We want you to kill your father."
"Really? Is that all?"
"You will do this?"
"Of course," Lloyd Callahan said. "That won't be a problem."
Cracks in a Sidewalk, Part IV
We come to the end of another arc, and one more piece of the puzzle emerges. You'll just have time for tea, too.
Debra Sorensen had watched Sherman's exchange with that companion of his – because that's what she, or it, really was – her heart filling with cold running dread as she watched the creature. This – thing's – aura was still confounding to her; it looked less like a maze of fluid than an electric field, and as such what she saw when she looked at Goodman had always been meaningless. But now Didi Goodman's shimmering aura looked malevolent, and ominously so. It's 'aura' looked like a pulsing electro-magnetic field hovering over it's skin, the field the color of a raging fire – yet the entire structure seemed lined with oozing blackish-blue plasma – and Debra simply couldn't make sense of the shifting patterns. Even as she had spoken those chilling words — "What makes you think that you aren't?"
Debra watched as the thing disappeared, then she turned to Sherman – and he seemed almost too stunned to think. Even as he turned to examine the wounded boy's belly. Deb watched as, without thinking, he took a syringe of morphine and jabbed it into the boy's arm, then she felt a sense of wonder as he ran his fingers through the boy's hair, speaking words of comfort as the morphine broke over the boy, and as his breathing slowed.
Bud Kurzweil came back to the cockpit and looked down at the boy, the disgust in his eyes in an instant turning to displaced empathy, then compassion — and Debra watched this transubstantiation with a growing sense of understanding. Humans, she realized, were nothing more than chemical beings. They responded to the ebbs and flows of their hormones, yet they couldn't control their reactions. When a certain kind of stimulus washed through them, a prescribed chain of responses began to take form, yet this response was – almost – impossible to stop once the reaction took hold. It was like a lightning bolt still in it's cloud, all limitless potential before energy coalesced in branching arcs on it's way to ground.
"What would you do, Gene," she asked as she watched him watching the boy, "if you could change what had just happened here?"
He shook his head, then he looked at Bud Kurzweil's pistol and Deb understood.
In the next instant they were back in the marina fairway and the boys were approaching aquaTarkus again. Bud was slow to draw his pistol this time and the boy got off a clear shot – that struck Sherman in the chest. Gene felt searing pain as he fell over the wheel and in the next instant he was back leaning over the boy in the cockpit, and it was the boy, once again, who still lay dying…
"What the fuck just happened?" Kurzweil moaned as his disorientation grew more intense.
And Sherman turned and looked at Deb. "Don't do that again," he growled. "You promised."
And in the next instant Sherman and Kurzweil and Debra were on the summit of the Matterhorn, watching as Beth led Betty and Father Pete along the knife-edge back to Sherman. Yet Gene knew the massive gust was coming so he tried to yell out a warning but he watched again helplessly as they were picked up like leaves and scattered on the wind, only to begin their long fall to the rocks below – again. He saw Hans and turned away, only to find he was back in the cockpit, still leaning over the boy. Kurzweil was covered in snow and he appeared wordlessly terrified.
"Stop it, Deb," Sherman snarled. "Now."
"I didn't do anything, Gene," she whispered.
"What? What do you mean?"
"You did that, Gene," she sighed. "Only you."
Kurzweil's body twitched into deep spasm as understanding fell away, and Sherman took a deep breath and stood again, but he reached out for the binnacle as if he was unsure of his footing and needed to steady himself. "What are you saying, Debra. What are you telling me?"
"You took us there, Gene."
"I can go back?"
"I can change what happened?"
"You can. But you must learn to see before you try again."
"To see? See what?"
She took his hand and they were back on the Matterhorn, but time was as frozen as the rocks now. Beth was suspended in the sky as the last moments of her life became clear, but Debra led Gene to her unseeing eyes and then she put his hands on the young girl's face.
And he could see.
Like branches of a tree reaching for the sky. Like tendrils of lightning falling to earth. Memories of a life that had never taken shape formed in his mind and – he could see. All that never had been was suddenly coming to pass – but then Deb took him to another tendril and let him see inside. Endless. Infinite. Everything impossible because it had never happened — and yet it had, for how else could he have seen such things?
"This is madness!" he screamed. "Pure insanity! Get me away from here!"
And then they were both back in the cockpit, the boy still slowly bleeding to death.
"And this isn't madness?" she said to him, her question not really a question at all. She swung around and held her arms out wide. "Your planet is burning up before your eyes, Father Sherman, and yet all your species sees is another opportunity for war. Can you explain that to me, please?"
Sherman felt as if the fabric of reality was unravelling underfoot as he turned and looked at Debra again, but now there was something very wrong with what he saw. She was more than ten feet tall and her skin was glowing from the inside with a fierce magenta-pink light, then feathers replaced skin and bright amber eyes came into sharp relief.
The creature went over to the wounded boy and placed her hand on his bloody shirt and something like an arc of electricity passed from her into the boy. She turned again and stood tall, and then huge wings unfolded from behind and she stood there basking in the sun for several minutes, while Sherman simply stood there, staring at her in disbelief.
The he heard Bud Kurzweil coming close. "Where's Debra!" Bud shouted, drawing his pistol from the leather holster on his belt and pointing it at the tall, feathered creature. "Bring her back! Now!"
Yet the creature turned and looked at the police officer almost dispassionately, like it was regarding something completely inconsequential, then it looked at the weapon in the man's hand before it slowly shook it's head.
Kurzweil pulled the trigger, and the Sig P-220 roared one more time, the Winchester SilverTip bullet striking the creature in the upper chest.
And then the creature disappeared, and Debra Sorensen slowly reappeared – only now with a massive chest wound spreading across her upper chest, and as she began bleeding to death Gene and Bud ran to her as she began her falling away. Sherman caught her and cradled her head in his arms as she tried to say something, and Roscoe came up the companionway just then and he looked around until he found her, then he walked over to Debra and licked her chin. Sherman took her hand and she cried as she passed.
Roscoe curled up beside her with his nose on her neck, and then he looked up at Sherman – now very confused.
When others in the encampment spoke of the old man in the gray tent they spoke in hushed whispers, some almost reverentially, even though more often than not they simply let him be. Some in the camps even protected the old man, though few understood the reason why.
He rarely spoke to anyone, not even to the people who protected him, though every now and then he could be seen walking among the tents with an old brown dog, usually at night. He walked to the beach and listened to the breaking surf, and on cooler nights, usually in winter, he could be seen laying on the sand looking up at the stars, the old brown dog curled up by his side with its nose on his neck.
The police still checked the encampments near the beach every morning, their sad duty it was to find those who had fallen into one of the many cracks in the sidewalks and send their remains on to the crematories, and one morning the old man's body joined those headed to the furnaces.
The officer who found the old man thought it odd, however, when she found an old brown dog curled up on the his chest – for it too had passed in the night. Funny, she thought, how often that happened.
And yet no one, or so it seemed, knew the old man's name – but that really wasn't so surprising, not in the end. Few people in these camps had names, after all.
© 2022 adrian leverkühn | abw | and as always, thanks for stopping by for a look around the memory warehouse…and note this story is fiction, pure and simple. Image: M104, APOD. Music today by the Moody Blues; I never thought I'd live to be a hundred, I never thought I'd live to be a million, and Watching and Waiting. Again, thanks for dropping by – for a read and a listen.
Cracks in a Sidewalk, Part III
Time for tea? Perhaps. Ginger tea for this one, if you please.
[You'll Never Be Alone \\ Duncan Sheik]
Sherman and Didi Goodman sat outside the tent, now located a few blocks in from the boardwalk but still near the North Jetty, going over the latest vectors. The TB outbreak was gaining serious momentum now, despite the health department and CalTrans dispersing the latest encampments with bulldozers and flamethrowers. Most had fled to Culver City, though some of the homeless made it as far north as Santa Monica, but it was a rout. Daytime temperatures were still in the F-115 degree range, or Category 4, though the beach was still relatively cool at F-95 degrees. Still, as nighttime temps were still almost F-90 near the beach, the remaining homeless populations were suffering. And now that the Colorado River was a shadow of its former self, hydro power from Hoover dam was sporadic at best, so rolling blackouts were the norm these days. When people got home from work their gasoline powered generators fired up, fouling the air even more. Calls for wind and solar farms in the city were escalating, but in a sense everyone knew it was already too late.
Didi had located Ellie and Sherman had tested her family, and when they all tested positive for TB he'd had to notify the health department. The problem now, at least as far as Sherman was concerned, was that TB was spreading too rapidly in some neighborhoods, but not fast enough in others. And there was nothing predictable about these new vectors. If he'd been paranoid and susceptible to conspiracy theories currently spreading around the web, he'd have jumped to the conclusion that "someone" was seeding ghetto neighborhoods with the bacterium, but the simple fact of the matter was that wealthier neighborhoods on the west side had been equally hard hit. Yet clusters of localized infections was the norm, but when entire city blocks fell to the bug something new had to be at work. How could one city block fall and the next one over have zero cases? It just didn't make sense.
"Any new ASP cases today?" Sherman asked, referring to the Amnesic Shellfish Poisoning passed along by consuming infected shellfish.
"Two clusters. San Pedro and Newport Beach. There's also a new cluster of cholera patients at a camp near Griffith Park."
"Cholera? Damn."
"The Eagle Network affiliate is making noise again," Goodman replied.
"What…the internment camp solution?"
As homelessness spread, conservative news outlets were beginning to clamor for more aggressive solutions to the problem, the latest being to round up all the homeless and put them into camps up in the desert.
Bud Kurzweil pedaled up in a rush just then, and he looked spooked. "Have you heard?" he said breathlessly.
"Heard what?" Sherman said, taking a Diet Dr Pepper out of the cooler and tossing it over to the cop.
"At least two bombs hit in the Netherlands," Kurzweil said. "And the word is NATO has launched on Russia."
"Bombs?" Sherman sighed. "I assume you mean nuclear bombs?"
The cop nodded as he opened the can of soda and gulped it down. "Yup. The one that hit near Amsterdam was a big city-buster, at least that's what CNN is saying. And there are reports of Russian airborne troops in the area."
Sherman remembered nuclear doctrine. He knew what came next.
"Say, weren't you in the Navy?" Kurzweil asked. "Were you ever around any of that stuff?"
Sherman nodded. "Yes. To both your questions."
"So, how long until the bombs hit?"
Sherman shrugged as he pulled out his iPhone and dialed Debra's number.
"You back on the boat?" he asked when she picked up.
"Watching CNN. Amsterdam and Rotterdam are gone. One missile has hit St Petersburg and another is headed towards Moscow. The president is about to address the nation."
"Better fire up the engine," Sherman said softly. "I'll be there as soon as I can." He rang off and put his phone away.
"Where you headed, doc?" Kurzweil asked.
"Back side of Catalina. Didi, better bring the car around."
"Got it," she said, her voice sounding unchanged, indeed almost unaffected.
Kurzweil shook his head, and he looked distraught. "Think you could make room for me?" he asked carefully.
Sherman looked at the cop for a moment, then he nodded. "You won't be missed if you cut and run?"
"All things considered, Doc, I'd rather be alive than late for roll-call."
Kurzweil knew engines so he'd be good to have around, and besides, Sherman owed him now. After the solar-magnetic anomalies of the past couple of days the entire electrical grid had been down for hours, and engines of every kind had been fried. After switching out solenoids and logic boards, however, Kurzweil had revived the Rover and the boat's diesel in one afternoon, so Sherman didn't hesitate. "Well, of course. There's plenty of room, and we'd be happy to have you."
Didi pulled up in Debra's old Land Rover and they loaded all the medications in the rear and then took off for the marina. When they got to aquaTarkus Deb was filling the water tanks, and she had Roscoe leashed up and ready for one last walk, so Sherman and Kurzweil took the pup up to the grass. Cars were streaming into the parking lot now, and boat owners were loading supplies as quickly as they could, only now there was a sense of real panic in the air. Even more so as they walked back to the boat, as people were frantically loading supplies on their boats.
"I wonder how many people got there engines sorted out?" Deb asked after they cast off their lines and motored for the breakwater. And as if on cue, a little sailboat entered the fairway under sail, and in the disturbed, light air it was hardly making any headway. "Gene, you think everyone will be headed for Catalina?"
"It's the safe call. Two good harbors on the backside, and the only other option is San Clemente, but that would be dangerous. It's too close to the Navy bases in San Diego." They were the first boat to make the breakwater, but Sherman halfway expected the flash of a detonation at any moment. He looked at the chartplotter and noted the course, 197 magnetic, and he synced the autopilot – watching as it kicked-in when engaged.
"Isn't there another island out past Catalina?" Kurzweil asked.
"Yup. San Nicolas, but the Navy owns that one. And Santa Barbara Island is even closer, but it's too small to offer any protection from a blast and I don't thing there are facilities there."
"I can't believe we're having this conversation," Debra said as she and Darius came up from below.
"Everything stowed?" Sherman asked.
Debra nodded while Darius stared at an airliner trying to line up for a landing at LAX. "Man, that don't look right," he grumbled as he pointed to the west, and Sherman turned his attention to the A380 that looked about five miles out, so coming in from the west. The left wing was low and the huge aircraft seemed to be wallowing, then he suddenly realized he didn't hear any sound coming from the engines and he looked at the aircraft's position relative to their own.
Sherman swung the boat into a hard right turn and then chopped the throttle, letting speed bleed off as the boat arced in a smooth circle.
"What's wrong, Gene?" Debra asked, but Didi answered before he could.
"The jet is out of fuel and in a glide. It will not make the runway," she added unnecessarily, because now it was quite obvious the huge jet was too low and too slow to even make the beach.
"Bud, you got your radio handy?" Sherman asked Kurzweil.
"On it," the cop said, taking his radio out of its holster. "Two VictorPaul to all units vicinity LAX, looks like an inbound A380 is going to land in the water." Since the solar flares and magnetic anomalies of the day before, LAX had been closed so the tower and fire services were unmanned, and that meant that the county's emergency services would have to respond…and they'd be slow…at best.
And as everyone looked on, the A380s drooping left wingtip sliced into the water about a half mile short of the beach, and horrified now, Sherman looked on helplessly as the aircraft started spinning towards the breaking line of breaking waves. Sherman pointed the bow at the disintegrating airliner and pushed the throttle to full power while Kurzweil started giving updates to responding units from both the fire and police departments. One doorway up on the airliner's right side's forward upper deck opened and the emergency slide deployed, just as the entire left side of the airliner slipped beneath the waves.
"Looks like the port wing spar snapped," Sherman said, "but it's still partially attached to the fuselage, so it's pulling the passenger cabin down!" And as he spoke the right wing started rising higher and higher, until it was pointing almost straight up into the midday sky. People started climbing up and out of the lone open doorway and onto the side of the fuselage, and Kurzweil kept sending updates to emergency responders all the while. A couple of firetrucks appeared near the beach but as very few vehicles had been repaired after all the recent geomagnetic anomalies, it looked like the response would be inadequate, at best…
"Better break out the Zodiac," Sherman said to no one in particular. "Deb, you'd better take the helm while we get it ready to go."
"Got it," she said, and then: "Gene, have you been keeping an eye on our depth?"
He nodded. "Yeah. It's gonna be tight. When we get to fifteen feet indicated turn away from the beach and circle around."
It took about five minutes to get the inflatable boat in the water and running, and Sherman ran Kurzweil over to the fuselage. The aft end of the airliner had sunk rapidly so people had moved that way, to where the water met the fuselage, and because he was still in uniform Kurzweil's gun and badge prevented panic from overtaking the crowd. They loaded five injured passengers the first time over and ferried them to just outside the surf line, where paramedics and firefighters were standing by to carry the injured ashore. Two more sailboats arrived and soon two more Zodiacs joined the operation, and between the three inflatables everyone was evacuated from the Airbus within a couple hours.
And by that point it was obvious no hydrogen bombs were on their way, so Sherman looked around and asked everyone on aquaTarkus what they wanted to do. And everyone now wanted to go back to the marina.
"Well, Hell, that was an interesting day," he said as he pointed the boat at the breakwater and added power.
Then Darius came up to him and showed him his iPhone. Turned out he had captured the A380s approach and water-impact on his phone and he smiled. "Betcha I get a million hits on YouTube!" he beamed.
Debra had gone to the hospital and visited the woman with the black aura more than once in the days just before the two-day war, and she soon came to a startling realization. The woman remembered nothing about her life, nothing at all, and her physician expressed concern about her neurological condition.
"Her short term memory should be impaired, perhaps permanently, but this toxin has no reputation for affecting long-term memory."
"So," Debra said, looking at the young Vietnamese woman, "do you think something else is going on?"
"Every test we've run is negative, even her fMRI came up clean."
Debra looked at the woman through a window; her aura was still a swirling obsidian mass, and she still felt her father's malign presence when she walked closer to the woman, but how on earth could she relay this information to a neurologist? "Could this be a mental disorder, I mean like some kind of psychotic episode?"
The physician shook her head. "No evidence of that."
"Idiopathic," Debra sighed. "But that just doesn't seem logical," she added.
"Logical? What do you mean, exactly?"
"Next time you talk with her, ask her if she's been to Argentina recently."
"Argentina? What do you think's going on?"
But Debra shook her head. "Just a hunch," she said – quietly. "But ask her about Argentina. And see if she responds to the name Ted Sorensen."
"Sorensen? The movie guy?"
Debra nodded, but now she was getting upset. She looked at the woman again, studied her aura and recoiled when she felt her father still reaching out to her, but after a minute more of that she turned and walked from the hospital. Darius was waiting for her at the Land Rover, and he could tell something was wrong as he watched her approaching – but he knew that look, knew not to push her.
"Father Gene, he needs us to to get more of them TB drugs, he said the starter paks if they still have 'em."
She nodded. "Okay. That means we head over to La Cienega. Feel like driving?"
"Yeah, sure," he said, helping her in then walking around to get behind the wheel. "Ain't much traffic out yet."
She sighed. "No more solenoids, no more motherboards. A lot of people are going to have to learn to like public transit."
"Radio was sayin' they got no power from the Bay Area all the way up to Vancouver. A hundred and eighteen degrees in Portland today, too."
She turned on the air conditioner and basked in the cool air – when the sky turned unnaturally bright and the engine died. She saw people out on sidewalk cover their eyes but within a few seconds they started falling to the pavement, then her eyes were drawn to the Land Rover's hood – because the paint was beginning to sizzle and crack. She picked up her iPhone but it wouldn't turn on, and when she looked outside the car she saw bodies writhing on the pavement.
And then the sky turned an impossibly bright white for a few seconds and spidery cracks appeared all over the windshield – then as quickly everything went back to 'normal' – whatever normal was these days. She opened the door and stepped out onto the pavement but her tennis shoes seemed to melt into the concrete so she jumped back into the Rover.
Darius experimentally held his hand up and placed it on his door's glass window – but he quickly yanked it back and whistled in startled pain as the intense heat registered. "Must be a hundred and fifty out there," he said as he looked at the skin on his fingers. "What happened?"
"Probably another solar flare. Now we need to wait for the temperature to stabilize."
"Then whatta we do?" Darius asked.
"We get the folding bikes down and head for the marina…but we'll have to wait for the pavement to cool down first." She pulled out her iPhone and it too wouldn't 'wake up' and she shook her head. "Looks like this is fried too," she sighed. She held her hand up to the glass and quickly pulled it away, surprised that some people had survived and that they were getting up and making their way to any shade they could find.
But after a few minutes sitting there in the line of stalled traffic the temperature inside the Rover was rising quickly, and now Darius was beginning to sweat profusely.
"Okay," she said, "let's get the bikes and see if we can make it down to the boat."
Once the bikes were down and unfolded, she tentatively rolled the tires and they moved freely so they took off down Venice Boulevard, weaving between stalled cars and around dazed people wandering around in the streets. She smelled smoke in the air as they made made their to Lincoln Boulevard, then she heard someone screaming, and they could both see flames coming out of several buildings, then people smashing glass storefronts and grabbing anything of value before they took off down the street.
"We best hurry along now, Miss Debbie," Darius said – just before a huge fireball erupted at the Chevron station they were passing. The concussive explosion knocked them both to the ground, and when Debra stood she saw that Darius was having a hard time just sitting up so she went to his side. He'd tried to stop his fall with an outstretched arm, and she could see that both the radius and ulna in his right forearm were fractured, their disjointed forms stretching the skin above his wrist, and he appeared to be in a good deal of pain. She helped him stand but he was looking at her like he really didn't know what to do, so she picked up his bike before she reached for hers, but he still seemed confused about what to do next.
"What's wrong, Darius?"
"I ain't no good now, Miss Debbie. Can't protect you, can't drive you nowhere…"
"Don't you worry about that," she said, watching his aura wilt before her eyes, turning from deep blue to silver gray as his lingering depression came back for him. "Come on, let's go…we've only got a few blocks left to go."
They pushed their bikes along, watching as the world went mad all around them. More windows shattered and television sets disappeared down trash-filled alleyways. Someone tried to rob a liquor store and the owner chased the robbers out into the street, shooting at them as they ran between cars and completely oblivious to the danger he was himself creating. A house was on fire a couple of blocks away and a huge column of black smoke was rising into the cloudless sky, joining the fire and smoke from the blazing gas station behind them, then she saw smoke coming from the marina – a lot of it, too. She picked up their pace a little, suddenly wondering where Gene had been when the solar flare hit – and if he was okay.
As they got closer to the marina she could see dozens of boats fully engulfed in fuel-soaked flames, but most appeared to be on the far side and well away from where aquaTarkus was tied up. She turned and looked back towards downtown and was shocked to see dozens of columns of black smoke rising into the afternoon sky, but what was most surprising was the utter silence of the scene. No cars, no airplanes or helicopters, and most worrying of all, no sirens. No cops. No firefighters and no paramedics.
They were alone now. Cut off.
When they made it to the pier where her boat was tied off she saw Gene and Bud Kurzweil were already there and waiting for them, and as they pushed the bikes out the pier Gene came out to meet them, stopping when he saw Darius's wrist – then nodding his head in understanding.
"Get him down to his cabin," Sherman said. "I'll get to him after we get out beyond the breakwater."
"So, you got the engine running?" Deb asked.
"Yup. You and Bud need to stow the bikes after we cast off the lines."
She stared at him for a moment – as she was not quite sure what she was seeing in his aura – but whatever it was he seemed seriously alarmed, so she helped Darius into his berth and told him they'd be with him soon, then she went topsides in time to help coil and stow the lines Gene and Bud had just pulled aboard.
Gene went to the helm and backed out of the slip – again, and this time he took note of the mass of other boats entering the fairway. "Lot of people having the same idea," he said to Debra as she came and sat by him. "How bad is out there," he asked.
"People were looting within minutes, and I think people were trying to steal gas by cutting the nozzles from the fill hoses. I think that's what caused the Chevron station to go up, anyway. Knocked us right off our feet."
Sherman shook his head as he listened, then he watched as kids in a Zodiac took off from a nearby pier and headed for the closest boat to them – which happened to be aquaTarkus. Then he realized the guy in front of the little boat had an assault rifle. "Bud," he said, "you see what I see?"
"Yup. On it," Kurzweil sighed, keeping his right side out of view as he unsnapped his holster.
When the Zodiac was about fifty feet away the kid with the rifle brought it up to his shoulder but Kurzweil drew down and fired first; this kid fell back into the inflatable and the other boy in the boat picked up the rifle and started to aim at Kurzweil; two more shots rang out and this kid went down, only now it was obvious both were badly wounded and writhing in pain.
Sherman backed off the power and circled around to the boys' little boat – just as automatic weapons fire erupted from Chase Park – causing instant havoc throughout the marina. Bud jumped down into the inflatable and he found the boy in the back was already dead, while the first boy was wounded and crying out now as he went into shock.
Sherman tossed a line to Bud and as soon as the boy was hoisted onboard and the little dinghy tied off, Sherman moved away from the gunfire at full throttle. As aquaTarkus motored out the breakwater he could see the large homeless encampment by the North Jetty and he flipped a button on the plotter and looked at the current outside air temperature.
"One eighteen," he sighed, "and that's down here at the beach." Bud lifted the wounded boy into the cockpit and Sherman looked at Deb and pointed at the wheel. She nodded and he went below to grab an IV setup and his go-bag, but he dropped in to check on Darius first.
"How're you doin' down here, Amigo?" he asked, and when Darius shook his head Sherman took out an pre-filled morphine syringe and shot him in the arm.
"Did I hear shootin' up there, Doc?" Darius asked.
"Yup. Things are breaking down real fast now. No cops, no fire department, so I'd guess the next thing will be troops. I don't think we want to be around for that."
Darius nodded. "Thanks for taking care of me, Doc."
Sherman nodded. "Darius, you've been taking care of me for years, so it's about time I returned the favor, you know? We got a kid in the cockpit with a gunshot wound, and as soon as I'm done up there I'll try and set your arm." Darius nodded and Sherman turned to go topsides – and there in front of him was Didi Goodman.
He jumped back, completely startled. "How'd you get here?" he asked, looking her over suspiciously.
Yet true to form she simply shrugged away his question with an enigmatic little flip of her hand, then she turned and walked aft to the companionway. She picked up Sherman's equipment then walked topsides – only to have to face down the shocked expressions from Deb and Bud Kurzweil. But she ignored those as adroitly by turning to the boy with the gunshot wound in his belly – and she sighed when she saw the damage to his upper right quadrant.
"Let me guess," Goodman said sarcastically to Kurzweil, "hollow points…right?"
"You know it, man. 45 ACP, Silvertips," Kurzweil nodded with satisfaction. "Great stopping power," he added – unnecessarily.
"Yes, you stopped him, alright," she said as she leaned over and palpated his belly. The boy writhed in agony and Kurzweil turned away and walked forward, leaving Goodman and Sherman alone to deal with the consequences of the boy's actions. "He might survive a day," she started to say to Sherman, "in a well equipped hospital. But he's going to need a transplant, Gene. What do you want to do? Drop him over the side, maybe?"
Sherman recoiled from the insinuation. "We can give him morphine, I think…"
"And just how much of that do you have, Gene? Enough to help Darius and this kid? Because that's what it's going to come down to, and you know it."
Sherman turned and looked shoreward, as if there was a morphine store right around the next corner – but the hard-edged reality of the situation came into sharp relief as he looked at the surreal number of coiling back clouds now rising over the city. "It's all coming undone," he whispered – more to himself than to anyone else. "I thought we'd have longer, ya know?"
"Maybe it was always just a house of cards," Debra said as she turned and looked at whole blocks of houses and condos being consumed by walls of towering flames.
"That doesn't matter now," Goodman said stoically. "What matters is this kid. What are you going to do for him right now?"
Sherman caught the tone in her voice as he turned and looked at her, his eyes suddenly full of wonder: "Why is it that I get the impression we're being judged?"
"What makes you think that you aren't?" Goodman said with the faintest smile on her face – yet in the next moment her form wavered a little before it just disappeared.
Sherman turned and looked skyward, then he turned to his bag of tricks before he shrugged and started to work on the boy.
© 2022 adrian leverkühn | abw | and as always, thanks for stopping by for a look around the memory warehouse…and note this story is fiction, pure and simple.
Cracks in a Sidewalk, Part II
Not trying to be obscure here, but for the most part The Eighty-eighth Key is complete. And yet it seemed that before I could post the conclusion I needed to lay a little more groundwork – in order to set up the conclusion of that story will take us straight into TimeShadow. Enough said, for now.
[Buffalo Springfield \\ For What It's Worth]
Sherman woke earlier than usual; Roscoe hopped off the berth and made for the companionway, wagging his tail while he waited for him. Sherman strapped on his leg and put the coffee on then hooked up the leash before he set off up the companionway and into the dawn.
Roscoe was a Sussex Spaniel, a low-slung long brown haired fluff ball, and he was also a born show off and kind of a clown. He hopped off the boat's bulwarks and pulled Sherman towards the nearest patch of grass, still almost fifty yards away, and for his size Sherman thought the pup was incredibly strong.
"Not so fast," Gene Sherman growled, and Roscoe let up…a little, but he'd held it long enough and time was now of the essence. They made with just moments to spare and Roscoe watered the grass before he circled twice and got down to the real business at hand. With those chores out of the way, Sherman took the pup for a long walk before heading back to the boat.
Debra was up and futzing around in the galley by the time they got back to the boat, and she had Roscoe's kibble ready to go by the time he trundled down the steep steps. He dove in and wolfed down his chow, and Deb handed Gene a mug of coffee as he sat down beside at the cockpit table.
"I'm glad you could stay last night," she said, smiling. It hadn't taken a whole lot to convince him to stay, but the hot shower had probably sealed the deal. Sherman insisted on sleeping in the tent most nights, though it was unnecessary at this point. Her father had completely disappeared from LA years ago, and in a matter of months Ted Sorensen's malign influence had evaporated. Sherman, however, still wasn't sure what was going on, so he still kept to the shadows.
After the night of the signal — when the fate of the planet had been revealed — Deb and Sherman had slowly grown close. First in the underground research facility and then after Daisy Jane passed. Debra had started to lean on him as soon as it became crystal clear that Henry Taggart was gone, that he'd never come back to her.
When Sherman became aware of her abilities he was curious for a while then he just took it for granted, and when Debra finally realized that Gene Sherman never lied, and that he didn't even try to keep secrets, she understood that he didn't have anything to hide — from her, or from anyone else, for that matter. His aura was always cool blue and the only time she'd sensed anger in him was once right after he'd smashed his thumb with a hammer.
Was that, she kept asking herself, why Henry left her? Too many secrets he could no longer keep?
If so, she couldn't imagine how difficult it must have become for him. And she'd never once intuited how impossible their situation had become. 'Why not?' she kept asking herself. Had she become so blind to their reality? But when he left she'd begun to feel deep changes within, like something changed when he left, like his departure triggered a release of some sort…
…and yet Gene Sherman had proven to be the exact opposite of Henry Taggart. He fit, he understood, and her only regret was that he was so much older than she was — because he'd have made a perfect husband. And yet when she mentioned that once he'd not rebuffed her.
"Why would you want to hang around with an old fart like me?" he'd replied with a chuckle.
"Because…you didn't run away."
And then he'd turned and looked into her eyes, a somewhat and reserved love manifest in the gentle, soft light of his aura. He'd reached out and cupped the side of her face in his hand, stroked her hair as he looked into her soul.
"If that's what you want," he'd said, "let's do it."
So they'd run to Vegas and done the deed, yet it wasn't long before he told her he wanted to return to Venice Beach, and then he'd told her what he had in mind. So she'd picked up a new boat and moved back to the marina, and he'd helped her find a new pup along the way. Soon enough her new life looked a whole lot like the one she'd hoped to share with Henry, and soon enough she'd even begun to feel a little of the happiness she'd always longed for.
Every now and then Ralph Richardson dropped by — "Just to say hi!" — but he wasn't fooling anyone, least of all her. He'd made a Faustian bargain somewhere along the way and was creating clone-like beings, but for what purpose? She'd met one the night of the signal, the red cat-suited blond in Gene's Ferrari, yet even Sherman had no idea what she really was. The strangest thing about her was she seemed to "belong" to Sherman, and though he'd plainly rejected the relationship she was never really far away from him. When he had dozens of patients lined up at the tent she'd simply show up and start taking care of the next one in line, and from the first Gene had just shrugged and let her do her thing — whatever that was. Soon enough they'd both grudgingly accepted her unwanted appearances as almost inevitable.
She pulled bagels from the toaster and spread a thin layer of cream cheese, then slivered tomatoes and red onions and freshly sliced Scottish gravlox were carefully layered before she sprinkled a few capers on top, and she had to admit once again that she loved doting on Sherman. Because unlike her father, and yes, Henry Taggart, he really seemed to appreciate her efforts, yet his ongoing appreciation continued to surprise her. Though of course he always put aside a few choice pieces of salmon and slipped them under the table to an equally appreciative little spaniel, she never experienced his type of appreciation.
"After you drop me off," he said that morning, "could you take Darius and run over to the lab?"
"You think they'll have results this early?"
"They might have Ellie's…"
"You're really worried about her, aren't you?"
And he'd nodded his head carefully — and slowly. "Yes. Too many vectors. If her grandmother is the source, I'll have to get the public health department involved…"
"And people will start losing their jobs," Debra replied. "Again."
"That's what it's going to look like from now on. Culling the sick and the weak from the main herd…"
"Stop with the Darwin, would you? It's too early in the morning for that crap."
"It's inevitable now," he said before he took a bite of his bagel. "Oh, what's the weather look like? Any word on the high today?" She turned on the television and flipped over to The Weather Channel, and soon enough the local forecast popped up and Sherman whistled: "Geesh, 115 in the valley and 98 at the beach," he said as he shook his head. "The water will start warming again."
"I can bring an extra cooler and ice water," Debra said helpfully.
"Yeah. Maybe the blue cooler with bottled water and the big white one with Gatorade. It'll hit a hundred on the pavement. Oh, I've been meaning to ask…how's Darius doing?"
She shrugged. "Still moody but he's cleaned up his act. No hangovers and he's not as angry."
Sherman shrugged. "That's the bupropion kicking in."
"So, you think that group on the beach has TB?"
He nodded. "My guess is we're going to have a major outbreak down there…what's that on the TV…something about Russia…?"
She flipped the channel over to CNN and breathless reporters were describing a sudden Russian ground advance into Poland, and one reporter came on and advised that air raid sirens were going off in Berlin and Hamburg…
"What the hell?" Sherman sighed as he leaned over and turned up the volume. "Did I miss something? When did this start up?"
Deb looked away, suddenly very afraid. Henry was over there right now, and he'd emailed last week, told her he was already very ill and making for Paris as quickly as he could.
"Oh man, this is so Crazy Eddie," Sherman grumbled.
She nodded. "Why now? I mean, aren't things bad enough as it is?"
He shook his head and sighed. "Well, it is what it is, and whatever happens it won't stop people from getting sick. I'm going to change into my scrubs. Can you be ready to go in five?"
He leaned over and kissed the top of her head. "Don't worry. He'll be alright."
"What?" Deb said, startled now. "Who…who will be alright?"
He smiled at her – but then he slowly turned and walked aft to the head. She watched him, watched his aura, but it never changed.
The old man slowly made his way to the Zebra but he wasn't too surprised when he found that Ellie had already called in sick. He nodded and asked for his coffee 'to-go' – then he made his way to the tent, only to find Bud Kurzweil and his rookie already there — waiting anxiously. Which meant that all his homeless patients had scattered and disappeared into the woodwork.
"You'd better pack up, Doc," Kurzweil said as Sherman walked up.
He nodded. A large TB vector in the area would certainly drive a massive Public Health Department response in the area, and that had to mean that the lab results from last night's exams at the north jetty had already been received downtown. "How long?" he asked Bud.
"The dump trucks are on the way. Call it twenty minutes."
Sherman fished his iPhone from his coat pocket and sent the emergency pickup signal to Deb. "Thanks for the head's up, Bud."
"Can we give you a hand?"
Sherman shook his head. "No. You two can't be seen here."
"Where are you going to set up?"
Sherman sighed. "The garage, I reckon. Give us a couple hours."
"Okay," Bud said. "Did you hear about the crap going on in Europe?"
Sherman nodded. "I guess someone figured we needed another world war. Odd timing, though."
"Odd?"
"Yeah. I mean, it seems kind of pointless right now, ya know? Floods and droughts and crop failures everywhere, and now on top of all that it seems like people from equatorial regions are heading for cooler climates. So, yeah…why now?"
Kurzweil nodded. "Well, we'll drop by later this morning. We gotta go check on that camp by the jetty."
Sherman sighed. "Hopefully they won't be scattered. If they are, a major new outbreak is just about guaranteed."
"I hear you," Kurzweil said. Deb pulled up in the Rover just then and she smiled at the cops then she and Darius started breaking down the tent and loading it in the back, and ten minutes later the 'clinic' was gone — and it looked as if it had never been there. They drove over to Deb's old house on the boardwalk and Sherman helped them set up the clinic in the garage, then he sat and read through Ellie's lab results. "Positive on both blood and sputum," he grumbled, and he knew what that meant. Chest and abdominal imaging to confirm involvement in the lungs and to see if the kidneys were involved, then patient education on proper adherence to protocols during the long term antibiotic therapy she'd start. But first he had to get labs working on Ellie's grandmother and brother.
And just then Didi Goodman drove up to the garage — in a small mobile CT scan rig. She slipped out of the truck's cab and walked over, and Sherman was glad to see she'd finally given up on the red leather catsuit and was now wearing green scrubs and gray felt clogs. Even so dressed she was still sexy as hell, and he found that amusing.
"Well," Sherman said, smiling, "long time no see."
Goodman appeared to ignore the comment. "I assumed you'd need this today."
"Where'd you dig it up? At the mobile cat-scan store?"
"I borrowed it."
"Did you borrow a technician to run the thing, too?"
"I read all the relevant materials. That should suffice."
He shook his head and grinned. "No doubt."
"Where is your patient? Ellie, isn't it?"
"A no show, so far at least."
"Would you like me to find her?"
Sherman shrugged. "Sure. Why not…? And bring her family, would you?"
It would have been so much easier to simply keep the clinic operating out of Deb's old house, but the city, and her neighbors, would have nothing to do with such a venture in a 'high rent' neighborhood like this one. Even operating here for a day or two at a time was fraught with risk, because anything that encouraged the homeless to remain in the area was tantamount to treason – at least as far as the local homeowners were concerned – yet Sherman could understand their point of view. When swarms of the homeless settled in an area all types of problems exploded almost exponentially. There was the usual problem of urine soaked sidewalks, but soon human feces would appear on sidewalks and in roadways. Far from a trivial concern, outbreaks of cholera and dysentery would follow as these encampments grew in size, and without aggressive management of these diseases they could, if left unchecked, spread rapidly to the general population. Of course property crimes increased too, with petty theft and home invasions soon spiking rapidly. Trash accumulated in public spaces, rendering them useless or even dangerous. Homeowners and shopkeepers soon demanded enforcement action and the unhoused would be pushed on to the next neighborhood, and the cycle would begin again.
