Bright kid, no matter how sold he was on the old man’s daughter he had thought things through. Dan Brenckmann — who was nobody in particular from Boston — was not going to get within fifty miles of DC at a time like this without being arrested or turned back or possible shot if he pushed his luck. None of which was going to help Gretchen if she had been caught up in the fighting.
Maddeningly, it had taken nearly twenty-four hours to obtain the clearances to get Dan Brenckmann, and two of Claude Betancourt’s beefier, ex-military staffers through to the beleaguered capital city.
Miraculously, Dan had located Gretchen on Thursday and been near or actually at her side ever since.
When Claude Betancourt, by then in despair, had got the kid’s call telling him that Gretchen was alive in intensive care at Bethesda, he had very nearly expired with relief. At that moment he would have given the boy a million dollars if he had asked, except no son of Walter and Joanne Brenckmann would ever ask for any kind of reward for doing the right thing. In any event Dan Brenckmann already thought he had won life’s lottery just finding Gretchen alive in the death and mayhem of what had been a great city only a few days before.
The story was still a little sketchy.
Mainly because Gretchen had still not recovered consciousness.
Notwithstanding, Dan had painstakingly unravelled a little of the barely credible tale of how she must have survived the bombing and the subsequent assault on the Main State Building at 2201 C Street, NW.
It seemed that Gretchen had been with George Ball, the Under Secretary of State when the first truck bomb detonated. Ball had died in this explosion, or been crushed by falling debris, nobody knew for sure which. Gretchen meanwhile had been briefly knocked out and buried. Possibly only minutes later there were further big detonations and rescuers carried her out of the Under Secretary’s office. By then there were gunmen in the building whose sole mission was to kill everybody.
It was like something out of a Gothic nightmare!
It seemed likely that Gretchen — unable to walk unaided and probably partially blinded — had been hidden in a small third floor storeroom and the door behind her locked. Both her companions in the hideaway were later discovered dead from multiple gunshot wounds from a fusillade fired randomly through the still locked door. Doctor’s speculated that Gretchen’s survival at this point was because the body of a Marine Corps Corporal — a man from the ceremonial guard platoon on duty that evening in the grounds of the Main State Building — had taken the brunt of this ‘volley of automatic fire’, meaning that both the bullets which had hit her already prone body must have lost the greater part of their ‘punch’ by the time they entered her back.
Gretchen and her dead companions had lain undiscovered for the best part of eighteen to twenty hours in that lonely, locked, darkened room. It was a measure of how lucky she had been that Gretchen was the only living survivor discovered in that part of the building during the day after the initial uprising.
For most of that day the ruined State department had been in the hands of the rebels who, after assuaging their blood lust had begun to systematically ransack the areas of the complex undamaged by fire before air strikes cleared the barricades off C Street and two companies of Marines from the newly bussed in 3rd Marine Division had stormed the Main State Building and over run the by then disorganised, exhausted and apparently, largely inebriated rebels in less than a bloody hour.
Gretchen had been taken first to an emergency field hospital at nearby Rawlins Park. This was where the medics had attempted to ‘document her’. She had been ‘Patient R0672MSB’ at that stage. ‘R’ indicated she had first been processed at Rawlins Park, ‘0672’ meant she was the six-hundred-and-seventy-second person ‘documented’, and ‘MSB’ meant she had been sent to the field hospital from either the Mains State Building or its immediate vicinity. Her age was assessed as ’25 to 30’, her height was measured as five feet nine inches, and her hair described as ‘brown’. Two partially deformed 5.56-millimetre rounds were removed from Gretchen’s back at Rawlins Park; one from beside her ninth vertebra, the other from the lining of her left lung. It had not been possible to x-ray her torso prior to operating to remove the bullets; or to assess the extent of her other internal injuries. The patient was ‘unconscious on arrival, throughout initial triage and processing, operative procedures and at the time of her transfer to NNMC’.
Although the National Naval Medical Center at Bethesda, Maryland had been attacked by rebels early in the uprising, this assault had been driven off by an ad hoc force of Navy MPs, State National Guardsmen and Marines who had raced to the hospital as soon as the fighting had broken out.
It was likely that Gretchen had been one of the first casualties from the ‘Foggy Bottom combat zone’ to be carried across the city to Bethesda on the so-called ‘Sikorsky Shuttle’. The courage and the sheer, bloody-minded tenacity of the men who flew the first four US Navy Sikorsky SH-3 Sea Kings that were diverted from ‘war missions’ to evacuate the most seriously wounded to the one remaining largely undamaged hospital in the city, would resonate down through the coming decades of American history. Hundreds of lives — like Gretchen’s — would have ended squalidly in overwhelmed, under-equipped and under fire emergency medical stations but for the bravery — which frankly, defied belief — of those men who had flown, time and again back into the fiercest fire fights. Eventually, dozens of helicopters had joined the mercy flights, many being shot down including two of the original four SH-3 Sea Kings.
At Bethesda x-rays revealed Gretchen’s skull was fractured, thankfully an undisplaced series of cranial fractures radiating out from an area approximately an inch above her left ear. She had three damaged vertebra — seven, nine and ten — again cracked, apparently undisplaced hairline fractures. Her left shoulder had been dislocated and her left calf broken, a clean break.
The crisis had come while she was on the operating table at Bethesda — surgeons were tidying up the bullet wounds, setting her broken left leg and investigating the mass of welts and deep bruises all over her torso for further soft tissue or organ damage — and Gretchen had stopped breathing.
Dan had read the notes of what had happened next with horror.
She had been dead on the table; nothing had seemed to work.
Then, after a tracheotomy, cardiac shocks and two minutes of manual resuscitation, Gretchen had spontaneously sucked air into her lungs via the tube in her throat and she had lived…
Mercifully, Dan had not known that, any of it until thirty-six hours later.
When he had got to the NNMC its gates were thronged with people desperately searching for missing loved ones and he would never have got into the hospital without the magical ‘clearances’ he had obtained from Claude Betancourt before setting out for DC.
By then the hospital had formed a small team specifically to identify the living, the dying and the dead coming through its doors. Dan had immediately offered his services, ensuring his new colleagues knew Gretchen’s details and where she might have been brought in from; thereafter he had started to systematically search the grief stricken wards overflowing with traumatised, suffering humanity.
Dan had know it was a long shot coming to Bethesda but the streets around the Main State Building were still a battlefield and if Gretchen was still in the middle of that she was probably dead. Except, he could not allow himself to think that way. If she was alive and safe someplace that was good, he would find her later.