But what if she was badly hurt?
Unable to defend herself?
Alive but helpless?
Where was she most likely to end up?
At around four o’clock on Thursday afternoon he had found himself standing at the foot of Gretchen’s bed. He had been trembling like a leaf, his eyes misted with unbearable relief…
‘Is she something to you?’ A nurse had asked him, touching his arm as she took a moment to draw breath amidst the ongoing mayhem.
Dan had sighed.
‘Yes. Pretty much everything actually.’
Claude Betancourt shook the younger man’s hand and held onto it for several seconds.
“How’s our girl today, Dan?”
Dan Brenckmann tried not to broadcast his worry but that was not easy when you were feeling as comprehensively torn up inside as he was feeling at that moment.
“The same, sir,” he murmured, attempting a tight-lipped smile and failing dismally. Each day he hoped for some tiny sign of improvement, a suggestion of a spark of life, recovery, genuine hope. The Doctor’s half-suspected Gretchen would be blind. Brain damage had been hinted at but not specifically voiced; she had had a bad knock on the head and been without oxygen on the operating table for one, two, perhaps several minutes. What with one thing and another the omens were uniformly bad. It cut him to pieces to see Gretchen with her arms full of tubes, her throat opened, lying inert in the big hospital cot. “The same…”
“When you’ve been around as long as I have, son,” the old man decided, releasing Dan’s hand and taking him by the elbow, “the same is good news. Trust me, it is good news that our girl is holding her own. If I was a religious man, which I’ve never been, I’d be down on my knees thanking my God for ‘the same’.”
Dan Brenckmann nodded numbly.
While he was near Gretchen he could hold himself together; when he left her side it was as if his strength evaporated.
“Give yourself a break, son,” Claude Betancourt ordered gently. “Go for a walk. Have a beer if you can find one. Gretchen doesn’t need us right now but when she wakes up properly she’ll need us. Trust me, she’ll need us.”
Chapter 22
There were tents being erected by filthy, haggard looking men on the boggy ground within sight of the road heading down to Centerville and the old Civil War battlefield of Bull Run. There was nothing fancy about the POW camp; the Army had strung barbed wire around the perimeter and was keeping the rebels and their collaborators back with the threat of fifty-calibre machine guns mounted on jeeps.
The first two nights it had rained and the hurriedly erected arc lights had failed; thirty prisoners had been gunned down attempting to escape.
Camp Benedict Arnold!
Major General Colin Dempsey had allowed himself a brief guffaw at the name. Somebody still had a sense of humour. Naming a shit hole like this for a Revolutionary War turncoat like Benedict Arnold was a classy touch. Likewise, the refusal to prioritise the raising tents for the overlarge contingent of FBI men who were under the mistaken impression that they owned the inmates of the prison cage. If J. Edgar Hoover’s boys wanted a nice dry tent or two in which to ‘interview’ rebels they could put them up themselves.
Dempsey stared across the coils of barbed wire at the shambling mass of humanity inside Camp Arnold. The men and the small number of women trudging aimlessly or squatting on their haunches around smouldering fires fuelled with green wood, had about them the look of a rag tag defeated Confederate Army of yore. Separate from the rest were forty or so people of color in the cage. They huddled together for safety; the FBI had probably only rounded them up because they were still convinced the civil rights movement was in some way involved in the uprising.
The sixty-one year old Washingtonian mood was as jaundiced as his soul these days. It would not have surprised Dempsey one jot if most of the people in the cage still called the nearby battlefield by its Southern, rebel name, Manassas. Some of the ‘rebels’ had fought with maniacal bravery, many had died charging machine guns and tanks, or had stood their ground with hopeless, doomed courage even after they had survived the first napalm and rocket strikes by the A4-Skyraiders Curtis LeMay had ruthlessly called down upon every possible insurgent strong point. But the courage of religious zealots rushing towards the promised land, or the one-eyed conviction of men who had convinced themselves they had a constitutional right to overthrow what they construed to be tyranny by force, or of men who reserved to themselves the right to exact whatever revenge took their fancy against those who they believed had done them ill was hardly a thing of any honour. Wherever the ‘rebels’ had seized ground or roamed they had murdered, looted and raped; women old and young, girls, and small children had been subjected to a sustained outrage that would have not been out of place in the sack of a medieval city by Genghis Khan’s Mongol horde. The emerging scale of the sexual violence spoke to the fact that the ‘rebels’ had deliberately paused every time they had seized new ground, not to secure their lines or to prepare for the next move forward, but to methodically murder, loot and rape their way through whole neighbourhoods. Hardly any woman who had fallen into the hands of the rebels had not been brutally violated, usually by gangs of men drunk on killing, alcohol, drugs or some kind of vilely warped religious need to take out their sense of injustice and rage on the womenfolk of their clan enemies.
It was now evident that within hours of the outbreak of the rebellion it had disintegrated into an insane orgy of murder, torture and bestiality; it was as if the ‘rebels’ had forgotten they were supposed to be toppling a government in the euphoria of sacking the nation’s capital.
Major General Colin Powell Dempsey had always considered himself to be an honourable and humane man; whenever possible during his career in the Army, and in civilian life, he had been mindful to conduct himself by the tenets of his Episcopalian upbringing in rural Washington State. He still considered himself to be a good man, a Christian man, albeit one driven to do terrible things in the defense of everything that he held dear and sacred. However, lately righteous anger had become his guiding star, no matter that sometimes it made him no better than his enemies. Duty was not and never had been a kind mistress.
He turned to face the ragged line of prisoners he had ordered to be paraded in full view of the huddled crowds inside Camp Benedict Arnold for the last two hours.
Unhurriedly, he drew his service pistol, a forty-five calibre Remington Rand Model 1911A1. The weapon had been with him through Tunisia, Sicily, Italy and the Ardennes. It had sat on his hip when he had been a staffer with Patton as he raced the British to Messina in 1943; and it had come home with him after he was invalided back to the States at Bastogne. During the ‘liberation’ of Bellingham it had never left its holster but after the sights he had seen in the streets of Washington in the last two days, the gun felt reassuringly heavy in his right hand as he looked up to scowl at the line of prisoners, drawn randomly from the caged inmates by snatch squads of Marine Corps MPs shortly after dawn that morning.
When Dempsey looked at the rebels he did not see human beings.
All he saw were the broken, burned, mutilated bodies in the road, the thousand yard stares of the countless women who had survived their ordeals at the hands of these animals and the smoking husk of the Smithsonian and practically every other great building in Washington.