Yet being homeless was itself a risky proposition. Aside from being broke all the time, most homeless were elderly and disabled – either mentally or physically, and many were disabled veterans. A surprising number of these elderly people had recently lost homes after compounding medical debt led to confiscation of their homes, and suddenly cast out into the wilderness and now without a physical address, they lost what little retirement income they had as they fell through the cracks in the system. Every morning the police were called to the tents of these elderly men and women to deal with the aftermath of yet another suicide, and public crematories discarded the remnants of dozens of these sundered lives every weekday morning.
Yet for some reason Sherman felt drawn to these people, and he had since his time in seminary, yet he found their situation uncomfortably close to home. 'There but for the Grace of God go I' came to mind, of course, but there was also something about the way so-called organized religion had turned on these people, and that overreaction had unnerved and revolted him. As the evangelical movement had grown increasingly political, and as this movement became more closely aligned with the 'prosperity gospel' that had sprung up in Texas in the 1980s, it seemed that more and more the teachings of Christ had been removed from Christianity.
And yet Sherman was also an astronomer, and he was one of the few people around that understood what the signal had revealed. In a very real sense, he knew the truth of human existence in a way that few others could, or ever would. Life on this planet would perish in roughly fifty years, and there was literally nothing anyone in the world could do to stop that from happening.
So it seemed now to Sherman that the best use of his life would come from alleviating human suffering, and right here in Los Angeles, the City of the Angels, was as good a place as any to start down that path. He had soon turned his back on the the Church and married Debra Sorensen, and he had set about tending his new flock in the only way he knew — by tending to their infirmities. With Ted Sorensen gone he had no enemies left in the city, and there was no time for anything other than his mission.
As he was setting up for the morning a sleek black Lexus SUV rolled to a stop and a woman opened the driver's door and quietly fell to the pavement; Sherman ran to her side and began to assess her situation. She was weak and trembling but otherwise appeared healthy; a few questions revealed that her long term memory was intact but short term was affected. She convulsed and he observed fresh diarrhea running onto the pavement, then she started coughing and she produced large amounts of phlegm.
"Short term memory loss," he muttered, his mind sifting through possibilities as he took her temperature. There had been numerous sick sea lions washing up onto the beach recently…and that meant an algae bloom and a red tide. That meant shellfish, near the bottom of the food chain, had ingested the psuedo-nitzschia diatom, which led to domoic acid poisoning in mammals that ate these impacted shellfish, and which could in extreme cases produce a rare reaction known as Amnesic Shellfish Poisoning. There were no treatment options beyond fluid support, allowing the body to flush out the toxins as quickly as possible.
Darius and Debra helped Sherman get the woman on a cot, then he started an IV and set an aggressive flow rate. "Better call for an ambulance," he said to Debra, but she was staring at the woman, and Sherman noted the look of concern in her eyes. "What's wrong?" he asked.
"Her aura. It's solid black, Gene. I've never seen anything like it."
"Do you think…you can see her thoughts?"
"I'm not sure I want to," Debra said as she stepped closer to the woman. She closed her eyes and drifted inside the currents of the woman's aura – until she was in – and then she felt her father, and now he was probing her thoughts.
[Something Happening Here \\ Duncan Sheik]
A not so short story here, a couple hundred pages so plenty of time for ginger tea. All three parts revised since you last saw them, too. Have fun.
[The Years Roll By \\ Glass Hammer]
Part I: Copper Canyon
He checked his rearview mirror again, no longer sure what he might find back there.
Nothing? Could it be? Was this really going to work?
He saw nothing. And then he realized he felt nothing at all. The adrenaline fueled sense of exhilaration had been ebbing fast, even though he was sure he was being followed. He had to be. He could still feel that much in his gut, and that was all he needed to know. Weaving through late afternoon traffic, he made it to his house on East Summit Street and pulled into the garage, hitting the button on the sun visor and closing the overhead door even before he turned off the truck's motor. He darted inside and showered, and after he dried off he made a reservation at the Marriott in the French Quarter for tomorrow night, staying four nights. With that last detail out of the way he called Quintana on one of his burner phones.
"I'm blown."
"I thought as much. So, the truck goes to New Orleans as planned?"
"Yes. It's loaded now and the other stuff you requested is there under the seat."
"When will it go active?"
"Thirty miles."
"Bueno. The boy will be there in an hour."
Quintana hung up and he powered-off the phone, then he placed it in a baggie full of isopropyl alcohol, which fried the circuits and completely erased all residual oils and fingerprints. Next he went to the bathroom and shaved his head, and then his face, even trimming his eyebrows until they were reshaped and unrecognizably short enough to confuse facial recognition software. He grabbed his 'go bag' and waited for the courier to show up. Tonight's driver, really just a kid the DEA had forced to make the New Orleans run, was already late and he was getting nervous. It took all his remaining patience to not beat the kid to a pulp when he eventually showed up, but death would come soon enough.
The kid was instructed to drive straight through to New Orleans, and he'd been given a route map and money for gas before being sent on his way. Tonight's payload was supposed to be coke and crystal meth, reportedly several hundred kilos of each, and once the truck was gone and headed to New Orleans he called an über to pick him up at Barbaro's. He changed clothes again, taking care to strap a huge prosthetic stage belly around his waist and a sloppy wig on his head before he slipped out the rear door. He sucked in a deep breath of warm air and slipped his ragged old go bag over his shoulder and, adding just one more last minute detail, he started walking through the alley with a cane, now hunched over and limping like an old man. He passed a black Ford Explorer parked down the block from his house, and he even waved at the two DEA agents inside as he passed, noting that they were still looking at his house through binoculars and clicking away with a Nikon. He smiled as he limped past the Ford and, taking care not to break his limping stride, made it to the pick up just in time.
The über took him to a large self storage complex just west of his office at Lackland Air Force Base and he went to his unit and unlocked the door. His motorcycle, a new BMW R1250GS, was already packed and fueled, and he had fifty thousand dollars stashed inside the foam seat, and another 300,000 in Mexican pesos in the tank bag. He unhooked the battery charger and started the motor, and while the engine warmed he discarded the latex belly and the wig before he changed into a one piece riding suit. With that last chore done, he locked the unit before he drove slowly out onto Highway 90, headed westbound for Del Rio, Texas and the Mexican border.
The sun was setting on another hot Texas day, and he set the cruise control on 65 and flexed the fingers on first his right hand, then the left. He took a deep breath after he checked his rear view mirrors again, and leaned back against the duffel bag he'd strapped across the rear seat, trying to relax. Something caught his eye and he looked up, saw a v-shaped formation of ducks headed south and he had to smile at that. "Great minds think alike," he said to the roaring slipstream of air outside his helmet, but as it always did, the sudden dark memory came for him once again…
…his stepfather, always his step father. Beating his mother. Again. He'd been too little to help her, of course, but that had never stopped him from trying. He'd run and slammed into his stepfather's legs, knocking the old drunk off balance for a moment, but that had only pissed the old fart off even more. The last time that happened his stepfather had a knife out and the bastard had gutted his mother before he turned on him, but they'd both heard sirens in the distance and the old man had trundled out to his Harley and taken off—heading for Mexico.
And now? Like his stepfather he was making a run for it…to Old Mexico.
His mother Mary didn't survive that last beating, either. Police officers found him hiding under a bed and he'd been taken in and processed by CPS, the State of Texas' Child Protective Services bureau, before entering the foster home system. But Eugene Diggs had been lucky. He was placed with a couple that lived at the Chase Field Naval Air Station in Beeville, Texas, a US Navy attack pilot training facility. This new 'family' adopted him before moving to Whidbey Island, Washington, to the naval air station located there. His new father, the only real father he'd ever have, was a flight surgeon, his new mother a school teacher, and they had doted on their new son.
He smiled when he thought of that brief period of normalcy. Of course he'd killed that, too.
Riding along while the sun slipped lower into one last lost horizon, he realized his life had become the very same perfect storm his mother had given him as his birthrite. If he represented the sum total of the discussion between nature versus nurture, genetics had carried the day where he was concerned. In the end he had been raised in a caring household by very well educated people, he had excelled in math and science but from the time he arrived in Washington until the day he left for Yale, all the way across the country in Connecticut, he had been fascinated by the fringes of his new culture. He played the guitar, and decently, too, but even in middle school he'd dabbled in hallucinogens, mainly peyote and acid, so by the time he arrived in New Haven he'd been around the block a few times.
He was a natural student, perhaps because of his new parents constant encouragement and attention, yet the fear of landing in a house with someone like his stepfather was never far from his mind. His new parent's doting love and the lingering image of his mother's emaciated body lying in a bloody heap on the kitchen floor would compete for Gene Harwell's attention for the rest of his life.
His father had convinced him to let the Navy pay for his schooling, including medical school, so after graduating from the med school at Johns Hopkins he soon found his way to Afghanistan, and it was there that the whole nature versus nurture conversation took on a peculiar urgency. Afghanistan was, when he arrived, still ground zero in the global heroin supply chain, and Gene Harwell had been quietly, and almost eagerly sucked into the trade, helping pack dead bodies being returned to Dover Air Force Base full of product. He had no way of knowing that even then he was being drawn into working for the Sinaloa Cartel, but the bargain had been made a long time ago, maybe even before he'd come into the world. Fate, he had come to believe, had dealt him the cards he was destined to play.
And his work for the cartel continued when, after his return from Afghanistan, he was posted to SAUSHEC, the combined services medical training facility in San Antonio, Texas, and here his relationship with the cartel only deepened. He became an integral part of a massive operation moving cocaine and heroin all around the country, and as the cartel's efforts generated so much cash there was always more than enough on hand to pay-off anyone's silence, or even buy their complicity. There was even enough to siphon a little off every now and then.
He slowed down as he approached Uvalde, Texas, because deer were moving in the twilight and hitting one with a motorcycle at high speed would be the end of his line. Hungry now too, he stopped at the Whataburger on the east side of town, then he topped off the bike's little fuel tank, paying cash now for everything before continuing on to Del Rio. He filled up the tank once again before crossing, uneventfully, into Mexico, telling the ICE agents there that he was bound for the Copper Canyon region to join a motorcycle tour along the famed highway that crossed the mountains west of Chihuahua. He found a quiet looking inn on the south side of Ciudad Acuña and put the cover over his bike before settling in for the night, and once in the little room he didn't even bother to get out of his riding gear; he just flopped down on the bed and promptly fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.
He spent three days making his way to Chihuahua, and once there he found a mechanic to change the oil and the BMW's filters, and then, after another night in a sleepy little inn, he turned west into the mountains, not quite sure where he was going but reasonably sure he'd know the right place when he found it.
He stumbled into the village of Batopilas on his seventh night in Mexico, and felt by then beyond exhausted. He ached everywhere and for some reason his groin burned, but he put that off to all the long hours spent in the saddle. He pulled into an upscale looking lodge and inquired about a long term stay, but by then all he wanted to do was lay down…
"How long did you have in mind?" the proprietor asked.
"I'm a writer," Harwell lied, "and I'm looking for someplace quiet to spend a few months."
"We have two casitas for rent by the week, but soon it will be the off season and I am sure we could work something out."
"Sounds good. So, how 'bout tonight?"
"Of course. I'll just need your passport. Will you be paying cash, in dollars?"
"If you prefer, certainly." He handed over his passport, one of two bogus passports he had with him.
"Ah, Dr. Eugene Smith, of Duluth, Minnesota?"
"Yes," he lied.
"And you are a physician?"
"I am, yes. General surgery."
"And you are writing about surgery?"
"No, I'm writing a novel about the Gulf War. I served in Iraq."
"I see. Well, unlike Iraq it is quiet here, that much I can assure you."
"Perfect. And is there a bank in town?"
"Yes. There are two, and in addition to the dining room we have here at the lodge, there are two nice restaurants in town. And of course breakfast is included with your room."
"Internet?"
"Just here in the main building, I'm afraid. We have a computer for your use, but it is a dial up modem. The canyon walls are too steep for satellite coverage, and our village is still too small for other services. Here are the instructions, and the computer is in that room," the proprietor added, pointing to a room full of potted palms, complete with squawking parakeet.
"Will you need help with your luggage this evening?"
"No, I've got it." He paid cash for a week's stay then returned to the bike and carried his bags to the room, then he showered and changed into street clothes before returning to the bike. He pulled the seat off and removed the tool kit stored inside the seat and while he checked his tire pressures he also removed his stockpiled cash and put the lead foil packets inside his tank bag before setting off down the street to find a restaurant. Every muscle in his body ached, but his groin burned ever worse now, and he felt a deep muscle spasm taking root inside his left thigh as he walked around the bike.
After dinner he fired off an email to Quintana from the lodge's computer, then returned to his room to wait for the reply.
He woke in the middle of the night with gut ripping cramps accompanied with a spiking fever and chills, and he knew he'd picked up a nasty GI bug, and then he realized he'd not remembered to pick up any ciprofloxacin before leaving Texas. He shrugged, knowing there wasn't a whole lot he could do about it right now, so he concentrated on drinking bottled water between bouts on the toilet. By 0530 there was blood in his stool and he groaned at the implications: he was going to need antibiotics and this tiny village couldn't possibly have a doctor – or even a pharmacy.
"The closest clinic is in Guachochi," the proprietress now working the front desk advised, "at the Mission Hospital." She handed over a bottle of bismuth subsalicylate with a smile, and he popped the top and took a long slug of the pink sludge right there at the desk.
"How far is it?" Harwell groaned as his gut twisted into another barrel roll.
"Are you on the motorcycle?"
He nodded. "Yup. Lucky me."
"It will take all day, I'm afraid, but if you leave soon you might avoid the rains."
"The rains?" he moaned.
"Yes, but there may be some snow at higher elevations."
His eyes wide open now, he had to confront the reality that he wasn't in Texas anymore, and that now there wasn't a pharmacy just down the street across from a well-stocked supermarket, and that he had for all intents and purposes run from that life with the DEA and probably the FBI hot on his tail – but at least here he was still a free man. "Alright," he sighed. "Do you have a hotel safe? I want to leave a few things if I may."
"Of course," the woman said, "and I'll have some rehydration fluid ready for you."
He went to his room and put his riding suit back on, then put his dollars in a small Pelican case and locked it before heading back up to the desk. The woman gave him a bottle of ORF, or oral rehydration fluid, and she gave him a couple of packets of the mix to add to bottled water as he crossed the mountains.
"I guess I'll see you tomorrow night," he said as he walked out to his bike. He put his helmet on and fired up the engine, then entered the clinic's address into the GPS as he stretched – but no…it was too soon, he realized as he turned and sprinted for the restroom off the lobby. He made it just in time.
He pulled into the clinic parking lot a little before eight that evening, but he was shaking now, and he knew he was borderline hypothermic. The bike's engine heat, and the heated grips on the handlebars, had been the only thing between him and death for the last two hours. Snow in September? In fucking Mexico? Well, mountains are mountains no matter where you find them, but having to stop every half hour to shit on the side of the road had only added insult to injury – and completely dehydrated now, he was near the end of his rope.
He had just got the bike up on the side-stand and was making his way through blowing sleet to the clinic entrance when he collapsed just outside the door.
He felt the stinging pinch of an IV, heard the calm, reassuring voices of a physician giving orders to a nurse and he relaxed – until he remembered he was in Mexico and these people were speaking English! Had the DEA caught up to him? Was he in a prison hospital?
He grimaced at the thought and opened his eyes, but he saw a very cute American girl drawing blood from a stick in his right arm and another, even cuter girl looking at his EKG, then this girl turned and looked at him.
"Oh, you're awake now!"
"Where am I?" Harwell sighed, mesmerized by her red hair and green eyes.
"Guachochi. At the Tarahumara Mission Hospital, and I'm Dr. McKinnon."
"Shouldn't you be, oh, I don't know, in Glasgow, maybe?"
She smiled. "Med school in Mexico City, and I'm doing my public service commitment here," she shrugged.
"UTMB Galveston," he smiled, telling yet another little white lie.
"You're a doc? Where at?"
"Minnesota. Taking a year off to do some riding."
"Oh," she said, her voice suddenly dull, flat, and comprehending. "Well, your core temp was 95.6 so I put some heat packs under your arms and I'm running Cipro wide open. You should be good to go in the morning."
"What's your specialty?"
"General surgery?"
"Really? I've got a kid with a hot belly and no cutter. Think you can do an appendix?"
"When? Now?"
"You should be hot to trot in an hour or so," she said, knocking his knee with her clipboard. "And look at it this way…you do me a favor and maybe I'll do one for you."
"You got a gas passer?"
"A nurse practitioner. Well, kind of."
"Oh, I don't know. You'll figure it out."
He shook his head and looked at his watch; he'd been out for a few hours – but he really was feeling a lot better. He shivered once and a nurse draped a hot blanket over him and he fell into a deep sleep…again. When the dreams came his stepfather was running out the back door and headed for Mexico…
The overhead lights weren't the best but the instruments were clean and the OR was spotless, now he stood over an eight year boy and checked off his landmarks for the incision, making a few dots with a marker on the boy's belly before he swabbed betadine over the site.
Patty McKinnon had taped hot packs to his axial pits and inside his thighs and at least he wasn't shaking now, so when the anesthetist, a girl from San Diego named Debbie Surtees, gave him the go ahead he made his incision and dissected muscle to expose the kid's appendix, and forty five minutes later he closed the incision and had just made it back to his bed before he passed out. Again.
He woke early in the morning and saw two bags of antibiotics and a bag of platelets running, and he didn't know what to make of that. "What the hell?" he wondered out loud.
McKinnon came in an hour later and when she saw he was awake she pulled up a chair. "Your white count is in the basement, Doctor – uh – Smith. And your right nut is as hard as a golf ball. Some of the cord, too."
"My surgeon will be here this afternoon, and we should do an orchiectomy first thing."
"All my stuff is over in Batopilas…"
"At the Lodge?"
"I know Martin. I'll have 'em put your stuff in storage 'til we can run over and pick it up."
"You won't be riding that bike for a while, if you know what I mean."
"Yeah. We'll treat you here, and you can work off your bill with the rest of the indentured servants working here."
"I've got to be in Creel tomorrow morning."
"That isn't going to happen."
"You have internet here?"
"If you don't mind me asking, which cartel got to you? Sinaloa?"
"Quintana?" she sighed knowingly.
"That's right. How'd you know?"
She chuckled. "Half the docs working in Mexico these days got sucked into their fentanyl operations. There used to be a shortage of doctors down here. No more. You can find better surgeons in Puerto Vallarta than you can in Dallas these days."
He nodded, if only because he'd already figured as much.
"I can get in touch with him if you like, but I'll need to know your name."
"Gene. Just tell him Gene, okay? He'll know who you're talking about."
She looked away and shook her head. "Sooner or later you're gonna have to trust someone."
"I'm not there yet."
"How long you been on the run?"
"A week."
"Shit. No wonder…"
"Did you run an AFP?"
"No. Our tech would have to get supplies from Creel to run that one."
"Sorry…it's just a lot to wrap my head around." He took a deep breath and shook his head. "I thought I felt something down there, like a burn, a pulled muscle kind of thing."
"Probably the cord. We can decide on chemo after we look at the histology, but retroperitoneal radiation will probably be worth looking into."
"Uh-huh. Where? Not here, I assume?"
"No, not here. We do limited chemo, but I do mean limited."
"So? Where?"
"I assume going home is out of the question?"
"You could go to Creel, but…"
"Yeah…no buts, please. I guess that means Mexico City?"
"Oh, yeah, of course, but there's a good medical school in Chihuahua and the hospital there has a decent radiology department."
"What would you do, Patty?"
"I'd wait until I had the pathology report, 'Gene.'"
He grinned. "You know, I was thinking when this blows over about heading over to someplace like Sudan or Ethiopia, joining MSF and maybe working over there."
"Really? Why?"
"Something about practicing medicine in the states bothers me, I guess. Maybe it has for a while. When I joined the group I was working with I was told we were a volume business, that the aim was to spend just enough time with each patient to get a handle on the exact medical problem, then get 'em in and out of surgery as fast as possible. I guess within a year I felt like I was flipping burgers at MickeyDs, and I didn't know my patients, not one. It was like go into the OR and see a patch of skin already draped, get in and get out and go to the next OR for the next case, then off to the office for exams before heading back to the hospital for rounds. Pretty soon I realized I couldn't even remember one patient's name from the last couple of years."
"Flipping burgers," McKinnon sighed, shaking her head in disbelief. "That's a good one. I'll have to remember that."
He looked out a little window and nodded. "I think I felt useless." He looked around the room then back at her. "Maybe I'm tired of feeling useless."
"Do you have any idea how many times you say 'I' when you're talking?"
He turned and looked at her. "What…a little too much narcissism for your taste?"
"Just curious," she shrugged, "but was someone holding a gun to your head when you decided not to get to know your patients?"
"Yeah. A fire breathing dragon called the office manager was, and the partners were pretty nasty, like out of a Dickens novel…"
"Really. My-my. So, it's off to Africa you go where, guess what, you won't speak the language so there'll be no way in hell you'll ever get to know anyone…"
"And I sure won't be part of another volume enterprise, will I?"
"What's that got to do with medicine? You were treating sick people, right? I mean, isn't that the point?"
"I don't know that there is a point anymore."
"Ah. The heart of the matter. You've lost your way."
He looked away again and took a deep breath, but finally he nodded his head just a little.
"So…you think you'll find your way back from the wilderness by going to deepest, darkest Africa? Sound about right?"
"I don't know what I'll find…"
"Yeah? But isn't that the point?"
"The point, Gene? To find yourself?"
"You make it sound so…trite…?"
"Hey, if the shoe fits…"
"You like kicking people when they're down, don't you?"
"Like it? No, not really, but sometimes people only really listen to you when they're face down in the mud. And who knows, if you're lucky maybe you'll finally listen to that little voice in the back of your head."
His eyes blinked a few times and he nodded. "Anything else, Doc? Any more words of compassion and wisdom?"
She hooked up a syringe in his line and shot in something. "Get some sleep, okay? We'll operate as soon as the cutter looks over the images."
"What about my things?"
"I'll take care of it."
His eyes suddenly felt full and very heavy, and later, sometime in the dark he felt gloved hands running a catheter. More strange voices came and went and at one point someone drew blood, then he was aware of being lifted onto an operating table and then the strangest thing of all; he seemed to be aware of a mask sliding down over his mouth and nose – followed by an all consuming stink that was not at all enjoyable…
"Well, Dr. Frankenstein, it lives," he heard someone say as he opened his eyes.
"McKinnon? That you?"
"Yes, it is, Dr. Harwell. Can you rate your pain for me?"
'She knows my name,' the scared little voice inside Gene Harwell's head screamed. 'What else does she know?' He strolled along her razor's edge with ambivalence on one side of the blade and utter fear on the other, all while trying to think of how to reply to this simplest question.
"Let's just say I'm still deep in the land of I don't give a flying fuck, and let's leave it at that."
"Okay, we'll call that a nice, fat zero. Know where you are, by any chance?"
"In the wonderful land of Oz, and I'm about to pull back the curtain."
"Memory intact. Sense of humor sucks," she wrote out loud on her chart. "Know who the president is?"
"Snidely Whiplash, esquire."
"Good one. I'd never have thought of that. Think you could handle some water?"
"If it comes out of a bottle, maybe."
"Good situational awareness, too. Okay, five by five, Harwell."
"You got a path report yet, smart ass?"
"Diffuse seminoma and teratoma in the left testes, no cells in the cord so no radiation needed."
He felt a roaring surge of relief and then a few tears running down his face, so he cleared his throat before he spoke. "Thanks, McKinnon. I think I love you."
"No problemo, Gene. Oh, Quintana is okay with things, he says to just lay low for a while and he'll be in touch. And Martin is bringing your stuff over tomorrow."
"How long you going to keep me here?"
"You could go home today, but…"
"…but, right, I got no home to go to. I think I got that."
"I've got a spare room at my place if you want to bunk out there for a while. There are plenty of places to rent around here, too. Like three, maybe four."
"Ah. So, any port in a storm, huh?"
"How's the pain now?"
"I'm feeling it now. Versed is wearing off."
She picked up a syringe from a bedside tray and hooked it up to his IV and sent a little morphine down his line. "That'll take the edge off for a while. You have any trouble taking Oxy?"
"Yeah. I don't take it, period. You got naproxen?"
"That'll do."
"You want me to get my spare bedroom cleaned up?"
He nodded her way, then grinned at her green eyes: "Yeah. That'll do."
He started easy, riding a few miles around local roads, then a few mining trails, but his groin still hurt when he pushed too hard. He worked three weekends at the hospital before he decided he'd had enough domesticity in his life. It wasn't that McKinnon was hard to take, either; in fact, the opposite was true. She was bright as hell but should have gone into psychiatry, not general medicine, and her constant psychoanalyzing had grown stuffy and was often downright obtuse. Even after a couple of weeks with her she seemed to alternate between voracious horniness and bouts of moodily introspective self analysis and he never really felt like he belonged there.
Probably because he didn't like moodily introspective analyses of his situation. And maybe she knew that too, but it didn't keep her from pushing him to look at his choices.
But he'd liked the way Batopilas felt, and something about the place still seemed to pull at him. Maybe it was the steep-walled, tree-lined valley, or how the town was clinging precariously to a ledge just above the edge of a roaring river, or even how the tiny village was defined by narrow cobbled lanes and brightly painted stucco walls topped with sun-dried red-tile roofs, everything surrounded by overhanging trees and the roar of the rushing water just below. He wondered what it would feel like to stay in a village like that and yeah, maybe write about the war and to call a place like that home. Maybe he could buy a house and open up a little clinic there, too…
Yet when he told McKinnon he was thinking of leaving she seemed to come undone.
"You've got to be kidding," he said. "I haven't been here a month…"
"But I've had this feeling about you since the moment I saw you," she said, coming on hard. "Look, I don't want you to go."
He shook his head. "Yeah, I get that and yeah, I like you too. I've enjoyed spending time with you…"
"Then stay!"
"And what happens when I decide to head to Africa? What then?"
"We both go."
"Simple as that, huh? You just pack up and head out?"
"Yeah. Simple as that. I've looked into it, I know what we'd have to do and we'd be a perfect team. Medicine and surgery…I mean, they'd be nuts to turn us away!"
"Patty, doesn't it bother you that I don't love you?"
"No, not really. You're a guy and guys are like that. I do know that we fit together, that we'd be a good team…"
"And what about you? What about love?" he asked.
And she shrugged away his indifference. "We haven't been together long enough for that, Gene, not really, but the thing is – when I'm around you I'm happy. And it's like I can't imagine being happy ever again unless I'm around you, and I don't know what else you call that…"
"Infatuation, maybe?"
"But I'm not a teenager, Gene," she said, though perhaps a little too defiantly – like maybe she'd had 'daddy issues' once upon a time and still didn't like being told how she felt. Still, he had Quintana to worry about, because if he bolted on the cartel now he might as well hang it up. He knew too much and they'd never let him go without an understanding of some kind.
So he stayed. He understood, really understood, that without Quintana's blessing he had to 'stay put' for the time being. And yet, by that point he'd also recognized that McKinnon and Quintana had a bond of some kind, some kind of connection he could only guess about. Like maybe she'd gotten him out of a tough spot once upon a time, and maybe he owed her. Big time. At least…that's what it felt like. On the other hand, he's stashed away money in banks in Mexico City, and over almost fifteen years he'd siphoned away a lot of cartel money, too. Down here he was safely out of reach from both the DEA and the FBI and he had a roof over his head. McKinnon was fun to hang with and all in all he was soon inclined to just go with the flow.
But after a couple of months he missed 'big city' medicine, and he couldn't get a handle on the reasons why. His Spanish, after living in San Antonio for almost ten years, was already more than passable – but now his language skills were quickly improving because of this immersive setting – and so he was finally able to talk to his patients without the commercial restraints imposed by corporate medicine. And he liked working that way – finally. And while it was what he'd always imagined medicine could be like, or should be like, he reminded himself, conditions at the mission clinic were almost, but not quite primitive.
He liked riding around the mountains but he also recognized he was living right alongside the edges of a really hostile environment, too. At medium elevations vast fields of poppies were growing in the meadows he rode by, while at lower elevations marijuana cultivation was in full swing. And everywhere he went he ran into armed guards, in many cases just kids with AK-47s and itchy trigger fingers. Rival clans were staking claims up here in the mountains and some were encroaching on other clan's grows, with turf wars the first obvious result, and that made him think about the role he'd played in this ongoing house of cards.
There wouldn't be cartels without users and all this semi-clandestine production was aimed at supplying the North American market. With almost two thirds of the people in the United States and Canada now being regular users of marijuana, and with domestic cultivation still for all intents and purposes illegal, the cartels had been handed a market so insatiably vast it was almost beyond comprehension. It was no wonder the cartels were paying lobbyists in the U.S. to keep these products illegal, yet the handwriting was on the wall. U.S. tobacco companies had been buying up land in Northern California for decades, and why? Because it was prime land for marijuana cultivation. Not to mention federal taxes on marijuana and related products could crush federal budget deficits. But it would severely limit the profitability of the cartels, and that was the game, the cards as they'd been dealt…
So for the time being riding around these hills was still dangerous. Kidnappings were more frequent, and some kids had been known gun down bikers just to take their motorcycles for a joyride. There were often no repercussions because the cartels owned the cops, and only reason he could ride around the area was because he was under the protection of a capo, one of the Sinaloa cartel's commanders. He was therefore untouchable, so he rode around and kids with AK-47s waved at him as he passed – though he usually stopped and talked with them. They talked about the things they did out here, about their command structure, and he listened as they talked about their gripes – and even their hopes and dreams. Most of these kids, he soon learned, had already killed members of rival clans, and Harwell began to feel as though the whole set-up was faintly medieval.
He also found that a lots of these kids were working while they were sick as hell, so he started loading up his saddlebags with medical supplies and started taking care of the kids along his route.
People in the smaller villages along his route soon heard about that, too.
So when he rode through these hamlets people waved him down. He learned that most of these people didn't trust doctors, or hospitals, but for some reason they trusted him, and probably because he'd treated their kids and he was under the protection of the cartels. So pretty soon he was treating people along a vast network of tiny villages along dirt roads in the boondocks, and the administrators at the Mission Hospital grew quite interested in his successes. When he ran across a case he couldn't fix out on the road he put the patient on the back of his bike and brought them back to the hospital, and he fixed 'em there. Word spread, too. Harwell was soon a popular man, and accorded saint-like status in many of these villages.
And so pretty soon he began to feel the one thing he'd been missing in his life: a sense of purpose. When he told an old woman that his mother's name had been Mary her eyes lit up and she'd crossed herself while she fingered her rosary.
So almost out of inertia he fell in with McKinnon and soon enough weeks turned into months, and months to a year, and still, at least three days a week he hopped on his bike and rode off into the boonies. He worked weekends in the OR, usually three to four surgeries a day, some days more, rarely less. He stopped caring about McKinnon's perceived flaws and started listening to her hopes and dreams, and her fears, too. Somewhere along the way he started caring for her, too.
He found her breast cancer and he did the procedure. He nursed her through chemo, and he held her hands as her hair fell away. He stayed by her side as she regained health, and he took her to Chihuahua for radiation. They took walks together, short walks in the beginning but longer ones as she got stronger, and her hopes and dreams turned into quiet talks about some kind of a future together, just the two of them. Maybe here in Mexico or maybe somewhere in Africa…it didn't matter to her as long as they were together.
So on a Friday night in April one of the Jesuits at the mission said the words people say when they promise to stay together until death do they part, and standing there in the candlelight surrounded by his new friends, Gene Harwell felt something he'd never really expected to feel after he left his home, and his country. He felt happy, and that even came as a surprise to the DEA agents who'd had him under surveillance for the last two months.
"Hold your legs up," the Bexar County sheriff's deputy told Harwell, and with his legs shackled the deputy pulled him roughly from the van. Once he was out on the concrete the deputy began pushing Harwell through the sally port to the inmates entrance, but no one noticed rough treatment down here in the courthouse basement – and no one cared if anything out of place went down. They waited for an elevator with several other inmates and deputies, and when the elevator came they all rode up to the fourth floor holding block, and he was quickly locked-up in a small holding cell.
He'd had a jerk-water public defender who hadn't objected even once to questionable evidence presented at his trial but by then Harwell knew this trial was a slam-dunk, a show trial for public consumption. The DEA had rammed the case through pre-trials and before a trial judge in record time, and from then on he knew he was being made an example of how not to fuck with the Feds, and physicians were the intended audience. The guilty verdict was a forgone conclusion, so he'd just smiled and shuffled off the stage, his performance complete. What had surprised him was Quintana, and how the cartels had simply dropped him like a hot rock. Still, he'd decided on silence as the best course, banking on the cartel having people on the inside who'd keep him relatively safe. And who knows, maybe they'd even be able to keep him alive.
Today's appearance was for sentencing, but by this point he really didn't give a shit. He'd gone from being a physician in a lucrative American practice to taking care of peasants in Mexico's central highlands, and now the word was he was going to spend the rest of his life in a "SuperMax" prison outside of Canyon City, Colorado. Not exactly how he'd seen things working out once upon a time, but what hurt most of all was leaving McKinnon down there, because just before the Federales came knocking on her door she'd told him she was pregnant. He knew the stress would get to her, and he hated himself for what she'd have to go through on her own.
So now it looked like everything he could have possibly screwed up in his life he'd managed to do, because on top of everything else he'd have a kid he'd never know…so in a way he'd have a kid that would experience many of the same joys he had. Then a funny thing crossed his mind: while he was glad neither of his 'parents' had lived to see his fall, he'd never once imagined how his biological mother might have felt.
Why? Was she so unimportant? Had she ever loved him, or had her role been to simply set the stage for all that came next?
But yeah, his prosecutors had proven beyond a reasonable doubt that he'd moved the cartel's product for years and years. They'd mapped out his life for all the jurors to see, from being part of an intricately planned and meticulously executed supply pipeline to helping kill DEA informants. He'd been responsible for moving Mexican meth, Afghani heroin, and Chinese fentanyl all around the country, but consider this, ladies and gentlemen of the jury: he'd made a shitload of money along the way too, and that was his game, the only one that mattered, wasn't it? Money was only thing that mattered to Gene Harwell, MD. Helping to move product through hospitals where he worked, but he'd also done so in uniform while serving his country in Afghanistan. Not saving lives, mind you. No, this monster had not been caring for his wounded brothers, he'd taken part in a system that created nothing but suffering.
"What sort of stunted creature does this" the prosecutor asked those wide-eyed jurors. If not for a well-placed informant this monster would still be on the loose, moving heroin to school playgrounds in a neighborhood near you! But he'd been fingered! Maybe it had been a very bloody jailhouse confession, but in the end none of that mattered because here he is, ladies and gentlemen, awaiting your judgement. The Mexican 'Federales' and the DEA had scooped him up while he was on the run down in Mexico and now here he is, teetering on the edge of the abyss, waiting for you to pronounce his fate.
Another deputy came for him a few hours later and walked him down a marble hallway to the courtroom, and then he was pushed through heavy oak doors into the courtroom.
And there he was. His nemesis.
J. Alan Wentworth III, the federal prosecutor ramrodding his case through the system. Wentworth was short, fat, baldheaded and bespectacled – a paragon of every modern virtue imaginable. He was playing the game, alright. Throwing aces every time, and always with an extra up his sleeve. He was asking the court to consider the death penalty, or at the very least life without parole, because if they didn't come down hard on physicians like him then law enforcement would never get a handle on the problem…
The problem with your thesis, Mr. J. Alan Wentworth III, is that law enforcement is in on the scam at every fucking level, from cops on the beat to the guards in the jails; all of them feeding at the cartel's trough – but there was no way Harwell would be allowed to say this in open court. This simple truth was so readily apparent even a dime-bag dealer could figure it out: pay anyone enough and they'll look the other way, and every fucking time, too…but Wentworth had a quota to meet, a conviction rate to maintain, and that more than anything else was dictating the outcome this afternoon. Harwell was just a mid-level executive in a thriving international manufacturing and distribution operation, but instead of working for one of the big pharmaceutical outfits he'd chosen to work for the cartels. Too bad anti-trust laws didn't apply, because the irony on display in the courtroom was a little too rich.
Harwell wasn't exactly surprised when, a half hour later and due to the aggravating circumstances of his crimes, he was sentenced to life in prison at ADMAX Florence, the notorious and justifiably dreaded super-max facility in central Colorado. When asked by the court if he had anything to say prior to final sentencing he declined to speak, and so was simply escorted from the courtroom straight to the elevator – this time by a nattily dressed US Marshall – and then out to a shiny new Ford Explorer waiting just for him.
Harwell was driven to the basement parking garage at a nearby office building and led inside a basement level office, and then right into a restroom – where the handcuffs and shackles were removed. Not at all sure what was happening now, the marshal handed Harwell a gym bag and the keys to the Ford, then the cop turned around and walked out of the restroom, and he left Harwell standing there – almost in a state of shock. Not knowing what else to do, he opened the gym bag and found an envelope, two changes of clothes and some toiletries, as well as a new pair of Adidas running shoes. He opened the envelope and found an airline ticket, cash, credit cards and a French passport.
