“Dale? Lew? Y’all still there?” Mel asked weakly.
Wattenbarger leapt back on top of the pile so he could see her. He reached down inside and touched the top of her head. “We have a plan, but we have to leave you for a few minutes to go back inside the compound and get the equipment. We’ll be right back, I promise. Here, take this flashlight till we get back.”
Her hand snapped up and grasped his wrist. “No! Dale, please don’t leave me! Please don’t leave me!” she cried frantically.
“Mel, be strong. Be strong for Alex. He needs you to be strong. You have to let me go, minutes count. You know that I’ll be back.”
Her hand released its grip. “Be strong for Alex, yes…” she whispered.
Wattenbarger leapt up off the top of the pile and picked his way down to the other side in the darkness. Warren had already slid under the gate and was sprinting to the main building of the observatory.
Wattenbarger caught up with him just as Warren kicked open the front door.
“I left my light with Mel,” Wattenbarger said through labored breathing.
“I have a backup in my pack,” Warren said, tossing it at Wattenbarger’s feet, then he ran into the closest office and began slamming open drawers and cabinets.
“Jackpot!” Warren shouted. “A bottle of rubbing alcohol.” Then he shoved it deep into his front pocket.
“I need sterile cloths to scrub her leg,” Wattenbarger said.
“Take your pick; everything you see is sterile, except your own clothing,” Warren reminded him. “But I’m looking for iron pry bars and saws.”
Wattenbarger finally found Warren ’s light and flashed its beam on. He tossed Warren ’s pack to him and left for another room.
Long minutes slipped past them as they searched – room to room, building to building. There were a few metal bars but they were either of light aluminum or they were too long. There found a single hydraulic bottle jack with no handle and a come-along, but it was rusted and frozen in position. After half an hour of searching, they were nearly empty-handed. Even the pickup’s jack was gone.
Warren turned to Wattenbarger and looked at his friend, his face filthy and coated with dirt and sweat. Warren ’s mouth was frozen down in a rigid mask of fear and agony. He, too, was saturated with sweat.
“Time’s up,” Warren stated, looking in a panic at his watch.
“Lew, you go on back,” Wattenbarger said stoically. “Take care of the boy.”
Warren stared back, speechless.
“It’s the only way. I’ll stay with Mel.” Wattenbarger’s face was calm as he slowly wiped the sweat off his brow. He had obviously thought about it and made up his mind. He seemed to be at peace.
“Read my lips,” Warren spat in anger. “No – way – in – hell! We’re all gonna live tonight, all of us are goin’ home together. Now let’s get on with the amputation. I’ll go down on her right side and sit beside her on her left, squeezing her carotids when you give me the word. We’ll tell her we’re sawin’ the logs and it’ll hurt. You tighten the tourniquet and cut the muscle and tendons away, then saw her femur with this,” Warren said producing a rusty four inch saw blade he had found in a corroded coffee can. “It looks nasty but I can guarantee its sterility.”
Wattenbarger looked at the rusty blade, his eyes fixed upon it. Then he looked back to Warren and blinked twice with wide, brown eyes. “We need to hurry,” he added, then broke into a sprint back toward the pile.
But as their shoes slapped against the asphalt, a brilliant streak of lightning lit the night sky, followed by the boom of thunder. By the time they had reached the mound, a warm rain began to pour out of the heavens.
As they approached the pile they could hear Mel’s voice against the insistent clatter of the rain falling all about them. She was singing softly to herself.
“Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me. I once was lost but now I’m found, was blind but now I see…”
“Mel, we’re back,” Wattenbarger said as he dove past her into the mass, head down, the rain pouring off his soaked clothing and into his face.
“It doesn’t hurt anymore,” she said, looking back at him in the dim yellow beam with glazed eyes and a gentle smile, the raindrops streaking down her face in tiny streams of soiled water. “I can’t feel anything.”
Warren slipped in the stack beside her and gently took her in his arms. “Mel, dear, Dale’s gonna… he’s gonna remove your leg from the pile. It’s gonna hurt, so I want you to hang on to me. I’m gonna help you get through this.”
