by Frank Perry
the explosion. In the field, the Army Reserve Rangers and the FBI pair were bound by blood and mutual protection. He’d forgotten these feelings since leaving active duty. But something was different, more mellow and satisfying this time. Women were in his dreams. These women, Rachael and Angela had fought with the men. His kindred feelings had never included women before and it complicated his dreams. He wanted to be with everyone again in some kind of group huddle or social gathering, some place where they could all hug and laugh and make life-long pledges to reunite in the future, but it was only a dream.
Unknown to Peter, Rachael was fighting to stay alive. She lay in a dream state with no recollection of anything except a vague memory of talking with Peter. Her first awareness in the emergency room was of floating near the ceiling. She could see herself lying calmly in the bed below. She was aghast at seeing her blood-caked skull. Nearby she saw a female member of the medical team and felt a great need to get her to communicate. Then a male voice said that there was blood on her eardrums, and that she might be deaf. “I'm not deaf! I'm not deaf!" she shouted to herself. All visual images were secondary to the desire to communicate verbally. Then the female said, “We don't know how much brain damage there is and she might be in a vegetative state. She yelled in silence at her, “I'm not in a vegetative state!”
She saw lights and did not know what they were from. She felt unconstrained, free and giddy with an amazing ease of movement. She felt like screaming and shouting with intoxication. She began rising through the ceiling, through the floors above, and finally, into the sky above. Then without warning, she began to fall. As she accelerated downward, terror displaced euphoria. Again, she wanted to scream, this time in sheer terror as she saw the building, floor and bed approaching at tremendous speed. Then suddenly, she was suspended in a darkened space, with no sensation of falling anymore. She was unconscious and near death.
Rachael had suffered severe head and spine trauma. The force of the blast had collapsed one lung and she was bleeding internally. She was fighting for her life without much help. A cardiac monitor beeped in the background and she had a breathing tube down her trachea. IV tubes were dripping something into both arms.
To make matters worse, the Intensive Care Unit of the University of Chicago Medical Center was filled beyond capacity from people injured or dying from the blast and radiation. They were being treated in the hallways and some were lying on hospital beds and gurneys in the waiting room. The emergency room physicians at UCMC are some of the best in the world, but the frightening truth in massive trauma care events, is that decisions must be made at various levels to apply resources where they yield the highest mortality rate. Doctors and nurses are sometimes forced to make decisions about who to save when catastrophes overwhelm them. They must “pick” to save some people over others with lower chances to survive, in their opinion. Dr. Len Perlstein was the Resident in Charge of the ICU and rushing from patient to patient doing cursory assessments. He’d already seen Rachael and concluded that she wouldn’t survive. As soon as he could get back into the main ICU, he planned to have the staff remove the respirator and move her out of the ICU for more “urgent” patients--those that he thought could be saved.
Rachael hovered in darkness, unable to feel any part of her body, and none of her senses were registering. She could not hear, see or smell anything. At some point, she had the sensation of someone around her removing devices attached to her body. Then her mind faded into resolute darkness, without sensation of any kind.
Her bed was wheeled out of the ICU and they moved her to the linen closet where it was dark and she could die peacefully.
At 11:00 AM, Peter woke and mustered the troops. He rallied the Striker One team and got the Little Bird One pilots to pre-flight their helicopter. Striker Two was instructed to resume their flights at a higher altitude to see if they could cover the surface more quickly. Peter’s team would go first to the federal building to assess their operations capability and possibly moving the base from Naperville closer to downtown. With the city’s emergency operations center destroyed, the federal building seemed to be a logical location for emergency command purposes. He also wanted to know more about the wounded.
