A Perilous Journey

by Darrell Maloney

  “Lastly, my mother had her gall bladder removed but there were complications. They said they could do it laparoscopically but once they got in they saw that the gall bladder was stuck to her liver. They had to pry it apart, and to do it they had to open up her whole right side.

  “They’d done a lot of cutting already, and when they separated the gall bladder from the liver she started to hemorrhage terribly. She was on blood thinners so her blood was very thin anyway, and they couldn’t stop the bleeding. Every pint of blood they gave her came right back out again.

  “She died on the operating room table.

  “And here’s the kicker: when mom died she was sixty seven years old. The same age I am now.”

  “I’m sorry to hear about your family, I really am,” Brad countered. “But you have something none of them had. You have us. And we’re gonna make darn sure you don’t die.”

  Debbie added, “Yeah. Not on our watch, buddy. Not on our watch.”

  The group conferred the first time Al took a nap and decided that one of them would stay with him every hour of every day.

  It wasn’t because they didn’t trust the nursing staff, for the nursing staff was great.

  It was more the sense of camaraderie they felt among themselves. They were a small group of people who felt out of their element. For most of them this was the first time they’d ventured away from their shelter, be it Eden or Salt Mountain, in many years.

  While they were excited to be out and about, and to meet new people, they were not unlike a group of Arctic explorers.

  Or astronauts on the surface of the moon.

  They felt an overwhelming attachment to each other. A need to protect one another. A need to keep one another on short leashes.

  And in light of Al’s fear of hospitals they felt a strong requirement to protect him; to coddle him, if you will.

  To that end they decided it would be best for someone to stay with him, day and night, to comfort him when he awoke from his night terrors. To soothe his fears when he was apprehensive or felt scared.

  Or even something as simple as fluffing his pillows for him and fetching extra blankets when he felt cold.

  Since there wasn’t much else to do on a base where they felt like fish out of water, and where they knew absolutely no one, the group of Al’s friends and supporters typically hung around his room, even when it wasn’t their turn to be there.

  It was a room made for four patients with only one residing there. At six stories and covering a city block, Wilford Hall was a large hospital. But its primary purpose was as a military hospital, to provide follow-on care for war wounded soldiers during an armed conflict.

  The only war going on at the present time was the war of survival against the cold.

  Its secondary purpose was as a trauma hospital to support the civilian population of San Antonio and Bexar County. Gunshot wounds, car accident victims, those sorts of things.

  Those types of injuries were low these days, since few people ventured outside in the frigid weather.

  As a consequence, Al had a four-patient room all to himself.

  Nurses moved two of the extra beds out and brought in easy chairs and a card table. Al’s friends spent far more time there, playing cards and taking turns napping in the extra bed, than they spent in their VAQ rooms.

  All except for Hannah, who on day three announced she had a mission to go on.

  -34-

  Hannah had been chomping at the bits for quite some time to get to Joint Base Lackland.

  She saw it as her duty to intervene in the pending court martial of colonels Tim Wilcox and Morris Medley, since they’d assaulted a top-secret bunker as a direct result of information she’d provided them, and were subsequently charged with mutinous behavior.

  As a civilian, Hannah was not subject to either the Uniform Code of Military Justice or its companion Manual for Courts-Martial.

  But she was heavily involved in the matter, since the information she’d provided the colonels turned out to be false.

  It wasn’t her fault. Not necessarily.

  She provided factual information as she knew it: that Colonel Travis Montgomery was overseeing an operation to raise massive amounts of livestock and growing massive amounts of food, purportedly to feed San Antonio’s civilian population.

  That much was indisputable fact.

  Also, that Montgomery was lying about feeding the civilians. The food was not making it into San Antonio’s neighborhoods. The civilians were left to fend for themselves or were eating rice and grains provided from FEMA stockpiles.

  That much was fact as well.

  There was a massive project going on in the cordoned-off section of the base Colonel Montgomery directly controlled. A project which required the removal of thousands of tons of earth.

  That was a fact.

  The rest was speculation. And therein was the problem which led to the colonels’ arrests.

  Hannah saw the project from afar while riding in Montgomery’s helicopter.

  She asked him about it and he told her the dirt forty feet below ground was much richer than surface dirt. Much richer in minerals. And much more suited for his growing operations.

  “By using the richer earth we can grow better and more nutritious crops, and grow them much faster,” he said.

  Hannah was an astronomist by trade. She knew little about agronomy. She took his explanation at face value. But something about the conversation bugged her.

  Only later did she realize what it was.

  That’s when something else she’d seen in the distance finally registered in her brain.

  It was the long line of cement mixers she’d seen lined up at the dig site.

  She asked herself why such an incredible amount of concrete would be required if all they were doing was digging out fertile soil from the ground.

  It made no sense.

  But a bunker… now that made sense.