Wattenbarger slipped away beneath them, deeper into the pile, his head just even with her leg caught between the two huge trunks.
“My leg doesn’t hurt anymore, Lew,” she said staring blankly at him. He could see that the color was gone from her face and she seemed to be nearing shock.
“Mel, listen to me!” Warren said sharply as he heard Wattenbarger tearing her pant leg away. “Look into my eyes and listen to me!”
She seemed to have trouble focusing, but made the attempt.
“Are you listening to me?”
“Yes…”
Warren felt Wattenbarger lift the bottle of alcohol from his pocket, and smelled its vapors as his friend began to wipe down the bare skin of Mel’s leg.
“Listen to me! Look at my eyes,” Warren commanded.
Mel’s eyes focused slowly onto his.
“I don’t know what we would’ve done without you and Alex,” Warren said gently. “I just wanted to thank you for being our friends and puttin’ up with us – and agreeing to stay with us. Especially… especially after I was such an old, stubborn fool.”
Mel just stared back at him, then smiled peacefully.
“I think we’re ready now,” Warren said to Wattenbarger. A violent crash of thunder rattled them all as they clung to one another and Warren said, “You hang onto me tight, Mel. You hang on tight…” Then his hand reached up just under her jaw and he placed his fingers gently across the interior of the wet skin of Mel’s neck, just below her jaw bones, and pressed down.
64
Karl Leighter convinced Commander Winsteed that his plan to kill the Russian mafia insurgents was sound. Leighter and Damian Cook had worked together to devise a weapon so horrible that it was given the name HUDEW-MOD1, an acronym for “Horribly Unspeakable Destruction and Extermination Weapon.” Indeed, Winsteed ordered his entire company of 21 other individuals to give their undivided attention to Leighter and Cook’s efforts and that every hand should pitch in and join the project.
Each late afternoon, two hours before sunset, the contingent would awaken and eat an early breakfast, then join in a conference on the progress of Leighter’s plan. Right at sunset, they would all ascend the long, winding steps, assemble in the hangar and work on the project. They were divided into teams and each team was responsible for modifying existing equipment or creating new hardware that had to be crafted and machined on site for the effort.
On the ninth day after the project began, Winsteed, Juarez, Leighter and Cook were hunched together over a large drafting table in the middle of the cavernous hangar. Leighter’s finger traced a set of lines that represented wires, his face illuminated by the bright bank of fluorescent lights just above his head.
“It has to be wired just like it shows on this drawing,” Leighter insisted. “The wires have to be shielded in this flexible, stainless conduit or it won’t work!”
“Why not?” Winsteed asked, fully exasperated with Leighter’s obstinate perfectionism. “You know that we don’t have that much stainless conduit and that it can be accomplished with equal effectiveness using some other shielding.”
“No, it can’t!” Leighter said, slamming his hand down on the chart in anger. “Look, if you’re going to nickel and dime me on this, then we might as well get back to our movies and popcorn.”
“I’m not nickel and diming you, Karl. We don’t have that much stainless conduit available.”
“Karl, just listen to yourself for a minute. I have no intention of spending the better part of a full working day stripping the conduit off our generator system and then replacing it when something else will work just as well.”
“It won’t work, Commander,” snapped the normally passive and soft-spoken Cook, “because in the 500 milliseconds it takes to deploy the agent, without the stainless conduit, the wires will melt down and end the project earlier that you want it to.”
“Sir, excuse me…” said a quiet voice from the other side of the drafting table.
Winsteed looked up to see the shadowed face of a pretty, young seaman standing with her fingers curled around a cup of steaming hot coffee. She was a petite young woman not yet twenty years old, dressed in blue dungarees, a white shirt and a button up sweater. Her medium brown hair was tied in a bun over her head, her face was smiling and friendly.
Winsteed looked her in the eyes and smiled. “Thanks Nixon,” he said, reaching his hand toward her. “I really need this.”
