The Guardian Angel

by George Lazăr

  “God save us,” Admiral Thompson whispered.

  The aircraft carrier’s command room became unusually quiet as the officers on duty struggled to understand grasped what had just taken place. For a while, only the beeping of the various devices could be heard. The greenish light they threw gave a ghastly pallor to the faces of those in the room. The sounds coming from the hydrophones hesitated for a few moments, groaning and popping and grinding, but then they all merged into one – a barrage of underwater sound that exceeded the limits of the human ear. An officer hastened to lower the volume of the hydrophone.

  An entire side of the seamount had collapsed, its ancient, crumbling, volcanic skin disintegrating in a cascading surrender to gravity. Boulders and rubble raced toward the ocean floor a dozen meters below.

  ***

  The shockwave began at the ocean floor, but the seismic wave raced across the surface at a height of more than 15 meters. It reached the west coast of Bali in mere minutes, destroying everything it touched, leaving behind thousands of dead bodies. The surfer’s beach disappeared, while its only survivor, Bolden, slept peacefully on board the helicopter that saved his life.

  The pilots tried to contact the Roosevelt to report the disaster, but the fleet’s ships were having problems of their own with the aftershocks caused by the huge wave, and had scattered in dispersed for safety. An air traffic controller, up to his elbows with fixed-wing aircraft seeking to land on his pitching deck, suggested the helicopter find a safe island where they could put down until the chaos ebbed.

  Fears of panicked refugees kept the pilots away from Bali, so the they climbed to four hundred meters and headed northwest toward Java, which was outside the tsunami’s trajectory. Within half an hour they were flying above a cluster of uninhabited islands administered by Indonesia. Too small to sustain human settlement, the islands appeared only on the detailed maps seamen use.

  One of them had been secretly occupied by a Muslim independence group. The rebels had found the isolated island the ideal site for a training camp. A few spectacular attacks against targets in Jakarta had earned them a small but generous group of sponsors.

  “Something is wrong,” the colonel mumbled, throwing a glance at the Device on Bolden’s wrist.

  Folder unfastened it and adjusted the detection range to a minimum, yet Bolden’s personal probability still surged past 80 percent. He shook his sleeping client and Bolden opened a bloodshot eye. He looked around confused, without grasping anything of what was going on, then his eyelids fell heavily over his eyes precisely when the helicopter was passing above a somewhat bigger island.

  Two things happened almost simultaneously.

  First, from a clearing in the luxuriant vegetation below them, a 16-year-old recruit launched three ancient Russian anti-aircraft missiles the terrorists had brought to the island years before.

  The helicopter’s radar immediately detected the danger and automatically launched as countermeasures several flares meant to fool the heat-seeking guidance systems of the three missiles. The chopper also launched an air-to-ground missile that vaporized the rest of anti-aircraft battery and the rebels around it. Two of the aggressor missiles followed the false targets, reached them and exploded at a safe distance.

  The remaining missile closed in on them at great speed, automatically engaging the chopper’s second defense system. A robotic Gatling gun with six rotating barrels released a dense curtain of shells in mere seconds, exploding the warhead on the missile.

  The explosion saved the helicopter, but it was close. Shrapnel pierced the aircraft’s light armor, and the blast wave shook it violently. For a moment it seemed unclear whether the pilots would regain control of the chopper, but they soon had it back on a stable flight path. Everyone on board has escaped serious injury.

  Except Bolden.

  He had been hit by shrapnel that pierced his kidneys and ripped through his torso. Cautious Folder had brought along medical equipment and a doctor from the aircraft carrier, but the best that could be done was to stabilize him.

  Chapter 14

  Strangely enough, nothing hurt, but as he tried to regain full consciousness, his most recent memories came back, rushing in abruptly:

  The helicopter, the explosions, the tsunami, perhaps not in that order. He had been hit by something. He remembered Folder shouting orders, trying to make himself heard over the noise of the chopper’s rotors. Bolden had felt calm because of the drugs from the beach, but, most of all, because he was Bolden, the hen that laid golden eggs. It was their job to save him.

  As a matter of fact, they had already done it.

  Someone had applied one or more bandages. Someone else had injected something in his arm, and then something else in his heart directly through his bloody T-shirt. They had been very efficient. Before falling asleep for good, he felt another needle piercing his arm. They were giving him a transfusion, but he didn’t care.

  They probably stuffed him with anesthetics. He managed to roll his eyes to the left, but he saw nothing but different medical devices, with displays that were flashing different colorful read-outs. He tightened, in turns, the muscles of his legs and arms, breathing relieved when they responded. He was in one piece, or at least seemed to be.

  He turned his head to the right. His hand was fastened to the hospital bed with two soft bandages. A winding IV line connected to his arm. Tubes and wires attached to his chest, but since it didn’t hurt he gave up trying to figure out what they were for and made up his mind to ask about them as soon as a doctor showed up.