"Quintana," he muttered to himself with a smile, then he changed into the street clothes and dumped the orange jumpsuit in a dumpster on his way back to the Explorer. The NAV system was already programed for the airport and he put on a ball cap and sunglasses the cop had left on the driver's seat and he drove straight to the airport. Once there he parked the car in the long term lot and went into the terminal. He checked the envelope and found a boarding pass so went right up to the TSA security checkpoint and then out to his gate, where he waited for an AeroMexico flight to Mexico City. His assigned seat, he realized, was in the business class section, and he suddenly felt as if he was inside a particularly warm and fuzzy dream.
When his flight was called he halfway expected a dozen DEA agents to come crawling out of the woodwork…but no, nothing happened, and by that point Harwell thought his life was getting positively surreal. He walked out the Jetway and boarded the 737Max and a flight attendant brought him an ice cold Bohemia and a slice of lime, and he did his best to ignore the people boarding the flight because he just knew that at any moment he was going to wake up and this was all going to turn out to be a really nasty trick of the mind.
But no, the main door was about to close – when, apparently, one more person ran into the cabin, and Harwell watched as Quintana boarded and came to the seat next to his own.
"Mind if I sit here?" the number three man in the Sinaloa Cartel asked.
"No, please," Harwell said, then he watched as Quintana put two small carry-ons in the overhead bin.
Then Quintana sat and took the offered Bohemia from the flight attendant, and Harwell watched as the main door was pivoted into the closed and locked position, and he looked out the window as the Boeing was pushed back from the gate. When he could stand it no longer, he turned to Quintana and smiled.
"Did you have a nice visit?" he asked the capo.
"Yes. And you?"
"I'd have to say, all in all, that it was an interesting trip."
"Perhaps someday we'll have time to sit over dinner and talk about your experiences."
Which meant, Harwell understood, now was not that time. He nodded and smiled and looked out the window as the Boeing turned onto the active runway and dashed into the evening sky.
He ate his dinner in silence and watched intently as the jetliner lined up to land in Mexico City, and just before Quintana left him there he advised that Harwell not forget his two bags in the overhead bin, and Harwell thanked his friend then watched him leave. He pulled the bags down and walked out the jet and through immigration and then found a small lounge to sit for a while.
Then he opened Quintana's parting gift.
Another envelope on top…
A ticket to Paris on Air France, departing in an hour and a half. Enough cash to live comfortably for several months. Documents to provide a completely new identity along with the academic degrees and transcripts of post-grad work to back everything up. And a note that said all his savings accounts in Mexico City were still intact, and that the DEA hadn't uncovered them.
And then there was one last note from Quintana.
'Silentium ac fides super omnia.'
There wasn't a whole lot else to say, was there? He'd never talked, never sought a plea bargain right up until the moment of his sentencing, and maybe that had come as a surprise to Quintana. Maybe that was why he'd risked it all to come up the States, to see this through to the end. To see what kind of man this Gene Harwell really was.
Maybe. Maybe not. Harwell would probably never know the answer to that one, would he? Because the second part of Quintana's message was equally clear.
We own you. And now you owe us not just your life, but your freedom, too. And we can take both if we need to.
He walked over to the First Class lounge and went inside, checked-in for the flight and saw that he was indeed flying alone. Not knowing what else to do he sat and watched jets come and go until his flight was called, then he walked out and boarded the 777 and made his way up to seat 1A.
A simply gorgeous flight attendant came by and introduced herself, offered him a glass of Champagne and a warm towel for his face, then she smiled and sashayed up to the galley. After three months behind bars the sight of such a woman was enough to leave him in puddles of wilting despair. He shook his head and tried to remember he'd been married – once upon a long time ago.
He looked up and saw the main doors close a few minutes later and then he looked down at his hands. How long had it been? How many months since he'd last operated on a patient? How long since he'd given up on ever doing anything like that again?
How many months since he'd seen McKinnon?
How would she feel now? Would she still care about him?
Dare he even try to get in touch with her? Wouldn't the DEA be monitoring her every move? Especially now that he'd managed to flee?
The jet pushed back and taxied out to the active, then it turned onto the runway and lumbered into the sky, turning to the northeast to fly up the east coast of North America on its way from the New World to the Old. He saw Washington DC down below just after his second dinner of the evening, then New York City and Boston before the long Atlantic crossing. His seat was turned into a cozy little bed and he slept the miles away, waking up in time for a little breakfast and a mid-morning arrival in Paris.
He waited until almost everyone else had deplaned before grabbing his bags and heading out the Jetway into the terminal. He made his way to immigration and as he was now a citizen of France he walked right through the 'Nothing To Declare' line and then out to the queue of people lining up to ride into the city.
And then he felt an arm slip into his.
"Well, hello there, stranger," Patty McKinnon said, a coy little smile crossing her face. "Fancy running into you here."
"Yes, small world," he said, smiling. She leaned into him and they kissed with a ferocity that might have annoyed most of the people standing in line, but hey…this was Paris.
"How are you doing?" she asked.
"Better now. You?"
"Not bad, considering," she said, rubbing her round tummy.
He took her hand in his and closed his eyes. Not a day had passed that he hadn't dreamed of feeling her skin on his one more time and now here she was.
"I have an apartment for us near the medical school," she sighed. "We start an MSF orientation in a couple of weeks, then we're headed to Ethiopia, to a new clinic south of Gondar."
"Did Quintana help you with this?"
Gene Harwell smiled, but in a snap he suddenly understood his future as everything popped into focus. Quintana would never let him go, not completely. He'd have to work off his debt – one way or another – and in the only way he could. He'd go to Africa but as always he'd help establish new markets and new distribution networks, just as he always had. Where would it be this time? London? Berlin? Or the explosive new markets in Stockholm and Moscow? It didn't matter now, did it? – because there wasn't such a thing as a fresh start where the cartels were concerned. The life that had chosen him valued loyalty – and silence. Nothing more, and no less.
He helped McKinnon into the back of a little beige Mercedes taxi and then slipped in right beside her, and for a moment he considered turning and seeing if he could spot the people tailing them, but—why? In the end nothing really mattered, and anyone could see that.
Part II: The Soul of Perception
Once upon a time in a city by the sea there worked a physician. A surgical resident doing his time at a big university hospital, he at first glance seemed to genuinely care about people; he always had a caring smile on his face ready for the next patient, and he could always be counted on to lend a hand to anyone who needed help. Yet some people thought of the man, this physician, as something of a doormat, thinking that he simply couldn't say no to people and that, as a result, everyone lined up to take advantage of his generosity. Such people no doubt called the doctor a 'patsy' — another word for an 'easy mark' — and, who knows? Perhaps such people laughed at him behind his back, from time to time, anyway — at least when they didn't need him. Perhaps such little voices of whispered derision are little more than a sign of the times we live in, yet in a world suffocating under the weight of so many little sidelong whispers you have to step back from all the noise for a moment and ask yourself just one little question all your own. Have we forgotten that, if only occasionally, true goodness walks among us from time to time. Or is there really such a thing? Perhaps, in our haste, we have confused goodness with expedience?
Doug Tanner rubbed the corner of his right eye, trying without much success to brush away the lack of sleep from his burning eyes. He looked at his watch and noted the time: 2220 hours. He'd had, by this reckoning, an hour of sleep — in the last two days — and his mouth tasted coppery, almost cruddy; he smelled like stale coffee, dry body odor and of an after shave lotion that had given up hours ago. He was hungry, yet he could hardly stomach the idea of food; even the very idea he needed food seemed vaguely off-putting. There were times he resented his own human frailty, and this was one of those moments.
The pager in his lab-coat buzzed and he picked it out of the rubbish of gum wrappers and throat lozenges that lived there; he looked at the code on the little green display and groaned.
"Shit, not again…"
Then, from a old speaker mounted in the ceiling: "Dr Tanner, Dr Tanner, stat to ER, Trauma Two. Dr Tanner stat to Trauma Two."
"Hey, Dougie, sounds like they're playing your song again," a third year neurology resident sitting in the room said. "Go get 'em, Tiger!" she snarled.
He didn't know her name, and for some reason he didn't care, though he smiled at her on the way out the door. Then he grumbled something nine-tenths obscene under his breath and rubbed at his eyes absent-mindedly again while he from the stumbled break room. He followed the red stripe on the floor to the ER and waded into the full-blown chaos that was Trauma Two, one of two rooms set up in the ER for emergency surgery and advanced life-support. A couple of other residents had already arrived before him and were sorting out the mess under the lights.
"Ah, Tanner! Gun shot, through and through URQ and I got tamponade. Gonna need you to get a chest-tube in, pronto!"
Doug Tanner was wide-awake now. He gloved-up, moved to a tray set-up beside the patient, the terrified black kid on the table — his wide-eyes darting everywhere, bloody froth coming from his nose and running down his neck; a nurse opened the chest tube kit while Tanner gloved-up and palpated the kid's thorax, then Tanner made an incision between ribs on the kid's left side and thrust the hemostat and surgical tubing into the kids chest. Frothy blood came out the end of the tubing at first, then a steady stream of deep red fluid jetted to the floor. Then an anesthesiologist was by the boy's head and intubating the kid; a fourth year thoracic resident hovered over the boy's sternum, her scalpel poised and waiting for the go-ahead from the 'gas-passer'; another resident was swabbing the kid's sweaty, mud-caked skin with saline and Betadine. It was now or never, because there just wasn't enough time to get the kid upstairs to a fully equipped O.R.
This was Tanner's second year as a general surgery resident, and his third six-month rotation through the ER, and he couldn't remember ever having done anything else in his life. He could barely remember his parents anymore — they seemed like abstract constructs that had existed once upon a time in the gauzy remnants of time before the first year of med school. Girlfriends? Like…are you kidding? Who had time? There'd been a Becky so-and-so, then a waitress one night, but then there'd been Macy last summer — yet the other one night stands had come and gone so fast he couldn't even remember what any of them looked like. Because soon enough everything had fallen into the general blur of this chosen life, and like everything else in this world people soon became one more blur inside a fast-passing landscape that never seemed to stop for a rest. Everything he had once thought important, girls, cars, maybe even getting married someday — all these things belonged to a past that was so far away it wasn't even recognizable anymore. Everything he'd ever wanted to do had been wiped clean away, his memory replaced by an endless stream of drunk drivers, irate husbands and soaring cholesterol levels, and the broken bodies never stopped coming in through the out door. Life had turned into a carousel — wooden horses that never slowed down and that just couldn't stop going round and round. And he was trapped here, trapped with no way off.
But everything had to stop, didn't it? Eventually? But apparently that wasn't true, not here, because now he was on again and going round and round and nothing mattered anymore — nothing, except what happened within the confined little spaces inside this sprawling emergency department. This place was like a beast that fed on human weakness, a Darwinian jungle where only the strongest survived, and as he sutured the chest tube into place the door flew open…
And an orderly, a young kid, rushed into the trauma room: "We need someone in Five, like right now!"
The Head Resident looked up at the orderly, then at Tanner.
"I've got it," Tanner said, the room spinning round and round.
"Go!" she said, nodding as soon as they made eye contact.
"Right." Tanner walked down the hall and ducked into Trauma 5 and shuddered to a stop: "What the fuck?!" he whispered, his eyes flaring in wide-eyed astonishment. Still, he managed a brief smile of encouragement to the patient – just because…
"He got his arm caught in this machine," one of the paramedics started explaining. "They use it to grind hamburger and sausage at the supermarket…"
Tanner looked at the mess, then at the patient, a middle-aged man who, stunningly, appeared quite calm; he was sitting up on a fire department gurney, and his right arm — almost up to the elbow — had been pulled into this large stainless steel meat-grinder, and there was one fireman holding the grinder on it's rolling base, mainly to keep the blades from cutting the rest of the man's mangled arm from his body. Paramedics had applied a tourniquet at the scene and started an IV; every time they released it on the ride-in through traffic massive blood loss resumed.
Tanner walked to the man's side, trying to smile. 'Why isn't this guy in shock?' he asked himself.
"How'ya doin', doc," the man said. He still had his white butcher's coat on. "Sorry about this."
"Can you feel anything?" Tanner said, nodding while he bent over to examine the "hamburger" that had come out the spout on the far side of the machine.
"No, not really… it hurt like a son-of-a-bitch when it was happening, but not much since."
"Nerves completely severed," Tanner mumbled. "Nurse, get me some saline, and let's get some serious light down here in the chute." Someone handed him a fresh bottle of saline and he slowly poured half of the one liter bottle over the shredded pulp; Tanner pulled the overhead lamp closer and closer, looking at the mangled mess while he took mental notes. "And start some ringers," he added, looking at the nurse by the IV tree.
"You gonna have to amputate?" the butcher asked stoically while he watched Tanner probing the pulpy mess.
But Tanner kept looking at the remnants while he poured saline over the tissue, looking for hidden structure in the muck with the metal probe in his gloved hand. Every now and then he made little clucking noises with his tongue as his head moved from side to side, but other than that he seemed completely absorbed with the problem at hand…
"Does this machine come apart? Like…maybe right about here?" Tanner asked the butcher as he pointed at the main body of the grinder.
"No, not the chute," the butcher said. "That's solid aluminum there, doc."
Tanner moved, looked down into the machine's feed chute, from the uninjured side of the man's arm. "Tell me about those blades in there? Do they reverse?"
"No, doc. The gears just turn one way." Tanner studied the machine for a moment, then he stood up:
"Nurse, call someone down in maintenance and have 'em bring up a metric socket set and some vice-grips."
"What?" the nurse said. "What did — you want…what?"
Tanner turned to the nurse. "A metric socket set and some vice grips, and maybe some WD-40."
"You want some duct tape too? Just for good measure?" she asked sarcastically.
"Wouldn't hurt," Tanner added, seriously.
"What are you gonna do, doc?" the butcher asked again. "Amputate?"
Tanner looked at the man; he saw eyes full of fear beyond the crumbling bravado. "What's your name?"
"Jake. Jake Bushman. Sorry I can't shake hands."
"Well Jake, I'm going to disassemble this grinder and remove whatever is keeping those gears from going into reverse. Then we're going to turn the gears slowly, by hand — only in reverse — then we'll pull your arm out the way it went in, trying not to mess up any more tissue than we have to. Once we get that done we'll take you up to an operating room. We'll try to reassemble the radius and the ulna, repair the veins, and see if we can't save this hand."
"You gotta shittin' me!" one of the paramedics whispered.
Tanner looked up, scowled at the paramedic: "Nope. Piece of cake."
"Fuck! I thought for sure I was gonna lose my arm!" Jake said.
"No guarantees, Jake. But we're gonna give it our best shot. Okay?" He turned to a nurse, ordered some blood chemistries and a couple of surgical trays, then pulled up a stool and began looking at the machine.
When a janitor walked into the room with his toolbox he looked at the butcher and the surgeon, then at the gleaming machine and the pulpy mess of arm hanging from the spout, just before he passed out and fell to the floor like a sack of potatoes.
Tanner left the hospital a little before noon the next day; he crawled inside his ancient BMW 2002 tii and drove out of the physician's lot and headed down to the marina, parked and walked out the interminably long pier to his boat, a pristine Crealock 40 pilothouse he kept in immaculate trim. While he walked down the pier he looked at his feet, trying to ignore the world around him. When he got near his slip he stumbled to a stop, looked at the suitcase on the deck by the cockpit, then he saw Macy sitting in the shaded cockpit and he sighed.
"Ah, the ghost of girlfriends past," he mumbled as he took a few more steps her way. "It must be Christmas already." Though they'd broken up last summer, a spectacularly uneventful parting of the ways, hers was one of the few faces he did remember. Fondly, as a matter of fact.
"Hey Doug," the girl said when she saw him. She seemed upset, not at all like the Macy he remembered.
"Hey yourself." He said as he climbed on-board; he sailed right past her and unlocked the companionway, lifted the boards and walked below. He went to the breaker panel and flipped on the air-conditioning, checked the battery monitor and flipped a switch to cycle the bilge pump, then he walked to the little fridge in the galley and pulled out a Coke. "Want something?" he called up.
"Whatever you're having."
That was vintage Macy, alright. Never asked for anything, never wanted anything, but she resented the hell out of you when you didn't give her what she wanted. Pure passive-aggressive. He grabbed another Coke and walked up the steps into the cockpit.
"And to what do I owe this honor," Tanner said as he popped the top and handed her a Coke.
"I'm pregnant," she said directly. She was looking him in the eye, daring him to say something smart.
"Oh? Really?" he said as he met her eyes.
"Don't worry," she said, suddenly looking guiltily down at her hands, "you're not the father."
"Great, but am I missing something." She seemed to be hovering over plains of a great despair, and he could sense that she was hiding her feelings. "I mean, like why are you here? And, why me?"
"I lost my job. I need a place to stay."
Jake looked at her, lifted his hands and shrugged. "And…what? You suddenly remembered good ole Doug and decided to come on over, move on in?"
She smiled unevenly, laughed a little: "Yeah, something like that." Then she looked at him again, a little more closely this time. "I didn't know what else to do, Doug. I had to move out of my apartment last night."
He nodded. "What about the father?" He studied her eyes and her hands as she acted and reacted to his words.
"Nada. Threw me out when I told him."
"Sounds like a nice guy. Real father-of-the-year material."
"You have to go back in soon?"
"Nope; got 48 off."
"Think we could go out?"
"Out?"
"Sailing?"
Tanner sighed, looked at the sky then at her forehead, thought about his berth down below and how much he wanted to sleep. "Hadn't planned on it," he said, but what the hell. Looked like a nice breeze out there and maybe he could figure out what it was she really wanted from him.
"Please," she said. "I used to love going out there with you…"
"Well, why don't you put your stuff up forward, give me a hand with the lines…"
He raised sail as the boat slipped out the cut from Dinner Key, pointed toward Key Biscayne as he steered across the shallow, blue bay, with downtown Miami off their port quarter. It was cool out, in the hi-60s, a typical mid-December day, and there was almost no one out on the water mid-week so it was like they had the whole place to themselves. The boat knifed gently through the calm water, the wind little more than a breeze. Macy took the wheel and Tanner went below for more Cokes and to make chicken sandwiches. They ate in silence; Macy seemed to bask in the sun for a while, then she curled up in the cockpit and fell into a restless, twitching sleep. Every now and then she moaned; Tanner took her pulse and felt her forehead from time to time, getting more and more worried by the sheen her felt there.
So Tanner watched her while he sailed, he jibed the boat slowly and pointed the boat south, toward Homestead, then he set the auto-pilot and put his feet up for a while, regarding the girl while she slept.
A gust passed through the sails, the boat heeled a little and knifed through a sudden, big wave, water flying aft through the air, spraying the cockpit with a fine, cool mist.
"Penny for your thoughts?" he heard her ask.
"Why me?" he said again.
"Because you are who you are," she said openly. "I know you, your smile…and I knew you'd help."
"Why's that? Because I'm the biggest sucker you know?"
She shook her head. "You're not a sucker, Doug. You're anything but."
He looked at her, looked at her tiny belly. "How far along?"
She shrugged.
"Macy? Have you seen an O.B.?
She sat up and laughed, then she shrugged away the question. She turned into the afternoon wind, her hair streaming past her shoulders. Classic Macy, all her evasions good natured and guilt free.
"No foolin', Macy! You been gettin' check-ups or not?"
She shrugged. "I can't afford all that stuff now."
"What…what happened? I thought you were pretty high on the seniority list."
"Not high enough, I guess. They let about three hundred of us go."
She'd been a flight attendant with a major carrier for years, but everything seemed to be falling apart this year; the only real growth industries in Dade County seemed to gunshot wounds and drug overdoses.
"I'm sorry," he said. "I didn't mean to pry; I know it's been a bitch all over. But don't you have Cobra, or some kind of policy?"
She nodded. "Yeah, but the premium's are pretty steep, the co-pays worse…and there's just not enough to go around."
He nodded. "It's been tough for a lot of folks." he said. The ER was awash with these new, cruel realities — he sutured-up the grim truth of this reality day in and day out, though few could afford to even walk in the door. Until it was too late, anyway.
He looked at her for the longest time, tried to think of what to say, or even how to ask her, but then he came to a decision:
"So, right, feel free to stay aboard as long as you want. 'Til you get your feet back under you, anyway." He looked at her, looked at her gentle smile. Maybe that was all he wanted out of life, he told himself; to see people smile, see them get a fair shake every now and then.
"You see, I told you."
"You're…you know…you're the most decent human being I know, Doug."
He laughed, blushed, looked away. "Right, that's me. The very soul of compassion…"
"You see the truth, that's all. And why do you always put yourself down?"
"It's an old habit," he said, "I learned from my father."
Tanner eased into the slip just as the last of the sun's light slipped away, as the sky drifted through purples and oranges into sinking waves of cobalt that led down to the hazy purple-black of Miami's neon skyline. But there were no stars out here, there never were, not here under layers of bright city haze. Tanner chopped the throttle, jumped onto the pier and made fast his lines, hopped back aboard with power cords and hooked them up. He squared away all the "stuff" that went along with sailing, went below and switched the ships systems back to shore power.
"Man, you got some sun today!" he said as he helped Macy below. "You're gonna burn, there, on your shoulders."
She reached up, felt her skin: "Youch!"
"I'll get some aloe…" he said as he went to the fridge for the bottle he kept there. "Sit you down; let's get some goop on that…" She sat, he rubbed. He remembered the way she felt now, while he touched her, like his skin on hers unlocked some vital store of memory. He thought of her, of the time they'd spent together, and he had to admit the memories were good — now that he'd found them again. He rubbed her shoulders, the tops of her arms, then up her neck…before he felt the downy hair there and remembered the way it used to smell when they made love.
"You're still in love with me, aren't you?" he heard her ask as he slipped away in blond shaded echoes of distant sun-drenched afternoons.
He heard her words, shook himself back into the present, stood and put the aloe away. "You hungry?" he asked.
"Actually, I'm not sure. I feel, maybe, well yes…"
"Me too." He slipped into the aft cabin, grabbed his shower things and walked up to the shower building. He enjoyed this marina despite its size; once upon a time it had been a Pan Am flying boat terminal; now it was a huge marina full of live-aboards, overflowing with herds of South American pilots and families with kids and retired people off to see the world — only taking a little time out along the way to too late. He showered, walked back to the boat, saw a mother and her crying daughter waiting by the boat. And of course the little girl appeared to be hurt…
"High Amy," he said to the freckle-faced girl as he got close enough to recognize her, "what's wrong?"
"Oh Doug," Amy's mother said, "she picked up another splinter, a real biggie this time, playing a while ago." Mary Ann, the girl's mother, was sweet and caring and she'd taken care of him too well once or twice. The little girl looked at him stoically now and held up her foot so he'd know which one. He bent over and squinted in the darkness.
"Youch! That IS a biggie, alright." Tanner said. "Well! Let's see if we can't fix you up." He jumped below, heard Macy barfing in the forward head while he got his bag out; he walked forward and knocked on the door: "Morning sickness?"
"Oh boy oh boy am I gonna chop off the next dick I come across!" — she said before she retched again, followed by a deep moan… "I swear to God I'll never touch another fucking penis as long as I live…"
"Uh, right…I'll be back in a second, got a splinter to remove…"
"Right…" More retching followed. He shook his head and went to the panel, turned on the cockpit lights and went back up to the wheel.
"Is Macy back?" Mary Ann asked. The marina was like any other small town — news traveled fast along the grapevines here. Her husband was a pilot for United and he was gone all the time, so…
"Lost her job and her apartment," he said while he opened the cockpit table and laid his tools out. "Okay Amy, let's see that honker!" He helped get her foot on the table then he bent over and looked at it. "Well, doesn't look as bad as I thought but it IS in there real deep. You want to be a trooper and tough it out or do you want me to use some Novocain?"
"Is that a needle thingy?" a suddenly very wide-eyed Amy mewed.
"Yep. But that's a real big splinter, Amy. If it was in my foot I'd want the shot."
"Okay then. But only if it's what you'd do." Not too long ago Mary Ann had told him her little girl had a crush on him.
He got to work, cleaned up the wound and bandaged it, gave her a tetanus shot and sent them on their way; he went below, found Macy on the v-berth up front shivering in a pool of sweat.
"You're burning up, kiddo," he said. He returned to the galley, got his bag and a cool washcloth and went back forward, put it on her forehead. "You hurt anywhere?"
"Here," she said, pointing to her lower left quadrant, "and here," now at her mid-groin.
"How bad?" he asked as he reached down and gently palpated her belly.
"Bad!" she moaned when he touched just to the left of her navel.
"Okay. If you think you can walk, I reckon we'd better get you to the ER; if not I'll call an ambulance."
"Why? — I mean, what's wrong?"
"Not sure," he lied. "Better check out a few things and make sure the baby's okay." But he was thought she might have an ectopic pregnancy, so right now he needed to keep her still and get her to the ER as quickly as possible. "Think you can walk?"
"I don't think so," she said carefully, obviously in excruciating pain. "I don't think I can move."
"Right." Tanner walked back to the chart table and got his phone and dialed 911; he gave the operator directions to the boat, then went back and took her blood pressure before he wiped even more sweat from her face.
He heard the ambulance a few minutes later, went topside when he heard the paramedics getting close, then helped them load her in the ambulance, riding with her to the ER. He called a social worker while an OB did her work up; he wanted to get Macy set-up with Medicaid before her bills got out of hand. He went back to check on her but by then they'd already taken her upstairs to an OR. And then he remembered he didn't have a ride back to the marina. He looked at his watch; it was now three in the morning and he couldn't remember the last time he'd slept.
"Great!" he moaned. "Ain't that peachy…"
"Hey, doc! How's it going?"
Tanner turned, saw one of Miami's finest, a good-natured cop everyone called Mannie. "Hey yourself. What are you doing down here? Krispy Kreme not open yet?"
"Ha! I don't eat them hi-dollar donuts, Pachuco!"
"Yeah? Looks like you're eatin' 'em somewhere, Mannie! Whoa, dude, you're packing on the pounds!"
Mannie Hernandez looked down. "Yeah, I know," he said quietly.
"Something wrong?"
"Yeah, everything."
"You on duty?"
"Overtime. Came in with a big MVA, a DUI—homicide. Headed back to the station now."
"Good, you can give me a lift?"
"Yeah, sure, no problem," the cop said.
"Thanks. Now, what the fuck's wrong?"
"Oh, man, it's my old lady…"
They stopped off for a couple dozen donuts on the way…because Tanner had learned that trick a long time ago. If you ever needed a cop to talk, it paid to take 'em to a good donut shop.
He spent the morning with Macy, and the other half of his day off cleaning the boat; he had finally put his feet up in the cockpit and opened up a book when an old couple walked up…
"Dr Tanner, you have a minute?"
He looked up, smiled. "Bill, right? And Lucille? What's up?"
They nodded and smiled: "You still giving out flu shots?"
"Yeah, I think I got a couple left. Y'all didn't get yours yet, I take it?"
"No sir, we sure didn't, and we heard it's going around. Do you think you could get us one?"
He put his book down and went below to the fridge, opened a fresh box of the pre-loaded syringes and had them read and sign the County's release, then he gave them their shots, had them sign a book he kept for the County Health Department – and that was it.
"Dr Tanner, I've got a fresh pot of turnip greens and a pot-roast on. Would you like me to bring you a plate?"
"Is that what I smell down there'?"
Lucille smiled, blushed.
"My word but that smells fine."
"I'll go fetch you some…"
"No-no-no, I'll come over if that's alright with you two."
The couple seemed pleased with that and scuttled down the pier to the old cabin cruiser they called home; Tanner walked along slowly in their wake.
"Y'all came down from Tennessee, on the river? How was that?" he asked when he read the hailing port on their boat's stern.
"Yessir, we came down the Tenn-Tom Waterway," Bill said. "Real pretty trip, too. Best thing we ever done."
Tanner broke bread with these funny old people and he couldn't help but think of Audrey Hepburn singing Moon River; he laughed with them as they recounted their adventures on the water, he held their hands while he listened to their heartaches, and though he talked with the old couple for hours and hours he couldn't have been happier. When he went back to his boat he soon fell into a deep sleep and when he woke the next morning he found himself whistling Moon River as he drove his ancient Beemer into work.
He went in early, talked with Macy in her room. She was beat up both physically and emotionally, was adrift after losing the baby she'd never know. Yet Tanner thought she seemed a little too depressed, thought he'd better tell the charge nurse to add 'depression?' to her chart.
"You'll be here today, maybe tomorrow," he added before he left for the ER. "When you're ready I'll come and get you, take you down to the boat."
She smiled, turned away, looked out a window to some faraway place.
And yet the look on her face almost frightened him. "I'll come by again in a little bit. You get some rest, okay?"
She said not a word, just drifted away into the hazy confines of a life that would never be.
The paramedics said she was a hooker, that she'd overdosed on horse and sometime during their transaction she'd gotten into a fight with her 'john' over the quality of services she'd rendered; the guy knocked her around a little, then shot her twice — once in the arm, once just above her collar-bone — and then they really got into it. The 'john' was in Trauma Six, his penis hanging on by a thread; the hooker was in Trauma Three, and she was a mess. Though it was four in the morning all twelve trauma rooms were full, several with gunshot or knife wounds, people hit by drunk drivers or wives beaten by angry husbands. Mannie Hernandez stood in the corner watching Tanner work; he had, by law, to remain with an attempted homicide victim until the docs could tell if she would live or die.
The hooker was in and out of consciousness but her vitals were pretty good — so she was labeled 'stable'; Tanner held her latest x-rays up to the light-box, looked at the bullet lodged in the woman's neck. He wanted to pump her stomach while they waited for an O.R. to clear, watch her fluids and vitals, but he was afraid if she vomited the movement might push the bullet against her spine. He called the neurosurgeon upstairs and explained; the surgeon wanted her stomach pumped, didn't want her vomiting with a tube down her throat on the table, so that was that.
He got the tray ready while nurses strapped her neck brace to the board, then Tanner ran surgical tubing up her nose and threaded it past her glottis and into her esophagus, then down into her stomach. He put positive pressure on the tubing and listened with a stethoscope, made sure the tube was in her belly and not her lungs. A nurse mixed activated charcoal and saline into a wet slurry and filled a huge, syringe like pump and handed it to him. He fit the first syringe to the tubing and pumped the black sludge slowly into her stomach; a nurse listened to the stuff enter the stomach and gave Tanner a thumbs up. Another nurse mixed saline and ipecac, an emetic that causes near instantaneous vomiting.
Tanner looked up, grinned at Mannie.
"Say Mannie, you wanna come over here and hold the bucket?"
"Hey, fuck you, homey. I ain't standin' next to no fuckin' volcano! No way, no fuckin' way! All them scrambled eggs and shit! Shit no, no fuckin' way!"
"Hey, you know, just thought I'd ask…" He fit the second syringe to the tubing and pumped the ipecac in, then listened before he quickly pulled the tubing out the woman's nose. As soon as the tube was clear a nurse held the woman's neck while everyone else rolled the woman on her side. An orderly stood beside the table with a fifty gallon trash can ready to go, a mask over his nose.
"Oh, crap," the orderly said seconds later, "here it comes!"
The woman's eyes opened momentarily, just before the deluge; she managed to say "what the fuck!" before she let loose. She convulsed violently then settled down a little, then kept barfing into the can, moaning between upheavals.
"Hey, Mannie!" one of the nurses said. "How'd you know she had scrambled eggs for dinner?"
"Fuck you, man! Just fuck you!"
Everyone laughed, everyone but Tanner. He ran his fingers through the woman's hair, leaned over and whispered something in her ear. She moaned, smiled a little before she closed her eyes. He continued rubbing her head until he was sure she was asleep again.
He got off after thirty hours on, went upstairs to Macy's room.
"Howya' doin'?" Tanner asked as he walked into her room. She seemed brighter today, not quite as down.
"Better, Doug. Thanks."
"Yeah. Say, your chemistries look good; they wanna cut you loose. Feel like taking a ride?"
"Doug. I mean it. Thanks. You saved my life."
"Bah! Nonsense!"
"I was gonna go get a hotel room. I would have been alone. The nurses said I'd have bled to death."
He looked into her eyes and nodded.
"Doug? You ever think that some things happen for a reason?"
"Maybe — I don't know."
"You don't, huh? Imagine that. I thought you knew everything…"
They laughed at that, but Tanner felt a little off balance now. "So, I brought you some things. Why don't you get dressed and I'll come back in a few minutes…"
He drove slowly, let her get used to the sun and the air and the greenness of her own life once again. The sky was pure bluebirds, not a single cloud could be seen anywhere, and the air was cool and fresh. The world smelled of mangos and freshly mown grass, girls on roller-skates and dudes on skateboards crowded the sidewalk by the beach, Frisbees flew just above the sand and out over the silvery-blue water beyond the beach dozens of sailboats crowded the cut from the marina out to the deep water beyond the protected waters of the bay.
He watched her, thought about what she'd been through, about the hopes and dreams she might have had, about the nightmare that had come calling in their stead. He helped her from the car when they got to the marina, walked arm-in-arm with her down the pier. There were fresh flowers 'from all of us here in the marina' and Lucille stood by as they passed, followed them and handed Tanner a huge pot of greens and corn bread.
Macy was pale and light and he had to admit it now: he had never really stopped caring for her. He fed her and put her in his berth in the aft cabin, drew the little curtains and crawled in next to her and held her while she dreamed through the night. He held her when she cried, he held her while she slept, and he brushed the hair from her face and kissed her eyelashes as gently as a breeze. She looked at him, held him in her eyes and she smiled from time to time and that seemed enough for him.
"See," she said, "I told you. You still love me."
"You were right."
It was her turn now. She held him, held on to him as tightly as she could.
Tanner went in early the next morning — it was an off day but a third year resident had called in with the flu. When the Chief was short she knew who to call. Because Tanner never said no.
Sundays were slow days. They didn't usually get mad until evening rolled 'round, but even so most Sundays were easy. And so it was this Sunday. Medicine was busy, lots of flu presenting, and psychiatry was roaring along, too — because this was, after all, Miami. Paramedics came by with a teenage-girl strapped down to the gurney a little after noon; she'd slit her wrists — "the way they do it on TV" she told him, and he repaired a tendon and sutured her wrists while she went on and on about how life wasn't worth living because her boyfriend had dumped her…
"Just curious," he asked her at one point, "but what would make life worth living?"
She mentioned something about a new cell-phone or a Mercedes like her mom's and Tanner smiled as he looked at her, while he steri-stripped the margins of the wounds and covered them with four-by-fours. A resident from psychiatry came by, and when out of the room she asked Tanner what he thought about the girl:
"Looks like a classic cry for help," Tanner said, "except her feet are filthy, there's a load of dirt under her fingernails, and she's malnourished. She acts like 'little miss rich-kid' but I'd lay odds she's alone and on the street, maybe a runaway. I'd call Social Services right off the bat." The resident nodded and made notes before she walked in to meet the girl. A little later they rolled the girl down to psychiatry; she waved at Tanner when she saw him and he smiled, waved at her while he wondered when and where The Big Mistake had caught her.
It was like a law of physics with kids like her. The Big Mistake came for them out of the blue, caught them unawares and left them compromised for life, alone now to struggle with the consequences. Loneliness hit the force multiplier of guilt and then the long slide down into the shadows began, and once you landed in the darkness you finally realized just how much trouble you were really in, and how impossibly alone The Big Mistake had left you. Slit wrists and fentanyl overdoses hit these kids hard.
"Gunshot wound inbound," came the crackling voice from the overhead speaker. "Paramedics advise five minutes out."
Tanner was the senior resident on the floor. Two first-years surgical residents and a gaggle of interns hovered expectantly, watching and waiting for him to say something. An emergency medicine doc was hustling down from the cafeteria. The oldest resident, Doris Tayloe, a woman who'd graduated from med school on her 48th birthday, looked ready to go:
"Right. Doris, go get the trays set up and ready to go, would you? Take a couple of interns with you, and tell 'em to tuck in their goddamn scrubs this time! And trust your nurses!" He was tired of finding loose hairs on his sterile field; heads would roll soon if he saw another sloppy intern walking around with their scrubs not tucked-in!
He got on the phone, called the doctor advising the paramedics in the field: "What do they have?" he wanted to know.
"Six year old African-American male, at least two gunshot wounds, one in the gut, one looks like it got the femoral artery. They've got trousers on the kid."
"Right, have you notified vascular?"
"Yeah. Collins is finishing up a chest, he'll be down as soon as he can. I called your chief, too. She's on the way."
"Right. Thanks."
"Okay, they're turning in now. Seeya…"
Tanner hung up the phone, walked down to Trauma One and filled in the team. Everything looked ready.
He saw the ambulance screech to a stop and back in to the loading bay, two patrol cars roared in and pulled raggedly into spaces marked Police Only. Mannie Hernandez jumped out of one, another officer he didn't recognize followed.
Orderlies got the ambulance doors and firemen helped pull the gurney out; one of the paramedics was bagging the kid, another held IVs overhead as they rolled the kid into the ER:
"Go to One!" Tanner called out; he saw the emergency medicine doc running down the corridor. "Thank goodness for small favors," he said as he followed the gurney into the room.
Orderlies and nurses began cutting away the kid's clothes; Tanner saw the boy's eyes roll back in his head and moved to the kid's gut. "It's a fucking mess in there," he heard one of the paramedics say. "Must have been a .357 or something, maybe a 41 mag; there's a big fucking exit wound where his right kidney used to be…"
Tanner started calling orders, supervising the residents and nurses, letting them do their jobs while he did his. "Okay, I can palpate the aorta; it feels intact — good pressure — the renal might be okay too but I kinda doubt it — Doris, let's roll him… I wanna have a look at that exit wound before we take the cuffs off his legs — sheez, what a mess! — Somebody call for a gas-passer — the renal is intact but I can feel bullet fragments all around his kidney — goddamn hollow-points! Has anyone called Urology…?"
He heard, in the periphery of his mind, Mannie out in the hall, and then an hysterical woman screaming, probably the kid's mother, probably taking all Mannie's strength to keep her out of here, then — "get a cut-down and lets get those cuffs off, I'm gonna go in and clamp off the femoral…"
"But it'll retract…" one of the interns commented.