The next five seconds would be seared into his mind forever.
Winsteed was watching her beautiful eyes as Nixon slowly and carefully reached her hand forward across the table with the cup of steaming coffee toward him. But halfway across the table, her hand flinched and a bead of coffee leaped out of the cup and fell onto the drawing mingled with splotches of blood. Winsteed saw her eyes dim as her hand stopped. Her mouth opened slightly as she pitched forward and fell face down across the table. As her head hit the table he could see that the back of her skull had been blown away and where her hair had once been, a gaping, bloody hole oozed a stream of blood and brain tissue. He then heard breaking glass as he saw holes appear in the table top before him.
“Down, down! Everybody down!” he screamed. As he fell to the floor of the hangar, Winsteed could see his company falling to the deck, either out of obedience or from being shot. From his position on the floor he could hear screams - screams of fear, pain, surprise and agony.
Winsteed heard glass breaking as bullets rained down on them from above. The Russians had obviously gained access to the roof and were firing down on them. They were also using silencers so that the entire scene was unfolding itself in a strange, nearly noiseless rain of disaster and death. The noise of screaming was mixed with breaking glass and the sound of lead ricocheting, bouncing and embedding itself into metal and wood.
Winsteed reflexively removed his .45 caliber Ruger P89, aimed carefully at the flashes of white light from an open window and fired. A body immediately fell and hit the concrete floor with a thud.
At that moment, the bullets stopped completely. Winsteed considered for just a moment that perhaps they had been attacked by a lone gunman. But that thought was quickly corrected when he saw a hand from another window toss a Molotov cocktail down onto the hangar floor. It struck the deck some dozen feet in front of him and immediately exploded into flames, igniting two of his people instantly.
Winsteed looked over to Juarez and screamed, “Take care of them…now!”
Then he rolled across the floor just as the rain of bullets began again. Winsteed braced himself against a post, aimed carefully and fired another single bullet, bringing the assailant down, his body hanging half out of the upper window. The rain of bullets stopped again.
Juarez had draped a tarp over one of the victims and was pounding out the flames. The other individual was fully engulfed in fire but was not moving.
“Put that fire out!” Winsteed screamed, his eyes scanning the windows above him for more action. He desperately wanted to fire above him until his clip was empty, but he also did not want to waste precious ammunition.
Leighter and several others leapt up and, using wall mounted extinguishers, began to put the fire out.
Winsteed could see his people lying all over the hangar floor. He could not tell who was alive and who was not, who was injured and who was unharmed. He heard a sound outside the hangar and he ran quickly toward the door. He could see a black suited figure scramble down the external ladder and run across the tarmac into the darkness.
Winsteed sprinted to a waiting Humvee, fetched the keys out of the ash tray, started it up and quickly caught up with the assailant. The running figure heard and saw Winsteed approach and he ran into the tundra to the right of the long concrete strip. But Winsteed simply followed him in the waist high grass, driving with his left hand and gripping his Ruger in his right. The assailant had no where to run in the flat, unbroken field, so he finally stopped, raised his hands and put them over the top of his head, standing still.
Winsteed then had to make a difficult choice. Should he blow the man’s head right off his shoulders, which he desperately wanted to do, or should he take him prisoner when they did not need a security problem and had no extra rations?
Winsteed just sat in the Humvee with its engine idling, his headlights aimed at the back of the man who stood 15 feet in front of him and tried to figure it all out. In his mind he could see the beautiful eyes of Nixon in her last second of life – a life that lay mostly before her. His fingers gripped the trigger and squeezed lightly so that he could feel the cold metal mechanisms engage inside the gun. This Cossack mercenary deserved nothing less than the same thing he had just dished out to Winsteed’s people. Perhaps he should set him on fire first, and then blow his brains out. Winsteed was consumed with hate, his finger just a tenth of a millimeter from ending this man’s life.
