These men had their own satellite receiver on the roof of the firehouse. They waited on the man who waited.
Chapter Four
The patients referred to the room as the torture chamber. Its location belowground next to the VA hospital's parking garage added to that image. There were no windows and the echo of car doors being slammed and engines running echoed dully through the cinder block wall separating it from the garage. Inside, the rows of machines with their Velcro belts and gleaming metal would have done the Spanish Inquisition proud. Patients sweat and cried while they were strapped to those machines as they worked to rehabilitate damaged parts of their bodies or to compensate for missing ones. On one end of the room, rows of prostheses, crutches, canes, and wheelchairs added a macabre tilt.
McKenzie liked the physical-therapy room because it reminded him of the weight rooms where he used to spend all his off-duty time. It was the only part of the hospital where he felt comfortable. His ward upstairs was full of whining old military retirees too afraid to die. The little park in the back of the hospital where he was supposed to go every day for some sun depressed him with its view of jets landing and taking off at nearby Miramar Naval Air Station. McKenzie had staged out of Miramar several times when he was on SEAL Team Two back in the late eighties and those memories only brought bitter bile to the back of his throat. In the other direction lay the Pacific Ocean off of San Diego and it was in those waters that McKenzie had received his SEAL training when he was a much younger man. It also wasn't a direction he favored.
"Are we ready?" Nurse Stedman was a petite, wizened brunette in her early fifties who had seen a generation of men, old and young, through physical therapy here. When she'd first started they'd handled loads of Marines, their bodies torn and maimed in the jungles of Vietnam. She'd thought she'd seen and heard it all but this SEAL, McKenzie, was someone very unique, in even her experience.
"Ready," McKenzie growled, hopping onto the rubdown table. He pulled off his shirt without being asked and extended the stub of his left arm.
The arm had been gone when he'd arrived here two months ago, but he'd needed an operation to smooth off the stump and then he'd been confined to his bed as he fought off several infections from what had been a very dirty wound. He had told her he lost the arm to a tank. He'd also said that he and his partner had knocked out that tank as well as another. Stedman had instinctively thought he was lying at first. Marines and SEALs would come up with anything to try to impress a nurse. But she'd checked his medical records and discovered to her surprise that he was telling the truth. There was no hint in the records telling where this had happened but despite her world-weariness, and maybe because of it, Stedman had an itching desire to know McKenzie's story.
The doctors had been forced to take the arm four inches above the elbow. The mangled joint had still been attached when he'd arrived, the original amputation being below the elbow, but there was too much damage to the joint. Besides, the original surgical amputation had been crudely done. Stedman had checked the records and discovered that that initial procedure had been done by a ship's doctor on board a submarine. She shuddered to think of the scene inside the cramped, insufficiently equipped infirmary onboard that vessel. It must have been a desperate situation for the sub's doctor, a general practitioner, to do the surgery. And the submarine must have been someplace where an aerial evacuation had not been possible, which further fueled Stedman's interest given that there wasn't an ocean in the world where the U.S. Navy couldn't get a medevac helicopter in a few hours' time.
Stedman picked up the artificial arm which had undergone several adjustments based on their last attempt at fitting. She'd had to stand over the bored specialist to get the job done right, but she felt McKenzie was worth the time and effort.
"Let's see how it works now." She attached the arm, using a Velcro and leather harness that slipped over both of McKenzie's shoulders and hooks that went into loops left at the end of the stub. The massive muscles in his upper arm had been salvaged and the hope was that the operation of the prosthesis could be linked to those muscles. It took them twenty minutes to get it on.
"How does it feel?"
McKenzie looked at her. "Feel? It's metal. I don't feel a damn thing. I feel like my arm is still there, but every time I try to use it I'm reminded it isn't."
"Your nerves will keep firing as if the arm were there for a long time," Stedman said. "What I meant was how does the prosthesis feel?"
McKenzie hopped off the table and walked. "Strange. I don't know. Maybe it's normal. It was strange not to have the rest of my arm there. I'll have to get used to the weight. The balance." The arm twitched as he attempted to move it.
"Sit down, please," Stedman said. She took the metal hand at the end of the arm and carefully lifted the arm up until it was standing straight out. "How does that feel?"
"Fucked," McKenzie muttered. "It's fucked. It's never going to be the same."
Stedman was used to that. The feeling of irrevocable loss hit every amputee sooner or later. She sensed a deeper level to what McKenzie was saying though. As she began working him out, teaching him how to use the arm, she questioned him about what had happened.
"I looked at your file. You weren't B.S.'ing me when you said a tank caused your injury."
McKenzie stared at her. "Injury? Is that what they call it? An injury? Like I was lifting weights and hurt myself? Tripped over a rock?" He tapped the artificial limb with his good arm and his voice dripped bitterness. "This was a wound sustained in the service of my country."
"Your VA status and the—" Stedman began, but McKenzie cut her off.
"I lost my arm in Lebanon," McKenzie said.
As she worked, he talked, telling the story of what had happened for the first time since he'd been debriefed during the medevac flight from Italy back to the states. He'd been ordered under an oath of secrecy never to discuss what had happened, but such oaths meant nothing to him now.
"Captain Thorpe got me on board the SDV," McKenzie said as he neared the end of the story. "Then he headed for the sub. Only it wasn't there. Seems like when Loki pulled the plug on us, he pulled everything."
"The only thing that saved us," he said, "was that the captain of the sub picked up our transponder as he was beating feet out of the area. He didn't check in with anyone higher or else we'd still be out there. He came back and picked us up. I heard he was relieved afterward for disobeying orders."
Stedman had heard many horror stories in this room but she had to shake her head. "I can't believe they would abandon you."
McKenzie snorted. "They didn't just abandon us. Someone gave us up to the Israelis and the CIA. If that sub captain hadn't disobeyed orders, Loki would have gotten his wish and Thorpe and I would be dead."
"Why would we be supplying plutonium to the Israelis?" Stedman asked. A part of her wanted McKenzie to be lying, but her instincts told her he wasn't because there was no bravado in what he said. If his story was true, it was a story she wasn't supposed to know.
"Politics," McKenzie said. "Why was Oliver North sending arms to the Contras? Why'd we fight the Gulf War? Who the fuck knows why?" he said.
"I do," a low voice said behind them.
McKenzie turned. An old man, dressed in a brown wool suit with a wildly colored bow tie, stood behind them. He looked ill, his gray hair missing in spots, his body rail thin, his skin splotchy with red, raw areas.
"Who are you?" McKenzie demanded.
"My name is Kilten." The man waved an ID card at Nurse Stedman. "Might I have a few moments alone with Chief McKenzie?" he asked.