"No shit, Sherlock!" the emergency medicine doc said angrily. "Now get the fuck out of here and go read a comic book!"
Tanner palpated the inner thigh, thought he felt pressure and made an incision from the scrotum down his thigh about eight inches. There wasn't much fat, not much muscle, either; he stuck his finger into the shattered tissue, felt the artery, felt it pulsing lightly. "It's just… still mostly intact… oh, no! Clamp!" he shouted. He felt the clamp slap in his left hand and guided it down to the deteriorating artery; he got it on the first try. "Got it! Shit, there're bone frags everywhere — better call ortho, somebody!"
Tanner stood, looked at the monitors: the kid was holding his own but the screaming in the corridor was getting out of control.
"Mannie! Bring her in here, now!"
"You sure, man!"
"Bring her in!"
A black woman, maybe twenty-five, maybe thirty, thundered into the room; she shuddered to a stop when she saw her baby boy. She started wailing big time when his reality slapped her in the face.
"Ma'am," Tanner said gently, "I need you to be quiet, and I want you to listen to me, alright?!"
The woman struggled to control herself.
"Ma'am, I need you to listen to me…okay?"
She calmed noticeably when she looked at Tanner, as if she took comfort from the strength behind his voice.
"Awright, doctor, I'm listenin'."
"We've got a lot of the bleeding under control. Your boy's stable right now. Now, do you believe in God?"
"Yessir, doctor, I sure do."
"Alright. I want you to go to the chapel with Officer Hernandez and get down on your knees and start prayin'! You here me? You stop prayin' when I come and tell you too. You hear me! Your boy needs you to do that, okay?"
"Yessir," she said. "Thank you, doctor." She had somewhere to focus her strength now, and backed quietly from the room.
In the sudden quiet, Tanner hoped, things would go smoothly, then maybe things would start looking good…and prayer sure wasn't going to hurt anything right about now.
The man was huge. His bald head just barely cleared the automatic sliding doors when they slid opened for him, and he must have weighed three hundred and fifty pounds. His black skin glistened with sweat; he was wearing ragged denim overalls and old work-boots caked with dried mud, and nothing else: his bare chest appeared to be solid muscle, his arms too. He was looking for his step-son; the kid had taken twenty dollars from his wallet and that had, apparently, been the last straw…because he'd felt something inside snap and give way after that…
He saw his wife standing outside a little chapel, a cop between him and her. He took out the pistol in his overalls and aimed, shot once at the cop. The noise was overwhelming in the closed corridor; people started screaming and running for cover, interns ducked behind counters while the cop fell over, slid down to the floor, blood coming from his mouth and nose.
The woman turned, saw her husband and ran into the trauma room, tried to hide from him there.
The man followed her, walked into the trauma room, saw his wife hiding behind a doctor…or was the doctor trying to shield her, protect her…he couldn't tell…but really, it didn't matter now…
He fired once, then again and again, his eyes burning pyres of blind fury.
Nurses and doctors flattened against the wall, tried to get out of the line of fire, then they heard another gunshot, this time from behind the man, then another and another. Brain was exposed on the left side of the big man's head as he stared into the darkness, his eyes lifeless now, the fires all burnt out of them as he fell away.
Doug Tanner lay on the floor, bleeding; he saw Mannie across the room on the floor, blood pooling under his head; he tried to move, to help him — but he couldn't. The world grew light and distant, and as he felt himself falling into cold light he wondered what came next.
He woke up, recognized an ICU nurse and wanted to ask her what she was doing in the ER. He tried to talk but couldn't, tried to swallow but again he simply could not. He felt a wave of panic, knew he was the patient but had no idea how he'd gotten here. Then a nurse was overhead, looking down at him…
"Doug? Doug, you were shot, down in the ER. Neck wound. There's a drain in now; that's why you can't talk…"
He heard her talking, heard her say something about his mouth and tape and everything was going to be fine… and then he felt himself drifting off again…
He felt his head lifting, heard a motor whirring away under the bed; he opened his eyes, saw doctors looking at his neck and talking. The room was dark, but he could tell the curtains were drawn and only faint sunlight was seeping through. Wind and rain were pelting the glass, and for some reason that just didn't make any sense at all.
"Oh, hey Doug. You awake enough to talk?" one of the doctors said.
"Yeah," he croaked. His throat hurt like hell.
"Good! The vocal cords are fine! I think we can take out the drain, Bill." Tanner ignored them…
…because he saw Macy behind them; she looked anxious and moved close when the doctors left a moment later. He watched as she started crying, as she began shaking uncontrollably. He reached out and took her hand. "How are you doing," he asked her.
"How am I doing? Me? Oh God, Doug!" He felt her head on his chest, smelled her hair, felt her body shake as tears convulsed…
"Hey, Pachuco!"
"Mannie?"
He felt Macy stand, saw her turn and look at the cop as he wheeled in.
"Hey, amigo, brought you some donuts…"
"Right!" He looked at Mannie, then at Macy: "Try and save me at least one, will you Macy. That man is a donut fiend. He'll snatch 'em right off your plate…right out of your mouth, even…"
Everyone laughed at that, even if the truth did hurt a little.
"What about the kid, Mannie? Did he make it?"
"Yeah, sure did, his mom too."
Doug Tanner smiled when he heard that, but Mannie decided against telling him about the two nurses who hadn't made it. He'd hear about it all that soon enough.
A year later the economy was rebounding and Macy was flying again. She wanted to try the whole baby thing again too, only this time with Tanner, and despite all the very real risks she'd face he'd agreed. Maybe because he understood her better now, her strengths and hopes and dreams, and beyond the love he felt for her there was a fair measure of respect. Motherhood was a force of nature, after all, yet he also had grown very protective of her, though for a while he assumed that went along with the whole fatherhood thing…
"You know," he told her one evening, "all those pressurization cycles can't be good for you."
"Is there anything about it in your textbooks?"
"Rudimentary stuff, kiddo, like limit flying after six months. I can't find squat about ectopic risks, but it just feels wrong to me."
"Wrong? Like how?"
"Like it scares me."
"Scares you? Now that I did not expect."
"Macy, there's no certainty here…I mean the odds are you'll have a normal pregnancy, but…"
"Doug, show me anything concerning pregnancy and childbirth that's risk free…!"
"Okay, point taken, but…"
"There are no buts, Doug. Either I carry to term…"
"Or you don't."
She saw the look in his eyes, knew what he felt. He was scared of losing her for good this time, that she'd bleed out and there'd be nothing he could do to save her. Everything had happened so fast, and once the bleed had begun in earnest she'd literally almost run out the clock. It had been that close, but he'd always kept that part of the story from her and she had begun to wonder why.
"I wonder if it means something, ya know?" she said as she looked at him.
"Like…maybe I'm not supposed to have children."
This was terra incognita for her, and the sudden change he saw was startling. "What makes you say that, Mace?"
"Just a feeling, I guess. Lurking around somewhere. Like in the shadows, maybe."
"We could adopt, ya know?"
She looked away, wiped a tear as sudden implications washed over her doubt. "Or I could just keep flying, Doug. Stay on the pill and just work away the years."
He shook his head. "That's not a real option, Macy. Not if being a mom means that much to you."
"What about you, Doug? What does it mean to you?"
"I just don't want anything to happen to you, Mace. I guess I have a hard time seeing past that."
She shook her head. "That's not good enough, Doug. If you don't want this at least as much as I do, I can't see this ending well."
She seemed distant after that conversation, and one evening about a week later—when he returned to the boat after work—he found she'd taken all her belongings and had simply gone. She left behind not one thing, not even a note of explanation. He learned some time later that she'd moved to Chicago and was flying out of O'Hare and as unpredictable as her actions might have seemed at the time, for some reason a part of him understood. She'd decided he probably wasn't good father material because he'd always been too wrapped up in work, and he thought that maybe it really was like his own father had told him once upon a time: he was too focused on dealing with other people's problems to ever take care of his own.
So, maybe his old man had been right all along; maybe he'd always been that way? Who knows…maybe he'd always be too self-absorbed, but what if this was the price he'd have to pay to see into other people so clearly…?
He began to see patterns in the chaos. Simple things, like violent crime increased when times were tough. That Thursday nights were the worst because that was the day before payday and family arguments almost always revolved around money. He talked to Mannie about these things, too. Like…did violent crime increase around the time of the full moon? Turns out it did, yet that was almost counter-intuitive. Shouldn't crime go up when the moon was dark?
Tanner began compiling statistics after that. His curiosity engaged now, he'd wrap up each shift by going over the socio-economic backgrounds of his patients, and he soon began to see into these events with new insight. The poorer you were the more likely you were to be shot or stabbed. Same if you were African American, except you were much more likely to die in the ER if you were black. Affluent white girls were most often seen in the ER for drug overdoses and attempted suicide. Most white people, generally speaking, ended up in the ER after being in an automobile accident or having a heart attack, while most blacks involved in auto accidents were pedestrians run down at night. At first he looked at some of these conclusions suspiciously, like there were racist undertones in these findings—but then he had to shake that off because raw numbers tell a truth all their own.
But one of these sets of numbers got to him. That blacks died violently, and their rates of survival just didn't compare to the rates of other groups. So he began to focus his attention there, among the survival rates of ER patients by race. And within weeks new patterns emerged.
If you were white, you were ten times more likely to make it out of the ER than if you were black—and that held true even after accounting for the severity of the initial injury. 'But I'm not a racist!' Tanner told himself after going over his latest round of statistics. 'But what if I start keeping track of deaths per physician? What will that tell me?'
And the result was so obvious his stomach turned. The rate was the same for every doc on the floor.
'No more,' he told himself. 'No good can come from this.'
Instead he resolved to watch his residents more closely, and what he found then was almost equally upsetting. White kids with bad lacerations received careful suturing, while the work done on black kids was barely adequate, so he made an attempt to get to know the residents better, see if he could better understand why this was happening.
Yet he couldn't detect any overt racism after he talked with the physicians he worked with. So was this, he wondered, an unconscious process? And if that was the case wasn't he looking at something systemic, something beyond easy homespun remedies. And now thoroughly unsettled after trying to deal with these revelations he found himself consciously drawn to caring for the poorest of the poor, to the completely marginalized and the destitute. And, by and large, these were almost always black people—and that realization sickened him. Could it be that, fifteen years into the twenty-first century, we were still dealing with the aftereffects of slavery and the institutionalized racism of the Old South?
He remembered his father talking about his experiences of the summer of '67, when America's post Civil War legacy of institutionalized unemployment, abusive policing, and poor housing all came to a head. Race riots broke out all over the country starting in May, with huge, pitched battles taking place in Newark and Detroit by July. Things seemed to settle down after those convulsions, at least until Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were gunned down. But then Richard Nixon won the election in '68 and everything started to go downhill after that. Fast, too.
His father had just finished the second year of his general surgical residency in May '67 when he received notice of his eligibility to be drafted, so after a brief discussion with members of his local draft board he'd opted to go into the Navy. As a surgeon, he reasoned, he'd sit out his "enlistment" in Hawaii or more likely San Diego, and after a few years working on his suntan he'd muster out and resume his post-doctoral education. Probably in LA, or maybe even Hawaii. It would be…fun.
Except things hadn't worked out that way.
After a quick detour through an abbreviated officer's training program his father landed in Hue City about two months before the Tet offensive kicked the war in Vietnam into overdrive, and he spent the first year of his war at a battalion aid station just north of Hue City; the second he spent on aircraft carriers working off the South Vietnamese coast, at Dixie Station. And at one point Doug Tanner learned there was no amount of liquor he could get into his old man that would loosen him up enough to talk about what he'd experienced over there. After just one attempt his mother warned him off.
But his mother was gone now, though his father was still alive. He'd been living, alone, in the same house in Rockport he'd purchased when he came back from Vietnam. And even that was odd, too, because his father never left the Navy; he did his twenty then managed to keep practicing until failing eyesight finally turned the clock past midnight. Now the old house stood like a monument to the war between a father and his son, a never-ending series of skirmishes and retreats that signified nothing much beyond stubbornness and injured pride.
So, the one constant between Doug and his father was a distance that could never be bridged, and that constant still held true. They didn't call one another, neither did they write. The last time Doug had seen his father was at his mother's funeral, and they said not a word to each other; Doug assumed that was the way things would end between them.
And then his sister Meghan called one evening, about a year after Macy left.
"I've moved in with Dad," she told Tanner. "He can't see much now and the neighbors have had to call the police a couple of times."
"Because he can't see?"
"No, Doofus. He walks out into the middle of the street. Marjorie says it's like he wants to get run over."
"Are you ever going to stop calling me Doofus?"
"Why would I do that?"
"Because I'm your big brother and I can still outrun you."
"In your dreams, Doofus."
"So, you moved back into your old bedroom?"
"What's that like?"
"Weird. No dust, anywhere. Clean sheets and towels."
"Pure Navy," Doug sighed. "Some things'll never change."
"He's changing, Doug, and fast."
"Oh? What's up?"
"He's not, for one thing. I never saw him playing the depressed old man, but he's working the role for all it's worth right now."
"Dad? Depressed?"
"Doug, I know you two never saw eye to eye, but I think it's time you came home and broke bread. I think you're running out of time, if you know what I mean."
"Can you pick me up at Portland?"
Sure she could. Which was why Tanner happened to be on a flight from Miami to Maine two days later. Which was when he bumped into Macy Beresford.
Isn't life strange? The way the unexpected slips up from behind and taps you on the shoulder?
Meghan watched her brother as he stepped out of the terminal and into the driving snow, still dressed like he was headed out to dinner in Miami Beach. Then she saw he had brought one small duffel and knew he wasn't planning on staying long, so she felt let down. Again. Which was nothing new between them. She tooted the horn and he looked through the ripping snow until he saw her, then he bent into the gale and made for her ancient Honda, wondering for the millionth time why on earth anyone would voluntarily choose to live in Maine.
She reached over and unlocked the door just as he reached for the handle, and he crawled inside after he tossed his bag into the back seat. She watched as he buckled in then slipped into the light stream of traffic, heading back to the interstate. "Bring anything warm?" she asked.
"As long as no one threw out my old stuff I should have a coat or two."
"What? You haven't gained any weight since high school?" she asked.
And he shook his head. "Doubtful. Might have lost a few, but I don't really spend a lot of time on the scales."
'Ah', she thought, 'the first subtle dig of the spur.' Meghan had struggled with weight all her life and now probably weighed fifty pounds more than she had as a senior in high school. "How long can you stay?"
"Until I get a handle on things."
'The second attack, and so fast! Big brother rides in to save the day. Again — because I'm so incompetent!' She shook her head. "You wanna stop off at Bean's for some gloves?"
But he just shook his head. "Who is he seeing locally?" he asked.
"Peterson. You remember him?"
"Yup. You've talked to him, I assume?"
"No, I haven't, Doug. Dad told everyone at the clinic not to talk to us."
"Isn't that special," Tanner sighed. "Any idea why?"
"Other than hating me and not trusting you? No, nothing else comes to mind."
"Okay. So, tell me about you. What's going on?"
"Still teaching in Camden. No change."
"New partner, anything like that going on?"
"No," she snarled. "What about you?"
He leaned back for a minute then exhaled. "Had a close call a couple of years ago, lasted a year. I hadn't seen her in ages but she turned up on my flight."
"No shit? What was that like?"
"She was one of the flight attendants. She's married now, sounded happy. It was good to touch bases."
"Yeah. Call it closure. Watch it…that's black ice up there…"
"You wanna drive, smart-ass?"
"Nope. Take my word for it, I haven't driven on snow in ten years."
"So, you think dementia's set in, something like that's going on with him?"
"Not my area of expertise, Doug."
"Okay, so…what if it is? You thought much about that?"
"Doug, whatever you might remember about him, well, he's gotten really mean."
"Meaner than he was?"
"And you moved in with him?"
"He's my father, Doug. Yours too, I seem to recall."
He turned and looked out the window, lost in thought. How many times had he taken this same route, from Rockport to Portland. A thousand times if it was one, and even the trees looked unchanged. He looked out in the general direction of the sea as they crossed the bridge in Bath, then she pulled into the big Irving station outside of Damariscotta and he filled up her tank.
She thanked him but she finished the drive in an old, familiar silence, a silence that seemed have found them all too easily. Maybe like fighters who had retired to their respective corners to plaster an old wound or two, wounds that had suddenly come undone. Not exactly unexpected but certainly not welcome.
After winding their way through Rockport, Meghan turned on Winter Street and then into the driveway to her father's house. To the house she could never bring herself to call home. Her brother watched her for a moment — in that way physicians' often do. Visually taking a measure of a patient's response to subtle questioning on the way to a working diagnosis…taking a measure of the moment. He saw the pounding vein in her right temporal region, took note of the twitch under her eye and the sudden shaking hands.
"You okay, kiddo?" he asked.
And she shook her head. "No, not in the least. I'm afraid what you two are going to do to each other."
He nodded, but all the same he reached over and took her hand in his. "If it gets too bad, just tell me to back off, okay?"
She kept nodding, then she started slowly shaking her head. "I don't feel right, Doug. Something's not right."
He came around and opened her door, noted there was already about six inches of snow on the ground and that it was coming down hard now. He helped Meghan stand and just held onto her for a while, and she melted into him more than he'd imagined she might. When she was ready they turned to face the music and began walking up the old brick walk to the front porch. And when he saw the front door was open about an inch, he too began to feel something was off.
"Stay here," he said to his sister, then he stepped into the entry.
His father was sitting in his favorite chair by the fireplace, and the fire was still burning nicely, casting shadows enough to just make out the devastating self-inflicted gunshot wound in the flickering light. His father's old Commander Model 1911 Colt had fallen to his lap, and Doug walked over to him and out of stony habit he felt for a pulse. The top half of his father's face was gone now, but that oh-so-familiar skin of his was still warm. Probably the fireplace, he thought as he walked over to the phone and dialed 911.
"Can I come in now," Meghan called out.
"No, not just yet," Doug Tanner said carefully. "Give me a minute."
Realtors were already circling the house like sharks, leaving business cards with their practiced notes of condolence. His father's affairs were in perfect order, naturally, and he'd left everything to his two children—again, naturally. And he'd passed a wealthy man, leaving his kids an estate worth something on the north side of five million dollars, give or take market valuations. Tanner read through his father's chart at the clinic, saw the inoperable glioblastoma diagnosis entered after an MRI completed a week before his death, and it all fell into place right then and there. His father knew the score and he'd decided that was one road he didn't want to take. Only now…there were so many things he wanted to talk to his dad about, and that lack of closure hurt. That, and his old man hadn't even wanted to say goodbye, to either of them. 'How true to form,' he sighed.
Meghan wanted nothing to do with the house, nothing to do with her father's money, so Tanner did what he thought best. He transferred everything to a trust, because one day his sister would come back to life and he wanted things to be ready for her. He called a friend from high school, a contractor now who had a decent reputation, to go over the house with a practiced eye, so Tanner could keep everything in good repair. And once all the paperwork was out of the way he took his sister with him back to Florida, away from all the cold and death and the never-ending babble about taxes and what to do next.
She stopped eating for a while, but then he took her sailing—over to the Bahamas—for two weeks. She swam and ate conch fritters and he fixed her strong drinks full of potent rum and she finally started to come back to him, to life. She'd let herself go long before, of course, and the road back wouldn't be easy, but it was his place to do these things now. Because it was a road he'd have to take with her to see it done right.
But of course he went back to work and work pulled him in deeper and deeper with each passing shift and soon enough he saw Meghan falling into the same kind of despair she always had. Their father had abandoned them to work, left their mother to assume all the duties of parenthood, and that was a role so unfamiliar to her that she had been doomed to fail from the beginning. Good teachers and a caring neighborhood had helped carry the load for a while, but in the end their mother ate her way out of her misery until an early heart attack took her away, but the damage had by then been well and truly done. Yet Doug escaped this benign neglect, while Meghan had been buried under the weight of their helpless mother's simmering frustrations. Even so, Doug had long ago concluded that his father was the real villain of their story.
Another year down.
Meghan in graduate school, back in Maine and living in the Old Man's house.
Tanner still alone. Still working 'eight days a week.' SSDD, as in Same Shit Different Day. His last year of residency, when big choices loomed, the year major change became unavoidable. Questions like where to start a practice, but little ones trailed along, too, like 'do I fix the transmission again or break down and finally buy a new car?' Or: he almost liked Miami Beach but in the end he really disliked Florida, especially the endlessly oppressive humidity. He liked living on the boat but he was waging a constant battle against mold and mildew. He wanted a dog and a yard and yeah, he wanted a wife and kids—yet the boat might not be the best way to go about doing that, ya know?
And when those thoughts came on hard and fast it always seemed like a fresh parade of broken dreams would come in through the ERs doors to remind him of all the hazards ahead. Another mangled marriage, more blood on the gurney, another gunshot wounds to the groin only one way furious resolutions were arrived at. Another overdose, or do we call it what it really is? Suicide, without the courage to face the pain? Or was that one a cry for help? Or, God forbid, a real accident? How many good people chased the dream only to find that it wasn't in the cards. Not for them, anyway. Bad choices seemed to develop a momentum all their own, and the courts and the prisons were ready and willing to change that course for you, once you were discharged from the hospital, that is. Then all your bad choices turned into a cyclone of penal servitude and mounting court imposed debt. And don't forget you still owe the hospital about a hundred grand for pumping your stomach.
And then it hit him one day. Was that what the realization his Old Man had run into, once upon a time all his own? Was that why so many of his colleagues in 'Nam ended up in dermatology or cosmetic surgery after the war spit them out? Burned out before they could even finish their training? He'd seen as much already, of course. As in peers switching from general surgery to something a little less…stressful? Like after a really bad experience, some even going back to med school…only now to teach?
And he was in his thirties now. Highly trained, certainly, but adrift. The hospital might offer him a position on staff, but then what? Just slip into the grind and watch the years drift by until things went from "maybe tomorrow" to half-past too late? He could, theoretically, even join the Navy—but every time he thought of that he saw his father in his chair with the top of his head blown away—because, in the end, would the outcome really be so different? He was his father's son after all…
But 'like particles' tend to repel unless acted upon by external forces, right? Just as 'opposites' attract? So, had Macy been his opposite, or more similar that that? He'd seen her as an opposite, so what had torn them apart? He'd been more than willing to commit to her, but less so when it came to risking her life to try for a baby again? Had that been the difference? And if so, could such a union ever endure?
And every time he asked that question he saw his mother's broken body laying on a cold slab at the funeral home.
His father's son, indeed.
Tanner chose the easy way out. He accepted a position on staff. He had the boat hauled and slapped a new coat of bottom paint on her hull. He sold the old Beemer and remembered his father's admonishment that physicians should drive Buicks, not fancy German sports cars. And maybe that was why he picked up a new 911, because he could now so why not?
The hospital parked him in a surgical practice with a dozen other cutters; no more 'eight days a week' but regular office hours. On-call duty one night every two weeks and one weekend every two months. Nights free unless something really off-the-charts happened, like a major pile-up on the freeway. He started going out with old friends, and he made new friends too, and it didn't take long for the inevitable. He was like red meat now, after all.
Her name was Sandy. Sandra McClellan.
She had long red hair and deep green eyes, and she knew exactly what she was looking for in a man. When she met Tanner she latched onto him before he knew what had hit him. She took him to meet her family at one of the local country clubs and "See, you fit right in, don't you?" was the first thing she said. And in a way he began to see through her in that moment, but attraction and love are not at all the same thing. And twelve years of self imposed academic exile had made a blind man of Douglas Tanner, MD.
"Do you always smile like that?" her father Rupert McClellan asked the first time they met.
"I don't know, but I've been watching and you always seem to be grinning like a fool. I don't know what to make of that, do you?"
And because it wasn't, really, the first time someone had mentioned his smile he tried to brush aside the comment. Besides, his smile really wasn't exactly a conscious thing, it was just that it tended to put patients at-ease and so it had, in a way, become one of the tools of his trade. "Maybe I started smiling more when I began to deal with patients."
"You mean you started smiling like that when you went into residency?"
And he had to stop and think about it, because that wasn't exactly the truth, was it? No, he'd been smiling all his life, so much so that even his father dropped a few snide comments along the way.
"Well, I guess maybe I've been smiling since I was in grade school. I'm sorry, I didn't ever think it was that big a deal, certainly not enough to bug someone."
"I don't trust people who smile all the time," the 300 pound politically connected stock broker said just before he downed another scotch and water.
Tanner smiled. "Gee, I never thought of it that way," he said to the hulk as he turned and walked away.
And looking back a few years later, that moment summed up his 8 month marriage to Sandra McClellan. He'd begun to really see through her a few months too late, and Tanner began to think of her father's bullshit as just a dodge for his own endless scams. Keep people off guard, never let them see the big picture – never let 'em see you coming. And who knows, maybe it worked. It didn't take too long to see that her plan all along had been to file for a quickie divorce and fleece him for all he was worth. She was her father's daughter, after all…
Too bad he'd put most of his income in a trust, and so well beyond her grasp. Still, he'd bought her a house and sold the boat by then, so she got that much from him.
And yet it was about then that a couple of cutters in his group asked him about doing a volunteer stint with MSF in Ethiopia or Sudan later that year…
"Isn't that the French group?" he replied. "Doctors Without Borders?"
"Yup. Three or four of us go over every winter; we typically spend about a month there."
"What's it like?" Tanner asked. "Primitive, I'd guess?"
"You have the basics," Beth Gruber said, her matter-of-fact expression open and honest, "but if you get sent away from the main hospitals, living conditions can get pretty basic."
"What kinds of cases to you see?"
"'Bout the same as here. Hot bellies and lots of gunshot wounds."
"You mean…like street gangs?"
"Warlords and the usual cartels. Everything from drugs to spices."
"So…you mean like open warfare, right?"
"Not in the modern sense. No airstrikes, no napalm, none of that stuff. Small arms fire and land mines are the usual modes. Lot of kids caught in the crossfire, too, and lots of amputations from landmines."
"Sweet Jesus," Tanner muttered under his breath. "Sounds like a lot of broken hearts, if you ask me."
"It's worse when there's no one around to help," Gruber added, looking him over. "So, you tell me. What's worse, broken hearts—or the total despair of no medical care?"
"Is that why you do it?" he asked Gruber.
"Why I do it isn't really the question, Doug. You're pretty good at this stuff and your time would be appreciated, and that's really about all there is to it. The question is, to put it bluntly, are you in or not?"
He'd looked away then, but after a moment he nodded: "Let me look into it and I'll let you know."
"Why don't you join us for dinner? The four of us going this year are meeting up this Saturday at my place. Bring your questions and we'll hash 'em out, okay?"
Which was how Doug Tanner found himself at Washington Dulles International Airport two months later, in August, boarding an Ethiopian Airlines 787 Dreamliner bound for Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Beth Gruber and Jenny Peterson, two surgeons from his practice, were flying over with him, but only Peterson was going with him all the way to the teaching hospital in Gondar, located in southwest Ethiopia. Gruber was headed to a refugee camp near the border between Eritrea and the Tigray region of northwest Ethiopia, and as this was an area of incipient guerrilla activity and ongoing political instability, only more experienced physicians were allowed in that region.
When their flight was called he walked down the Jetway behind Gruber and Peterson, queuing up just outside the forward door, and then he caught a glimpse of the the flight attendants. All black women. And as he'd never seen anything like that before it caught him off guard. And then, once he entered the cabin he looked into the cockpit—and saw two black men, and once again he felt a little flutter of disorientation…as in…'what the fuck am I doing here?'
He'd booked a ticket in business class, much to the disappointment of his traveling companions, and when his flight attendant brought him French Champagne he felt a little stir of resentment, like what the Hell is this African woman doing serving me—ME!—Champagne?
And then he thought of all the disparities he'd seen in the ER, the second rate care, the veiled racial disparities, and he held up that glass of Champagne and looked at it for the longest time before he finally broke down and took a sip. He turned to the window as the Boeing was pushed back from the gate and he saw his reflection in the plastic there so he studied the features in his mind's eye and compared them to what he really saw there.
'I'm just another racist,' he sighed inwardly, 'despite all my pretensions to the contrary.' He looked into his eyes, not at all liking what he saw but trying his hardest to accept this simple truth.
'Okay, so what do I do about it?' he asked himself as the Boeing turned onto the runway and began its sprint into the evening sky. And then he held his hands up and stared at his fingers for the longest time, knowing that whatever good might come from him would be delivered by these hands.
"Are you alright, sir?"
He turned and looked at his flight attendant and he nodded, then he smiled at the woman. "Yes, I think so. I was just lost in thought…"
"You look troubled," the woman added.
He sighed while he nodded once again. "I'm off to Gondar to work in the hospital there. It's my first time."
"Médecins Sans Frontières?" she asked.
"My brother is in medical school, in Paris," she said, smiling politely.
"Small world," Tanner sighed with a shrug.
She weighed his words against the measure of her own experience, though she smiled once again. "Let me know if I may bring you something?" she added as she turned and walked forward to the galley.
Flying from the sun now, darkness enveloped the Boeing as it streaked through the remains of the day, and all the while Doug Tanner wondered what revelations the next day would bring.
The jet touched down lightly and slowed in time to make the first turn out, and he was surprised once again by the terminal he saw as the jet taxied to the gate. Maybe he'd been expecting thatched roofs and dusty old Land Rovers waiting under shade trees in a sandy parking lot, but what he saw now was a modern airport that might have looked right at home in any large US city. Black glass and polished aluminum and a few dozen jumbo jets greeted him and yet one more time he was left to confront the reality of his skewed perceptions.
When he walked off the Boeing he smiled at his flight attendant yet was a little surprised at her reaction. She seemed almost annoyed, and he wondered if his doubts were really so readily apparent? Some people wore their racism on their sleeve, like right out there in the open, while others were more practiced at concealing such feelings of hate. Which one was he, he wondered?
He waited for Beth and Jenny outside the Jetway, then they walked down to customs together, and after they cleared, they collected their luggage before heading on to their connecting flights. It was only a 250 mile flight on to Gondar, while Beth had a 350 mile flight up to Aksum, near the border with Eritrea, but he was surprised when they learned they were all on the same outbound flight. He and Jenny would deplane in Gondar, while Beth would remain onboard for the last leg of the flight.
They boarded a new Dash-8 Q400 this time, and now he hardly gave the matter of who was flying a second thought. Once they were in the air he wondered if it was only a matter of being in a new environment. Had that made him question his values and assumptions? He sat just ahead of the massive engine with its huge scythe-like propellor, looking at the semi-arid landscape below, and Jenny pointed out a few sights along the way…
"How many times have you been over here?" he asked.
"Oh, I come to Gondar a couple of times a year, but I prefer Aksum, really. Aksum is, I think you could say, more like being on the front lines of the war zone while Gondar is safe and secure."
"What do you mean, like a war zone? Is it really that bad up there?"
"Oh, sure, it can be, but what's most difficult to wrap your head around is that many of these regions were occupied by the Italians in the 20s and 30s, and that set in motion all kinds of animosities. Not to mention you can get a really good lasagna out in the middle of nowheresville. It takes a while to get used to all the changes, I guess."
"Will Beth be safe up there?"
"Beth? Oh, no worries there; she was born for this stuff. Everyone knows who she is, and I guess everyone loves her. She doesn't pick sides, doesn't judge people. She just fixes 'em up, no questions asked."
"And you?"
"Me…what?"
"What do you do here?"
"In Gondar? I usually spend mornings in the OR, afternoons at the medical school."
"So, you teach? What about the language barrier?"
"It's not that big a deal, and I help students in their clinical rotations. Kind of a general introduction to surgery. I doubt you'll have time for much of that this trip. They'll be looking you over pretty good, by the way. If they like you, you'll be invited back, then you'll ease into teaching."
"I didn't really come to teach, I guess."
"Oh, don't worry. You'll be busy either way, and as long as you're cool the residents and surgeons will work with you."
"Cool?"
"You seem pretty uptight so far, Doug. You've got to keep in mind this isn't America. You're the visitor, the outsider here. And you're never really going to 'fit in' over here, so try to think of yourself more like not trying to stand out so much. Do your job and you won't have to try to make friends. Friendship will come naturally unless you push these people away. And, oh, you can't pretend here so just let go of all your preconceptions…"
"Let go? How do you do that?"
"Don't think things through so much, and maybe just kind of follow your heart. We'll be at the MSF compound and most of your time there you'll either be asleep — or trying to get some sleep. The rest of the time you'll be in the OR, so just go with the flow."
"Funny, I was expecting…"
"Oh, don't worry. Shit comes up all the time. One day you be in a helicopter going out into the bush and the next you may be in the OR all day. You just never can tell, but you'll never get into a rut while you're here. Oh, and tomorrow is just a jet lag recovery day, so I'll show you around town."
He didn't know what to say so he just nodded and looked away; a few minutes later the wallowing turboprop was fighting a stiff crosswind to line-up and land in Gondar—and the enormity of what he'd signed up for began to fill him with dread. There'd be no Mannie from the police department looking out for him here, and there'd be no cocoon-like boat to run home to after a tough day. No…everything was going to be new — and relentlessly unfamiliar, so there'd be no comfort zone to fall back on, no safe haven, only a compound where he might find some cheap sleep and maybe something to eat.
So why had he come here? Why had he signed up for this? To confront some unknown inner demons, or simply to run away from Sandy Collins and all her broken dreams? Or maybe he'd wanted to impress the other surgeons in his group – by showing his willingness to play their game on his terms? Maybe all of the above? Or…was it none? Like…was he still running from his father?
The airplane suddenly dipped and wallowed and dropped so hard and fast that his seat belt dug into his thighs so hard he cried out, then the power came on and the Q400 was climbing again, back up into the clouds, and for a moment all his petty otherworldly concerns seemed to wilt away. Suddenly it felt like a more immediate death had come out of nowhere and now seemed to be calling his name. The cabin grew dark as it entered the clouds, and cold air sprayed little droplets of water out the overhead vents. Lightning arced seemingly just outside his window and when the aircraft lurched and dropped again Jenny instinctively grabbed his hand, and suddenly human skin on his own felt good. More than good, really. It was galvanic and comforting…
Three more steep, banking turns and then Tanner saw runway lights in the distance, the Q400 was still yawing wildly as the pilots battled the stormy air, then everything disappeared in blinding rain and impossible darkness. Jenny's grasp was now so fiercely tight his own fingers felt like they were bending under the pressure and he turned to her and smiled when her eyes met his.
"Aren't you scared?" she cried out over the frantically revving turboprops.
"Nah, just another day at the office," he sighed, holding her in his eyes with his smile.
And that did it. She relaxed as she basked in the warmth of his smile and he felt her hands ease a bit, and maybe even the storm felt his warmth and decided to let up for a while—because just then the Q400 popped out into bright sunlight and the ferocious turbulence eased. The pilots coaxed their beast down to the earth again and everyone in the cabin burst out in cheers and wild applause. But Jenny's eyes never left his.
"Is the weather around here always so sedate?" he asked Jenny, and she started laughing so hard that Beth, just across the aisle from them, looked at her like she was a nut case. Then she saw Jenny's hand still clutching Tanner's, so she looked away to hide her smile. Like any surgeon, Beth Gruber liked clarity, and something new had been born in the sky that afternoon.
Tanner had gone to medical school in Baltimore, at Johns Hopkins, and while the area surrounding the campus wasn't considered a ghetto, there were areas not so far away that easily qualified as such. And they were, by and large, areas consigned to the poorest of the poor, in other words, consigned to members of the African-American community. Boarded-up windows spray-painted with gang related graffiti could be seen almost everywhere you looked, and as none of the homes were air conditioned heat related illness was a standard fixture of life there. Many homes were burnt-out shells, and destitute people wandered the streets at all hours of the day or night, while drug dealers owned the streets after the sun went down.
So he'd almost expected Gondar to look like the Baltimore of his memories. But now, driving into town, he no longer knew what to expect. They passed through distinct neighborhoods, each imbued with distinctive characteristics and he mentioned this to Jenny as they approached the medical school.
"Don't think of Ethiopia as a homogeneous state," she said. "Neighborhoods tend to reflect well defined divisions within the country, and these, in general, reflect very old tribal divisions. Other divisions tend to be ethnic or religious."
"What about crime? Like street crime?"
"It's probably safer than you think, but don't be naïve."
"Drugs?"
She sighed. "Did you notice how lax security was when we arrived?"
"Well, Ethiopian Airlines has one of the largest route networks in the world, and many of their routes flow through areas with rather intense narcotics production. The word is that customs is so lax because literally tons of drugs flow through Addis Ababa, though some of that traffic arrives in-country by overland routes…"
"So you're saying that drugs are an issue, right?"
"Yes and no. Most people here are socially addicted to khat leaves, and…"
"Khat? What's that?"
"Almost like coca leaves. It's a mild stimulant that produces a euphoric buzz if taken in large enough amounts. It's also legal here, and it is throughout the region, so don't look down on people who use it—you won't win over people if you do. And its use goes back literally thousands of years, so consequently what you might call drug use is pretty much limited to that stuff. As to the hard stuff? Well, it's more like Ethiopia is a major trans-shipment point, and most of the locals aren't involved."
"So no gangs…stuff like that?"
"Not much that I'm aware of, at least not as far as drugs are concerned. What you might think of as gangs around here revolves around political and military power structures…"
"You mean, like warlords and such?"
"And these distinct neighborhoods are…"
"You got it. Each neighborhood is vying for political dominance, because that's where the money is. Political patronage is power, and power is money. Just like it is at home, only more so here. And right now the Chinese have all the money, so they have all the power."
"The Chinese? What are they doing here?"