  There was also a window that was partially covered by the body of a man sprawled in a chair. He was sleeping with his head dropped onto his chest, snoring lightly. Although Bolden couldn’t see his face, he could have sworn it was Folder. He found that it was the first time he was looking at him from a reclining position and he realized astounded that he looked differently. The colonel slept uncomfortably in the hard hospital chair.

  Judging by the way he looked, Bolden deduced that the colonel had been in the hospital with him at least a day and night. As if he felt him, Folder took a long breath and woke up. He looked at him with filmy eyes and, realizing he had come out from under anesthesia, he stood up, rubbed his eyes, stretched his limbs and sighed deeply.

  “What happened?” Bolden articulated with difficulty.

  The colonel walked to the window without turning to face him:

  “You’ve escaped again. An amazing string of events this time. Impossible to predict or prevent, extremely difficult even to intervene successfully. It’s all like pool at this level: you hit a ball that ricochets off the cushion only to hit another ball that goes in one of the table’s pockets. The tsunami, should have killed you. The missile that exploded near the helicopter was the secondary event. It almost managed to finish you off. From this level onwards, things become ever more complex.”

  “I know, you want more money,” Bolden mumbled.

  The colonel suddenly turned around with his hands behind his back. He looked at him sternly.

  “It’s not just about the money here, Ian. In simple terms, your destructive potential has increased a great deal. This time, the collateral victims surpassed a hundred thousand dead. Do you understand? If it hadn’t been for you, those people would have been alive.”

  “Do you want to make me feel remorseful?” Bolden uttered slowly. “Why don’t you put it otherwise? If you hadn’t been guarding me, they would have been alive. Or not. The combination of events that, according to you, was meant to kill me, might have happened anyway and there would have been a hundred thousand casualties plus one – me. Only that, unlike the others, I paid to stay alive. Right? Wasn’t that what you told me once?”

  The door flung open. A doctor came in, accompanied by a nurse. They were both wearing antiseptic masks and latex gloves. Without saying a word, the doctor checked the devices, jotting something down with a stylus on an electronic tablet, while the nurse changed the IV and slipped a stainless stee
l bedpan under his bottom, beckoning him to urinate. Which he did.

  As quickly as they arrived, they departed. Folder waited for the automatic device to close the door behind them.

  “Actually, you’re not out of the woods yet. You’re badly injured.”

  Bolden showed a faint, crooked smile.

  “I don’t feel anything and nothing hurts. My arms and legs are where they should be. I checked as soon as I woke up. How bad can it be?”

  The colonel sat back in his chair. He drew his head closer to Ian’s and looked him straight in the eyes.

  “You are hooked up to all these machines, Ian, because your heart and kidneys can no longer function on their own. You’re getting by on constant blood transfusions and a steady rotation of painkillers. We are feeding you intravenously.”

  Bolden slowly realized what he was being told. He raised his eyes inquiringly.

  “For how long?”

  “Eight days, today. We’ve managed to bring you to one of our on-shore facilities after we stabilized you on the aircraft carrier.

  “You need a transplant. Several transplants, actually. We have put out worldwide bulletins for donors, but you have a rare blood type and matching you to a compatible organ donor won’t be easy.

  “How much time have I got left?”

  He had fought hard and paid a great deal for his life. It wasn’t fair for everything to end like this. So many people had died and he was still alive. All those deaths should have had a purpose, even if only a meager one – his survival. He didn’t compare himself with those who died in wars, fighting for the freedom of nations, for ideas or aspirations, but he understood something that people who died for a cause did not. Death has no meaning.

  The ultimate goal was to stay alive. All the rest was cheap philosophy. Nothing could compare to life and he felt this fundamental truth to be even greater as he grasped the ever-increasing threat to his existence.

  “A week, ten days at most,” said Folder without looking at him. “That’s the limit set by doctors. It’s been eight days already. You desperately need those transplants.”

  “But you said there is no donor,” Bolden whispered faintly.

  Folder got up again, placed his hands behind his back and went close to the window. The polarized glass delicately filtered the light.

  “Actually, there is a possibility.”

  Bolden felt his blood freezing in his veins.

  “No! No way!”

  “That’s all that’s left, Ian. There’s only Norton, your son. He’s the perfect donor.”

  He felt he was falling asleep again. He got tired or maybe the doctor had put something in his drip. Or perhaps his subconscious wouldn’t let him make a decision. He dreamt, or thought he was dreaming, half-asleep, of Veronica.

  Norton had been an accident. Veronica was a piano teacher, but she was passionate about all the other arts, and she came to work for the Boldens straight out of college. She taught young Ian to appreciate art, to read and interpret a musical score on the huge Mason and Hamlin piano Ian’s father had triumphantly installed right in the middle of the great hall of their house in Bel Air. He was 17, and she fascinated him.

  Everything about her was magical. Her hands caressed the keys of the piano, fingers so frail and yet so powerful and commanding. He loved the way she talked to him about the paintings his father had purchased at different auctions as investments. After a few visits she managed to convince his father to let her rearrange them, setting them up until the light fell exactly as it should have, and the paintings seemed to come alive and whisper. Or at least that was what Veronica said, fascinating him even more, and he didn’t contradict her.