  Hannah, like most people, jumped to conclusions in the face of a situation she didn’t understand and desperately wanted answers for.

  The only reasonable explanation she could come up with was that Montgomery was building the bunker in preparation for the second freeze he somehow knew was coming.

  And that, like the king of a small country who all alone decided who was blessed enough to live or die in the face of a great calamity, he would choose who would join him in the bunker.

  He would choose who would survive, eating the food he said was supposed to feed the people of San Antonio.

  Hannah had her answer. And it was dead wrong. Montgomery was killed in the same helicopter crash which severely injured Hannah. But she was convinced his cronies were occupying the bunker, eating the food that should have been helping keep San Antonio’s citizens alive.

  She took that information to Colonel Wilcox, the base commander, and his deputy, Colonel Medley.

  Both accepted the reasoning of her argument, for they couldn’t think of a single counterargument to explain Montgomery’s actions.

  They were left out of the loop, you see.

  The military is big on keeping secrets, and there’s a reason for that. The more people who know about critical plans and decisions, the more chance such plans and decisions will leak out.

  They therefore compartmentalize such things. Only people with a “need to know” are provided such information.

  A military officer with a “top secret” security clearance does not have access to all “top secret” information. He has access to only that information he needs to do his job. No more and no less.

  But sometimes the military gets it wrong.

  Sometimes they screw things up, for despite what they’d like to believe, they’re not infallible.

  Sometime before the Department of Defense notified the base commander they were commandeering a very large section of land for a top-secret project. Since the base commander controlled the land, he did indeed have a “need to know.”

  The DoD to
ld him the land would be used to grow crops and raise livestock which would then stock a large bunker being built nearby.

  Inside the bunker, the top secret message read, would be the Defense Department’s reconstitution team. That’s military speak for the team of key personnel responsible for rebuilding the military services following a major war or natural disaster. It’s a necessary function, since we don’t want another country to try to take advantage of the United States by kicking her while she’s down.

  The building of the bunker was necessary and justifiable.

  So was keeping it top secret.

  But it was at that point at least two people dropped the ball.

  Colonel Bettis, the old base commander who was told of the plan, destroyed the classified message which spelled out the details. He should have kept it in his safe in the event he wasn’t around and his successor needed to be filled in.

  Colonel Bettis couldn’t stand the pressure of the first freeze. He abandoned his post and eventually committed suicide. Colonel Wilcox stepped in to fill the void out of pure necessity, but by then the message had already been shredded.

  The Secretary of Defense also dropped the ball by failing to provide regular updates to the base commander while the project was in work. Had he done so, Colonel Wilcox and Colonel Medley would have been informed of the bunker and its role.

  But none of that happened.

  Consequently, the colonels learned of the bunker through Hannah Snyder, and had nothing to dispute her opinion. They too believed the bunker was being built and stocked by a rogue colonel for his own purposes.

  They breeched the bunker to drive Colonel Montgomery’s cronies out.

  And the rest, as they say, was history.

  -35-

  Joint Base Lackland was covered in the same three to four feet of snow and ice that blanketed the rest of the world.

  The old parade field, where the latest crop of graduates from Air Force basic training once marched flawlessly before their proud moms and pops in the reviewing stand, was a sea of white.

  The field of white was surrounded by airplanes: twenty six war birds from yesteryear. Fighters, bombers and cargo planes which would never fly again, since their engines were removed and they were placed upon concrete pedestals.

  With the snow obscuring those pedestals, as well as their landing gear and wheels, it was easy for one to squint and imagine the planes in flight.

  The bitter cold and snowfall brought death and misery to so many humans. But it was kind to these old birds, for it gave them the opportunity to at least pretend, one last time, that they’d broken free from the bonds of earth and were airborne once again.

  After all, horses are meant to run. It’s all they want to do. Race cars are built to go fast, and they long for it.

  Airplanes want nothing more than to leave the earth behind, and to go wheels-up into the heavens.

  Just east of the sea of white and the old airplanes pretending to fly once more, a two story brick building stood alone.

  No other structure came close to it. It had a full acre of nothingness on all four sides, save a parking lot to its north and a roadway along its eastern face.

  This was a building few people enjoyed going to, either before or after Saris 7’s and Cupid 23’s joint assaults on the earth.

  The south side of the building housed the base command section.

  Few people liked going there because… well, let’s face it. Nobody likes being called before a general to explain this or that.

  Not even other generals. They prefer to meet on the golf course or the officer’s club.

  The northern half of the building houses the base legal office.

  Another place few people like to tred, for military people don’t like legal problems any more than civilians do.

  On the second floor, Captain David Wright was at his desk in the Area Defense Council’s office. He was going over several pre-trial motions he was planning to submit to Major General John Paul Stephens.

  MG Stephens was brought in at the direction of the convening authority to serve as president of the court martial panel and would act, in effect, as the military judge.