"Building railroads right now; I think the biggest project is a line to the coast in Djibouti, ostensibly to help industrialize the region. The main thing is if you run into them, be real nice 'cause they can cause problems. Got it?"
"Geez…anything else?"
"We'll be briefed on local conditions tonight, but just remember your training, and for God's sake – don't accept rides from people you don't know…"
He'd been through the two mandatory orientation sessions—the main topics covered included how to avoid kidnapping situations and what to do if taken hostage, but also helicopter and aircraft procedures. Those sessions had been a real eye-opener, but then he'd gone over the list of vaccines he'd need at least a month before departure and he'd almost changed his mind about the whole thing. As hypocritical as it was, he'd hated shots all his life and if anything he hated them now more than ever…and of course his shoulders had ached for days.
Their ride dropped them at the MSF compound and he carried their bags to their rooms—and that was about the last thing he remembered. A mass casualty event had just occurred and they both ended up pulling thirty hour stints in the overwhelmed and understaffed local ER.
A week later he was sleep-walking from the hospital to the compound, and still wearing scrubs, when a car pulled up alongside; two armed men politely pushed him inside an ancient Fiat 124 and slipped a black nylon hood over his head. No words were spoken, and with nothing else to do Tanner leaned back and took the opportunity to catch up on some sleep. At least he tried to.
The old Fiat bounced and rattled along a deeply rutted muddy track off into the bush, stopping twice to pass impromptu checkpoints along the way, then, after about an hour of this the car stopped in the middle of nowhere and he was helped out. The sun was setting and swarms of mosquitoes were out in force as he was escorted into a very large olive drab colored canvas tent, and he found he was now inside a fairly complete military field hospital, complete with injured soldiers and for all intents and purposes without a doctor. A handful of propane lanterns was lighting the interior and still without any words exchanged he walked over to the most seriously wounded man, an older fellow who appeared to be a rather high ranking member of this cadre, and he looked over two gunshot wounds in his thigh and groin. Another soldier, this one no older than twelve or so, was holding his belly and Tanner soon understood that the kid was keeping his intestines from falling out onto the floor. Both had been sedated with multiple ampules of morphine, which would normally only complicated matters. Yet, with no anesthesiologist on board, morphine would have to do.
He pointed at the surgical lights overhead and shrugged, so someone went outside and started a gas generator; soon he had lights, suction, and a respirator that appeared to be a fairly recent Chinese knock-off of a Byrd Mk IV. He found bottles of saline and iodine prep – all with labels in both Mandarin Chinese and English – as well as sterile IV kits and cut-down sets, so he set about stabilizing the boy before he cleaned up the old man's gunshot wounds.
He turned to one of the men who appeared to be in charge and asked him about moving the boy to the hospital in Gondar.
"Absolutely no!" the man shouted in halting English.
"I can't save the boy without the equipment there."
"Why this so?"
"You understand x-ray? Need x-ray to find things inside, need help to find all the holes in his gut, need to put boy asleep to operate, boy need hospital for maybe month after."
"No do!"
"Then boy die."
Guns were produced, Tanner was threatened, but he held his ground.
"Who is the boy's father?" he asked the man.
"I father."
"Let's get him in the car now," Tanner said, smiling gently. "We are running out of time."
The father looked at his son then at Tanner, then he fell into the embrace of this stranger's oddly reassuring smile; his resolve vanished and he called men to help load the boy into the back of a small pickup truck, then they set out through the night.
A week later the local MSF coordinator called him to her office.
"Your ambassador in Addis Ababa apparently has a hot belly and a positive Murphy, and as it seems you're the best cutter in-country right now to handle a hot gall bladder your embassy has asked that you fly over on the afternoon shuttle to handle the situation."
"The embassy doc can't…?"
She shook her head. "You'd better pack a bag for three days."
Tanner grumbled.
"And you've got an hour and a half to get to the airport."
So a driver picked him up and ran him to the compound; he tossed a few things in a duffel before the truck ride out to the airport. It looked like the very same Q400 waiting for him out there on the tarmac, and he smiled just for good measure as the sky was full of towering cumulonimbus clouds. He made it on board a few minutes before the door closed and he buckled in for the ride, looking forward to—hopefully—a good half hour of sleep en route.
The embassy's chargé met him at the gate and drove him directly to the hospital, explaining the situation as best he could. The local doc wanted to do the case but the ambassador was a full-blown southern racist and he was refusing to let a 'goddamn African' physician anywhere near his belly, so nerves at the hospital were already way beyond frayed…
"So, what you're saying is I shouldn't step on any toes?"
"That's about the size of it, yeah."
"Why the hell is a racist our ambassador over here?"
"No opening in the Ireland, I reckon. These postings are usually nothing more or less than political indulgences."
"Ain't that ducky," Tanner sighed.
The chargé walked him into St. Paulos hospital and took him straight to the ambassador's room, and as he walked up to the bed a sudden wave of rage descended on Doug Tanner. Because it turned out the new ambassador was none other than his ex-father in law, the oppressively obtuse Rupert McClellan.
So Tanner did his level best not to smile. "Hello, Rupert," he said as he walked up to the bed. "I hear you've managed to insult everyone here. Good for you. Now, is there something I can do for you? Like slit your throat, maybe?"
"Balls! Don't tell me the grinning fool carries a grudge? Shit, boy, I thought you were made of sterner stuff…"
"How nice it must be to live in a bubble like that."
"Okay, Doug, enough with the adolescent bullshit. Look, once I heard you were here, well, no one else would do."
"Have you considered the ethical situation? I mean, other than us hating each other you were my father in law…?"
"Sure I have, but you're the best man for the job and you're in-country. And besides, even if I was back in Miami I'd have beat feet straight to your door."
"For gall stones?"
McClellan sighed before he turned and looked away. "I got a feeling, Doug. Like something real bad is going on down there. That's why I insisted you come."
"Okay, Rupert," Tanner said gently. "I understand."
"Would you call Sandy when I come out of surgery?"
"Yes, of course. Does the chargé have the number?"
"Yeah. He'll hook you up."
Tanner went over the latest chemistries and imaging, and while the CT wasn't the best he'd ever seen there were a couple of areas that raised alarm bells. Laparoscopy wasn't an option here which meant a full exploratory procedure was scheduled for later that afternoon, and as soon as he was inside the full scope of Rupert's premonition became clear. Cancer, in the liver and the bile ducts. Spread to the abdominal nodes noted, then more around the pancreas.
St Paulos was a teaching hospital and the medical school's head of surgery was nominally in charge of the OR and he concurred with Tanner. There was no need for resection, no need for chemo or radiation. McClellan might live six months, but even that was an optimistic assessment.
Tanner looked at the man under veiled layers of surgical drapes, at the open belly under his hands, and for the first time in his career he felt like crying. There was quite literally nothing he could do to help save this man, but then again Rupert wasn't just someone off the street. He saw flashes of a wedding and a reception as he stared at the open belly, and he felt once again the anger of his sudden divorce, and standing there in the looming shadow of death he came to terms with the reality that this was no stranger he was talking about, and that yes, he was ethically compromised.
"Do you concur?" he asked the medical school's head of surgery.
"There is nothing we can do. I would close now."
"Would you do that for me, please?"
"You know this man, don't you?"
Tanner nodded. "Not very well, but I thought I knew his daughter — once upon a time."
"You do not look well."
"I don't feel so hot right now," he sighed, "and I've got to call his daughter."
"Does he have a wife at the embassy?"
"No. Not for a while."
"Go then, make your calls, and please, come by my office when you have finished. I would like to talk over tea, if you have the time."
The chargé had Sandy's new number in Boca Raton and he asked for help placing the call.
"Doug?" she asked when she picked up the phone. "Is that you?"
"Yup. It's me, the man you loved to hate, once upon a time."
"How is he?" she asked, ignoring his sarcasm. Again.
"Not good, Sandy." He explained the procedure and his observations, then he passed along his prognosis and when he heard her tears for some reason he wanted to be with her again, if only to hold her one more time.
"What now?" she asked. "I mean, what's the next step?"
"He comes home, I assume. He'll probably want to see an oncologist but at the very least he'll need home care, then palliative care. It might be prudent to look into hospice options too, I suppose."
"Oh, Doug, I didn't imagine anything at all like this."
"I know, I know," he sighed. "Look, I'll be back in a couple of weeks and if there's anything I can do just let me know."
She broke down then, told him she'd never wanted a divorce, that she'd filed just to get him to pay more attention to her, that she couldn't stand his being at work all the time, and he found he almost believed her, but not quite. And it was funny, he thought as he stood there in an Ethiopian hospital, because the more she spoke the more he realized how little he'd ever really known her. And the more he listened the more he regretted not taking the time to get to know her better.
He talked to the chargé as he walked to the ICU after the call to Sandy, and he filled him in on the results, and their implications. Oncology wasn't an option, he said. Cancerous tissue was everywhere, even in the lymph nodes and pancreas. If it had been limited to the liver and possibly even the bile ducts, a transplant might have been a possible way out, but with spread noted in the pancreas no transplant registry would take him. Chemo was a long shot at best, though it might buy him a few months, and that was all the diplomat needed to know. He'd call Washington with the news and he thanked Tanner before he left.
He made his way to the chief surgeon's office and straight away the man offered him a job. "Even if you can teach just a month over your summer break it would make a vast difference," the man pleaded.
He left the offer hanging in the air with an "I'll think about it," then he realized it was now quite late and he had nowhere to bunk out.
"You must stay with me and my family tonight," the old surgeon said, "and I will see you to the airport after you speak with the ambassador in the morning."
He found he most enjoyed clinic days in Gondar, when he could tend to minor injuries and interact with his patients. He enjoyed listening to stories about their lives, and he smiled when he realized that there really weren't so many differences between their hopes and his dreams. Because their schedules were similar, Jenny Peterson spent almost all her free time with him, and it wasn't long before he developed feelings for her, but he felt more like she was a little sister than someone he'd pursue. They took their meals together, they walked among all the medieval castles scattered around town and he watched, bemused, as she photographed quite literally everything from every possible angle. She used a boxy old Hasselblad camera and spent minutes composing each shot, and he wondered why anyone would spend so much time and money on something so trivial. He watched her staring down into the boxy viewfinder and found her vaguely pretentious and ultimately more than a little annoying.
One morning two new docs appeared, both Americans. Patty McKinnon was an internist and Gene Harwell was, like Tanner, a general surgeon. They'd been working in Mexico and had recently completed their MSF training in France; they were slated to work in a new clinic south of Lake Tana. Yet as he watched them he felt there was something troubling about Harwell, something he couldn't quite put a finger on, but when he mentioned it to Jenny she agreed. "There's something in his eyes," she sighed. "Something desperate, almost haunted."
"See if you can take a picture of him, will you?" He didn't know why he asked her to do that because Jenny Peterson wasn't a spy, she wasn't trained in surreptitious surveillance methods, and even though she asked to take their picture Harwell watched her fiddling with her camera before she fired off a couple of shots of him. Harwell left and made a call after that, just before they departed for their new posting in Zege, on the southern shore of the lake.
Then one morning Beth Gruber appeared, and her arrival marked the end of Tanner's deployment in Ethiopia, and he had a hard time sifting through the cascade of emotions that washed over him as he made his way to the compound one last time. With their bags packed and teary-eyed promises to return out of the way, he went to the airport with Beth, leaving Jenny there for the time being, as she had two more weeks on her current deployment. He looked around the crenelated stone airport while he waited for his flight to be called, and an hour later he boarded the Q400 for the bumpy flight to Addis Ababa, sitting next to Beth this time. They talked about her experiences near the war zone, and he told her about his kidnapping.
"What happened to the boy?" she asked.
"He's doing okay, but his gut was a mess. Peritonitis had set in and it took a while to get that under control."
"You were lucky, Doug. Some docs aren't released for months, sometimes years."
"Yeah, so I've heard, but I reached an understanding with the kid's father."
"An understanding?"
"We had a stare-down. I won."
She shook her head. "Like I said, you were lucky."
"No way. It's all in the smile, Gruber. It's gotta come from the heart, ya know? Doesn't matter where you are, either. It's like a universal language; people can smell insincerity from a mile away, and fear is a weakness to be exploited."
And when she looked at him he was smiling at her and her heart melted. "Goddam, you sure are cute, ya know? Like a little boy kind of cute, if you know what I mean?"
His smile deepened and he put his hand on hers. "I do, as a matter of fact," he said, still smiling. "That's exactly what my mom used to tell me…"
After changing planes in Addis Ababa he found his seat on the Dreamliner for the flight back to Washington-Dulles, and he looked out the window with Gruber by his side this time. She'd upgraded – because she wanted to bask in the warmth of Tanner's smile for a few more hours. They talked about Jenny and his job offer in Addis Ababa and then about his marriage to Sandy McClellan and her father's surgery. And so the time passed, but Tanner felt like the time up in the air marked an ending.
A week after their return Tanner and Gruber learned that an attempt had been made on Jenny Peterson's life while she'd been walking from the compound to the clinic. The attempt appeared 'targeted' as opposed to random— or so the embassy said, and that was something that rarely happened to MSF physicians — in Ethiopia or anywhere else in Africa, for that matter.
When he listened to the FBI agent delivering the news the first thing that entered his mind was Gene Harwell, but he decided not to speak up just yet.
Instead, he went to talk with the former ambassador to Ethiopia, who was still recovering from his surgery though now in Miami Beach. Tanner voiced his suspicions about Harwell and Rupert called his former chargé at the embassy; agents were dispatched to Zege, more photographs would be taken and a surveillance operation set up.
A few weeks passed and he'd yet to hear from McClellan, then one evening agents from the Drug Enforcement Agency approached him while he and Gruber were walking to their cars after finishing up for the day.
"You'll need to come with us," one of the agents said, pointing to a black Suburban waiting in the parking garage.
"What? Why? What's going on?" Tanner asked, his voice incredulous and anger welling up inside.
"We're taking you into protective custody. There are at least to men closing in on you right now, and we need to get you out of here."
"Closing in?" he asked. "What the devil does that mean?"
"Assassins, Dr. Tanner. As in, two people who've been paid a lot of money to kill you."
Tanner stopped in his tracks. "Does this have something to do with Gene Harwell?" he asked — and when the agent nodded Tanner seemed to accept his fate.
"Doug," a very confused Beth Gruber asked, "what's going on? What's this all about?"
"I'm not sure," he said, "but we'd better go with them." He turned to the agent then, suddenly concerned for his sister in Rockport. "I have a sister up in Maine. Will she be safe up there?"
"We have agents on the way, Dr. Tanner."
Tanner nodded, then he looked at Gruber and sighed before he turned to the black SUV. When he opened the door he found a very frightened Jenny Peterson already in the back seat, and without saying a word she flew into his very surprised arms. Heavily armed agents surrounded the Chevrolet as they were ushered inside, and even though the air conditioner was running full-blast it didn't take long for the interior to grow thick and stale. Winding through heavy evening traffic, it took a half hour for the little caravan to reach the airport in Opa-locka, and once there the Suburban drove out onto the ramp and right up to a waiting Gulfstream business jet. More armed men formed a cordon and Tanner led Jenny and Beth to the airstairs; they agents boarded quickly and took their seats as the jet's engines started. Within a minute they taxied to the active runway and took-off.
Once in the air the jet turned almost due north as it climbed out over the Atlantic, and the agent in charge came and sat across from Tanner.
"Harwell is in deep with the cartels," the agent began, almost out of the blue. "Seems he was helping to distribute product near the end of his time in Texas, but he helped set up a bunch of our agents when his cover was blown. We ended up losing a half dozen undercover operatives because of him, but I'll say one thing about the cartels. They protect the people who are loyal to them, and they got Harwell to Mexico and then on to France. We'd have lost him for good if you hadn't…"
"So it was just chance that I thought he looked suspicious?" Tanner growled.
The agent nodded. "These are bad actors, Doc. And like an octopus, they have tentacles everywhere, and I mean everywhere. We moved in on him three days ago and our team was met by a large force, and that only means one thing."
"They knew you were coming, so they'd already penetrated your operation."
"That's our best guess, yeah, but at that point we'd already decided to get Miss Peterson and you two out of harm's way. We picked up signs that a hit team was setting up on you, and that was that. Washington okayed moving you into Witness Protection."
"Upstate New York."
Wide-eyed now and with events sinking in, Tanner turned and looked out the little jet's big oval window; they were climbing past the Kennedy Space Center, and a gnawing emptiness began tearing at his gut. Everything he'd every wanted was disappearing behind this jet right now—because of a bunch of fucking druggies, no less—and he felt shattered. Beth was sitting next to Jenny and she turned to the agent: "You said there was a fight?" she asked. "What happened?"
The agent looked away, plainly thinking about what he could and could not tell her, then he shrugged. "Harwell got away. The girl he'd been with for a couple of years, this Doctor McKinnon, was wounded and taken into custody, along with her baby. She was treated in Addis Ababa and arrived at a high security facility in Virginia last night. We really don't know what to do with her, either, as we're not sure she's broken any laws, either here or in Mexico, and besides, she's not really cooperative right now."
"So, protective custody…like us?" Gruber asked, then adding: "Do you have any idea where this Harwell is?"
"They fled west, into Sudan. There are active cannabis farms in the region so we assume the cartels may have an ongoing interest…"
"Fucking drugs," Tanner snarled. "Why does it feel like half the world's problems boil down to these fucking things…?"
The agent shrugged. "Maybe because that's about the size of it. The appetite for these products is enormous and the profit margins make it impossible for farmers to justify cultivating typical cash crops. It's a vicious cycle."
"Upstate New York?" Beth asked the agent.
"Well, your cover is simple. You three are used to working as a team so we've found a town that could use a surgical practice."
Beth looked at the agent, then quickly at Tanner before she shrugged and looked away. She was still too upset about all this to process the information, and after a full day in the OR she was already too tired to think straight. Now the idea that Mexican goons were after them was almost comical, almost as funny as her living in New York. She was from Ithaca, after all.
The lights dimmed and soon everyone was napping. Everyone but Tanner, anyway. He couldn't sleep, and he was so upset he could hardly think straight.
The jet made a series of hard turns before it settled on a quiet runway, but as they taxied to the ramp he noted there were no aircraft anywhere in view – just empty ramps and a few deserted buildings. Yet another black Suburban met them at the airstairs and they drove off into the night.
"We're headed over to Lake Placid," the lead agent said, smiling.
And when Gruber looked at Tanner she thought he might just spontaneously combust.
The agents took them to what looked like a farm, but the place was actually a compound of sorts, with three houses and several outbuildings, including two barns, one set-up for a small dairy operation and another for horses. "You three will be in the main house over there," the agent in charge said, and there'll be at least two agents in the house at all times, at least until we get a handle on the opposition. There are a couple of horses in the barn if anyone wants to go for a ride."
No one said a word. Beth wanted to mention that they had no clothes with them, and no toiletries, for that matter, but she just shook her head and trudged off to the big house, grumbling as she walked along the lighted bricked walkway.
Tanner turned to the lead agent. "You can't be serious," he sighed. "We may work together, but we're not exactly roommate material, if you know what I mean."
"Sorry. It's all we could come up with in the time we had."
"Do we have new identities, stuff like that…?"
"Yup, and we'll go over all that in the morning."
There was a husband and wife team already set up and working in the main house, and they'd furnished the bathrooms with all kinds of stuff. To Tanner's delight, Mrs. Team Member had baked oatmeal raison cookies and had fresh, ice cold milk ready to go, and that was all he needed for a solid night's rest.
Beth, on the other hand, loved to cook, and within a week Tanner had decided she was going to make someone a spectacular wife. She cleaned incessantly, cooked up a storm, and did everything around the house but yard-work and laundry. Agents took care of the yard and their laundry, which left Tanner with very little to do around the house. At least two agents went everywhere Tanner, Peterson, and Gruber did, from the clinic to the movie theater. And predictably, within a month Tanner was chafing at the bit, restless, irritable and grumpy. They were slowly setting up their own clinic while the agents went about securing bogus privileges at the two area hospitals, and until that work was complete the physicians had very little to do.
The lead agent, usually in Washington, dropped by the farm a month later and let them know that Harwell had simply disappeared, but then again so had the hit team sent to take them out. "If we don't locate them soon we may have to move again…"
"What?" Tanner cried.
"Are you hard of hearing or something?"
"Did you say something about moving? Again?"
"Ah. You did hear me."
"And you are out of your mind. We can't just bounce around forever."
"Well, we could let you sit here and wait for them to find you. How does that sound?"
"Are those the only options?"
"Unless you have another idea."
"Let's just stay here," Beth said. "Let them come to us. You guys take them out and we can get back to our lives."
"I'm not sure that's the way this works, Doctor Gruber. If they don't succeed they'll come at you next time with a larger force."
"You talk about these guys like they're in some kind of army," Tanner sighed.
"Well, in a way they are."
"So? Why don't you locate their headquarters and take 'em out? You know, like in Iraq?"
"Mexico isn't Iraq, and anyway, I'm not sure we want to invade Mexico, if you catch my drift…?"
Tanner shut up and went back working on the clinic's computer system. When he returned to the farm that evening they told Jenny about the possibility of moving and she grew quiet, and then she seemed to grow depressed right before his eyes; Tanner shut up after that and was unusually quiet for the next few days.
"What do you miss most?" Beth asked him a couple of nights later, while Jenny was burning their dinner.
And he thought about that for a moment. "I think Gondar, actually. I miss the people there, taking long walks after dinner, the ruins…"
"…and getting kidnapped?"
"I wasn't in any danger, Beth. Never. Not for a second. I did manage to built a little trust with those people, and that wasn't such a bad thing."
"So you'd go back?" Jenny asked as she joined them at the table.
"Tomorrow. Yeah. No doubt in my mind."
"You mentioned something about a teaching gig in Addis Ababa?" Jenny added.
"Are you thinking of doing it?" she wondered aloud, her eyes growing kind of dreamy.
"I've been thinking about it. A lot, really. I guess what it comes down to is I felt like I was finally making a difference over there. Here…it's always the same old crap, dealing with insurance companies and setting up shell corporations to shield assets from lawyers. Ya know, I went out to dinner with the managing partners not long after they hired me and they took me…"
"Let me guess…to Joe's Crab Shack," Beth chimed in, grinning. "Yeah, they take all the new guys there."
Tanner nodded. "Yeah, but you know the thing that got me was after dinner they all pulled out these massive cigars and lit up, and the whole thing was so fucking pretentious it made me sick. They were all talking shit about women and menopause and…"
"Oh yeah? Like what did they say?"
"Oh, shit like women in menopause are beyond crazy, that they ought to be put out of their misery, how they're no good for anything, least of all fucking. But there they were, sucking on those damn cigars and I wanted to laugh because it looked like they were sitting around sucking dicks and the whole menopause diatribe was just so fucking out of place, yet they were laughing their asses off the whole time."
Beth shook her head – but she grinned, too. "I take it you don't smoke?"
"No, never have."
"Not even pot?"
"Not even pot. The whole idea of fucking up my lungs really bothers me, always has."
"Ever do coke or 'shrooms?"
"Nope. I guess, when you get right down to it, I really don't want to fuck up my head, either. That, and I've always been a wuss about breaking the law…"
"Yeah, I notice you always drive the speed limit. Pretty uptight about it, too."
"Yup. Always have been."
"Maybe you ought to let your hair down once in a while, take a walk on the wild side and see if you like it."
He shook his head. "Liking it isn't the point. Liking it and being able to pull back…now that's the place where I might have trouble. But what's the point, Beth? Get fucked up, but maybe fucking up your life along the way, and for what? A few minutes of being high? Why not just go to Disneyland and ride a roller coaster?"
Beth shrugged.
"Have you done much of that stuff?" he asked.
"Oh yeah, between the shit I did in high school and then in college I did just about everything, everything but acid, anyway. Always wanted to to try that, too, but never ran into anyone…"
"Jesus, really? You don't strike me as the type."
"Oh, I had a couple of rough experiences but managed to pull myself out of the spiral, but in a way I kinda envy you, Doug. Sometimes I wish I hadn't gone down that road."
"Shit, you mean you tried heroin?"
She nodded. "Yeah, and it's as powerful as you've heard."
"Did you ever get busted?"
"Yeah, once, down in Cancun on Spring break. My dad had to come down and get a lawyer, but in the end he paid some big bucks to buy my way out before my case went to trial. That was it for me, the bottom of the barrel and the end of the line; I stopped cold turkey and never went back. When I did my rotations I thought a lot about going into psychiatry, but in the end I wasn't sure I was strong enough for all that. It took me a while…"
"Holy shit, Beth…" Tanner muttered.
"You know…I haven't ever told anyone any of this stuff. Not even my mom knows what happened down in Mexico. Now you and Jenny know."
"Oh? Why us?" he asked, not sure how to take the look in her eyes.
"Oh, you know, I think I've had a little crush on you from the first time I laid eyes on you, Tanner. That innocent little boy wonder thing you got going is like cat-nip to me, I guess, but you had me with that smile. I felt my legs melting, Doug. Still do sometimes, as a matter of fact."
Tanner blushed. So did Jenny.
"Tell me about your marriage," Beth asked, quickly changing the subject and trying to knock him off balance.
But he wasn't going to play her game. "A crush, huh? I never picked up on that."
"Oh, I didn't…well…Jenny? I thought you had it real bad, so I kind of backed off a little when you two went to Gondar. You two got close there, didn't you?"
"Well," Jenny said, looking away, "maybe just a little…"
"See, I thought so," Beth said, smiling. "Doug, why go back?"
"To Ethiopia?" he replied, and when she nodded he continued: "I guess maybe it's the old cliché. I felt needed. That I had something unique to contribute, and maybe I feel a little like a cog in a wheel over here. If I break there're a dozen more just like me waiting to take my place."
"So, you want to go to the national med school, help train residents?"
And just then the senior agent from D.C. entered the farm house and he appeared agitated. "Sorry to bust in like this, but we have a problem."
"Oh?" Tanner sighed, looking down and shaking his head.
"We moved Harwell's girlfriend to a minimum security facility earlier today, and the cartel's team hit the caravan. The have her now and as far as we can tell they've made it out of the country…"
"You can't be serious," Beth Gruber managed to say.
But Doug looked up, then he looked at Beth before he turned to the agent. "So, you guys are definitely compromised, right?"
And the agent nodded.
"So…you can't really guarantee our safety, can you?"
Beth and Jenny turned to face the agent, but the expressions on their faces had turned from bemused annoyance to concern…concern tinged with a little fear…yet for some reason Tanner had half-way been expecting something like this to happen. "What else do you know?" Tanner asked.
"Well, like I said, we're pretty sure they're out of the country, and we have two credible reports they might be headed to Chile or Argentina."
"What does 'credible report' mean?"
"Air traffic control monitored a private jet originally headed from Monterrey, Mexico to Paris, and it made a scheduled stop to refuel outside of D.C. After it departed the pilot changed the flight plan for a direct return to Monterrey, but once they were out over the Gulf they changed their flight plan again, this time with Quito as an intermediate destination, and Santiago as their final. The jet is about an hour out of Quito right now, and we're getting eyes on it as we speak."
"You think you have a data breech or someone working for them on the inside?" Tanner added.
"I hope it's a data breech. If we've been penetrated then the agency is fucked."
Tanner chuckled at that. "And so are we."
"So, what's our play?" Beth asked.
"We stay here. We reinforce. Or…" the agent began, but he stopped speaking now, not sure how to proceed.
"Or…what?" Beth asked.
"Or," the agent continued, "we cut you loose."
"And how would you do that?" Doug asked.
The agent produced three large envelops and he held them up. "There are new identities in these, for each of you. Passports, birth certificates, driver's licenses and everything you'd need to relocate, right down to medical school transcripts and licenses. And money. We couldn't know where you're headed, for obvious reasons."
"That sounds dangerous," Jenny sighed, looking away.
"There is, of course, another option," Doug said reluctantly, indeed, almost quietly.
"And that is?" the agent sighed.
"Move us to a high security military facility, maybe a nuclear submarine base. There's one in Georgia, isn't there?"
The agent nodded thoughtfully. "Yeah. Kings Bay, just north of Jacksonville. And there's one in Maine, too, as well as Puget Sound."
"So? Send us to one, or split us up and send us to …"
The agent shook his head. "You'd have to be commissioned officers, and you'd have to pass a thorough background check to be assigned to one of those facilities. I'm not sure we have time for that right now."
Tanner looked at the envelopes in the agent's hand. "So, if I'm reading you correctly you want us to take the envelopes and make a run for it. Is that about right?"
The agent crossed his arms over his chest and shook his head. "Simply put, the easiest thing to do is hole up here, bring in reinforcements and wait for them, but there's a big down side to that. Collateral damage could be high, and by that I mean not just agents getting shot up but possibly a large number of civilians, depending on where the attack was staged."
"Geez," Beth sighed, "when you put it that way we really ought to take the envelopes and try to disappear."
"But if we're on our own," Tanner grumbled, "that also means no back up, and if we do get taken out no one will know a thing about it."
"I want to stay here," Jenny said, suddenly feeling very vulnerable and alone.
"Me too," Beth said, her eyes steely hard. "Just, like, give me a fuckin' gun, ya know?"
The agent looked at Tanner, who simply shrugged. "If they're staying, I guess I am too."
The agent nodded. "Well, they got the McKinnon girl and her baby so maybe they'll just disappear. Maybe the whole thing will just blow over."
"But you don't think that's the case, do you?"
"No, as a matter of fact I don't, and because we're compromised I also take it to mean that they're serious about getting to you. My guess is they think you were undercover operatives tracking Harwell all along, and if that is in fact the case I doubt they'll let this go without exacting a price."
Tanner nodded. "So…why not make it easy for them. Get the word out we're in hiding up here but then quietly bring in a shitload of backup. Make the price too high in lives lost, then maybe they'll back off."
The agent nodded. "That's Plan A, in a nutshell. If the three of you are sure this is what you want then I'll put the plan in motion."
They did, and it was.
And so a month passed, then another and another. The seasons changed, snow began to fall. Skiers came, knees were broken. When outside situations warranted, one of the three surgeons was called in to the clinic but a peculiar lassitude fell over the three surgeons. Tanner hadn't skied in years but Beth and Jenny wanted to learn so he took them to the old Olympic venue at Whiteface and taught them, but as they rarely worked now Tanner felt useless, and he hated the relative inactivity. He knew that, as with everything else where an intense, highly specialized skillset is employed day after day, inactivity leads to a breakdown of those skills, and for a surgeon that could be dangerous in the extreme. As winter's boredom deepened, Tanner's gloom only increased.
And then early one spring day the agent from D.C. appeared and told them all that he could no longer see the need to keep three surgeons cooped up, and that the government had decided to cut them loose. And as long as they remained in the U.S., he said, they'd be able to request protection at a moments notice.
"What about the envelopes with the new identities?" Tanner asked. "Are those still available to us?"
The agent shrugged. "Not sure why you'd need them, unless of course you plan on leaving the country," he said with a sly grin, pulling the envelopes out of a briefcase.
Jenny Peterson took her envelope, too, and she and Tanner hopped on Amtrak's northbound Adirondack in Plattsburgh, and the two of them traveled all the way to Montreal without saying so much as a word to one another. Something unspoken had developed between them, something like an unresolved need to finish what they'd started in Ethiopia, only now this thing had turned into something rather like an obsession.
To Jenny, this obsession came by way of an unexpected lust for Doug Tanner. For Tanner, his took the form of a wholly predictable desire to make a difference, and for months he'd spoken of little else. About how in Miami Beach there were literally dozens of surgeons doing exactly what he had been doing, while in the entire country of Ethiopia there wasn't a single surgeon trained in arthroscopic abdominal surgery. He was needed in Addis Ababa, and he'd made the case that he was desperately needed—at least he had to himself—and he had agonized for months about being just another cog in the machinery of modern American medicine. He would go to the medical school and teach. He'd do his time in the OR. He'd continue to work with MSF. He'd make a difference.
So when Jenny Peterson opted to follow him he'd been a little surprised. Yet Beth Gruber wasn't, not in the least as it turned out. She'd decided to play the long game and see what developed between Tanner and Jenny, because she suspected Jenny would soon return to Miami with her tail between her legs, thoroughly chastened and utterly defeated. Beth had seen Tanner's obsession take root and knew what came next, while poor Jenny couldn't see beyond a sudden need to make babies. Beth sighed when she'd first recognized the symptoms of Jenny's lust; it wasn't Tanner the poor girl was after as much as it was a genetic time bomb ticking away inside her womb, and now she wanted a strong husband to take care of her new family.
So Jenny followed Tanner onto an Austrian Airlines 767 bound for Vienna, and she sat with him on the Ethiopian Dreamliner that carried them on to Addis Ababa, and still they hardly spoke to one another. In a way he seemed solicitous, even deferential towards her, yet at the same time he remained conscientiously distant. He spoke decent German and helped her decipher the menu on their way to Vienna, yet when she asked when he'd learned German he'd simply shrugged. It was as if he'd sensed Jenny's oblique motivations and had already begun to distance himself from another impossible entanglement. In his almost paranoid worldview, men experienced lust and a momentary lapse of reason, while women seemed to grow attached to men as means to an end, so the word love meant two entirely different things. With no common ground to stand on, relationships were doomed to fail.
Yet sitting there beside him over the Atlantic she sensed his retreat. And she almost instantly began to talk about ongoing problems at the MSF facility in Gondar, and how she'd miss him after spending so much time together. Perhaps she'd hoped to throw him off balance, but she'd seen the unsettled look on his face when he helped her onto the afternoon shuttle to Gondar later the next day, and she'd smiled when he'd hugged her and said he'd see her soon.
As he'd been in touch with people at the university for more than a month, he found on his arrival that they'd set aside accommodations for him on campus and expedited his work visa, so he got right to work. He always had at least two early morning cases in the OR, and this was followed by one class with second year medical students and another with post-graduate physicians, and he was soon so busy that he forgot all about Jenny Peterson and Beth Gruber and his lost year spent in upstate New York.
So he was free now, free to make plans for his future. To return to Miami as required to maintain citizenship. To attend continuing education programs on the latest techniques, this year in Bali, next year in Las Vegas. He looked at purchasing a house in Addis Ababa, or maybe something in Tuscany—because Italy had always appealed to him. Be bought a Land Rover, a Defender, because…why not?
One Sunday Sandy McClellan called him – "Just to say hi!" – and they had talked about her father and his passing and he'd thanked her for all she'd done to help him during that trying year in hiding. She'd asked when he was 'coming home' and if he'd call her when he knew so she could set aside time for him – and the alarm bells started ringing in Tanner's mind once again.
His sister called. She wanted to sell the old place "because property values are skyrocketing and we could make a killing" and he found he really didn't care about all that stuff anymore. He told her to send the necessary papers by FedEx and that was that—and even his father's ghost didn't know what to say about this sudden parting of the ways. Neither, for that matter, did his sister.
Jenny flew into Addis Ababa on her way back to the States but he was tied up in surgery and didn't get a chance to visit with her, and she cried all the way back to Dulles. Beth Gruber met her when she arrived in Miami, and while Beth had the good sense not to mention Tanner's name, inside she was all smiles.
And so for Doug Tanner life slipped into a new and totally unexpected routine. He began to look forward to Bali and going to a quick medical instruments presentation in Munich. He began to think about setting down roots, if not here then perhaps in Italy, or even Austria. He thought about his old life on the boat and there were times he missed that vagabond's existence, too. He could buy another boat and maybe keep it in Turkey, or perhaps Greece.
There were so many options now. Now that he was free of his past. Now that he had cheated death.
Yet there was one thing that Doug Tanner was not free of, and that one thing was Gene Harwell. He was reminded of this simple fact one evening when Beth Gruber called and told him that Jenny Peterson had been killed by a car-bomb that had detonated outside her condo in South Beach. She was now, Beth told him, on her way to the airport, and could he pick her up tomorrow afternoon?
"Why are you coming here?" he asked.
"There's trouble brewing there, Doug, in case you haven't heard."
"You mean all that stuff up in Tigray?"
"Yeah…that stuff. Things are heating up, and MSF just put out an urgent call for physicians and nurses. Jenny and I were both getting ready to come, by the way."
"Man, you are one clueless son of a bitch, Tanner."
"Really? You know, like Jenny followed you over there and you just ditched her, ya know? Broke her damn heart, and you're really going to sit there and play like you had no fucking clue why? What the fucking hell is the matter with you, Doug?"
"I'm really not following you, Beth."
"Yeah? Well, don't bother picking me up. I'll figure something else out, and I sure don't want to bother you any more than I already have."
Tanner listened after Beth hung up the phone on him, only now he waited for the secondary click that meant his phone was being tapped. When he heard the distinctive metallic sound he hung up and went to his bedroom to pack a suitcase, grateful that the witness protection agents had taught him that useful little trick.
It was time to run, and run fast – but where? If Harwell, or his cartel backers, was behind Jenny's death where could he run? Where would he ever be safe? If all he was doing was buying time, where could he find the most time?
And an even simpler question roamed in the back of his mind: Even if he tried to run…could he run fast enough? How would he know who was on his tail, let alone how close they were to getting him?
There was really only one viable option, at least as far as he could tell right now. He needed to somehow turn the tables, change the paradigm, and that meant he'd need to hunt Harwell and take him out. As he wasn't trained to do that kind of work he'd have to find someone trained to undertake such a mission. And that meant finding a secure channel of communication and contacting the witness protection agent in D.C.
When he finally got through, Tanner explained the problem and outlined his proposed solution, and he was surprised how quickly the agent agreed with him. "Go home as usual tomorrow night, and wait for contact," the agent said somewhat obliquely.
And so the next afternoon he went to the airport and met Beth. She had cooled down a little and wasn't overtly hostile to him, and as her flight to Mekelle had been delayed – due to insurgent activity near the airport – he took her to dinner before taking her back to the airport. And an hour after he returned to his house he heard a gentle knock on his door.