In the afternoon sun, the pilots had no difficulty navigating to the city using roadmaps for guidance. Chicago has a distinctive grid pattern that can be interpreted from the air with ease. The federal building was easily spotted at the crossroads of Western Avenue and Roosevelt, and the diagonal convergence with Ogden Avenue. The roof was clear for landing. The pilot approached at an altitude about fifty feet higher than the roof and encircled the building to assess wind. Peter was sitting in the right rear seat next to the open door looking below. They were about three miles away from the city center, slightly outside the grid pattern they had been navigating. As the aircraft banked around the north side of the building, directly above Roosevelt Road, he froze. In the street below, parked squarely in the center of the federal building was a Patriot taxi! Worse, there was a tow truck starting to hoist the nose of the vehicle.
He commanded, “Pilot, abort rooftop, get to the street below! Fast!”
The pilot leveled the helicopter momentarily flying along Roosevelt to the Ogden intersection then banked hard right in a reversal that virtually stalled them in flight. The helicopter plummeted downward as the federal building loomed larger along their right side. With the nose down, the pilot eased back on the control stick and came to a low hover behind the parked car. This pilot was good, but there was no time for praise.
As they jumped down, the tow operator stopped what he was doing looking stunned as the Rangers raced toward him. Peter shouted, “Halt that, don’t touch a thing!”
The truck operator raised his hands and said, “Oh, oh, okay”
”Put your hands down, but don’t touch the controls.”
The operator was cooperating fully and wanted to get away from these menacing people. He moved toward the controls to drop the vehicle when Peter shouted for him to stand fast and get onto the curb. He then signaled the EOD forward to disarm the bomb saying, “Look men, the car is partially elevated. The mercury switch may be close to detonation; be extremely careful with this one--got it!”
“Yes sir.” Both responded in unison.
The helicopter throttled down to conserve fuel. Inside the federal building, people were lined up along the open window frames watching the commotion. The other buildings in the area, mostly associated with the university, were severely damaged.
The EOD team opened the trunk and climbed in. With the front wheels elevated, the rear suspension swayed more than normal. They started the disarming process when hell erupted. Across the street, inside one of the darkened buildings, a hailstorm of automatic gunfire exploded. Peter was hit immediately and thrown to the ground. He was dazed and knew he was seriously wounded. A bullet had torn through his upper left arm into his chest. Another bullet ripped his left thigh as he lay there. The other Ranger was also down. The truck driver was safe behind his truck. The Little Bird was riddled and the pilots were both slumped in their seats. The EOD airmen were trying to hide in the car trunk.
Peter lay on the street surface with his head facing the gutter. He could not get enough air in his lungs and his vision was blurred with pain. He could not feel his left arm. Instinct told him to lie still, but logic told him to move. His left side burned intensely and he tried to move his right arm from under his body for leverage, but any movement made his chest ignite in pain. Resting momentarily, he could see the sole of a military boot a few feet away hanging over the curb. The other Ranger was down. He lay still for several seconds trying to gain his breath and muster enough strength to move.
Dazed and stunned, Peter needed cover, but movement would attract fire. At that moment, Little Bird Two came roaring down the street, twenty feet off the deck with guns blazing, the cavalry had arrived! As Striker Two drew fire, Peter struggled
to his knees and cradled his arm as he moved to the sidewalk falling behind the tow truck. His body was numb from pain, which actually helped him momentarily. Amid the sound of gunfire, he heard someone yell “SAFE!” Then both airmen tumbled onto the sidewalk. The truck driver helped Peter settle to the ground and said something about bleeding but his vision was spinning and sounds were blurring together. With his right hand, Peter struggled to pull a battle dressing from his vest, then tried to tear it open with his teeth, but faltered. The driver helped. As he lay on the ground with his back propped against the truck wheel, he looked up to see FBI and others firing through destroyed windows. The bad guys would wish they had just kept on running with so many angry people shooting to kill. Then there was blackness.
Hospital
Peter was groggy when awakening, taking several minutes to get oriented. He had a vague feeling of weightlessness and his inner ear buzzed. There was a smell of fresh linens and a thin cotton blanket over him, all white. As he became more alert, he could see stainless steel sidebars on both sides and his right arm was taped with intravenous tubes. There was no sound