  The first motion was to dismiss all charges on the notion that colonels Wilcox and Medley had no way of knowing the secret bunker held the Department of Defense’s military reconstitution team.

  Yes, under normal conditions they should have and would have known.

  But these weren’t normal conditions.

  Colonel Wilcox was gone now, having hanged himself in his cell.

  But absent any word from General Mannix, the Air Force Chief of Staff and convening authority, the court martial against Colonel Medley was still a go.

  He finished reviewing the documents after finding a couple of typographical errors on each of them.

  MG Stephens had a reputation as a perfectionist.

  It was said that on occasion he refused a motion not because it had no merit; but because something wasn’t spelled correctly or wasn’t worded well enough to suit him.

  Captain Wright’s legal secretary, a young staff sergeant named Swenson, groaned when she saw the captain mark up her latest effort.

  “I’m sorry,” he told her. “These have to be absolutely perfect.

  “If Medley is found guilty I want it to be because he is indeed guilty. I don’t want him to pay for something he was innocent of, because we got sloppy with our motions and they were shot down.”

  “I understand, sir,” Sergeant Swenson said. “I’ll do them again.”

  She collected the motions and walked back to her own office.

  Captain Wright stood from his desk and walked over to the window.

  “Well, there’s a brave soul. Much braver than I am,” he muttered to himself while peering out into the wintry panorama before him.

  In a world with so much snow it was very difficult keeping sidewalks clear. Imagine a world where the snow was shoulder high. Then picture a man with a snow shovel trying to clear a sidewalk and having to toss each shovel of snow… where, exactly? Onto either side? He’d be exhausted after three or four shovels full. He’d decide it was time to call it a day and have a beer or two, and let some other poor sap worry about the sidewalks.

  Who in their right mind would be out walking around in these kinds of conditions, anyway?

  Consequently, very few of the sidewalks on Joint Base Lackland were cleared of the mountain of snow.

  The roadways, now that was a different story.

  It would be difficult indeed to keep a military base operating in any capacity unless the roads were open for traffic.

  Joint Base Lackland was in a better position than some military bases in that it had an active runway. F-16 fighter jets came and went on a regular basis before Saris 7 brought white havoc to the world, and they still flew in and out occasionally.

  A base with a runway and taxiways has to have a means of clearing them from snow and ice. And JB Lackland therefore had snow removal equipment. Snow plows and dump trucks as well as deicing equipment.

  Nobody really knew what day it was anymore. But they knew that it had been a decade, more or less, since Saris 7 collided with the earth somewhere in Siberia.

  And that the snow first started to fall shortly after.

  They had plenty of time to remove it, and all the streets at JB Lackland had been cleared. Once cleared initially, it was relatively easy to keep the roads clear as each new snowfall fell.

  So getting around Lackland in a vehicle was relatively easy.

  Poor pedestrians, like the person Captain Wright watched from his office window, didn’t have it so easy.

  They had to walk in the street and dodge the traffic.

  -36-

  Hannah pulled the collar up on her parka as she walked, cursing beneath her breath with each step she took.

  The distance between the hospital and the legal office was a mere three blocks. She could see the smaller building from Al’s hospital window.<
br />
  She was one of the few who still viewed the snow-covered world as rather pretty.

  That was because she spent nearly all of her time in a salt mine where the temperature was a constant sixty two degrees. She was never out in the elements.

  From the hospital window her journey seemed a piece of cake. A short walk down the street.

  Sure, it was cold out there. But she had a parka, a knit cap and warm gloves.

  Sure, she’d be walking on ice. It would be slippery. But she’d walked on ice many times in her life.

  Really, now, it was three blocks, for cryin’ out loud.

  How bad could it be?

  It was the longest three blocks in the history of blocks. She was absolutely miserable.

  By the time she finally made it to the building she was shivering almost uncontrollably. Her nose was running, the snot freezing on her upper lip in the nineteen degree temperature.

  The wind chill was far below the nineteen degrees. A bitter breeze was coming out of the south and blasting her square in the face.

  Her face was numb.

  She was miserable.

  For many years freezing cold temperature was something she never had to worry about.

  She cursed the cold. She cursed the wind.

  She cursed herself for passing up the ride a nurse offered her.

  She was so stupid.

  But the worst was yet to come.

  She wasn’t the first one who’d made the journey. She could tell because when she got to the building she was able to walk out of the street not by climbing over a mountain of snow, as she’d expected to do.

  Thankfully, she was able to transition onto a crude path people before her had carved into the snow pack.

  The path was barely wide enough to accommodate one person. Had she encountered someone coming from the opposite direction, one of them would have to turn around and reverse course. There was simply no room for two people to pass.

  Closer to the building the snow pack just disappeared. The front entrance of the place had been completely cleared of snow.

  Someone had spent a lot of time and effort.