But he didn't know what to do. Was he trapped, or was this the contact he'd been told to expect?
So he held his breath and opened the door. Two men stood there, pistols out and both staring at him. Before he could say a thing, the older of the two and the man who seemed to be in charge, held a finger to his lips as he slipped quietly inside Tanner's house.
And once both were inside the younger of the two went to a potted plant and removed a hidden camera. He slipped the SD card out of the device and placed it into a viewer and the three of them stood silently and watched a time compressed view of the entire day; playback at normal speed began when the image showed a single figure entering the house and placing a bomb under Tanner's bed, and before he left the assassin placed an audio recording device in an air conditioning duct in the kitchen.
The older agent wordlessly indicated that Tanner should stand by the front door while the two agents went to work, and ten minutes later they led him to a windowless black Mercedes Sprinter and helped him into the back. They drove a few blocks away and the younger man hit a switch, detonating the bomb under Tanner's bed, then the older agent drove out to the airport.
The van pulled up to the open airstairs of a US registered Gulfstream G-600 and the older agent led Tanner up the stairs and into the darkened interior of the business jet. The pilots started the engines and immediately taxied to the runway and departed, turning to the northwest.
And while all this was happening the jet's interior remained completely dark, but once airborne dim red lights came on – and suddenly he saw Jenny Peterson sitting across the aisle from him, smiling like it was Christmas morning and all her dreams had just come true.
Part III: Trinity
The woman sat on a camp stool just inside a large canvas tent, her face lined and shoulders drooped – as if she was used to carrying an oppressively heavy burden. The expression on her face was fragile, almost cold, and bitterly so. She seemed preoccupied, and to passersby they might have thought she was lost in a daydream, yet she was nervously chewing on the blue cap-end of a worn out ballpoint pen. Camouflaged UN Peacekeepers in dry, dusty uniforms drifted around her like old smoke, as oblivious to her as she was to the quiet, withdrawn sunrise that promised yet another day of relentless, oppressive heat. The troops, a mix of Pakistani and Kenyan men, were loading boxes of medical supplies and furled tents into white trucks caked in old red mud; in the stillness feverishly shocked refugees looked on from a line of cots beyond the woman. They seemed resigned to an unseen fate, like they knew death was coming and there was nothing to do now but wait for the inevitable.
The woman, middle-aged and somewhat tough looking, had a large portable telephone in her hand, a newish Inmarsat iSatPhone2 satellite telephone, and she looked at the thing with sure dread in her mind's eye, the way one might hold a dead snake—one that was still squirming just a bit. She had been waiting for the call, yet even as she waited she knew the answers to her questions. They were stupid questions, she muttered to herself once again, and tiresome, too – yet only because of their stultifying futility. But, like the shattered children around her in this tent, she had run out of options – and now everyone knew the outcome, all her secrets were out in the media now. Aid agencies were being expelled from Tigray – because local leadership had been charged with War Crimes by the World Court. She'd tried to convince the court not to take this course, but by now she understood all too well that futility was just the institutionalized fear of inertia. The fear of taking responsibility for their failures, in this case.
Yet there were other trends that, like unexpected tidal flows, had changed this time around. The world had run out of options for these people – and because the vox populi, or in this case the so-called free press, had lost interest in Africa, and Africans – the shadows were once again growing longer. Everyone, or so it seemed, and almost everywhere you could find such trumpeting courts of public opinion, had constructed complex, interlocking walls of legal terminology to cushion the blow of all the hideous images coming from Tigray and northwest Ethiopia, and vacuous infotainment had once again taken center stage. Incessant blather about silicon boobs or Nascar races had replaced intelligent discourse about dying children and the never-ending problems of the displaced, so starving Africans simply would now vanish inside another night…the way homeless people hiding in plain sight often do. Yet, like the homeless, the kids in these tents had nowhere else to hide, for there are no walls to keep away the peculiar brand of darkness that stalks the refugee. Jackals circle beyond the shabby walls of their tents, stalking them in the shadowlands just beyond the crackling veneer of civilization's embers, predators waiting to move in the next time yet another American Idol checks into rehab or drunkenly crashes into another house.
But if you had been in this particular tent you would have seen something odd on the woman's face: taking care of these children had been her life, her calling, and she could not see beyond the Will to protect the innocent. Too much death had consumed her light, you might say. If you were patient enough, if you looked through her eyes at the world long enough, you might have watched the crushing bite to the jugular that comes stalking in the night for these children – but because she had lived this life for so long she had seen that death before – and you could feel the pain in her eyes as a measure of the Apathy that stalked these children. Yet now she methodically poked away at the sandy topsoil on top of her boots with the phone's antenna, looking at the reddened dryness that had settled on her shoelaces, then she reached down to the ground and picked up some of the scorched red earth and sifted it through her slender fingers. "Sand in an hourglass," she said quietly. If you were there beside her perhaps you would note she was speaking English almost out of habit, yet she is from France.
The phone chirped as the last of the reddened earth ran through her fingers, and she brushed her hands on her thighs and powered up the phone: "Yes? Paul? Yes, it is a bad connection, I'm afraid!" she said too loudly. All the children stared uneasily at her, then at one another. They have seen her face and they know the tide is changing.
She listens, too tired to interrupt, too tired even to plead her case – one more time.
"The UN backed us, didn't they? And still the government won't back down?"
She listened, covered her free ear, yet for some reason it looked as if she was warding off blows from an unseen enemy.
"Will we at least have an escort?"
She listened again, shook her head as if she couldn't believe what she was hearing.
"Paul, you can't be serious! That's absurd! You simply cannot believe that…they'll never give us safe passage! Not after this!"
Her head was in her free hand now, and she was almost in tears. She wanted to ignore the voice on the other end of the line but she couldn't. She was as trapped as any of the other little patients in this war-torn clinic, and she could feel the spreading dread in the anxious faces looking her way. If you were, by chance, looking at this woman and at these children you might notice that the expressions on their little faces was simply a mirror of the expression on her's.
"Paul! Please! Do you know how many new cases we have here now? More than five last night! Two more this morning. What? Yes, yes, confirmed meningitis. Multi-resistant TB is presenting now as well in some of the older men, in numbers I've never seen before. Have you been able to get…"
She paused, listened, then stabbed violently at the air with an outstretched finger. "Paul, no! That will not be enough and you know it." Another pause; her hands shaking now. "I think a few will stay, regardless, but not enough. Yes, a few of the nurses, the local ones, perhaps. And a few of the nuns that arrived last week have said they will stay. But that's fewer than ten, Paul, for more than ten thousand. And don't forget that's with a strong vector within the children. Okay, I know you understand! There are twenty five hundred kids here, and I mean under age ten, in this camp alone! And a fifty percent mortality rate! Do you understand?"
A young surgeon walked into the tent, stopped dead in his tracks when he heard the woman talking about these absurdly high mortality rates. He pretended he wasn't listening to the woman while he checked his iPhone for messages.
"Goddamn it, Paul. You're asking me to commit murder!" She listened again, but now her face was contorted and red with rage: "Gondar! You can't be serious! Those camps are already overcrowded! What about something closer? Why can't we…what? You can't be serious! Paul! No!"
But apparently, the young surgeon thought, Paul was serious. He looked up from his phone, looked at the woman and not knowing what else to do he took her picture. She ignored the surgeon as one might a noisome fly; he took another picture of her then moved slowly to take pictures of the children, children in shadows bathed in fevered sweat. He watched the woman as she turned away from him, listened as she lowered her voice a little. He could feel the familiarity in her voice now, like maybe once upon a time she and Paul had been more than friends.
He turned and looked at her again. She was one of the French docs, some kind of infectious disease specialist from Paris or Lyon. She looked like she was forty or so years old, maybe a little older, but she was a willowy creature, wispy in a soft-faced kind of way, and he thought she was rather beautiful – even with dark circles under her eyes. He looked on while she told Paul she would check-in once the convoy was on the move, then she broke the connection and put the phone in a small canvas case by her side.
"I'm supposed to ride with you," Doug Tanner said to the woman as he walked up to her.
The woman turned and looked at this new annoyance: "Excuse me?"
He found her accent thick but her English precise. "Most of the convoy has already left. Someone told me I'm riding with Hasan. And with you, I guess."
"What was that all about?"
"MSF in Addis. The UN has ruled and that is that; we are to leave, and now. We have safe passage out of Tigray, but only for the rest of the day."
"Peachy." Tanner said as he looked around the tent. "You going to stay? Tough-it-out here with the nuns?"
The woman seemed to hesitate, then she looked at the young man: "Excuse me, but who are you? I've seen you around, but we've never been…"
"Doug. Doug—Smith." He said quickly – as he held out his hand. "General surgery, but you probably haven't seen me as I've been doing bellies over in the OR since I arrived."
"Ah. I am Catherine DeSaunier," she said, taking his hand in hers. "I am with the pediatric clinic here." She looked him over, studied his hands for a moment, then his eyes. "You're not with MSF, are you?"
"Yes, as a matter of fact I am, but I've been teaching in Addis for a few months. I've been here about a week, flew in last Wednesday," he added.
"Teaching? At the medical school?"
"Yes Ma'am, that's right, but I guess someone thought I needed a change of scenery," Doug Tanner said, his warmest smile now front and center.
The woman tried to smile at the young surgeon's off-putting humor, yet as she looked at him she found his smile convivially warm – while also feeling oddly contrived. "Well, perhaps we simply follow where our dreams take us? One way or another?"
"I reckon that's true, Ma'am. Can I help you with anything?"
She looked at the case by her feet and sighed, then bent over to pick it up. "No, and please, call me Catherine. And we should go now, I think?"
Yet before she moved to the small remaining caravan of cars and trucks waiting in the meager shade, DeSaunier walked over to an old nurse; they spoke for a moment, exchanged knowing looks and a brief hug, then DeSaunier walked with this surgeon, this Doug "Smith", away from the fevered brows of dying children waiting for the jackals in their softly gathering shadows.
The air conditioning in the Toyota SUV belched foggy blasts of drenching mist from time to time, and Catherine wiped droplets from her arms after the latest dousing. Hasan, one of the drivers usually assigned to her, rattled on and on about Chinese technocrats and how it was they, not the rebels, who are the real threat in Tigray. Catherine detested the rat-faced man and his endless conspiracy theories; he'd come from Yemen with his parents ages ago and seemed to think he was somehow superior to the locals. His rodent-like eyes and twitching nose, she told herself again, did little to hide his true nature; he was rumored to be a plant, a spy, and it was assumed his real job was to report on the various non-governmental aid agencies present at the camp. He always wore new Adidas running shoes and was doused in a truly vile smelling cologne; with the windows up his extreme body odor and cheap cologne were beyond nauseating.
Doug sat behind DeSaunier in the back of the Land Cruiser, entombed within a huge pile of shifting cardboard boxes. She heard him growl when the Toyota hit a deep rut, but he had otherwise been quiet.
"Say, Bwana Doug, you ain't CIA, is you?" Hasan asked, and DeSaunier couldn't help rolling her eyes.
"What?" she heard Smith say.
"CIA? You CIA, is you now?"
"How'd you know?"
"What you mean, Bwana Doug."
"If I was CIA, Hasan, I wouldn't be riding in the back of this truck…"
"Oh yes, I see. Hah-hah. Yes, I see." Even Hasan's laughter was rodent-like, but she could tell he remained unconvinced.
Catherine, however, hadn't considered the possibility, if only because the young surgeon appeared too inept to be CIA. She shook her head, looked out the window at the scorched landscape on the other side of the thin glass, suddenly realizing she needed to pee. "Hasan, how far to the checkpoint?" Though only 40 miles west of the camp, they had been on the road for two hours and her bladder was already aching from the rocky undulations embedded within the drift-strewn road.
"Oh, Doctor-missy, maybe five more miles. Thirty minutes, no more. Many land mines…so need go slow."
"Hasan," Doug said, "there aren't any mines on this road and you know it!"
"Oh no, Bwana…many mines here."
"It does not matter," Catherine interrupted. "Stop here; I need some privacy."
"Yes, Missy," Hasan leered. She grimaced, heard Doug groan under his breath as he crawled out from under his pile of boxes. The Toyota had stopped on the drifting sand and she stepped out, walked unsteadily to the rear of the Land Cruiser and squatted in the shadows. She finished while Doug and Hasan walked forward to hose down their parcel of sand.
"Goddamn, if it isn't as hot as a pistol out here," Doug said in his feigned southern accent. He watched a marled, dog-like creature trot along a ridge off to the south not fifty meters away, and they never took their eyes off one another. Tanner felt a shiver pass down his spine as the jackal strutted off into the bush.
"You feel alright?" Catherine asked as she prepared to step back into the truck.
"Yeah, look at that jackal. Bigger than I thought they'd be."
"Meaner, too," she said as she reached for the hand-grip inside the doorway. "Here," she said distractedly, "you want to sit up here for a while?".
"No, that's alright." He took a couple of pictures of the jackal with his phone as it disappeared among the bushes, but he wondered if it might be part of a larger pack.
"Bwana Doug, we go now. Got to hurry, catch up to others at da checkpoint."
"Right." Doug hopped up into the rear and settled in among the tumbling boxes, and the Land Cruiser squirmed down the sand-covered highway once again. He felt the sand give way to pavement after a few miles, but the rising thermals and whirling dust-devils that roamed the morning desert remained. Within a few minutes the checkpoint became visible, hovering within the shimmering black asphalt ahead.
Troops stood between the road and a little concrete compound off the right side of the road; a village of low mud huts sat baking in the sand far off to the left, but no one was out in this heat. Dust from the main part of the recently departed convoy was still visible up ahead, suspended in the thermals over the road, so maybe they could make better time and catch up.
Hasan pulled up to the checkpoint and spoke with one of the soldiers; anger boiled in the steaming air, hostility seethed in the soldier's penetrating eyes. Words, hostile, hate-filled words, passed like bullets between the two, but then the soldier waved them through – yet one of the soldiers glared at Tanner as they passed his position; other soldiers filled in behind the Toyota as it drove away and watched Doug through the back glass. One of the soldiers turned to speak into a radio. Tanner thought about taking a photograph of him but changed his mind when he saw the AK-47s the others held at their sides.
"Very angry," Hasan said. "Army very mad now."
"Why is that, Hasan?" Catherine asked.
"They say all you doctors are spies. All of you. You work for this Gebremichael now, so Ahmed want you gone."
She nodded, yet couldn't think of a thing to say. After working in Ethiopia and Sudan off and on for almost ten years, she was used to dealing with the closed, often paranoid minds of officialdom, but in Tigray institutionalized paranoia had reached new extremes over the last year. And now that oil had been discovered in the region by both Chinese and American geologists, any excuse to rid the government of meddlesome western do-gooders would come only as a welcome relief. That several hundred thousand ethnic Africans already in refugee camps would have to die to sate the world's appetite for oil was a consequence of merest inconvenience to the authorities in Eritrea, Ethiopia and within Ethiopia's Tigray region. Yet she knew that the West, too, had more than its fair share of blood on its hands, enough to last a thousand years, anyway. Words kept running through her mind: 'For whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap,' or words to that effect. She smiled at the thought, smiled at the grim worthlessness of such words in places like this.
China had simply moved to fill the void left after the collapse of European colonialism and African incompetence; they were simply the newest jackals circling in the dark. Catherine was sure they'd be just as effective stripping flesh from bone as the Americans had been, and the British before them, and the Portuguese and the Italians. Things don't simply fall apart, she thought, her mind once again roaming to Yeats' Second Coming. As grimly prescient as those words were, now it was Darwin's turn to speak: the strong were simply picking apart the weak and eating them one by one — the way the strong always have. Soon these African's would have a new set of masters, and the weak would once again be pushed along same path their fathers had taken.
The highway ahead grew smoother and soon they were southbound on well-finished asphalt. Catherine saw they were making good time now and found she was sleepy, so she closed her eyes. And soon enough she saw the cold black eyes of jackals on the prowl — and she turned away from them as nightfall came, seeking release.
She felt her head lurch, glimpsed sleep-born images of burning fevers and smoldering villages darting across her mind's eye as she jerked awake, and she forced her eyes to focus on the harsh nightscape beyond the dust-caked windshield. Hasan was chewing some sort of twig; predictably it smelled awful – like cloves that had morphed into something almost like ammonia – and now he was listening to pulsating disco music. But she saw the main convoy ahead, now no more than a kilometer or so ahead, so she sat up and rubbed her eyes, then fought to suppress the overwhelming sense of relief that comes from a belief in strength in numbers. She heard Doug in the back and wondered if he'd slept…
…and that was when the windshield exploded…
…and she screamed reflexively as she covered her eyes. Shattered glass bounced off her arms, and she tensed when she saw the Toyota veering off the road towards a shallow drainage ditch…
…then she heard gunfire, very close and apparently very accurate – because more shattered glass rained down on her head and arms…
…just as the Toyota lurched and fell violently into the rock-strewn ditch…
…the airbags deployed, the cabin filled with dust and more dancing fragments of shattered glass…
…and she heard Hasan gurgling as he tried to speak so she looked over, saw him clutching at a gaping hole on the side of his neck…
"Jesus H Fucking Christ!" she heard Doug growl from somewhere in back amongst the boxes. "What the fuck's happening?"
…and just as the Land Cruiser slammed to a stop, nose down in the ditch, Hasan's foot still pressing the accelerator pedal all the way down. The truck was jammed into a small depression, pinned in place by the ancient remnants of earlier floods, and while the engine roared with furious impotence the tires continued to spin wildly, throwing up huge clouds of sand, dust, and flying rocks…
…but more bullets slammed into the left side of the truck, and Hasan's body jumped under the impact. Blood boiled out his nose, then frothily out his mouth and neck as he fought to breathe.
"We've got to get out of here!" Doug cried, and though she heard his door opening she felt locked in place, terrified as the shadows closed in on her. Then her door flew open, she felt the night clawing past conscious thought and then felt the surgeon pushing frantically on her seat-belt release, then his hands on her arms, pulling her from the Toyota just as another volley of machine gun fire slammed into the front of the SUV.
Apparently, he thought, they were not yet visible in all the stirred-up dust…
The back wheels were now off the ground completely, the front of the truck pinned in debris, but now there was a large space under the truck and Doug grabbed the woman and shoved her into the shadows, then he ran around and pulled Hasan's body free and pulled him into the makeshift shelter. Doug gasped for breath, Catherine rubbed sand from her eyes while Hasan bled to death between them.
"Can you get my bag?" she whispered through the sound of close small arms fire.
"What? Where?"
"My bag, on the floor by my feet…"
Doug scrambled over to her side of the truck and looked around, stuck his head then his body into the open air before darting up between the open passenger doors. He grabbed her canvas bag and disappeared back into the safety of their little redoubt.
The physician pulled out a penlight and shone it on Hasan's neck; there were two massive wounds visible, one rimmed with frothy blood pulsing from his wrecked carotid artery. She turned the light off and held his hand, wiped his forehead while he stared up at her, blinking occasionally as death came for him. Soon he lay very still.
Then another huge explosion, most likely a mortar round, shook the ground.
"We've got to get out of…" Doug began saying, but bullets slammed into the truck overhead, then he heard men running down the road and in the the ditch, coming for them.
"Play dead!" he whispered coarsely as he fell to the ground. He looked on, aghast, as Catherine took some of Hasan's blood and smeared it on their faces, then she melted into the ground and they both held their breath as men walked up to the battered Toyota.
He felt a gun-barrel roughly prod the side of his head and he let his head flop easily away, then someone climbed up into the truck and turned off the engine. The air filled with the sound the hissing and pooping as the engine began cooling, and now Tanner could smell antifreeze and gasoline. He chanced a glance at Catherine and saw she was curled up in a fetal ball, deep in shadow: perhaps they hadn't seen her and that explained why she wasn't being raped. One of the men was speaking Spanish, and Tanner knew then that the cartel hadn't fallen for the ruse. Gene Harwell had come for him, at long last.
He heard renewed shouting, more gunfire, listened as one of the men screamed into a radio, and then this group took off down the ditch towards even more gunfire.
"We've got to get away from here, and I mean now!" he whispered; he saw Catherine nod and she reached for her bag, scrambled across the rocky scree to his side.
"Away from here, and fast." He thought for a moment, trying to process everything that had just happened and coming up short. "We passed a ridge a while ago. and I thought I saw some caves there. Do you have that phone?"
"Yes…but…"
"Alright, bring it, and let's go…" Tanner said as he pulled himself free of the Toyota, then he reached back to help her before he peeked over the shattered front end of the Toyota. When she was standing beside him he pointed down to a riverbed and pointed at some rocks a few hundred yards away. "Stay low, and let's head for those rocks."
She ran but not very fast; he stood, took some bottled water from the truck and crammed them into his little duffel bag, then he grabbed a piece of brush and ran along behind her, trying to wipe away their footprints in the sand. She was breathing heavily when he reached her; he threw the brush away and took her by the hand, pulled her along the riverbed until they were completely out of sight.
Still she breathed heavily, alarmingly so. He motioned for her to rest a moment, then climbed up the rocky embankment until he could get his bearings. He looked back toward the north, saw the outlines of the little escarpment he had seen earlier, and he reckoned it was about a half kilometer back and not too far from the road. The riverbed, he saw, would shield them from view at least some of the way. He slid back down the bank and looked at her. She was crying, breathing hard, and now apparently very frightened.
"We're going to be alright," he told her. "We've just got to keep our heads down and put some distance between us and whoever the hell that was."
She nodded, fought to understand why this was happening, then she felt his hand take hers once again and she welcomed the feel of his strength as much as she despised herself for needing it. He pulled her along and they trotted along in the soft remnants of twilight until they came to a stunted tree. He made for the tree to rest but suddenly stopped short…
…when he saw an old man, an African as black as coal, who was sleeping there.
…but he was not a soldier for the old man was barefoot, wearing old khaki shorts and a tattered brown t-shirt. He appeared worn out, almost emaciated, and his brow glistened with sweat…
…so the old man did not appear to be a threat…
Tanner crouched beside the old man's tree, yet their arrival startled the old man and he pulled inward, and he looked alarmed when he first saw them. But soon enough he relaxed, because the old man understood. He could see the fear in the newcomers' eyes.
The old man said something and Tanner recognized the patois of disjointed French spoken by many in the region; he cursed himself for studying German in high school while he listened, trying to make out the flow of the conversation. Catherine, still breathing heavily, nodded understanding while she fought to get down as much air as possible; even so she managed to eek out a few words.
The old man laughed. Tanner heard the word Oromo more than once and understood he'd just become a part of Tigray's civil war in a very up close and personal way.
"What did he say?" Tanner said as Catherine paused to take a breath.
"He saw our convoy drive by, saw the guerrillas setting up their ambush, but there was nothing he could do."
"Is he sick?"
"What do you mean?" she said indignantly. "What would you have done?"
"No, no. Not that. I mean, is he ill? He looks sick."
She turned and looked at the old man, asked him a couple of questions.
The old man lifted his arms, raised his t-shirt and uncovered his abdomen. There was a grapefruit sized mass protruding from under his rib-cage.
Catherine asked him another question and she nodded at his reply, then turned to Tanner. "He says it's a tumor. I think he may be very ill."
"Gee, really?"
"No sarcasm, please."
"Ask him about those caves. Does he think we can get to them without being seen?"
She turned to the old man and began to speak.
"Not very safe place," the old man interrupted in halting English. "Many animals, same idea."
"Fuck," Doug sighed.
"Indeed yes," the old man said. "Fuck."
The three of them laughed, but then the old man winced in pain.
"Oromo come soon here," the old man said as his pain subsided.
"Well, I'm open to any and all suggestions," Tanner said.
"Hope you choose empty cave," the old man grimaced as he laughed.
"Me too." Tanner said – while Catherine wiped dirt from her face. "What's your name?" he added.
"Nimiri. You name?"
"Doug."
"Ah. 'And he shall go before him in the spirit and power of Elias, to turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the disobedient to the wisdom of the just; to make ready a people prepared for the Lord.'"
"Doug. To make ready the people. This your cause. Why you here."
The old man seemed confused. "The word of God. You understand?"
"Oh. You mean the Bible?"
"You will choose good cave. I think so now, yes."
They turned as one to the sound of another explosion, saw more flames and smoke rising from the convoy in the distance, then more gunfire erupted.
"We'd better get going," Doug said. He turned to Catherine. "We made about half a kilometer with that last sprint… think you can make another?"
She shook her head. "I don't know…maybe…maybe not."
Tanner stood, Nimiri too; they helped Catherine up and Tanner took her hand. He crouched a little then started down the riverbed once again – the physician in tow and the old man a few paces behind. Tanner ran a few hundred yards then pulled up next to another tree, waited for Nimiri to catch up. The old man wasn't breathing hard but was obviously in a good deal of pain. Catherine was gasping for breath and now sweating profusely.
He waited for her to regain herself, then pulled her out into the riverbed again. He ran a few steps then stumbled to a halt. A long snake, probably a cobra, undulated across the sand in the moonlight, and it was perhaps twenty meters ahead before it disappeared into the brush.
"Fuck!" Tanner said under his breath.
"What?" the physician said. "Did you see someone?"
He turned and looked at her, saw she was bent over, looking at the ground. Nimiri, however, had seen the snake. He pointed to the opposite side of the riverbed, then said: "Follow me…"
Tanner fell in behind the old man. They moved more slowly now, smoothly down the riverbed until the escarpment was only a few hundred meters away — but now they were moving across open ground. Nimiri let up his relentless pace, waited for Catherine to catch her breath, then looked at Tanner. "Bigger cave, bigger animal may call home. Choose carefully. When you have, I will bring your woman."
"My what? Oh, right." Tanner shrugged, took off in a low run; he moved steadily between clumps of scrub-brush toward the cliff. In many places the wall appeared to be twenty, perhaps even thirty meters tall, but most of the broken ridge was much less than that. Hundreds of caves of all size dotted the cliff, some screamed mortal peril while others looked merely dangerous; it was like some long dormant part of his brain was hard at work interpreting signs he was completely unconscious of…
One cave, however, seemed a good bet. He couldn't say why but he trusted this impulse and made his way through the jumbled rock at the base of the cliff then scrambled upwards until he gained the entrance. It appeared to be about a meter and a half high near the entrance and disappeared into complete darkness beyond a tight turn several meters in. He picked up a rock and tossed it in, listened as it bounced off the walls.
Nothing. No movement at all.
He tossed another rock and waited.
Nothing. Only stillness within the shadows.
He walked inside the rocky opening, saw people had once made a campfire inside but whether that had been five days ago – or five years – he couldn't tell. He sat deep inside the shadow and listened; when he was sure the cave was unoccupied he made his way back to the entrance and looked across the brush toward Nimiri and Catherine. He could just see them and he waved until he saw Nimiri return the gesture, then he slipped back into shadow and watched their progress through the moonlit brush.
He heard an occasional gunshot now, but not many and they sounded quite far away. It was as if the ambushers were mopping up the scene, dispatching the wounded and collecting all the loot, or perhaps the incriminating evidence. He thought he could see black smoke rising from behind a low hillock and he guessed the lingering flames were about three kilometers away — just less than two miles. Would that be enough?
Soon Nimiri and Catherine were at the base of the wall; Doug clambered down and helped her up and over the rocks and within minutes they were settled within their little sanctuary. She leaned back, wiped grimy sweat from her face, watched Doug open his bag and pull out a couple bottles of water and some candy bars, as well as a little yellow GPS unit. She thought of her own bag and reached for it, opened it up and dug around for the Sat-phone, then felt around for the little vacuum-bagged packages of smoked salmon she had stashed in the bottom. She left the food there, buried under a small pile of medical supplies, but she pulled out the phone and turned it on.
"Does your GPS work?" she asked. Doug set about giving the antenna a clear shot at the southern sky, then he pushed the power button, placed the unit on a rock near the entrance so it could pick-up valid signals. "Looks like it," he said as he read out the coordinates on the display. She scribbled the coordinates down on a notepad and dialed the phone.
"Paul, listen to me. The convoy has been…yes, ambushed…Paul…please, be quiet and listen, write this down…"
Doug looked at the GPS; the batteries were fully charged, would last another 48 hours if left on continuously, but he doubted they'd move again anytime soon so he powered the unit off and listened as Catherine read off their position, then repeated the numbers for good measure. She listened for a good minute then cut the connection.
"Well?" Tanner said.
"He'll call the UN, maybe the the prime minister's office or the AU…"
"Ah, crap, not those idiots! They probably put on this little shindig!"
Nimiri frowned, spoke harshly. "Not AU. Good people in AU. Oromo did this. Not AU."
"Okay, okay. Doc, you have any food in there?"
She shook her head. "Can you see anything from there?"
"Just some smoke. Fuck, did they pick a good location to hit us, or what! Between two fucking bridges! No retreat and no fucking place to run. And did you notice all the fucking black grass?"
"Yeah? What of it?"
"Fuck, man, they've been burning the locals right back into that town…"
"What town?"
"Fuck, man, you sure zonked-out back there. Big village, maybe five, ten clicks back. Lots of orchards and shit, too, then bingo — less than a mile and it's like we're on the dark side of the moon! Black fields, burned-out huts, a couple of bodies in the ditch off the side of the road. Fucking medieval shit, Doc."
But the physician had had enough: "Mister Tanner, this is not a medieval country! It is Africa. Now. Today." She was visibly fuming, clearly perturbed. "We are so sorry that offends your prim American worldview! But that is why we're here. Why we came. To help. Not to pad our resume!"
Tanner stared at her, wondered where this anger was coming from. Nimiri looked at him and shrugged.
"Just because they didn't show you cartoons of this 'fucking shit' at the country club doesn't mean it hasn't been going on right under your snotty little nose for the past thirty years! Understand?"
He looked at the woman again, then at Nimiri. He shook his head then took a sip of lukewarm water: "You say so."
"You're goddamn right I say so. I've been here in this medieval shithole for fifteen years, back when your mother was driving you around in her Cadillac to buy you hundred dollar video games! So just sit back and watch like a good American, and try to enjoy the show!"
"Look, I think you're being…"
"And try not to think, either, Dr. Smith, or whatever your name is. I wouldn't want you to hurt your ass!"
"You're welcome," Tanner said sarcastically.
"What?" Catherine answered as crossly.
"I said, you're welcome. You know, for pulling your fat ass out of the truck, saving your life, that kind of shit. Hey, next time…"
"There won't be a next time, Mister Smith. Count on that, would you? We'll be lucky to get out of this medieval shithole alive. Do you understand what that means? You're finally going to make it onto CNN!"
"Right. I think I have a pretty clear picture now. Thanks."
"Do you. Really?"
She looked at him, at the stuff around him: "Is that all the water you have? What, three liters?"
"Yep. Sorry, I couldn't reach more, what with the machine gun fire and all. Why don't you go back and get some more? I'll watch."
She snorted, leaned back against the smooth rock wall, then began to cry. Tanner looked at Nimiri. The old man was looking him directly in the eye, then he too turned and looked away. Tanner opened one of the candy bars and ate it defiantly.
Old Soviet-era Mi-8 helicopters make a distinctive wump-wump-wump as they draw near. Their inefficient airfoils don't slip easily through the air, they beat it up, and there is no mistaking when they're nearby because the earth rumbles for miles around. On this day, a single white UN Mi-8 helicopter approached from the southeast, flying low over the scorched earth, still well to the east of three people huddled in a shallow cave. The helicopter flew as fast as it could, purposefully just north of the smoldering ambush site; the pilot ignored the burning carnage between the bridges and he made a beeline for a low escarpment to the west.
The Oromo leader on scene had hidden his force hours ago, long before, in fact, he'd first heard the helicopter. Government air traffic controllers had been notified of the UN rescue flight and had dutifully passed this information on to the military. Because endemic corruption is what it is, someone in the military immediately notified the Oromo commander on the ground and he prepared his force by spreading them east and west of the ambush site.
The commander watched the helicopter, wondered why it was flying past the burning convoy towards a line of low cliffs a few miles away, then the helicopter banked to the south and began to fly toward his position.
"Take it out!" he shouted to his men hidden in the brush all along the river bed.
Two shoulder mounted surface-to-air missiles roared into the sky: the first missed completely; the second slammed into the underside of the main body of the aircraft. Flames and black smoke boiled from the cabin and the commander watched as the struggling pilot auto-rotated and flared too soon. The aircraft hit hard, bounced once and came down again. Before anyone inside could move the aircraft was slammed by heavy machine gun fire.
"Jesus Fucking Christ!" Tanner shouted as the flaming helicopter slammed into the riverbed. He watched as three people tried to get out of the wreckage, only to get cut down by machine gun fire.
As per protocol, Catherine picked up her phone again and called MSF Headquarters in Lyon, France. She explained the situation to the duty officer and waited for instructions. She gave their location again and repeated it, was told to limit use of the phone in case someone was trying to home in on them, and given a contact schedule. She broke contact and put the phone away.
Tanner felt the change that had come over the physician: "Was your friend on-board?"
"What?" she said, her voice lifeless, almost flat.
"Your friend, Paul? Was he… in there?" Doug pointed toward the burning wreckage.
She shrugged, her face a blank mask: "I don't know," she said softly.
Nimiri made his way to the entrance, carefully watched as the Oromo surrounded the downed helicopter and extracted two people from inside.
"Two yet live," he said, and Catherine darted to the entrance, pulled out a pair of binoculars from her case and looked at the scene below.
She watched, unaware that Tanner too was now by her side, as Paul was led away from the wreckage.
"See anyone?"
"Paul?"
"I don't… oh my God no!" She stood, started to run from the cave but Tanner grabbed her by the waist and pulled her back down just as the sound of rifle fire reached the cave. He took the binoculars from her as she crumpled to the ground, settled on the rock and watched as the Oromo fired again into the bodies on the ground before them. He turned, dropped the binoculars to the rocky floor, slid back into the cave, his eyes blinking rapidly as he tried to make sense of the darkness that lay ahead.
"Fuck…this can't be happening…" he whispered as the scene registered again in his mind.
Nimiri, clutching Catherine by his side, guided her back into the darkness. "Do you know, Doug, for an educated man, you say very little."
Nimiri could see the young man had suddenly come almost completely unhinged by what he'd just seen; the young man had drawn his knees up to his chin and now he was staring wide-eyed off into space. And yet Catherine too understood what he had seen; despite the pain she felt some deeper maternal instinct kick in: she went to the young man's side and knelt before him.
"Doug?"
He said nothing. No response at all.
"Doug? Tell me, what did you see?"
Doug's eyes welled up, he gasped for breath: "They're going to kill us…all of us…"
"Doug! Tell me what you saw?"
"I don't want to die like that…"
"How, Doug? Like how? What did you see?"
'With a black sack over my head, a gun pressed-up against the back of my head,' he wanted to say — but the words just wouldn't come. To utter those words was to acknowledge their truth, the cold reality behind them, and he chose to turn away and run to the comfort of other, more familiar delusions.
"I didn't see much," he said at last. "They're gone. I hope your friend wasn't out there."
"Paul? He was, Doug. He was the man in the red shirt."
"What did they say on the phone?"
"They will do what they can. They know where we are."
"What they can?" Doug said shrilly. "What the fuck does that mean?!"
"Doug, drink some water," Nimiri said. "You must think with clearness now."
"Clearness," Tanner said, his voice a faint whisper. "When I was a kid, my dad used to tell me that. Clarity is the word. He was a doc too, in the Navy. He went Vietnam, and he even went to Iraq."
"Doug?" Catherine whispered. "Violent death never makes sense. It is a shock to the system, it offends our sense of the sacredness of life, and yet to be reminded so powerfully how fragile life is. And how susceptible we are to such senselessness."
Doug still looked unfocused, unbalanced.
"What did your father see in Vietnam?"
"I don't know, really. He never talked about it. I mean, he wouldn't…"
"Do you think he believed in what he was doing?"
"What?" Doug said haltingly. "Yes, of course."
"Do you think he might have seen purpose working over there?"
"I don't know. Maybe."
Nimiri spoke now: "Doug, do you see purpose in your life?"
The young man's face lurched, his eyes flinched: "I don't know," he whispered after some time.
The old man nodded, sat down on his haunches; Catherine eased down beside Doug and laid his head on her shoulder, ran her fingers through his hair. They sat quietly for a long while, until a brief outburst of gunfire startled them back into the present.
Catherine pushed herself up, went back to the entrance, stopped to pick up the binoculars as she crawled along the rocks. She peered over the edge, brought the glasses to her eyes and swept the landscape. She saw men running down a shallow slope towards the burning convoy, the guerrillas firing at the trucks. She focused her attention on one truck: there were people in the back, armed people! As the Oromo closed the relief workers in the truck opened up, shot several of the guerillas.
"What!" she cried out. "Why are they armed? That is against the rules!" This was, Catherine thought furiously, a breach of the most basic protocol: MSF workers, indeed no relief workers anywhere, went into a conflict zone as an armed force. The UN or some other military force always carried out protective functions. But now someone had violated that most basic rule and the likely outcome was too grim to think about.
"You've got to be kidding me?" Doug said. "Someone actually broke a rule?"
"Yes! If people break the rules only more violence will follow!"
"Lady, have you ever considered that there are some people who never follow the rules?"
"Of course! Don't be naïve!"
"Moi? Naïve? Surely you jest."
She turned to face down Doug but saw him stand up, only now with a rock in his right hand, winding up for a throw. Before she knew it the rock left his hand and whizzed past her head – she heard the air ripping as it soared by – then Nimiri reached for her and pulled her forcibly back into the darkness.
"Why did you do that?" she cried.
But Doug was readying another rock; when the second was arcing past her face she turned, saw a long reddish colored cobra coiled up not a meter from where she had been just seconds before. Doug's second pitch was perfect; the snake boiled and hissed and disappeared down into the scree below.
