Serendipity

by Dennis Ingram

  Nathalie emerged almost thirty-six hours later, her eyes puffy and red. “It’s done,” she said to David. “John is safe, in stasis. Hope is safe. She has her memory.” Nathalie gripped his arm. “She’s a person, now, David. A real person.”

  She straightened up and pushed out her chest, despite her weariness. “She is my daughter.”

  David pulled her into a hug. “Thank you for saving them.”

  He released her and Nathalie wobbled on her feet. David caught her by the elbow.

  “Let’s get you some rest. You need it and God knows you deserve it.”

  “… and then she told her off, big time. I mean, it was epic.” Josh gestured as he recounted the story of Nathalie’s encounter with Hope. “I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t been there.”

  The council had assembled to discuss the events of the past day. Nathalie was absent.

  David stroked his chin. “Hmmm. So … Nathalie told Hope John was her father, therefore she must be her mother, then told her she couldn’t have any dessert unless she ate her meat?”

  Nigel laughed. “That’s exactly what she did. As I said, she’s a child. A very smart child, but a child nonetheless. I’ve been planning strategies to use on her, but it didn’t occur to me she needed a mother. Somehow, Nathalie not only realized this but also figured out instinctively what Hope needed.”

  “So she’s found a way to make Hope behave,” Heidi said.

  Nigel shook his head. “Not just that. Nathalie didn’t try to manipulate Hope, she really believes Hope is her daughter and she has a duty to mother her. That’s where she is now.”

  David shrugged. “Nathalie’s a mother and a damned good one. It shouldn’t be a surprise.”

  “Whatever it is, she was brilliant. She saved John and she’s working on Hope.”

  David nodded. Hope kept piling surprise on top of surprise.

  8

  “Have you had these dreams before?” Nigel asked.

  David stood in Nigel’s office, hands clasped behind his back, gazing through the window.

  Nigel waited patiently while David reflected. At last he uttered a single word, not turning around.

  “Yes.”

  “How long since the last episode?”

  Another long silence, broken by a sigh.

  “These past few nights are the first since the war.”

  “I see.” Nigel leaned back in his chair and rested his feet on his desk, one ankle crossed over the other.

  David turned and raised an eyebrow. “Shouldn’t I be the one getting comfortable?”

  “Because that’s what you do in the shrink’s office?” Nigel asked with a hint of a smile. “Did the last one do that? Put you on a couch?”

  David pressed his lips together and Nigel cursed himself for being flippant. He waved a hand toward the sofa.

  “Have a seat. I’m not going to psychoanalyze you; we’ll just have a chat.”

  “A chat?”

  Nigel nodded. “About your dream. That’s what you wanted, right?”

  David pulled at one ear.

  “You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t want help, would you? We see each other every day.”

  “But not here.”

  Nigel nodded. “Not here.”

  After a pause Nigel prompted again. “So, you said you haven’t had these dreams since the African war?”

  David nodded.

  “And did you experience them often after the war?”

  David nodded again. “Three or four times a week. Every night, sometimes.”

  “Did you seek treatment then?”

  David looked away, and Nigel didn’t really need him to answer.

  “I thought I could handle it.”

  “And did you?”

  David looked him in the eye. “I found a way.”

  “Perhaps that way could help you again?”

  David laughed. “Not this time.”

  Nigel’s questioning look prompted him further.

  “My fix was the Interstellar program. With my service history and background I knew I could qualify, so I made it my goal, my only goal. I got so busy with it my dreams began to fade. Once I made the cut and joined with you guys … it became a new life for me. The old dreams didn’t belong in my new life, so they let me alone.”

  “Until now.”

  “Until now.”

  “And now there’s no Interstellar program.”

  David looked at his hands. Nigel saw a vulnerable side to his friend for the first time. “It’s time to fix it, David.”

  David looked up, his forehead wrinkling. Nigel smiled in what he hoped was a reassuring manner. “Yes, it can be fixed. You’re not the first to suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. I’ve seen it before.”

  David sat down and crossed his arms. “PTSD? Is that what you think I have?”

  “That’s part of it. That and a dose of guilt.”

  David jumped to his feet, almost as if shocked. He strode around the office, rubbing the back of his neck. Nigel stayed still, waiting.

  Finally, he turned and looked at Nigel. “Why would I feel guilty?”

  Nigel spread his hands. “I’m not sure. People feel guilt for all sorts of reasons. Some good, many of them not. It helps to talk about it.”

  David froze. Nigel saw his weight shift to his right leg. He realized he had only seconds to stop him walking through the door. His feet hit the floor with a thump as he stood up.

  “I know this is hard for you,” he said, shifting from friend to doctor, “but think of your family. Don’t you owe it to them to at least try?”

  Nigel had struck a low blow in some ways. He knew very well David’s family represented both his greatest weakness and his greatest strength. David knew he knew this, and would undoubtedly realize Nigel had said it to offer him an excuse, a way to justify accepting his help.

  David stood poised to walk away for a what seemed like an eternity before his weight shifted again.

  “Where do we start?”

  Nigel turned to the credenza behind his desk. “Well, to start with I have a bottle of that whiskey one of the scientists makes now.”