“I reckon this is your lucky day,” Winsteed finally said, relaxing the grip on his Ruger and stepping out of the Humvee. “Okay, here’s the deal. If you move one muscle, you’re dead and I’ll sleep soundly. If you don’t understand English and move out of ignorance, oh well, you’re just gonna die. I’m taking you prisoner under the terms of the Geneva Convention and fully intend to treat you humanely under those terms, at least those I can remember, and ain’t it a bitch that you just burned up the filing cabinet with the only copy I had. So you’re just gonna have to rely on my memory. And, by the way, I slept through that class at OCS. Now, lie down, face down on the ground and keep your hands on top of your head.”
Winsteed approached within six feet of the man and stopped. The man did not move. Winsteed could hear the sounds of screaming coming from the hanger behind him, but he did not dare turn around.
“I don’t have time for this,” he finally said and clubbed the man on the back of the head with the butt of his Ruger.
Winsteed turned and looked back at the hangar in the distance. He could see what appeared to be his people running outside and smoke still billowed from its door. But from this position, they appeared to be running about with a purpose.
He disarmed the Russian, taking the AK-74 out of his hand and walked back to his Humvee. He then brought back a length of line and tied his hands tightly before he dragged him to the vehicle and dumped him into the back like a sack of potatoes, then drove quickly back to the hangar.
Outside the hangar, Juarez had begun triage, lining the lifeless bodies up in one row, the injured in another. Her arms were covered in blood up to her elbows.
“How bad?” Winsteed asked.
“Six of ours dead, two of theirs. Another three of ours won’t make it. Two more got it bad but may pull out. Eleven total U.S. casualties.”
“My God! Three Russians did all this in less than four minutes,” Winsteed said. “But I did manage to capture one alive.”
Juarez looked Winsteed in the eyes with contempt, then slipped her .45 Colt out of her waistband and began a deliberate walk toward the Humvee.
“Juniata, stop, right now! Just stop!” Winsteed ordered.
“What’s she doing?” Leighter asked, approaching them from behind.
“She’s about to execute a prisoner.”
“Can I help?” Leighter asked.
“Juniata, turn around immediately!” Winsteed insisted.
“What?” she asked in disg
ust, waving the weapon up and down in her hand. “You don’t think this pindeho deserves a bullet in his brain?”
“We need him,” Winsteed said.
“Why? So he can eat our food and we can use up more of our people and our resources to watch him 24-7? I say we execute this bastard and be done with it! We don’t have the time, people or food to keep a prisoner and we’re not lettin’ him walk.”
“Lieutenant Juarez, look into my eye,” Winsteed ordered with steely firmness. “Get a grip and stand down; that’s an order. We may be assigned to hell’s little kitchen, but we’re still members of the United States military, so start acting like it!”
Juarez looked supremely put out but slid her handgun back into its holster. Then she said, “Yes sir! But do not, do not, expect me to stand watch over his sorry ass or I swear, he won’t make it five minutes with me.”
“Sir, the top of the hangar’s clear,” said a voice from beside Winsteed. He looked to see Roger Smythe with a M-15 slung over his shoulder. Young Smythe snapped a smart salute which Winsteed returned with equal precision.
“Are you certain?” Winsteed asked, looking above them.
“Absolutely.”
“Good work. Juanita, get over here.”
Juarez walked slowly and broodingly toward him.
“You and Smythe gather up two more people and head out to the river and see if you can spot a boat or some other means of transport. We need to find out how they got over here. And watch your six, no heroics, no shots unless you’re attacked, do you hear me? Now Juanita, I’m entrusting these people to you and I want everyone back, alive and uninjured. Are you up to this?”
Juarez stared at him for a long moment, then she saluted smartly. “Yes sir.”
“I’d like to accompany them, sir,” said a voice over his shoulder.
Winsteed turned to see Leighter whose face was blackened with smoke and ash and had wide streaks of blood on his wrists and hands.
“Are you injured?”
“No, sir, not that I know of,” Leighter responded, looking over his arms.
Quantum Storms - Aaron Seven Page 60