"Oh my God, oh my God," she said as she fell into the safety of the old man's arms.
"Shit! Fuck-a-duck!" Doug screamed. "Holy fucking crap! Did you see the size of that fucking thing!"
Nimiri nodded, smiled. "You throw well."
Doug tried to stand upright but his head hit the low ceiling; still, he seemed giddy, lost somewhere between shock and pride. "Third base, man! Fucking high school!" he shouted as yet more adrenaline washed through his system. "Fuck! That fucker was huge!"
Catherine saw the snake in her mind's eye and recoiled inward, unaware now that she was shaking.
"It okay now," Nimiri whispered in her ear. "I think snake gone."
She relaxed, groped her way to the rocky floor and sat; the old man crouched nearby, watched her for a while, even as he watched Doug bounce off the walls as he came down from the adrenaline rush.
"What time is it?" she asked then.
Nimiri shrugged; Doug looked at his watch: "Almost five."
"I have to call in now. Is it gone?"
"You want me to stick my head up and look?" Tanner said.
She nodded. "Please."
"Fuck." Tanner went near the entrance and looked around, then tossed a few rocks out the opening and listened.
He slowly closed the distance, rose over the rock where the snake had been — and half expected to be hit in the face — but he saw nothing. Rocks, red dirt, some greenish-gray grass — but no snake.
"Clear," he said. He heard Catherine and Nimiri walk up, felt her placing the antenna on a rock clear of the entrance, then dialing the phone.
"Hello," she said to a faraway voice, someone sitting behind a desk in an air-conditioned office a billion miles away. "Desaunier here." She listened to the voice on the other end for quite a while, then hung up and shut the unit down.
"Excuse me, but you sure didn't say much…"
"I am told they can home in on these transmissions. Anyway, protests are being made in both the Security Council and the General Assembly, but there have been denials from all involved here."
"Interesting," Tanner said, because he was thinking of Gene Harwell and the cartel.
"Exactly." She sighed as she looked at the young man: "An AU force will come later this morning. A French force is coming as we speak, and something about your Navy was mentioned. They will attempt to reach us this morning. I am to call in every two hours and they ask that we monitor the Oromo's location."
"Okay, that sounds fucking doable to me," Tanner said nervously.
"Doug?" Nimiri interrupted.
"Yeah, man."
"You must find other word. I tire of this one word you use. This 'fuck'."
Catherine laughed as she put away her phone. "Nimiri, it is an Americanism. It means nothing."
"I know America. This is not America. The word he uses means nothing. Less than nothing. It is a word that tells the world 'here is a man with no self-respect'. Is that America?"
Doug looked at Nimiri: "You've been to America?"
"No, but I remember an American. A man called Kennedy. I remember him talking about standing up to oppression. People all over Africa remember this man, they still remember his words."
Tanner nodded. "I'm not sure anyone lives up to that standard anymore, Nimiri."
"Perhaps not," Nimiri continued. "But that is a choice, is it not? But tell me, where else but America could these words have come? But do not tell me this 'fuck' word represents who you are, or what you have become?"
"I'm pretty sure it has, Nimiri," Doug sighed.
"I remember Kennedy," Catherine said. "Ich bein ein Berliner! I remember hearing those words when I was in school. He wanted to tear down walls and take us to the stars. My God, how spectacularly we have failed that vision…"
"Hey," Tanner smiled, "the opera ain't over 'til the Fat Lady sings."
Nimiri frowned and Catherine explained as the old man looked at Doug: "I think you is fuckin' right. There is always tomorrow. Fuck 'em 'til fat lady sing."
The three of them laughed, they laughed for quite some time, but soon the sun slipped over the horizon and daylight came for them as they sheltered from the coming storm.
The Oromo commander and the American physician looked at the bullet riddled Toyota, at the one dead, ant-covered man laid out underneath, then Gene Harwell remembered that the helicopter had flown toward an escarpment just west of the road and he wondered if survivors might not have escaped from this particular truck? The commander looked with grizzled eyes at the ground under the truck and ran his hand over impressions in the sand. More than one person had been under here; he could feel their presence even now. He walked around the truck, looked at the ground with his flashlight, saw footprints – even though it appeared someone had tried to conceal them, and he smiled. There could be no witnesses and no evidence, he told himself once again. Because the Americans will come here.
He barked orders at one of his lieutenants and tension rippled through the sunrise like leaves blowing across still water.
Deep shadows cast a black veil over the escarpment, while slivers of bright yellow light hit stray gray rocks; three humans sat near the entrance to the cave and looked out over the valley below. The young man passed another candy bar to his companions, and he opened a fresh bottle of water and took a swig before passing it to the woman.
"It's so quiet," she said as she sifted through her bag. "Where are the sounds of animals? I can't even hear the breeze."
The old man lifted his head into the light, cocked his head as he listened: "You are correct, Lady. Too quiet. A great beast hunts in the shadows. The small hide now."
"That about sums things up, Nimiri," Doug said, "for us too, don't you think?"
"Oh yes." As they resumed their patient watch she pulled two bags of salmon from her bag and began opening them up.
"I thought you said…"
"There is too much salt in this fish, and we have not enough water. But perhaps the protein will help… "
"Yes," Nimiri said as he took a piece of the pink flesh. "Perhaps this is our last supper." He held the fish to his nose then shook his head: "What is this fish? He stinks mightily!"
"This fish," Catherine said, "is from an ocean far away, where the water is clear and cold. It has been smoked."
The old man turned away, pinched his nose: "You eat this fish?"
"Oh yes. It's very good."
"You say so. Not me." She passed around the fish and Doug took a bite and sighed.
"Oh man, that's good."
Nimiri looked unconvinced but took a piece and sniffed it tentatively: "It smell like goat shit."
"Go ahead, Nimiri, try it!" Doug said, so the old man took the piece and chewed it rapidly.
Then he smiled: "It is not bad, for goat shit."
Doug pulled out his last two granola bars and the old man's eyes lit up: "I guess you like chocolate, huh?"
"Oh yes. Chocolate very good."
Doug broke the two bars into six pieces and passed them around, then they sat back and listened to the wind. Shadows moved with the arcing sun, grass rustled in the light breeze as the daily rituals of hunger and survival got underway on the savannah below.
"I wonder if they'll get to us in time?" Catherine said after some time had passed.
"The way things have been going?" Doug commented, "I doubt it."
"Have you always been so…optimistic?" she replied.
"He carries a great burden," Nimiri said. "He grows tired."
"That's me. The Burdened White Man."
"The what?" Catherine asked.
"I was thinking of Kipling. The White Man's Burden. And what you said, that 'you reap what you sow'.
"Ah, 'Doug 12:24'."
"'Consider the ravens: for they neither sow nor reap; which neither have storehouse nor barn; and God feedeth them: how much more are ye better than the fowls?'"
"Not exactly what I had in mind," the young man replied.
"Perhaps," the old man sighed, "you do not yet think clearly."
"I meant…"
"I know what you mean, Doug."
The young man pointed to the sky: "Kipling wrote: 'Take up the White Man's burden, And reap his old reward: The blame of those ye better, The hate of those ye guard…'"
The old man opened both his hands to the heavens: "I think you should put your trust in God, not this Kipling," before he brought his fingers together, now as if in prayer.
"God always makes things so much simpler, doesn't he?" Doug said – but he spoke a little too sarcastically.
"That is true," Nimiri said, "because this life is simple."
"Everything always has to have as purpose, right?" Tanner sighed.
"So some say."
"And I suppose ravens never starve to death?"
Nimiri smiled: "Death comes to all things."
"And always the ready come-back! Amazing!"
"Perhaps because God has thought of everything."
Catherine watched, listening to their exchange and growing more agitated: "Some say that religion is the cause of all human suffering, little more than an opiate to the masses!"
"Perhaps so," the old man said. "But did God do that?"
"But everything has to have a purpose, Nimiri!" Doug interjected. "You said so yourself!"
"Did I?"
"If religion causes suffering, then…"
"What has religion got to do with God?" Nimiri said, and the other two stopped and looked at one another.
"What?" Catherine said, perplexed.
"What has religion got to do with God?" Nimiri replied.
"I don't understand," she said.
"Did God make religion, or did man?"
"Man," Doug said.
"Ah. But man flawed. From beginning. Everything man creates flawed one way or other. Even religion. Man overcome religion, only way to God."
"Now there's an interesting point of view," Tanner said.
"Nimiri?" Catherine said. "Did you ever hear of a man named Yeats?"
"Yeats. I not know name."
"Another poet, an Irishman. He wrote: 'The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.' About a time when goodness retreats and mediocrity assumes the lead. He called his poem The Second Coming."
Nimiri's eyes shone in the darkness. "Indeed. And you think such a time has come?"
"Sometimes, yes, it feels that way."
"I suspect," the old man said, "it always feel this way. Each face time of darkness."
"And become the raven."
"The what? But…why?" She looked at the old man, but he had turned away and was looking at the sky.
"Look!" the old man said as he pointed skyward. A jetliner was headed north towards Europe and it was leaving a long contrail across the morning sky.
Catherine turned, looked at the sky and wondered what had captured the old man's attention.
"That's an airliner," Tanner said. "Probably on its way to Europe."
"A what?" Nimiri said as he watched the contrails fade away to blue sky.
"An airliner, carrying hundreds of people to Europe."
"Hundreds?" Nimiri said wonderingly. "You mean there are hundreds of people in the sky?"
"Two hundred or so, yeah." The last of the moon was still visible low in the western sky and Tanner pointed to it now: "You know people have walked on the moon?"
"You are being serious?"
"Oh, yeah, Apollo. Five times, and ten men walked up there."
"Apollo?"
"Yeah. You don't remember that?"
"What? Men go there?"
"You heard about that, didn't you?"
"I remember the Kennedy-man spoke of this. You mean, people have go there? To moon?"
The young man looked at the woman, then at the old man: "Yes. Almost fifty years ago."
"Ah," Nimiri said. "I in prison those days." When no one spoke he continued. "You see, I killed a man."
"Really?" Catherine said uneasily.
"Yes. I was young. I home one day, find soldier top of my mother and I kills him. I taken away, taken place where told I am wrong."
"Ah," Doug said, "lawyers. You gotta love 'em."
"Lucky you weren't killed right then and there!" Catherine said.
"But a kid protecting his mother?" Doug sighed, shaking his head.
"Yes," Nimiri said. "Interesting tyrant in law."
"Amen," Doug said.
"How old were you, Nimiri, when this happened?" Catherine asked.
"Oh, Lady, am not sure. Perhaps ten years. I remember teacher told about Kennedy-man, and what he say about moon. I never believe such thing happen."
"Well, it did," Catherine said.
"How long ago?" Nimiri asked.
"Fifty years. This summer," Tanner added.
The old man turned and looked at the fading moon again.
"So. Your people walk there. How you look that and not have pride in people? Your people?"
"We were capable of so much more," Catherine said, "but somehow we have turned against our own ideas."
"Really?" Doug said. "Why do you say that?"
"I don't know. Look around and you see fascists taking power everywhere, even in your country."
"And what about France? The same thing isn't happening there?"
"Of course it is. It is the same everywhere. Immigration. It is always about immigration. A fear of others unlike ourselves."
"But you're not afraid, right?" Tanner said.
"Of course I am afraid, but not for the reason you imply. I am afraid we have failed to learn from our mistakes, that we will once again fall into the abyss of authoritarianism…"
"And why do you think that is?" Tanner quipped.
"I wish I knew. Some say it is a failure of our schools while others imply it is only natural for the different races to oppose one another, to regard The Other with a great suspicion."
"And what about you? What do you think it is?"
"I can't understand it. I can transfuse blood from a white man into an African woman with no obvious ill effect. We can transplant organs from one to the other, and we can do so because we are biologically the same, aside from the amount of melanin in our skin cells, yet this one little difference accounts for so much of the hatred we experience…"
"When I was in my residency," Tanner said, "I noticed all kinds of differences in the way we treat white patients versus blacks. Nice neat sutures for white patients and quick and dirty for blacks. I began to see all kinds of other signs, too…"
"And what did you conclude?"
"That people who'd never consider themselves racist just might be the most racist of all. We've just buried all our various hatreds under layers of rationalizations and intellectual dishonesty."
"But not you, I take it?" Catherine said.
"I wish that was so," Tanner sighed. "And you were correct, my name isn't Smith. It's Doug Tanner."
"So? What are you running from? Bankers or taxes?"
"As far as I know, a Mexican drug cartel."
Catherine's eyes widened. "What have you done?"
"I accidentally identified someone under the protection of a cartel to federal agents, and it appears the cartel has been after me ever since."
"This ambush? Do you think it's possible that these men are after you?"
Tanner nodded. "I heard someone speaking Spanish down there."
"Is the rest of your tale a lie, as well?"
"No," Tanner said. "I've been working in Addis Ababa for a few months. I was in a witness protection program before that, and with MSF before that."
"And it was an accident, you say? This identification?"
"And they have been following you for how long?" she asked.
"Over a year, I think. They're very persistent."
"So it would seem. It must be very confusing, but did you not consider this might happen?"
"I didn't come up with this arrangement," Tanner barked, suddenly angry at her insinuation.
"But how many people down there have died, and perhaps because of you?"
Soon they were arguing and Nimiri sat back, watched for a moment, then he cleared his throat: "You must consider where you are, please," he said, "and that we need be quiet."
Doug and Catherine separated then, and each moved into separate parts of the cave.
"You act like people you say you Hate," Nimiri said into the darkness. "Yet you are lucky be alive, and still you fight. All you do is fight! You come here to take care of us and you fight. Have you ever considered that we might be better off without you?"
Nimiri watched shadows on the wall, wondered why two such intelligent people would act so contrary to their nature, yet as he listened neither said a word to the other. They had wounded each other and that was all they could do. Nimiri shook his head and in time he heard the woman breathing heavily, the young man snoring, and he turned and watched the sun as it arced across the sky. Soon he felt his own eyes growing heavy as the sun raced across the sky…
…but then he saw something out of the corner of his eye…
…something low, reddish-gray, and moving quietly among the rocks…
…he moved his hand slowly, found a rock, and began to lift it…
…just as the cobra rose from the rocks and began his attack…
The last of the sun slanted into the cave, hit Tanner on the face. He stirred as he swatted a fly and opened his eyes. He saw Catherine curled up on a smooth sandy spot a few meters away and, while he sat up, he rubbed away the sandy grit that had formed in the sweat by his eyes while he slept. He yawned, stretched and had begun to stand when he saw Nimiri sprawled out unnaturally near the cave's entrance. Something didn't feel right and he crouched down protectively, eased over to where the woman slept. He paused when he reached her, shook her gently, kept his hand lightly over her mouth to keep her from speaking.
She woke with a start, tried to rise but he held her down and she looked up at him with wide-eyed fright in her eyes – until she saw him motion her to silence with a single pointed finger over his lips. She nodded and he released her, she tried to sit and felt his hands helping her up, then she saw him pointing at the old man by the entrance to the cave.
Nimiri lay perfectly still and at once she knew.
She could see his chest: no movement. None at all. And no respiration. She could, even from where she crouched, see his neck and the stillness within: still no movement, so no carotid pulse.
Her first impulse was to run to the old man's side, but some force gripped her, some deeper instinct held her back – and she felt the same response from Doug. He was on-guard, something menacing lurked in the shadows and he felt it too.
He pushed her back into the shadows but even so he remained protectively in front of her.
They heard footsteps now; sliding, grinding footsteps coming up the rocks outside the cave. Coming up, she had no doubt, for Doug Tanner.
Gene Harwell and his men paused ten meters behind their lead tracker.
The tracker had, he saw in the low slanting sunlight, held up his fist; the man had found something of importance – perhaps even dangerous. Harwell's men stopped as one on the signal, they collectively held their breath as the tracker eased forward slowly, silently, on hands and knees.
A moment later the tracker motioned for the column to move forward – slowly.
One man stepped too far and slid noisily on the scree and the mercenary group's leader cursed under his breath, looked at the offending man and made a cutting motion over his neck. The man nodded and Harwell watched the mercenaries behind him take-up positions on either side of the entrance to a deep cave. The group's leader climbed as noiselessly as a cat until he too was beside the entrance; once there he watched the tracker, listened to the silence for any telltale sign of activity inside the cave, then he looked down.
An old man lay on his side, a three meter long cobra by his side. Both were dead.
The man had several puncture wounds on his hands, face and neck.
The snake's head had been bashed-in by the rock in the man's hand.
"That guy had balls," Harwell said quietly, and the man next to him shuddered and nodded. The tracker stood, picked up a stone and threw it forcefully into the darkness…
"Nothing!" he said loudly in French a moment later. "Move on!"
But Harwell remained by the entrance, motioned to the mercenary by his side. "Sit here quietly, wait and watch," he whispered to the man. When Harwell was sure the man understood, he too moved away quietly.
Doug looked down at his watch again. It had been at least a half hour since he'd heard Harwell and his men move back down the slope – but still his instinct told him not to move – or even try to leave the cover of these deep shadows.
"I really have to pee," Catherine whispered, and he could tell she was still nearby. "I think I might wet my pants if I don't."
Doug listened, cocked his head to one side when he thought he heard some movement, then he edged forward, still in shadow, and pointed at the ground, motioned Catherine to go where she stood. He heard her undoing her trousers, then her water bouncing off the stone floor and running down rocks into the sand…
…then she slipped and fell backwards, cried out when her tailbone hit a sharp rock…
…and he listened as she regrouped, got herself together; but yes, now he heard more footsteps approaching again and he flattened himself against the side of the cave and waited.
Harwell and his men weren't trying to conceal their approach this time. Dozens of guerrillas were sliding noisily up the scree, taking up positions on either side of the entrance. Doug felt his pulse hammering inside his skull, found himself wondering what it would feel like to die, when he heard their first demands…
"Venez des maintenant!"
"What did he say?" Doug whispered to Catherine.
"Come out," she whispered back.
"Venez nous ou lancer des grenades!"
"Maintenant!"
"We must come out now," she said, "or they throw grenades in here."
"Okay," Doug said. "Game over." He could barely see her in the darkness, but an odd feeling came over him as he stood there in the dark. "Ya know, I think I would have liked getting to know you."
"Indeed?"
"Indeed. You ready?"
She felt her hand take his and he started forward.
"Mettez vos mains en l'air!"
"Put your hands up," she translated while she complied.
"What did you say!" Doug shouted as he inched towards the opening.
"Ah, there he is," Harwell said, his smile a broken, mean line creasing his face.
Doug could now see his wiry nemesis, a tall, skinny man standing just outside the entrance with an AK-47 in his hands, but then he saw Nimiri and the dead cobra. "Yeah, I'm with the New York Times. A reporter."
"Really? How nice for you, Doctor Tanner. Get your hands where I can see them or I will remove the woman's head slowly while you watch."
Doug got his hands up as he bent over to come out the entrance, but his second impression of Harwell was that he was astonishingly frightening looking, especially for a physician. He was tall and rail thin, and his face appeared quite old, as if his skin had been stretched tightly over a misshaped skull, so tight that it revealed every detail of the bone underneath.
"So. You're death, huh?" Doug said. "You look the part."
Harwell laughed. "I've play the part all too well, I'm afraid. And perhaps too many times."
"I'm curious…what happened to you?"
"I guess it's just the way I was put together," Harwell said lightly, as if that alone explained everything that had gone wrong with his life.
"Put together?" Doug replied, amused now. "Abused as a child, no doubt?"
Then time itself seemed to bend and hover for a moment, before the world outside the cave roared and filled with bright light; the first concussive blast knocked Doug backwards into Catherine and they both fell back against the cave's uneven floor. Catherine felt a sharp pain in her lower back as she realized bombs were falling on the riverbed beneath the caves, and she saw Tanner was trying to shield her from the worst of the blasts' effects. Minutes passed and then a deathly still fell over the area, only to be subsumed by the thrashing blades of several helicopters landing on the road on the far side of the riverbed.
Tanner got up and tried to wipe all the gritty sand from his face, but Catherine could see he was unsteady on his feet. He put his hand out to steady himself, then they both heard cries and whispers coming from just outside the cave, and a new surge of adrenaline seemed to push Tanner towards the cave's entrance.
He found Gene Harwell lying there, his right leg a pulpy mess and blood trickling out his ears, so Tanner rushed to his side. He started assessing the physician's injuries, first checking the sundered leg for compromised blood vessels before moving to Harwell's head. Harwell didn't respond to his voice and Tanner soon discovered the man's right eye had a penetrating foreign body protruding, and a trickle of vitreous humor running down his cheek.
Tanner looked up, saw US Marines running his way from a half dozen helicopters and he shouted "Medic!" as loudly as he could, hoping to draw their attention. Moments later the marines were climbing up the rocky scree to his position and two came and knelt beside him, quickly getting to work. A stretcher was summoned, and moments later Catherine came crawling out of the cave. She had difficulty standing on her own and Tanner went to help her.
"Who is that?" she asked, pointing at Harwell and the marines.
"He's the guy that's been after us."
"So all this happened because of him?"
Tanner nodded. "Because of me, really. I was the one that put the ball in motion."
She looked at the smoldering caravan off in the distance and wondered how many people had died during the fight, then she looked up at Doug Tanner. "This wasn't your fault," she whispered, taking his hand.
"I think I feel worse about Nimiri," Tanner sighed. "He sacrificed everything fur us, and what did he get in return…?"
She nodded. "Kipling again. What did you say, take up the White Man's Burden?"
"Maybe we really don't belong here, you know? Maybe it's simple paternalism."
"It's a noble thing you're doing, this teaching at the university. I hope you don't stop because of everything that happened here."
"Tanner?"
Doug turned to the sound of his voice and saw Gene Harwell motioning for him, so he walked over the stretcher and stood beside him. "Can you hear me?" Doug asked.
"A little, kinda faraway. Listen up, okay? My wife is down at Lake Tana, at the clinic there. Goes by the name of Patty McCluskey now. If I don't make it, would you see to her, please? Make sure she gets home, maybe?"
Tanner nodded. "Yeah, sure. Anything else?"
"I have money at the Citibank in Mexico City. A lot of it. Code number is my old social security number—reversed, access code is Trinity. Would you see that she gets it?"
Tanner nodded. "Of course."
Harwell held out his right hand and Tanner took it, just before the medics started down the hill with the stretcher towards the waiting helicopters. Doug turned and held out his hand; Catherine looked at him and smiled, then she took his hand – yet they stood there for a moment, looking at Nimiri and the red cobra.
"He seemed to think there was something important you need to do before you leave this place, Douglas."
He didn't know what else to say, so he went over and lifted Nimiri's frail body and slung him over his shoulder, then started down the steep slope. There was nothing left to be done now but to give their friend a decent burial.
He stood in the bedroom of his house in Addis Ababa, looking at his shattered bedroom and the ruptured exterior wall and he was quite amazed that fire hadn't broken out and burned down the entire structure. The university had hired a contractor to rebuild the shattered exterior wall and refinish the interior, and the work would be complete in a few weeks, but until then he was, in a word, homeless. He showed Catherine around the rest of the house and then they drove out to the airport together. She was headed home, to a small town outside of Paris, to rest and regroup. Or so she said.
Beth Gruber and Jenny Peterson were already at the airport when Doug and Catherine arrived, and MSF personnel joined them at the gate — with Patty McKinnon, Gene Harwell's widow, in their custody. She was holding a little girl, a toddler, close to her face, and when Tanner looked at her she shot him a gaze full of seething hate. He watched her little entourage warily after that, even as their flight was called and boarding began. Tanner, as was his custom, had upgraded to business class and so was sitting with Catherine up front, while Beth and Jenny boarded and went to the rear of the jetliner.
As did McKinnon, along with her dour-faced minders from Doctors Without Borders.
A final few passengers boarded just before the main door closed and Tanner watched as the Jetway retracted, then the terminal as it fell away in the fading light of day. A few minutes later the Air France A330 was airborne and headed for Paris Charles de Gaulle – and another lovely flight attendant brought warm towels and chilled Champagne to Tanner and Catherine. Dinner was served and the lights dimmed…
…and a stranger approached. Tanner looked up at the man and in an instant knew he was trouble.
"Excuse me," the stranger said to Catherine, "but Doctor Tanner is an old friend. Would you mind if I sat and spoke with him for a few minutes?" The man's English was flawless, even if he spoke with a faint accent, but Tanner had already deduced the stranger was nothing more or less than a message from the cartel.
"Of course," Catherine said, excusing herself and walking forward to the restroom just aft of the cockpit.
The stranger sat beside Tanner with an oddly exasperated sigh, then he turned to the younger man and smiled. "You have been quite a nuisance, Doctor, but I suppose you know that."
Tanner shrugged. "I'm not sure why all this happened."
"You were working for the DEA, were you not, when you identified Eugene?"
Tanner smiled. "Actually no, I wasn't. Neither was Jenny Peterson. We both thought he looked like someone who was running from the law, so I asked her to take a photograph of him so we could pass it along…"
"To whom would you have passed it along to, Doctor Tanner?"
"Frankly, we had no idea."
The man shrugged and smiled. "I've always disliked the idea of killing physicians," the stranger said. "It seems a pointless waste. Yet Gene was my friend and there is a price that must be paid for his death."
"I see. And what might that be?"
"We will need to replace him. I was thinking that you might be able to do that for me."
"Go to hell."
The stranger smiled, though he stiffened a bit — the kind of reaction Tanner expected of a man not used to being spoken to in this way. "I would advise you to consider the matter carefully, Douglas."
"Excuse me, but would you mind telling me your name?"
"Oh, I am so sorry. My name is Luis, Luis Quintana," the man said, holding out his right hand.
Tanner looked at the stranger's hand for a moment, then he took it. "Before Harwell died he told me where his funds are located, and he gave me the access codes. I would imagine his widow would be interested in gaining access to these funds, don't you?"
"What makes you think I don't already have these funds in hand?"
"If you did we wouldn't be having this conversation, would we?"
Quintana smiled, his grip on Tanner's hand increasing fractionally. "Had you planned on keeping these for yourself?"
Quintana studied Tanner's face as he spoke, then he released his grip and leaned back, sighing – just as Catherine returned from the restroom – so he stood and gave way to her. "Perhaps we could speak once again? After we arrive in Paris?" Quintana said pleasantly enough. "I'd love to conclude our arrangements before I catch my connecting flight."
Tanner nodded noncommittally and he watched Quintana walk to the far side of the cabin and take a seat, then he felt Catherine's eyes boring into his.
"What was that about?" she asked.
"I think that gentleman is the head of the cartel Harwell worked for, and he says Harwell was his friend."
"Oh, dear God, no…"
"What does he want?"
"That remains to be determined."
She buried her face in her hands and he could feel her trembling, so he put his coat over her shoulders and held her close. "What can you do?" she muttered through her fingers. "What else does he want from you?"
"Servitude, I think," Tanner said.
She looked up, aghast. "You can't be serious? What did you tell him?"
"That I'm not interested in that life."
"Again, that remains to be decided. In his mind there is a price to be paid, so…"
"How many people must die on account of this bastard Harwell?" she cried. "How much blood must be spilled?"
"Well, as they say…it's an insatiable market, so as long as people buy this crap the blood will flow."
She shook her head again. "Then it never ends."
Tanner nodded. "No, it never ends." He sat back in his seat and looked out the window, not knowing what to expect next. He closed his eyes and against all odds he fell into a fevered sleep. Dreams came on hard and fast, dreams of an endless cave. A cave full of red snakes writhing on a smooth stone floor. In the distance an opening, but hundreds of cobras remained between him and the opening, so he was trapped. The only way out was to confront certain death…
When he woke the sky was a pale gray and the checkered green landscape was coming up to greet the airliner. The flight attendant was walking through the cabin, checking on seat backs and tray tables and smiling with her warm towels and cheerful "good mornings." Tanner sat up and rubbed latent dreams from his gritty eyes, then he looked at Catherine and smiled at her brave face.
"Did you manage to sleep?" he asked.
"No, not at all. That was not the case with you, however. You snore loudly, by the way?"
"I do not."
"Oh, really? And I suppose you don't pass gas, either?"
She smiled. "You were restless at one point."
"I was in the cave. With a bunch of snakes."
She nodded understanding. "Perhaps that is why I chose not to sleep."
"You are very wise."
She took his hand, looked in his eyes. "What is to become of us, Douglas?"
"Oh, I predict a long life together, making you breakfast on Sunday mornings. I see a sunny patio and roses everywhere, and a little dog."
She closed her eyes and smiled, and he leaned over and kissed her once, gently, on the lips. "What else do you see?" she said.
'A cave full of cobras,' he felt he needed to say. but instead he squeezed her hand, then he kissed her again. "I think soon you and I must make a few decisions, about the future," he sighed.
"I think so too," she replied.
He turned and saw hedgerows and little roadways give way to hotels and warehouses and massive highways and then the Airbus settled on the runway and he wondered where the day would take him next.
There was a kind of unspoken acknowledgement when Tanner and Catherine met Beth and Jenny at the end of the Jetway, and regardless of intent Jenny could see it in the way Doug and Catherine stood together. They smiled congenially then started for customs, though Tanner studiously ignored Quintana all the while. Catherine walked through the EU portal and waited for them, and when they separated Tanner told Beth and Jenny that he wasn't sure what his immediate travel plans were but that they might be fluid…
"Fluid?" Beth asked.
Tanner nodded. "Yes. Someone from the cartel contacted me on the plane. They aren't through with me just yet."
"Jesus, Doug!" Jenny cried. "What are you going to do?"
"Play it cool, for one thing," he admonished. "No scenes, okay?"
"Right," Jenny said, trying to collect her thoughts.
"What are you going to do, Doug?" Beth asked. "Call our contact in DC?"
"They're watching me," he replied. "Probably all of us, so no, stay away from your phones for now, at least until you're sure no one is watching."
But it was at this point that Luis Quintana walked right up to them. "There's no need for such secrecy among friends," he said, smiling brightly at Jenny Peterson. "You will all be coming with us, to Mexico, for a brief holiday. We'll be leaving as soon as you collect your luggage, and we have a schedule to keep." Two rather beefy mercenary types then appeared beside Quintana – as if to underscore the nature of their predicament.
So Catherine DeSaunier waited and waited for Doug Tanner and the others to come out of customs, but after an hour she grew worried, and another hour passed before she called MSF to ask what she should do. By the time the authorities were alerted a Dassault Falcon 8x, ICAO registration T7-666, was well over the Bay of Biscay on a flight plan filed for Sao Paulo, Brazil. It was listed, illegally, as a ferry flight with no passengers onboard.
As the aircraft approached the Leeward Islands the pilots filed an amended flight plan and diverted to Mexico City. Interpol was, at that time, alerted and agents from the DEA and the FBI converged on the airport, only to learn that, at the last minute, the Falcon had filed another amended flight plan listing Puerto Vallarta as the aircraft's final destination. It was by then, of course, too late to carry out any kind of interdiction.
Tanner woke up and looked around the massive bedroom, hardly believing the lavishness of Quintana's residence, or the splendor of the view beyond his bedroom. There were, quite literally, no windows here, just a wide open expanse of patios and pools and then rocks and breaking waves, all with nothing between his bedroom and the sounds of the sea. He stood and stretched and went to the head to brush his teeth and dress for the day, then he walked out onto his patio and continued on to the rocks, and there he stood, staring out at the breakers about twenty feet below. Sea lions were basking on the rocks and there was nothing at all to keep them from coming up and going for a swim in one of the pools, and he found the realization as baffling as it was ludicrous.
"Ah, good, you are an early riser!"
Tanner turned to the voice and saw Luis sitting beside one of the smaller swimming pools. "Good morning," he said, stifling a yawn.
"Come, please join me. I am having a simple breakfast today, but there is plenty to share."
Tanner walked over and saw platter upon platter of fresh fruit and bolillos, an untouched French press full of coffee, as well as a bowl full of what appeared to be yogurt.
"Please, Douglas, sit and join me."
Tanner sat. "You'll pardon my saying so, but this is rather awkward. I mean, we are your prisoners…"
Quintana seemed hurt on hearing that. "Prisoners? No, not at all. You are my guests, and after your ordeal in the desert I assumed you needed time to recuperate. And truly, I can't imagine a better place than here. You must admit that the view is splendid, after all…"
"It is that," Tanner sighed, looking at the many swimming pools arrayed around the back of the sprawling residence, but just then a coconut fell from one of the nearby trees and splashed-down in the pool just behind him.
"The fruits of my labors, Douglas. Perhaps it would surprise you to learn that I built this house for my friend Gene, and just a few years ago. Yet he insisted on going to Africa and I'm afraid I will never understand that."
Tanner shrugged.
"What I find most strange is how much alike you and Gene are. Or rather, were. And excuse the observation, but by that I mean the impulses that guide and inform your decisions seem very similar. Like two sides of the same coin, perhaps."
"I'm afraid I never knew him."
"A pity. I think you would have enjoyed his friendship."
"So, what would you like to do today?"
"Go to Paris, I think."
Quintana smiled. "Perhaps…when you are more rested, but we can talk about that in a few days."
"Well then, what would you recommend we do?"
"Ah, well. Do you go diving? There are many interesting sights in the area. A few sharks, as well, but they are rarely troublesome."
"No, sorry. I never took that up."
"Well then, perhaps this would be an opportune time to learn. I'll have an instructor join us."
"I see. Are we all going for a swim today?"
"Yes, yes, the water is delightful this time of year. Ah, here comes Miss Gruber! Excellent!"
He turned and looked at Beth, and her hair looked like a bird had nested there overnight and she was wearing a t-shirt that hung down to her knees – that said Puerto Vallarta Yacht Club on the front – so now at least Tanner had some idea where they were. She rubbed her eyes as she walked up, and she plopped down in the chair next to Tanners and tried to stifle a yawn.
"God damn but it's fucking gorgeous here," she said between yawns. "Is this breakfast?" she said, smiling at the fruit and breads on the table.
"If you like, yes," Quintana said. "Or I can have the kitchen prepare something hot for you."
"No, no, this looks great," she said, spooning slices of mango and papaya onto a plate, then pouring a cup of coffee. "Did I hear someone say something about going diving today?"
"Yes," Quintana said, brightening a little. "Are you a diver?"
"You can't live in Miami and not be," she said a little too cheerfully, pausing to attack a slice of papaya. "Is there good diving around here?" she added.
"I thought that perhaps we would go over to Islas Marietas. It is a remarkable place, and the dive there is more than interesting."
"How's the water temperature?" she asked. "Pretty cool?"
"No, no, it is not so bad as that. A lycra skin will suffice, but more for your protection."
Patty McKinnon came out with her little girl next, and though she still appeared roundly depressed, Tanner could understand that. She'd just lost her husband, and here she was, being forced to relive that loss – just by his presence on the plane and here, at this table. So he stood and pulled a chair out for her, and then he helped her get settled at the table. "May I fix a plate for you?" he asked solicitously.
"No thanks. I can get it."
Still, Tanner studied McKinnon; first her mannerisms and her behavior towards Quintana, and then the way she responded to Beth – and then Jenny, after she finally emerged from her silk cocoon. He saw her furtive, sidelong glances, almost as if she felt insecure around Jenny and Beth, but then he considered that she probably just felt out of place, like he did. But hadn't she gone to medical school down here? Is that how she ran into Luis Quintana? What was the link? Or worse still, what did he have on her?
But there was more going on here than first met the eye: McKinnon was jittery and it seemed as if she was on the brink, like maybe having a full blown nervous breakdown wasn't out of the question, but then Luis would say something and she would rally for a moment and pull herself back from the edge. 'Is it for the sake of the little girl?' he wondered. 'Or for Luis?' He watched her for a while, then he watched Luis – and yes, there was something going on there…
Because it was obvious that Quintana cared for Patty, yet not in the way a lover might. More like a father, or even the way a friend would take care of a departed friend's wife. But…was it really possible Quintana did not have access to Harwell's bank accounts? Was he, Tanner, indeed the last link to ready access to those funds? And if so, was that money the key to their getting out of this trap?
Beth and Jenny were now talking about Scuba diving in the keys, about some sore of statue of Jesus they'd visited that was about thirty feet down on a flat sandy bottom, and about how they'd run into a Hammerhead shark on the last dive they made there…
"It's their backyard," Tanner said, rejoining the conversation. "I hope you weren't too surprised."
"No, not at all," Beth said. "Yet it almost looked like something primeval. Quite fascinating, really."
"But it was big as shit!" Jenny added, shivering as she relived the moment.
"And that, Luis," Tanner said, smiling at Quintana, "is why I never took up Scuba diving."
"Really? I have been diving here many times and never have I seen a shark. I understand Hammerheads pass by here in large groups, sometimes as many as one hundred or more at a time, but I have not seen this. I think it would be most magical to see."
"I'd shit myself," Jenny sighed, and Tanner watched Quintana's growing disapproval of Jenny's choice of words. He was scowling now, and even Patty noticed, which was, perhaps, why she spoke up just then.
"Where are you going today, Luis?" McKinnon asked.
"I was thinking of Islas Marietas, and of taking our guests to the hidden beach."
"I've always wanted to see that," Patty sighed. "I hear it's spectacular. Will you take your boat?"
"Sadly, no. She's down for engine maintenance, but I have a friend who runs a nearby diving school. Perhaps we can get him to take us, as he has a compressor."
"Count me out," Tanner said. "I'll be more than happy to sit here by the pool."
Luis looked at him for the longest time, then he looked at Patty. "Would you like to join us? Perhaps Dr. Tanner can look after the baby while we are away?"
Patty looked at Tanner then turned back to Luis. "No, I think we should all go."
And that seemed to settle the matter, at least as far as Quintana was concerned. "Good. I will make the arrangements."
Before Jenny left for her room Tanner pulled her aside and advised her to cut out the four-letter words, telling her that Quintana seemed offended by her use of vulgar language.
