Franklin kept seeing Cynthia and Steve and Melissa huddled together, trapped by flame and smoke. How long can they survive? Everon has the rental helicopter. All we need is clearance. He forced himself away from the hallucination and onto the people around him.
The green marble floor inside Hackensack Med Center was crowded and crazy and people were anything but normal. They sat and milled about agitated in long lines and gibbered. All I need is a certain type of person —
Franklin noticed things about people. How they walked and dressed, their posture, the way they combed their hair. Especially their voices. From these he could guess things about the way they thought.
He made a rapid study through the intake windows, behind the counters.
Him? No. Her — not her either!
I’m not going to find the person I need out here!
At the rear of the ER, he found a gray metal door into the hospital proper. He tried the handle. It was locked. He stood next to the door’s edge. Can’t be too long —
Somebody pushed it open.
He turned to slide through, but a tall gray-haired nurse in whites blocked his way. She glanced at his black leather jacket, obviously looking for a hospital ID.
“Hospitals have rules,” she said sternly. The door was closing.
Out of the increasing chaos, someone called out, “Nurse Vandersommen!” She rushed away. Wife? Franklin pictured the airport security guard. Mother? His fingertips caught the door’s edge at half an inch.
Inside, it was field hospital triage. Franklin considered the doctors and nurses in scrubs, running around binding up bloody wounds, treating burns. Him? — maybe — No! Him . . . ?
Down a side corridor lined with temporary wooden cots was a big beer-bellied man, face framed by a pair of bushy red-gray muttonchops. He wore a white lab coat and a harried expression.
Is he the one?
A printed paper Red Cross tag, safety-pinned to his coat, said CHUCK FARNDIKE, BLOOD COORDINATOR. He carried a clipboard, seemed to be in charge of organizing emergency donors among volunteers. Including some of the hospital staff.
Franklin watched the way the big man moved. Guy must have been a real dynamo. Something’s worn him down. The Medic pin on his shirt. Yes —
Franklin walked over.
“Hello. I’m Franklin Reveal, a minister from Pennsylvania. Could I get a couple minutes of your time, Mr. Farndike?”
“Don’t know I have a couple minutes, Reverend.” Chuck rushed past to check a filling blood bag connected to a middle-aged hospital administrator’s arm. “We can’t locate our emergency blood shipments. The phones are out. Our computers are down. I have two people out knocking on doors trying to find donors. We’re gonna be in one hell of a real mess around here pretty soon.”
A young dark-haired nurse in scrubs hurried up to the big man. “What do you want to do about AB neg, Chuck? We’re completely out!”
“Did you check the backups by OR 3?”
The nurse hurried away.
“Mr. Farndike?” Franklin tried.
Chuck rushed on by.
But the red liquid flowed as nurses connected empty bags to waiting arms of the few volunteers, each resting on one of the empty cots. Each time Franklin began, Chuck was grabbed by somebody else. He couldn’t hold the man’s attention. It was exasperating. Impossible to hold a private conversation. But this was a man who could get their helicopter put on the clearance list.
The young woman in nurse’s scrubs rushed back. “No AB neg over there either! And you know how hard it is to find — ”
Franklin could tell Chuck held his true feelings buried deep down inside: On the surface, his primary connection with the world was visual.
“I’m AB negative,” Franklin said, to Chuck’s surprise. “Hook me up. We’ll talk while you drain.” Franklin sat down on a cot and added softly an embedded command,“but I want us to be-not-interrupted.”
Chuck frowned at the strange minister with the long, dark tied-back hair. Whatever he needs is important enough for him to donate his own blood?
He nodded, opened a fresh needle and pinched it into Franklin’s arm.
Instead of lying down, Franklin remained seated on the cot’s edge, angled toward the big man at forty-five degrees. And began speaking softly, in deep, even tones, “You must . . . be tired. Were you ahh — sleep when the blast went off?”
“No,” Chuck frowned, “I was getting ready to go to bed.”
“Hmmmmm . . . ” Franklin nodded, dropping his vocal pitch half an octave, “easy to imagine . . . a corporal I knew in the Rangers — ”
“You were a Ranger?” Chuck interrupted, suddenly interested.
Franklin nodded, “This corporal, you see, was ordered along with the rest of our squad on a deeply classified mission op. I’m not supposed to say precisely where the op took place, but you can make your own guess — I can only tell you we were sent to a village deep (Franklin’s voice went softer) in a South American jungle.”
Franklin was nodding slightly, in time and sync with Chuck’s breathing. Already, few hospital sounds were getting through to Chuck.
“Now this wasn’t the kind of vision you dream of, unless of course you were having a nightmare. This was a very bad mission. You might wonder what made this mission so particularly bad. Well, the whole village, the entire town, was to be slaughtered. Men, women, old people, children too, wiped out, murdered, the way some of us saw it.”
“What — ”
“I know,” Franklin continued to nod with Chuck’s breathing, blinking when Chuck blinked, Franklin’s breath subtly shifting in perfect harmony. “I know. But you see, this particular village had been labeled by the-powers-that-be as an enemy of the United States. The coca plant was their number one crop, its processing, their only industry — mostly by hand, into pure white cocaine. The entire village made their living based on drugs.
“Our Ranger squad was ordered to fly in, infiltrate this area of highly guarded jungle, and burn them out. Burn the crops, the buildings, and, kill every man, woman and child, leaving the whole place dead to the bone. As if once the jungle covered it over, nothing had ever been there.”