  He had never understood why she gave herself to him. He didn’t dare make passes at her, but he almost went insane with jealousy one afternoon when the a young man kissed her goodbye right in front of the house. He confessed his love for her, and after listening to him without interrupting, she gave him a prolonged kiss on the lips, a kiss like nothing he had ever experienced. Then, she gently led him to a private place and made love to him for the first time. After that first encounter, each of her visits included at least one astoundingly orgasmic act.

  Then, after a few months, Veronica disappeared, and Bolden fell into despair. She reappeared more than a year later, but she wasn’t allowed to talk to him, meeting privately with his father and his lawyers. She brought a baby with her, and genetic tests confirmed it was Ian’s son. He saw her briefly through a window, watched her leave with the same young man who had kissed her goodbye in front of the house on the day she and Ian made love for the first time. Veronica had gained a lot of weight and the fine features that had seduced him no longer existed.

  His father didn’t say a word to him. He hadn’t scolded him and he never mentioned anything of what had happened. Ian understood and never tried to look for her again. Later, after he had inherited his father’s fortune, he found out from the family lawyers that Veronica had taken a lot of money in exchange for her silence.

  “Are you awake?” he heard the colonel’s voice as in a dream.

  Bolden opened his eyes and blinked in the artificial light of the fluorescent lamp on the ceiling. It was dark outside.

  “You have to make a decision. We’ve traced Norton.”

  Ian had taken interest in Norton right after his own father’s death, when the boy turned fourteen. Although he wanted to believe that what had happened with Veronica had been spontaneous, what he learned proved it had been a part of a plan. Veronica was supposed to seduce him and have his baby. He had been the prefect victim: a lonely teenager with very rich parents.

  Norton was supposed to be the object of the blackmail, and up to a point, the plan had worked. But no one had foreseen that Norton was going to be a perfect child. He had been a model student, always getting the highest grades. He was also an accomplished athlete, and top schools competed for him.

  He was everything that Bolden never managed to be, but his home life was severely lacking. Veronica started drinking, then taking drugs and finally mixing them. She had left her job at an art gallery and, after the money ran out, she looked for Ian to ask him for more. Her youthful beauty had been replaced with a tragic parody, and he would have tossed her out if not for Norton. He sent her a monthly allowance.

  When Norton turned eighteen, he took legal possession of the million-dollar trust-fund the younger Veronica had set up in his behalf.

  Norton used the wealth wisely, earning a degree in economics and starting a financial services company. He married a woman who looked like the curly haired, blue-eyed Madonna from Raphael’s Sistine Madonna. By his mid-twenties Norton was proudly raising his first son, a boy who would never know his grandfather.

  “Ian,” the colonel’s voice said as Bolden felt something shake his shoulder. “You have to make a decision. This is it. Do you understand me? You or Norton?”

  As if it were that simple. Norton and his wife had already welcomed their second child, and he was a successful businessman, respected and admired everywhere. He had no idea who his real father was --Veronica had died of an overdose before telling him.

  “Ian, I’m asking you once again. If you refuse to answer, I will understand that you’ve chosen to die. So I will ask you again: do you want to live?”

  Ian turned his head away from the direction of Folder’s voice. Mankind could build an elevator into space, but it couldn’t produce a replacement heart for a man like him. He would have given up all his money to find a solution that could save his life, but that wasn’t an option.

  Bolden felt his eyes swell with tears as he shook his head.

  “No,” he said clearly, to ensure that he was understood. “No,” he uttered louder. “Not Norton. I can’t.”

  He heard Folder’s steps on the linoleum in his room and then the door open and shut behind him. After that, although all the medical devices he was connected to were beeping and roaring, he no longer heard anything.

  It
was over. In the game with death that only had one winner he had fought and lost.

  He hoped he died without pain.

  Chapter 15

  Ian Bolden remained in a state of semi-wakefulness in the weeks that passed after Guardian Angel doctors turned his son, Norton, into a collection of individual spare parts.

  Officially, he had disappeared one night from the underground parking deck beneath his office building. Surveillance cameras recorded the kidnapping: two masked men who shoved him in a black, stolen van. The van was eventually recovered in an airport parking lot, but no ransom demand ever came, and despite a promising start, the investigation turned up no further clues, and eventually the FBI drifted away from the case.

  Norton’s angelic wife called in an expensive private investigation company. After three months the manager took pity on her and revealed that there was nothing to be gained by continuing to pay his firm.

  He died almost immediately after being snatched from the parking garage. Guardian Angel field agents anesthetized him in the van and rushed him to the Guardian Angel where Ian Bolden clung to life. Folder had purchased a team of unscrupulous surgeons from Singapore for $5 million each, and their orders were simple: take the parts from one of the patients before them and put them into the other. Without remorse or hesitation, the doctors euthanized the son and saved the father.

  The best that could be said for them was that they were proactive. In addition to the heart and kidneys the swapped, they harvested everything of value they could take from Norton: lungs, liver, eyeballs, skin, various bones and tissues. Each item was marked, packaged and cryogenically preserved.