"Fuck you, Tanner," she hissed as she turned and walked off. "I don't care what you think!"
Tanner nodded and went to his room. There were things laid out on his bed, which had of course already been made. A swim suit, t-shirt, and running shoes had been neatly arranged there, and a one-piece lycra bodysuit was there, too, still in its factory packaging. He looked over the items and smiled – if only because everything was the correct size. So, their things had been gone through somewhere along the way, probably while they slept, and why was that not surprising?
Two Suburbans carried the group down to a large marina near the center of a large city, and the mystery was soon put to rest when he saw signs indicating they were indeed in Puerto Vallarta. Luis led them out a long pier to a very large motor yacht, and this vessel had an extremely large aft swim platform, complete with an assortment of diving gear on the aft deck, and as soon as they boarded the lines were cast off. And then a blond haired girl, a vintage southern California type, walked up to Tanner as the yacht motored slowly through the marina.
"So," she said, "you don't have a C-card?"
"What's that?" Tanner replied.
"A certification card, for Scuba diving?"
"Never been, and I'm pretty sure I don't want to learn how today."
She smiled. "My name's Carol, and Luis told me I'm supposed to teach you what you need to know."
"I see. I have an idea. Let's say we did and then hang out at the bar. Sound like a plan?"
Carol grinned. "Not if you know Luis. He wants you to see this, and believe me, I know you'll enjoy the experience."
"So, you haven't spent much time around the ocean?"
"Oh, I don't know. Does living on a sailboat count?"
"No kidding? Where was that?"
"Miami, for the most part."
"And you don't dive?"
"I don't like the idea of swimming with sharks."
"Ah. Well, there aren't that many around here."
"All it takes is one, I reckon."
The boat cleared the marina and accelerated until it was up on a plane – and Tanner blanched at the thought of how much diesel fuel was being used. "Mind if I go up to the bridge?" he asked.
"No, come on. I'll take you up."
The skipper was American, and Tanner was beginning to see a trend. Luis Quintana had surrounded himself with Americans, but – why? 'Are we less dangerous for him?' Tanner wondered. 'Was that how Harwell got mixed up in all this?' He looked at the latest all-in-one NAV displays and found the fuel flow meters and tried not to scowl as he did the math in his head, but this little forty-mile round-trip jaunt would end up costing someone around two grand at this rate of consumption, then he looked at the radar overlay and counted all the other ships already out on the water.
"Lot of traffic out already," Tanner said to the skipper.
"Yup, lots of fishermen head out around midnight. They're heading in now, get their catch to market by nine or so. Cruise ships will come in around noon and their buyers scoop up all the good stuff that's left, so you gotta shop early around here."
"Cruise ships? Really? Where from?"
"Oh yeah, lots of 'em come down from LA and San Diego. Some head on down to the canal, some go back north to LA. Usually a couple a day in here, too."
"This seems pretty fancy for a dive boat," Tanner said.
"Oh, it is, but this is more a party boat that caters to a clientele that happens to have a lot of divers."
Carol tugged at his sleeve then. "Come with me, Doug," she said, and even that was funny – because he'd never mentioned his name to her.
"Okay. Do I get the nickel tour now?"
"No, it's time to get your gear sorted out, and we'll start with your dive computer…"
"My…what?"
Then she just smiled before she turned to lead him aft, but before he left the bridge he looked at a return on the radar – and observed a large signal with no AIS identifier showing on the screen. As he walked aft he looked in the general direction of the return and spotted what looked like a navy ship of some kind knifing through the water, and he wondered, well, no, perhaps he hoped the DEA or the FBI had caught up to them.
Carol showed him the basics of putting on all the complicated looking gear, but after the yacht arrived at the larger of the two islets Beth and Jenny came aft and slipped into their stuff with practiced ease. Then Luis came aft and Tanner saw he was still fully dressed – but two of his thugs were now with him and they appeared ready to get in the water.
"So," Tanner said to Quintana, "I take it you're not coming with us?"
"No, I'm afraid something has come up that I must attend to. My associates will take you over."
Tanner saw McKinnon and her daughter inside the main saloon, but now she was avoiding eye contact with them. And this exchange had apparently gotten Beth's attention, too, for she was now studying Quintana's face and was beginning to understand the situation. Only Jenny remained completely oblivious to their peril, but then again that was just Jenny being Jenny.
Tanner turned to Carol, but she just shrugged and stepped away, effectively telling him he was now on his own, so he looked at Quintana again and noted the odd smile on his face – and the remorseless calm behind his eyes.
"So, this is it, huh?" Tanner sighed.
Quintana shrugged. "The ship you have been watching," he said, "belongs to our navy. They will be making sure that your swim is undisturbed. Now, would you care to tell me anything before you leave us?"
Tanner looked at the man and his thugs and he shrugged. "No, not really. At least not without assurances that the money will go to McKinnon, and to her alone."
He watched the expression on Quintana's face harden, and that was all Tanner needed to know. Money was money, after all, and Quintana wanted what he considered his, and his alone. He might keep McKinnon around and take care of her – or he might not – and in that case she'd be alone and quite probably broke. And if she was broke there was no telling what Quintana might force her to do.
"Enjoy your swim," Quintana said, walking back into the yacht's interior.
Now Jenny looked at the two thugs, both heavyset and menacing, and she suddenly seemed to get it. "Uh, guys, what's going on?" she whimpered…
…and Tanner sighed. "In case you haven't figured it out yet, we were kidnapped yesterday by the same cartel that's been after us for months, and it's my guess these two gentlemen are going to take us ashore and then kill us. Is that clear enough for you? Any questions?"
"You don't have to be so sarcastic, Doug."
Tanner looked at her and just shook his head. She was more dense than uranium and he just couldn't stand the sight of her just then.
But Carol helped Tanner into his buoyancy control vest and then helped him down to the swim platform, then she carefully retreated, now avoiding all eye contact. He sat on the edge of the platform and slipped on his fins and then put the mask she'd given him on, placing the snorkel in his mouth before he pushed off and entered the water. One of the thugs jumped in and swan close to Tanner, treading water while he waited for the girls – and his associate – to jump in.
The water was more green than blue, and Tanner put his face down into the water and looked around. There was a rocky bottom below and not as many fish as he expected, and most everything he saw swimming around down there was less than a foot long…in other words completely uninteresting. He heard a splashing sound and saw that Jenny and Beth were in the water, then the remaining thug jumped in and the two of them corralled Tanner and the two girls and indicated the direction they would be going by pointing at what appeared to be a low cliff.
The girls were wearing full Scuba gear, while Tanner was using a simple mask and snorkel rig, and everyone took off towards the cliff – with one of the thugs in the lead and the other bringing up the rear. An airliner took off from the airport in town and Tanner looked up at the jet as it turned to the north, probably headed to LA or Dallas, and he wished he was up there going wherever all those people were going.
'All of this has happened because of one goddamned photograph,' he sighed, shaking his head at the thought. 'And I don't deserve this. None of us does!' He turned and looked at the thug bringing up the rear and thought about trying to overpower the man, but the thug seemed to be reading his mind and simply shook his head.
As they approached the cliff an opening appeared and, waiting for a wave to subside the lead thug swam into the opening and powered through the rocky opening, then the remaining thug pushed Tanner towards the opening, in effect telling him to watch the waves and time his attempt so that he could ride a wave through the opening.
Tanner watched a wave and caught it, diving a little to clear the rocks just overhead, and when he surfaced he looked around in wonder. They were in what felt like a pool of clear blue water and smooth cliffs completely surrounded the pool, the walls of the cliff curving up to form an almost perfectly circular opening. They swam across the pool and the lead thug disappeared into another opening, then Beth and Jenny followed him – leaving Tanner and the other thug to bring up the rear.
This next passage was different. The water was quite calm and this passage was more like a long cave, though it was much longer than the first, and the only light inside the cave came from indirect sunlight hitting the sandy bottom perhaps twenty feet beneath the surface, so the rocks were bathed in a shimmering silvery blue halo that was most pleasant to watch. And while Tanner wanted to linger the thug coming up from behind was there to remind him that this was not a sightseeing trip.
A few minutes later Tanner emerged into another circular pool surrounded by yet another circular cliff topped by another circular opening, yet on one side of this pool the sandy bottom sloped up, forming a decent sized beach that was bathed in pure radiant sunlight, and Tanner thought it was the damndest sight he'd ever seen in his life. He swam over to the beach and took off his fins then walked up onto the sand. He helped the girls out of their gear and led them up onto the sand…
…and then he noticed that the two thugs were standing in waist deep water, and now silenced pistols were in their hands…
…Jenny started crying then, and Beth moved over to comfort her…
…while Tanner turned and stared at the men, and all he could think to say was "Fuck you."
One of the men raised his pistol and then an impossibly loud shot rang out; this thug's head disappeared inside a concussive spray of brain and blood…
…and before the other thug could react another shot rang out, and his face disappeared before his body crumpled and fell into the water.
Two men in black fatigues stepped out of the rocks, each carrying large rifles, and then the shorter of the two pulled out a radio and spoke into it: "Archer Base, Red 1, secure," was all he said.
Then another voice could be heard on the radio: "Archer base, Blue 2, secure here."
And a minute passed before a Blackhawk helicopter appeared overhead; several minutes later everyone had been hoisted aboard and the helicopter turned to fly west, out into the Sea of Cortez. Fifteen minutes passed before a chunky aircraft carrier appeared, it's deck packed with nothing but more helicopters, and Tanner recognized it as a US Marine Corp carrier assault ship, and the men who had rescued them were a Navy Seal Team. Another Blackhawk landed after there's, and Tanner watched as Quintana was led, in handcuffs and ankle-shackles, belowdecks, while Patty McKinnon and her baby girl were escorted by a DEA agent to the helicopter carrying Tanner, Jenny and Beth. Once she was aboard, their Blackhawk took off – and it turned towards the airport in Puerto Vallarta.
A small private jet was waiting to take Jenny and Beth back to Florida, while a jet from the embassy was waiting to take Tanner and McKinnon directly to Mexico City, and once they were on board one of the diplomatic consuls brought them up to speed after the jet was in the air.
"We'll get to the city in time to get you to the Citibank Private Banking facility downtown, and Gene Harwell's assets can be turned over to Dr. McKinnon at that point, assuming you still have the codes, Dr. Tanner."
Tanner pointed at his head. "Still right up here," he sighed, "where I left them."
"Once that's out of the way we'd recommend you both get out of the country, and as fast as humanly possible. We will not be able to protect you once you leave our custody. Is that clear?"
"I'm surprised the government is allowing her to keep any of these funds," Tanner said.
"Oh, Harwell left a bunch of money in banks around San Antonio. The DEA seized all that months ago, but as long as Dr. McKinnon doesn't enter the US with that money she'll be okay."
"Just what am I supposed to do now?" Patty said. "I mean, I can't go back to the mission clinic, I can't go home, and I…"
"You could go to Europe," Tanner said. "From there you could park the funds before coming back to the States or going, well, just about anywhere."
"Could you help me?" she pleaded.
"Me?" Tanner said. "Look, I thought you hated me."
"I don't even know you. How could I possibly hate you."
Tanner shrugged. "Well, of course I'll help you."
The consul cough politely at that point. "Look, I'm not sure either of you understand what's going on here. Your husband," he said, looking at Patty, "had been siphoning money from the cartel, and for quite some time. We understand the figure is rather significant."
Tanner looked at the consul. "You mean…"
"Yes, they're going to want it back. So far they don't know what's happened to Quintana and they probably won't for a few more hours, so we've got to get you in and out of Mexico City as quickly as possible. What you do from there is up to you. In fact, we'd rather not know what you do, if you know what I mean."
"Do you have any idea how much is involved?"
"A lot," the diplomat said. "I mean a whole lot."
"So the cartel will want it a lot? Is that what you're saying?"
"A whole lot. Yeah."
"Can you set up a charter to Geneva? For tonight?" Tanner sighed.
The consul nodded. "Yup. I can do that, but I'd recommend Bern. Smaller airport, better access to the city, and our embassy is there. Oh, and I know people that can help get the ball rolling, if that's an issue."
"Do it," Tanner said, then he turned to McKinnon. "What about you? Any plans?"
Patty held onto her little daughter as she slept on her mother's shoulder, and Tanner could see she looked absolutely shellshocked. Not a week had passed since her husband had been killed and her daughter had no idea what had happened to him; now they'd both jetted halfway around the world only to get swept up in a failed assassination and a successful DEA arrest of her dead husband's protector and business partner. She felt like a pawn being moved around the board yet the only thing she felt now was utter exhaustion. She shrugged at Tanner's question, but her eyes remained fixed on his. "I feel like I'm out of my depth right now," she said, her voice now husky, almost raspy. "If you have any ideas maybe you should just go with it."
Both Tanner and the consul thought that odd. Tanner sighed and leaned closer to her, saw the woman was walking on the ragged edge and he reached out and cupped her face in his hand for a moment. "God, what you've been through…" he said, and then he smiled that smile of his and her eyes seemed to radiate the sudden warmth she felt inside. But his smile also seemed to bust the dam that had been holding her together; he saw her swallowing hard as her eyes filled with tears, and he unbuckled his seatbelt and went to her, held her while she fell into her first real release since her husband's death. He managed to get an arm around her and with his other he cradled the little girl, holding them both now. "It's okay," he whispered in her ear. "I'm here. You can lean on me."
And so she held on to him for the longest time.
He usually looked back on that moment over the coming years with something like a sense of wonder in his heart. Life had always been somewhat predictable, Tanner told himself, until that evening flying to Switzerland. Patty had fallen asleep and he'd held the little toddler for a few hours, and after a bottle she too had fallen asleep – only she had done so on Tanner's chest, her tiny hands clutching his shirt collar. He'd wrapped a little blanket around her and had tried to imagine what Gene Harwell had felt, yet his mind always raced in endless circles as he tried to understand what Patty had been feeling and, by extension, what she'd guessed might be in store for her little girl.
Retribution? That had always been first in mind. It might have taken years for the cartel to forget about McKinnon, and probably himself as well, but time was on the cartel's side. Tanner had decided they'd have to keep a very low profile – and for years – in order to survive, yet Beth and Jenny would need to as well, and quite possibly Catherine, too. So Douglas Tanner had realized that he had five other people to protect – one way or another.
Sitting in that jet that night, flying through the night alone in oceanic darkness, he had felt the little girl's heart beating against the rhythm of his own, and impulsively he had run his fingers through her fine hair and held her closer still – and the wave that broke over him was the closest Tanner had ever come to feeling something like a parental impulse. The need to nurture, to protect, was all very human and yet here he was, approaching thirty five years of life and he'd never once felt anything like it. These new, inrushing feelings were overwhelming, literally, so much so that he was convinced he felt love for this little girl. And, by extension, mustn't he have felt something like love for Patty McKinnon?
So it was all very confusing, the things he'd felt that night.
Harwell had indeed siphoned off money from the cartel. Over the years almost twenty million dollars of pure weapons-grade siphoning, and all of it earning interest in US Dollar accounts at the branch of an American back located in Mexico City. A few days after their arrival in Switzerland the money landed in a numbered account at Credit Suisse in Bern, and lawyers were secured to handle purchasing property. He used intermediaries to contact Catherine and then Beth and Jenny and he told them what he had in mind. All his thoughts were coalescing around the little girl he had held in his arms and one by one the others got on board and flew to Geneva.
Tanner purchased a modest chateau on the waterfront in Vevey and when, in the end, his story had come full circle he came to understand that he and Gene Harwell had indeed been two sides of one coin. Every step Harwell made had carried him deeper and deeper into the underworld – and Morpheus had finally come to collect his debt, while the dreams that remained were for Tanner. He gave McKinnon another daughter along the way to figuring out the whole love thing, and over the years the other three girls in Tanner's life found themselves with child – but in the end no one talked about who the father might be. They were a family, as unconventional as that sounded.
In a house packed to the rafters with physicians all Tanner's many children had little chance. Each walked the course that had been set for them, and in time each found their way to medical schools in Switzerland, France, and the United States. Beth and Catherine spend months at a time in Ethiopia and Sudan, while Patty and Jenny rarely left Tanner's side. In this barely understandable way, life passed gently for the people at the chateau.
He wondered from time to time what had happened to Luis Quintana. He heard the old man had found suitable lodging at a SuperMax prison in Colorado, but that was about all he ever heard concerning Quintana or the cartels. Then again, he knew that one day they would come for him. It was inevitable, like living large on borrowed time, yet Tanner was determined to make the most of the time he had stolen from them.
Some nights, especially in summer when the light stayed late, he'd sit on the patio overlooking the lake and watch the moon rise over the Alps – and he thought of another night long ago. He thought of Nimiri and the red cobra and the first words the old man had spoken to him: 'And he shall go before him in the spirit and power of Elias, to turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the disobedient to the wisdom of the just; to make ready a people prepared for the Lord.' Then he would see a coin rolling through his mind's eye and he wondered from time to time which side would show when it stopped and fell to earth.
Maybe the old man had, in his end, known what he was talking about. When Douglas Tanner heard his children running among the trees and the clouds he thought he knew that at least this much was true.
© 2009-2022 adrian leverkühn | abw | and as always, thanks for stopping by for a look around the memory warehouse. This was a work of fiction, and note parts of this story were first posted 5.May.2009. © renewed 2022, AL|abw. Thanks for reading along, and see you next time.
[At The End of the Day \\ Spock's Beard]
Cracks in a Sidewalk pt 1
Posted on August 31, 2022 by adrianleverkuhnwrites
A few more pieces of the puzzle. Time for tea?
[Duncan Sheik \\ Good to Know]
Cracks in a Sidewalk
First Part
The old man enjoyed his morning walks more these days than he had in years, if only because time seemed somehow more precious now…and life a little too fragile. This was nothing new, of course, this feeling he had. Life had always been fragile and more dear than anyone imagined, yet it seemed in this day and age that precious few could see or hold on to this one most basic truth. Even less so now that life was moving so fast into the unknown. "Youth is wasted on the young," he muttered under his breath, smiling at the cliché as he watched a kid on a skateboard rumbling his way. He stepped aside as the boy sailed past, then just shook his head and rolled his eyes at the utter vacuousness of youth.
He could smell fresh roasting beans on the morning breeze and for some reason that made this morning brighter still. And then, as if right on cue, the conjoined smells of bacon and eggs on a hot-top hit him and he almost felt like a kid again. "No skateboards for me," he sighed to himself. "At least not today." He thought of his mom and dad and Palo Alto and how far away all that seemed now, yet it wasn't…not really.
He was, of course, not at all aware that he was talking to himself, and at times quite noticeably, too.
He could see his destination now, and the pain in his leg told him that was a good thing. The Spotted Zebra coffee bar, just off Ocean Boulevard in Venice Beach, had their roasters going this morning, and just the thought of a smooth double café au lait was enough to jumpstart his heart — maybe enough to face the day. He walked into the place and smiled once again when he saw that Ellie was working the counter, and he sniffed around once or twice, his nose leading him to the pastry counter.
"Fresh blackberry this morning, I see," he said to the girl behind the counter, and she returned his smile as she came over to him.
"The usual for you today?" Ellie said.
"Think you'd better make it a double," he grinned. "And I think that blackberry scone right there has my name written all over it." He looked at her with practiced ease, noted the thin bead of perspiration on her forehead and then the red eyes, and he could hear her congestion was worse today.
She rang it up and he rummaged around in his coat pocket for some money, then went to his favorite table to wait for his coffee, picking up a discarded LA Times on the way. He read through the front page, shaking his head from time to time, then Ellie brought over his coffee and the scone. "Thank you," he said, smiling up at her, but he could see how terrible she felt today.
She was, he guessed, about twenty-five. She'd told him once that she had grown up in South Central but that she'd been on her own off and on for years — and that hadn't surprised him in the least. She was Black and a little on the pudgy side of the equation but she had an adorable round face and a lovely smile, and he came here more and more because of the way her smile made him feel. But she was a little down today and that bothered him — if only because, in his way, he cared about her wellbeing.
When she was around she was in charge of the bakery side of the operation and her scones were the stuff of legend. Come autumn she started making cheesecakes, and her sweet potato cheesecakes sold out within minutes. Hollywood types called ahead to reserve whole cheesecakes, too, a fact she was proud of.
The old man made his way through the sports section and he read up on the Rams and the Chargers and their rookies progress at training camps. He finished up his coffee and left a five on the table before he stood again, and his hips and knees barked at him pretty good so he stood there a moment and let the pain subside a little, then he walked up to the counter again.
"You running a temperature, Ellie?" he asked casually.
"Whew, I don't know…but I been runnin' around like a chicken with his head cut off since four a.m. so I wouldn't be a bit surprised."
The old man rummaged around in his coat and dug out a scanning thermometer. "Lean over this way," he said gently, and he ran the scanner over her forehead twice, then her left temple before he looked at the readout. "101.4," he growled, shaking his head as he looked over his reading glasses at her. "You need to get off your feet for a day or two, before you get yourself really sick."
"Sure wish I could," she sighed. "But if I do that we don't eat."
"What time do you get off?"
"S'posed to be around noon, but ya never know."
The old man looked at his watch and nodded. "I'll be back at noon-thirty. We're gonna take a little walk," he said, smiling disingenuously.
"Noon-thirty?"
"Twelve-thirty," he shrugged.
"Aw-right," she said to him before he turned and walked out into the morning. She darted over and cleared his table, pocketing his generous tip before the owners could see the money and take it for themselves.
He started back to his place, the pain in his leg getting worse after two blacks, so he stopped along the boardwalk, sat on a low concrete wall to rub his knees for a moment. Youngsters on rollerblades drifted by with AirPods dangling from their ears, oblivious to the world around them, consciously ignoring the hundreds of tents and lean-tos set up on the beach and lining all the areas alleyways. Over the last ten years the situation here had only grown intolerably more dire, and the old man was in a better position than most to understand the true dimensions of the problem.
He stood again and rubbed his upper thighs, wishing he'd used his cane this morning but resenting the damn thing all the more because of the decline it implied, then he walked down to Breeze and turned inland. Out of habit he turned and checked his six for a tail, but in truth those days were long gone. The pain settled in again and he felt a little winded now, but this was the home stretch so he pushed on.
His tent was in the disused corner of an old asphalt parking lot about halfway between Ocean and Pacific, and he'd left Darius out front to stand guard while he went for coffee. As he walked up he could see he already had about a half dozen patients lined-up and waiting; he nodded to himself and sighed as he got close enough to recognize a few of them.
Everyone smiled at the old man as he approached, and they parted to let him pass — yet they guarded their places in the queue, some more possessively than others. His "office" was a fairly old Coleman three room tent, kind of an 'L-shaped' affair, with one of the rooms a dedicated storeroom, the big central area an exam room, complete with a discarded exam table, and with the third room set aside as his personal space — which was where he slept most nights.
The city had closed all the free clinics in the area, and only his tent and the 'illegal' clinic set up in the basement of the nearby Catholic Church were all that was left to serve a population that at times numbered ten thousand or more souls. The church clinic was closed most weekdays, leaving his tent the only available option, but as the old man dared not advertise his services most of the homeless in the area had no idea he was even around.
He kept his patient charts on an iPad, and though several nearby practices kept him stocked with everything he needed, if the city ever discovered what he was up to down here they'd have had him drawn and quartered. That led the old man to move his tent every few weeks, but he got the word out and his patients never had any trouble finding him. He'd only been 'discovered' once, but by the time code enforcement officers arrived he and his tent were already long gone.
And this morning's patients represented the usual assortment of issues found in homeless encampments everywhere. Scurvy and even malaria weren't uncommon now, even in California, as with increasing temperatures mosquito-borne illnesses were on the rise everywhere, and by the time he wrapped up this morning's queue about the worst thing he'd dealt with was a little girl with a bad cut on the bottom of her foot. He was grateful his hand was still steady enough to suture such minor wounds, but time wasn't on his side.
Another one of his 'foot-soldiers' stood guard while he walked back to the Zebra, and as Ellie was still tied up in the bakery he asked for some hot tea. Two LAPD bicycle cops came by and and ordered coffee and as they knew the old man rather well they sat with him.
"How's it hangin', Doc," Bud Kurzweil asked as he sat across from the old man.
"Down to my knees. You?"
"SSDD," Kurzweil said, wiping a little sweat from his forehead after he pulled off his headgear. "Anything new we need to know about?"
"I'm running tests on two possible TB cases," the old man said. "I'll let you know if they come back positive."
The other cop, a rookie just getting familiar with life outside of police academy, simply shook her head.
A slight tremor passed through Kurzweil's hands. "Damn, not that shit again. Man, you know if it pops here again they'll restart the sweeps."
"I know, I know," the old man said. "Yet, if you really think about it that's probably the wrong way to contain an outbreak. You can't contact trace if you don't know where the infected people are hanging out."
"It's all optics, Doc. There ain't no policy anymore, there's just politics."
The old man nodded. "Same as it ever was. Say, I've been meaning to ask…how's the screenplay coming along?"
Kurzweil nodded. "My agent got a good response from DreamWorks, so who knows…"
"Really? Bud! That's fantastic!"
Kurzweil grinned. "Thanks, Doc. I appreciate all you've done. Really."
The old man smiled at that, but then he saw Ellie and his smile vanished. She looked beat, and if anything her eyes were even more red now. Then he noticed she was a little unsteady on her feet and he got up to help her as she came out from behind the counter. "I'll see you guys later," he said to the cops as he helped her out the door. He'd brought his cane this time so he had her hold onto his left arm and lean into him as they walked back to his tent.
Darius was manning the fort now and when he saw the Doc and his latest patient he unzipped the tent's opening and helped them inside. And perhaps not surprisingly Ellie had no idea this old man was a physician, or that he was one of LAs seemingly infinite supply of homeless men and women.
"I heard about you," she said, her voice now quietly unsteady. "You the doc everyone always talkin' 'bout. Like you was a ghost or something, ya know?"
He smiled as he took her vitals and then he let her ramble for a while before he got down to business. He asked easy, direct questions about her sweats, about where it hurt, and if she'd been coughing much…
"Not much, usually at night," he said as he palpated the lymph nodes in her neck and under her arms.
"Night sweats?"
She nodded. "Yeah. Pretty bad, too."
"What's your pee look like?"
"Oh man, kinda like iced tea, ya know?"
"Pain in the lower back?"
"Can you point to where it feels the worst?"
She reached around and pointed to where her kidneys were.
"Any pain in your spine, like maybe when you bend over?"
He listened to her lungs, her heart and then for her bowel sounds. "You eating okay?"
She shook her head. "Ain't been hungry, ya know?"
He nodded. "You live with anyone?"
"My grandmother and my little brother."
"Your grandmother…has she been sick recently?"
"She's had a bad cough all summer."
"Does she still work?"
"Uh-huh. She work at a nursing home, making beds and stuff, sometime she work in the kitchen."
"Oh," he smiled innocently, "where's that?"
"Shady Acres, over on Pico."
"She on Medicare?"
"Nope, not yet?"
"You kiddin', right?"
"How's your brother feeling?"
"Okay, I guess."
"Any cough?"
She looked down and nodded.
"I take it you don't have insurance?"
"Oh, I got it alright, but we gotta pay something like the first four thousand bucks…"
"I know," the old man sighed.
"You know what I got, Doc?"
The old man shook his head. "Gonna have to do a few tests first, but has your grandmother had a TB test recently?"
"TB? What's that?"
The old man shook his head. "Don't worry about it, Ellie," he said as he got pulled over a tray. "I'm going to draw blood now, then we're going to see if you can cough up some crud for me, 'cause I want to run some tests on that stuff too. And I'll need a urine sample, too."
"Hey Doc, like you know I can't pay for none of this stuff, right?"
"Not a problem, Ellie."
"What you mean, not a problem? Who gonna pay for this stuff?"
The old man just shrugged. "You won't owe anything to anybody, okay? Ellie, you hearin' me? And I want to see your grandmother and brother tomorrow."
"She be workin' tomorrow."
"No problem. Y'all come on down after she gets home. I'll be here."
She nodded uneasily as he put what looked like a large rubber band around her upper arm…
He saw a dozen more patients after Ellie left and about half past six an old slate blue Land Rover pulled into the parking lot; Darius carried a cooler full of blood and culture samples over and put it on the floor behind the front seat, then he got into the front passenger seat. Once he was buckled-in the old Defender took off into the last of the day's rush hour traffic.
The old man took off his exam gloves and finished up his patient notes on the iPad before scrubbing his hands in a foaming cleanser, then he walked out of the tent and pulled up a folding lawn chair and stretched out. He opened the cooler Darius had left for him and popped the top on an ice-cold Diet Dr. Pepper, downing the can in one long pull. He pulled out his iPhone and checked his messages and then his email, hoping the caffeine in the soda would keep him alert for another hour or so…just as Bud Kurzweil pulled up on his bicycle.
"Hey doc, you done for the day?"
"You know, for some reason I feel certain that's not the case."
Kurzweil chuckled at that, but he quickly did an about face and turned serious: "What are the symptoms of TB?"
"Generally speaking, persistent cough, fatigue, fever, night sweats and loss of appetite. Blood in the sputum is also a pretty good predictor. So, what's goin' on?"
"I think we might have a cluster down by the north jetty."
"Isolate 'em. Call Public Health."
"Doc, you know if I make that call they'll just make a sweep and push 'em off into the weeds."
The old man sighed and pointed to another lawn chair. "Want a DDP?"
"Sure," the cop said as he opened the chair and sat. He took the offered can and popped the top, then he slammed it down, waiting about thirty seconds for the desired effect to take hold — which started out as a low hiss before it burst out into the open as a plaster-cracking belch. "Goddam, I love this crap."
The old man nodded as he burped. "You know it," he added, as a little extra hiss-burp slipped out his nose. "No better cure for bloating out there."
"So?" Kurzweil sighed. "Do I make the call?"
"I can't walk that far, Bud."
"No problem, Father. We got ya covered."
"See if you can get me a couple of paramedics down there. Better yet, call Daniel Freeman and get some kids in training. They could use the experience."
"A nurse and a lab tech wouldn't hurt my feelings any."
"Got it. Where's Darius?"
"With Deb, off to the lab."
"How's he doin'?"
The old man shrugged. "Oh, you know. Good times, bad times."
Kurzweil shook his head. "Man, he was good. One of the greats, ya know?"
The old man nodded. Darius Jenkins had played with the Rams for seven years — before a career ending block wrecked his right knee. He'd been a wealthy man for a few years after that, until the hangers on slowly but surely bled him dry. The old man had found him living in a tent down here a few years ago; now he worked for a friend of the old man and was getting his life back together, piece by slowly broken piece.
"You had anything to eat today?" Kurzweil asked.
"A scone, I seem to recall. When do you two get off?"
"Off? Hell, we're on OT now — but then again we're off for two whole days — starting at midnight, I do believe."
"Where's the rookie? Down at the jetty?"
"Yup," Kurzweil nodded. "Got a car down there with her."
The old man sighed. "You got someone in mind to drive me there?"
"They should be here any minute."
"Am I that predictable?"
Kurzweil grinned as he shrugged. "Yo no se, Amigo…"
"Pues…porque asi es."
"Truer words, Father. Truer words."
The old man fired off a text just as a black and white squad car pulled up beside the old man's tent, and a rookie stepped out to stay with the tent until Darius returned. "You going to ride with us?" the old man asked Kurzweil.
"In this traffic? No way!"
He finished up after midnight and walked back to the beach parking lot at the end of Speedway, and he smiled when he saw the blue Land Rover was already waiting there for him. Kurzweil and his rookie were long gone now, but Bud had promised to drop by in the morning and check on him, maybe grab lunch if the old man had time. Hopefully he'd have results from the lab by then, because Gene Sherman had a very bad feeling about what was happening down here.
© 2022 adrian leverkühn | abw | and as always, thanks for stopping by for a look around the memory warehouse…and note this story is fiction, pure and simple…
The Eighty-eighth Key, Chapter 69
Harry's tale is rapidly drawing to a close, so hang on tight.
[supertramp \\ know who you are]
Debra Sorensen watched the General as he strutted around the underground facility, and she concentrated on his ever-shifting aura. Unlike her father, or even Delbert Moloch, this man rarely displayed the oily black shimmers of overt evil that those other two had, yet even so she picked up patterns and colors that upset her. While he wasn't exactly evil, he wasn't the benign character he so often pretended to be—despite all his airs of calm passivity. But now, with Callahan's and Goodman's disappearance, his aura had flared once again, filling the space around his seething eyes with hideous green streamers.
Then she parsed his thoughts.
He was angry because a tracking device had failed. Because the tracking device could only follow people traveling back in time. But not into the future. He was, for some reason, now thinking about Franklin Roosevelt, the depression era president. But why? What could someone who had passed away almost eighty years ago have to do with the future? She struggled to remember Roosevelt and grew faintly disoriented when she thought she recalled meeting him recently, but when she saw Roosevelt in the General's thoughts her sense of disorientation only grew more diffuse, almost like a heavy fog had settled over her. Then she saw huge, misshaped beings, squat triangular white-skinned things that moved with ponderous heaviness, and she saw the General talking with Roosevelt and one of these beings…
Krell. They called themselves Krell, and Debra wondered why that sounded so familiar?
She followed him to the huge orca pool on the lower level, and she watched the General's aura as it shifted from red to green and finally to a gentle cool blue, so she naturally concluded that he came here to relax—but as she looked on he waded out into the water – and then just disappeared.
A minute passed, then two, and she ran out and looked down into the peaceful abyss and saw…nothing. No orcas, and no General. He had simply disappeared.
She focused on the water and tried to follow his thoughts but she found that way blocked, as if someone was deliberately trying to keep her away from the General's thoughts. But…who among the people in the underground complex was capable of that? No one she was aware of, with the possible exception of Brendon.
So she made her way up to the living quarters, and she found Brendan in the dining room reading a book and waving at the sky. She picked up an omelet and went to a nearby table and watched the boy, watched his ever shifting aura, but all she could make out was a simple veil of swirling cool blues. When she entered his mind and began sifting through his thoughts he stopped reading and looked up from his book for a moment, then he turned and looked at her.
"What are you doing?" he asked.
"Me? Why…nothing. Nothing at all?"
Then she heard his thoughts, now directed at her: 'You don't belong here. Leave. Now.'
She looked away then finished her eggs and, now ignoring the boy, she left the room, doing her best to clear her mind.
'So, I'm not the only one,' she thought. 'Is that was this place is all about? Corralling us all in one place so they—whoever they are—can keep us under lock and key?' That would explain why the General was so upset about Callahan's disappearance, wouldn't it? 'But, where did he go? And why weren't there any orcas in the pool?'
Jim watched as Callahan and the woman were put into stasis, but he was still not sure this was the best way to deal with the two humans. Callahan's abilities were just blooming, but it was the woman who presented the biggest threat. She'd jumped, admittedly while she slept, beyond his ability to track, which meant she'd left this galaxy—yet she'd returned to her cabin within minutes. If this was indeed true she'd exceeded everyone's expectations. And if this proved to be the case, as it appeared to be, then these humans were indeed in a race against time.
How long would it take this species to fully evolve this latest ability? On a planetary scale? A hundred years? A thousand? And then what?
And then what, indeed.
That was the real question, wasn't it?
Humanity had proven to be a predatory species almost without parallel, but now they were standing on the threshold of becoming members of a very elite group. There were, at present, only a handful of species in this galaxy capable of roaming the universe, so the question being posed wasn't a trivial one.
Should they be stopped. Now. Before a sufficient number acquired the ability to jump as this human woman had. The Krell had already voiced their opinion: humans should be left alone to develop without interference. The Aerons, at least the Pinks among them, had also decided against any interference, while the Blues and Greens were actively trying to manipulate the outcome. The Sidions viewed humanity as a plague and wanted them destroyed, but for now their political leadership was divided on how best to accomplish this. Active intervention would draw a violent response from both the Krell and the Aerons and that might lead to open hostilities the likes of which hadn't been seen in the galaxy for almost a million years.
Which left Jim's people, the Centaurons, as the deciding factor. If the Centaurons and the Sidions formed an alliance, war might be averted but humanity would in short order be eradicated. If his people sided with the Krell and the Aerons, humanity might be saved but at the cost of open warfare, as the Sidions seemed unwilling to negotiate any outcome that didn't include humanity's obliteration. Jim's task was therefore quite simple: to determine which side the Centaurons would take in this dispute he needed to develop an understanding of how potentially dangerous humanity could become if turned loose on the universe.
But there was one other concern. An even greater concern.
The Others. The deciders, the final arbiters, the group known as the Phage.
There was evidence that the Others had detected humanity's first infantile interferences with time, and they never allowed such species free reign. And no one tried to stop the Others, for they were simply too powerful. If they were indeed coming to this solar system, time was now of the essence, and a decision could not be put off for much longer.
He regarded the two humans in stasis with something akin to wonder. Few species evolved to permit travel at the Speed of Thought, and fewer still evolved that could bend the laws of Time, yet this species was on the edge of the abyss, among the few that had evolved both abilities, and at the same time. The reality of this development was almost beyond comprehension, because if left on their own these humans could, in time, evolve to challenge the abilities of the Others.
And that one simple fact, more than any other, was what had long filled Jim with a sense of wonder. But now, a molten sensation of dread filled his mind—for even as he stared at Callahan in the stasis chamber the human's form began to pulse and shimmer…just before it disappeared.
[app \\ to one in paradise]
The Otter and The Owl
Seasoned Greetings
Hyperion, Chapter 10 and CODA
Hyperion, Chapter 9
teedeedub on The Otter and The Owl
adrianleverkuhnwrite… on Seasoned Greetings
adrianleverkuhnwrite… on The Otter and The Owl
teedeedub on Seasoned Greetings
COP related
Flying related
Life (romance, etc)