  David raised an eyebrow. “Is this best practice? To offer your clients a drink?”

  Nigel smiled as he splashed two fingers into each glass. “It depends on circumstance. In our case it’s just what we need.”

  He handed David a glass and raised his own.

  “Here’s to happier times.”

  “Happier times,” David said, sipping the substance Nigel claimed to be whiskey.

  “It was the last day of the war, for us, anyway,” David said. He nursed his whiskey, which had improved on the second pour. Nigel sat and waited patiently for him to continue.

  “The United States decided to cut its losses and leave it to the others to fight it out. I guess they finally tired of trying to sort out the mess.”

  He took a slug of his whiskey and looked at Nigel. “We should never have gone. We weren’t wanted and there was nothing for us there.” He stood and walked to the window again, eyes distant as he let his mind roll back the years.

  “So, it was the last day …”

  “The last day,” David said, turning to face him. “All of our ground troops had been evacuated, or so we thought. We waited offshore, on the carrier. All our air support came from there.”

  David sat down again and swirled his drink in his glass. “It wasn’t like the glory days of carrier wars, Nigel. That thing was an anachronism. It was just a big moving target, vulnerable to missile attacks. We couldn’t just park up off the coast and fly from there – we’d have been taken out before we could fire a shot. So we kept moving, far out to sea. Fast destroyers packed with EW gear, anti-air missiles, and drones swarmed around us 24/7. The fleet had a CAP – a Combat Air Patrol – up at all times, all just to stay alive, to avoid the missile attacks.”

  “Were there attacks?”

  David nodded. “Oh yeah. Two or three a week.�
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  Nigel’s glass stopped halfway to his mouth. “But you survived.”

  David pressed his lips together. “The carrier did. Not all the destroyers, though. Nobody talked about it, but we all understood part of their job was to act as decoys.”

  Nigel nodded, imagining the effect on the men and women serving on those ships, the uncertainty of not knowing if each day would be your last.

  “So you spent your time out at sea dodging missiles?”

  “Until it was time for a mission. Then the carrier would turn and head for shore at flank speed. We’d launch as soon as we came into range so it could turn back and run for the deep water like a scared rabbit.”

  “I see. And you had to find it again, afterwards?”

  David nodded. “It would return at a set time to an agreed location. We’d meet it there, unless of course something went wrong.”

  “And did it? Ever go wrong, I mean.”

  David nodded again. “Sometimes. Murphy, you know? Then we’d have to find it before we ran out of fuel. Mostly we did. Some didn’t make it.” He looked away for a moment, and Nigel guessed he’d lost friends that way.

  “Is that what happened?”

  David shook his head. “No. Oh no, it was much worse than that.”

  David held out his glass for a refill. Nigel poured.

  “The Admiral couldn’t wait to get under way. None of us could. The sooner we got out of there, the sooner we’d be away from the missile attacks and could quit worrying about who would catch the next one. So we buttoned up ready to go and then we hear news of American POWs found in the jungle. We thought all our guys were out and then this.”

  David’s right hand clenched. He stared right through Nigel, his mind taken back to the source of his anguish. “They were going to leave them there. Just leave them there.” A scowl creased his forehead as he recalled what happened. “Oh, they justified it. The enormous cost of keeping the fleet there. The risk of staying, how the lives of the many crew on the carrier and support ships outweighed the few that remained. You get the idea.”

  Nigel nodded, seeing where this would go. “But you didn’t accept that, did you?”

  David shook his head. “I wanted to go get them. But the Captain, he would have none of it. He wanted out as much as the Admiral, maybe more.”

  “And so?”

  “And so we went, anyway.”

  “How?”

  “It started with Andy. Andy Yardley. He was my navigator, my number two. He led the way to flight ops where we found the others. They all wanted in. None of them cared about being court-martialed afterwards, even about getting killed doing it. We’d all just had it by then, with the whole deal. This was the straw that broke the camel’s back. We had to draw lots because we couldn’t all go. We had an SAR – a search and rescue unit – on board, with choppers. That’s where we went next, to commandeer three of them. Only it didn’t work.”

  “Why?”

  “The SAR squadron commander, Arial Aziz, was waiting for us. She’d already heard what we were up to. She gave us, me in particular, a grade-A chewing out.”

  “So that was it?”

  David grinned, genuine warmth breaking through for a second. “Hell, no! She chewed me out for even thinking for a minute I could fly one of her birds. Arial let me know in no uncertain terms that while I might think fighter pilots could do anything, I knew shit about flying choppers.” His smile faded. “She was right, of course. I’d never flown one, I just kind of assumed I’d work it out.”

  “Because fighter jocks aren’t arrogant at all.”

  David grimaced. “I guess I asked for that. Anyway, to cut a long story short, we got three birds in the air with Arial flying lead and four other pilots from her squadron flying the other two. Somehow the deck crew accidentally got them up top and didn’t notice us taking off. The officer of the watch decided it must be a sanctioned exercise.”

  A twitch in the corner of Nigel’s mouth threatened to become a smile. “So you were all in on it?”