Franklin watched Chuck’s eyes water, drift in . . . and-out of focus — saw the markers and changes in posture suddenly as he breathed in . . . out and slowed . . .
. . . way
. . . down.
Chuck barely noticed the tension fading . . . shoulders relaxing . . . dropping deeper down into his torso . . . right down into his legs . . . eyes softening, closing . . . breath slowing . . .
Chuck was entering deep trance. A voice interrupted.
“Chuck, what are we doing about AB neg?”
Franklin leaned in close. “Hold on a minute, Chuck.”
“Okay,” Chuck mumbled.
Franklin looked up. A man in bloody green scrubs stood there, dark hair, solidly built, face changing from urgent need to blank wonder — to a frown of concern. A nameplate said Dale Rass, MD.
“Give him five minutes,” Franklin said in a lighter voice, pointing to the needle inside his own elbow. “He’s pumping a pint of AB neg out of me right now.”
The doctor looked from Chuck’s closed eyes to Franklin’s arm, shrugged, “Okay,” then hurried up the corridor.
“We got on the transport and headed south,” Franklin continued, voice dropping again. “Once we’d made our last fuel stop, the colonel himself — yes, a mere squad of thirteen was being led by a lieutenant colonel — actually opened our mission orders in front of us.
“He read them in silence, then stared into space. We could see our commander was pretty upset.
“Finally, he turned to us and actually read us those orders. He said, ‘Listen to me carefully and consider these words . . .’ We knew how unusual this was that he would share these with us, so we said to ourselves, you want to listen with everything you have, to each word, each and every nuance.
“When he’d finished giving us every bit of information, he told us we had a decision to make. Not him — us! It was a decision to be made together.
“‘As a team,’ he said, ‘you have to decide what’s best for the squad to do.’
“Our getus transport, six-six-six-ki, set us down in a small clearance in the jungle, whatever was required, and even though our mission deadline was one of limited opportunity, there we sat on the ground, our guns ready, while we argued it out.
“The colonel made it clear to each and every one of us that absolutely no action of any kind would be taken until a unanimous and unequivocal decision was reached by all of us.
“We could barely believe what the colonel was offering, so it took us a minute or so before we began to bat it around. Throw it back and forth.
“One man, a sergeant named Ben, insisted we follow orders, completing the mission-as-written. The sergeant stated flatly we had a duty to ourselves, to the Rangers, and to our country to follow orders-as-given. No matter what.
“But this corporal, hesitantly, disagreed. While not as high-ranking, yet encouraged by the colonel, the corporal said he thought our orders were in no one’s interest. That those orders were invalid, unreasonable. ‘Is what those villagers produce worse,’ he asked, ‘than sugar? Does it justify murder? Worth killing all these people? Killing children?”
“‘Listen to me, corporal,’ the sergeant said. ‘We have to get in there and do what we’re supposed to.’
“The corporal shook his head, ‘We have to do what’s right.’ He asked Sergeant Ben to think back on the feeling last time he’d stuck to a questionable order. ‘How did that feel?’ the corporal asked.
“Ben breathed out reluctantly.‘Not great.’
“And the corporal asked the sergeant to think forward, to ‘consider how he would want to remember this time, years from now.’
“Mostly the two of them went at it while the rest of us just listened and weighed in from time to time. We talked and talked and with each passing consideration we went deeper and deeper into it. We ignored the sound of buzzing mosquitoes, of jungle rain, of every obstacle. There was too much at stake. Nothing could stop us, nothing could interfere with our reaching complete and total agreement on the best way to act. We went ’round and ’round. Careers and relationships — and the lives of people we would never know, either way, were at stake.
“Finally, we put it to a vote. Eleven of us nodded to the colonel, raised our hands in agreement.”
Chuck’s hand, where it lay, relaxed in his lap, suddenly twitched, as if some internal fight was raging inside the big man.
“One of us,” Franklin continued, “hadn’t raised his hand. The sergeant sat there stubbornly resisting. But we waited.”
For ten minutes Franklin spoke — softly urging, encouraging, his smooth solid tone barely more than a whisper . . .
“Finally, giving a deep sigh, the sergeant woke up and nodded and gave us clearance, six-six-six-ki, to get that transport out of the thick, obscuring jungle. To do the right thing. To turn in, six-six-six-ki, the right direction. Finally — felt really good about ourselves.”
Chuck’s hand slowly rose into the air.
“Remember this . . . ” And Franklin reached out, put a momentary grip on Chuck’s right collarbone, “That’ll be great . . . ” he said, voice returning to normality. “When you think we’ll have those papers, our clearance approved.”
Chuck shook his head. “Ah, wha — ?”
“When the clearance . . . ” Franklin trailed off.
Chuck blinking, trying to clear his . . .
“ . . . Chuck, you’ll have approved . . . ”
“Oh, right,” Chuck blinked. “Ah — shouldn’t take more than five, ten minutes . . . to get into the system . . . ” answering with more enthusiasm.
The power of permissive suggestion. The right thing said at the right time. In just the right way. Maybe . . .
“It’s full,” Franklin said brightly, looking down.
“Uh — ” Chuck shook his head rapidly side-to-side, followed Franklin’s eyes — saw the fat red bag hanging there full.
“Oh! Sorry!”
He pulled the needle out of Franklin’s arm.
