As the wounded man was wheeled away another uniformed man came into my little cubicle. He was a beefy-looking German with a name tag on his heavy shirt that read horlenger. A blue UN beret, folded over, was stuck under his shirt’s shoulder loop.
‘Simpson?’
‘The same,’ I said.
Horlenger grunted, produced a folded-over topo map. ‘This house, the one that has the man and the boy. Can you show it to me on the map?’
I said, ‘Can you show me the highway where I was picked up? By the three shot-up UN vehicles?’
‘Ja, I can,’ he said. He pushed aside my ice water on the little side table and unfolded the map. He oriented me by pointing out the stretch of highway where I had been rescued. I recalled the hill and my little run, and I said, ‘On the other side of the hill. Right here. A farmhouse, a big barn and a pickup truck in the front yard. There’s a field over here that should be a good landing place.’
Horlenger just nodded, folded the map up. ‘I hope you know what you’re doing,’ he said.
‘How’s that?’
He shook his head. ‘In a few minutes I am going to ask two, maybe three crews to risk their lives, ja! Not to mention the equipment, which we don’t have enough of. All is “being threatened this afternoon. All for an old man and a boy. And a dog. When we could do much more, elsewhere, with what we barely have. You understand?’
‘Yeah, I understand. But it’s personal. They saved my life, and I promised them.’
He nodded. ‘Then maybe you should go. Hmm?’
‘If I could, I would.’
‘Bah,’ Horlenger said, and he stalked off. I rolled over on my side, pulled up the blankets, and despite the lumpiness of the mattress and the noise in the ER I fell right asleep. As far as I could tell, I didn’t dream of a damn thing.
Wet. Cold. Wet. Cold. I woke up with something slathering against my face, and I looked into sad brown eyes and a furry face. I coughed and sat up. The dog called Tucker got back down on the floor, having been up on his hindquarters, licking my face. I heard a boy’s laugh and sat up and rubbed at my eyes.
‘Well,’ Stewart said, smiling at me, his arm round his grandson’s shoulders. Jerry had a little blue knapsack in his hands and his nose was still running. Behind them, smiling like she had arranged the whole damn thing, was Ms Cecile O’Ryan.
‘Hey,’ I said. ‘You guys OK?’
Jerry piped up. ‘We flew in a helicopter! And Tucker peed on the floor!’
‘I’m sure he did,’ I said. ‘Flying like that can be scary.’
Stewart came over, offered me his hand, which I gladly shook. He said, ‘Good for you, Samuel. You didn’t forget.’
‘Not for a moment,’ I said.
Then he choked up some, started stammering, ‘You have no idea what we owe you, what it meant to see…’
Cecile O’Ryan stepped forward and started tugging at Stewart’s elbow. ‘Now, I’m sure you’d love to talk some more to Mister Simpson, but he’s still under treatment and needs his rest. If you come this way, I’ll have someone from the nursing staff check you both and get a hot meal into you. All right?’
So they went away, Tucker pausing just to look back at me. Jerry did the same, giving me a little bye-bye wave with his hands, which I returned. They turned the comer, by a nurse’s station, and then Ms O’Ryan came traipsing back, clipboard held up against her chest like a little shield. She came into my area, pulled the curtain shut and said, ‘Ready to get to work?’
‘I thought you told the Carrs that I need my rest,’ I said.
She smiled unpleasantly at me. ‘I lied.’
I folded my arms. ‘Fair enough. Ask away.’ I decided then that I still didn’t like her one bit, and that the matter of Peter could wait until I saw Jean-Paul.
I answered Cecile O’Ryan’s questions for the next hour, and then another German officer came in, a blond-haired guy with schneider on his name tag. He spread a big topo map over the top of my hospital bed. From the ambush site of a few days back — and Miriam’s alive, Miriam’s alive, came the singing voice inside my head—I did my best to reconstruct my travels, though I wished I had a better idea of where that damn militia camp was located. Schneider’s face darkened some when I told him about the soldiers I had seen shot and the Luftwaffe pilot’s body I’d seen hanging, and he made a series of marks on a little notepad he was carrying. He asked me about the camp’s defenses and the number of militiamen I’d seen and the weapons they’d carried, and I told him about the netting overhead and the spread-out nature of the place. He said, ‘Five minutes. Just five minutes with one of the American spy satellites and I would know where that place was. Just five minutes.’
Eventually he left and Cecile O’Ryan said, ‘Would you like to go home?’
‘Now?’ I asked, shocked.
She laughed. ‘No, not now. Maybe tomorrow or the next day. But I think you deserve a trip home, after all you’ve been through.’
Sure. Head on out. And I still had a bit of business to attend to, a bit of business that required me to talk to somebody other than Ms Cecile O’Ryan, from the large UN bureaucracy that was running things.
‘Jean-Paul Cloutier,’ I said.
‘Yes?’
‘My section leader. Is he still around?’
She made a notation. ‘I believe so. Why? Do you want to talk to him?’
You better believe it, honey, I thought. I have a little tale to tell him, about Peter and hidden radios and betrayal. Aloud I said, ‘Yes, as soon as I can. I just want to see… Well, I just want to see how he and the others in my section are doing.’
O’Ryan nodded, still smiling. I guess she was now my new best friend. ‘All right. I’ll see what I can do. In the meantime, why don’t we move you out of here into someplace more comfortable?’
‘Sure,’ I said.
Which was what they did.
About ten minutes later I was in another part of the hospital, maybe a part where family members could stay while their loved ones were under the knife. I was in a tiny hotel-like room, and I shivered as I remembered that unheated and unlit motel we had all stayed in. It seemed such a long time ago. I was surprised to see two muddy duffel bags on the floor and I opened them up. I felt my throat get thick. My old gear, including my Sony camera stuff and my computer terminal, all in one place. Even some old clothes — though laid out on the bed was what I had been wearing when I had been picked up, freshly laundered.
I went over to a small window and looked outside, feeling calm and peaceful from just looking at all those brilliant electric lights around me, bright lights forcing back the darkness. There were vehicles of all types in the parking lot—civilian trucks and passenger cars, military lorries and even a couple of armored APCs and it was just pleasurable to see them on the move. I looked out and in the distance, on the horizon, was a small orange glow. A fire of some sort. I only hoped that the polite German who had aided in my interrogation had located the camp where I had been kept and was busily blasting it off the face of the earth.
Before I gave myself the luxury of a thorough cleansing I took a small chair from in front of the writing table and shoved it under the main doorknob. Then I made sure that both locks were secured. Only then did I go into the bathroom. I looked at the mirror and saw red-rimmed eyes, a scabbed-over face that had been swabbed with some sort of disinfectant, and nearly a week’s worth of beard that still looked like I had been growing it for all of three days. But behind me was a shower. I turned on the faucet and hot water came out, lots and lots of hot water. Believe it or not, I spent a whole hour in that hot and steamy little room, finally getting myself properly cleaned up.