  David nodded. “It gets better. The CIC decided they saw an incoming threat from a coastal direction and scrambled my squadron to back up the CAP. They covered us the whole way in.”

  “I’m sure the Admiral was delighted.”

  David nodded. “He could wear the loss of a few POWs, but it would have been hard to explain the loss of a strike squadron and most of his SAR team. He had no choice but to turn the fleet toward the coast and stand ready to recover us. The fighters would be OK but the choppers didn’t have the range to make it back otherwise.”

  “So what happened next?”

  David’s gaze turned inward again as he continued the story. “CIC gave us the location and we flew inland over the jungle, forty or fifty klicks. We set down in a clearing not far from their reported location and struck out on foot. We didn’t know what kind of reception we’d get, so we didn’t dare fly all the way. It took us half an hour to get there – the trail was heavily overgrown so the going was tough. I remember it was unbelievably hot and humid. I guess we were working a bit too, hacking our way through and moving as fast as we could. These little midges were everywhere. They got in our eyes, noses, and mouths and we were always wiping them off. It was almost unbearable, but we had to do it, we were their only hope. Besides, we had committed now. We’d be in major trouble when we got back and there was no way we’d return without them. We had to do it.”

  “And did you find them?” Nigel asked, caught up in David’s story. He needed to get David to open up to find the source of his nightmares, but he also really wanted to find out what happened next.

  “There was a bend in the trail then the jungle thinned into a clearing. They were just sitting there.”

  David looked at Nigel and he felt a shiver go down his spine. This was the nightmare, he knew, right here.

  David’s voice was almost a whisper. “They didn’t need to be penned in or tied up. They’d tortured them. I don’t think any of them had all their limbs, they were all missing one of them at least, most more. They were missing eyes, too, noses even. Burns. Some of their wounds didn’t even have bandages. And the bugs, God the bugs in that place. They … they …” He looked away. Nigel had to bend forward to hear what he said. “They got into the wounds.” David shook his head. “It was like something out of a horror movie.”

  Silence fell.

  Nigel prompted David again. “Did you call the helicopters in?”

  David looked at him. Nigel had seen that look many times before from veterans.

  “They saw us and called out. We went to walk over to them, but then we noticed the others.”

  “Others?”

  “There was a kind of shack on the far side of the clearing. It’d had an iron roof once, but it had rusted away and they’d patched it up with branches and leaves from the jungle. These people – soldiers or rebels, whoever they were – came rushing out of there toward us, waving guns and shouting.”

  “So what did you do?”

  David’s eyes were distant. “I gave the order to fire. We shot them down, all of them. None survived.”

  “So you saved the POWs from their torturers.”

  David looked at Nigel and the expression on his face would haunt Nigel later. “That’s when I started to make sense of what they’d shouted at us. They’d been telling us to not to shoot them. It was these people who’d saved the POWs, not tortured them.”

  His eyes turned cold and flat and he shuddered as he looked down and buried his face in his hands.

  “I killed them. I killed them all.”

  Nigel reached out to touch his friend’s shoulder and felt him jump. He’d never seen David like this before. He had always been the strong one – disciplined and calm in the face of danger.

  “It was war, David. Life and death decisions have to be made in an instant. You made the only choice you could in the circumstances.”

  David looked unconvinced. “The dream always ends there. In the dream,
when I look down, my hands melt and I start to become like the POWs – damaged, mutilated. What does that mean?”

  Nigel considered. “I think it’s a case of survivor’s guilt. You blame yourself for what happened and feel you should be punished for it. Your subconscious is both punishing you and taking you away from a position of authority, removing you from blame.”

  David didn’t say anything. Nigel spoke again. “After that, you evacuated the POWs to the fleet.” He made it a statement rather than a question.

  David nodded. “I sent them back in two of the choppers. I stayed behind with Andy and Arial and her copilot, Sandeep. We dug graves for the dead.” He looked at Nigel. “It was a dumb thing to do. We were open to an ambush the whole time. But I felt compelled to do it, it seemed like the least I could do. The least.”

  “To atone.”

  David nodded. “Perhaps.”

  “So you made it back to the fleet.”

  “Yes. We all made it.”

  “Did anyone attack the fleet while you were gone?”

  “No.”

  “So no one else died?”

  “No.”

  “And what then? What happened after you returned?”

  “The Admiral threw us in the brig. Everyone on the mission, the officer of the watch and three officers from the CIC. The fighter pilots got the benefit of the doubt.”

  “Did you speak to the Admiral, or the Captain?”

  David nodded. “It wasn’t pleasant.”

  “And then they court-martialed you.”

  David looked up. “No. No, much worse than that.”

  Nigel raised an eyebrow. “What could be worse?”

  David’s shoulders hunched. “They gave me the Medal of Honor.”

  “There were no heroes in that war,” David said. “It was a sordid, shitty little affair no one should be proud of.”

  “But …” Nigel started to say, then bit down on his words.

  “But there was me.”

  “I remember now. The newspapers … I didn’t make the connection when I met you later, on the Starship program.”

  “That was the deal, you see,” David said, his expression sour. “Courts martial for everyone unless I accept the medal and do a promotional tour.”