"He's conscious, Mrs. Rodman," said the airman excitedly as he pushed the gurney into the room.
And then Karen was looking down at him. He had never seen a lovelier sight, despite the tears in her eyes. She reached out to take his trembling hand and leaned down to plant a gentle kiss on his swollen lips, about the only feature, other than his eyes, that had escaped the yards of gauze that swathed his head. He looked like a mummy, and he wasn't sure just how far removed he was from the ranks of the dead.
"Hi, Babe," he said wearily. "I don't know where I've been, but I'm back."
The airman maneuvered him into his bed, then left to inform the nurses that their patient had rejoined the rational world, if that term could be properly applied to the current international climate. Karen sat beside him and related what she had managed to learn about events of the past two weeks, which were lost completely among the damaged synapses of his memory banks.
Two Iranian medics had been attached to the army unit that shot down the helicopter. After doing what they could to stop the bleeding, the Iranians had transported the two critically injured pilots to the nearest town large enough to support a hospital. There the doctors accomplished some further patching up but gave the men only a slight chance for survival. Both were comatose, with multiple fractures and other life-threatening injuries.
The government in Tehran was having a field day pillorying Uncle Sam over the failed rescue effort. The Iranian president had been hoping for improved relations with the West, but this was the next best thing, a chance to put the Great Satan on the defensive. Upon learning that the pilots were beyond interrogation and likely to die, he consulted with his parliamentary leaders and decided on a new course of action. Rather than send the Americans two more corpses, they would return the men while they were still alive, seizing a unique opportunity to improve Iran's badly tarnished image as a humanitarian, law-abiding member of the community of nations. Arrangements were made quickly to transport the men to nearby Turkey, where an Air Force medevac plane picked them up and flew them to Germany. The American doctors had worked feverishly to stabilize their conditions, then began the slow process of nursing them back to health.
Rodman stared at his wife, wanting to avoid the obvious question, but knowing he couldn't. Forcing a deep breath that made him wince, he said haltingly, "You mentioned Dutch… and me. What about Barry… what about the others?"
Karen held a hand to her mouth as though attempting to seal her lips. Slowly she shook her head. "They didn't make it, Roddy. I'm sorry. Look, it wasn't your fault. Really, you had no way of knowing."
During the next two weeks, Roddy experienced enough aches and pains to make him wonder if death might not have been the easier out. The severe concussion that had obliterated two weeks of his life left him with a continuous headache, dizziness, spells of nausea. In addition, he suffered a total of five broken ribs, which guaranteed maximum discomfort, and several deep facial lacerations that would require more than one round of plastic surgery. His other major injury involved multiple fractures of his left leg. He faced the prospect of several operations involving pins and grafts to restore the leg to a semblance of its former condition. The chief orthopedic surgeon would joke later that he had enough metal in his leg to trigger a major alert should he dare to pass through an airport security scanner.
Dutch Schuler had suffered a compound fracture of his right shoulder and serious internal injuries that kept him on the critical list for several weeks. When they decided to fly Roddy back to the hospital at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida, located on the same sprawling installation as Special Operations Command Headquarters at Hurlburt Field, he asked to see Captain Schuler before his departure.
It was an emotional encounter, their first meeting since the crash. Both knew it was likely their last for a long while. Roddy's wheelchair was pushed into the room where Dutch lay like a human Hi-Fi system, wires and tubes protruding everywhere.
Roddy grasped the thin, cold hand that reached out toward him. He smiled as best he could. God, the man looked like death warmed over.
"Damn, it's good to see you, Dutch."
Schuler's expression didn't change, but his eyes seemed to light up. "I hear you're going home, Colonel."
"Yeah. Back to Florida. That's as much home as any place, I suppose. When are they going to let you out of here?"
"Wish I knew. They say I'll probably go to a hospital near my folks' place. They live in California now, y'know."
"The sunshine should do both of us good," Roddy said, shifting around in the chair, trying to find a comfortable position for that damnable leg. It felt like it was encased in concrete.
"Right. Good place to get out on the tennis court," Dutch said without thinking. Then, as the import of what he had said struck him, he added in a somber voice, "Probably a suntan is all I'll accomplish on a tennis court now."
Roddy winced. The pain was mental, not physical. Dutch loved tennis almost as much as he loved flying. Whether he would do either again loomed as a huge question mark.
It wasn't your fault, Karen had kept insisting. True, the Pentagon had signaled a positive commit. He'd had no warning. Not in the normal sense. He'd had that bad feeling beforehand, but you couldn't abort a mission based on some nebulous premonition. The plain fact was that he had sat in the right seat that night. That was where the buck stopped.
"How's the head, Colonel? You must have gotten quite a lick."
"Yeah. My helmet apparently came off or got crushed somehow. I've got a headache I wouldn't wish on anybody but Saddam Hussein."
One result of the head injury was that most of the details concerning the ill-fated mission still remained clouded in his mind. But he had been troubled by a recurring nightmare in which the muzzle flash fireflies metamorphosed into large missiles that exploded all around him with a deafening roar. This had led to several sessions with a psychiatrist who specialized in post-traumatic stress disorder. The physician was one who had worked with hostages coming through Wiesbaden on their way back to freedom.
"Damned shame about Barry and the other guys," Schuler said sadly.
Roddy nodded and averted his eyes, blinking back the tears. His thoughts were a confused mixture of guilt and hurt and anger and, more than anything, uncertainty. "I'm sorry I got you into this, Dutch. I wish there was some way I could—"
"Hey, Colonel. You did everything you could. Apparently Washington thought everything was fine or they would have alerted us. Somebody on the ground must have screwed up. We got caught in the wrong place at the wrong time."
As the days grew shorter and the nights cooler toward the end of autumn, Roddy was thankful to be back in Florida instead of heading into the cold of a German winter. He had been assigned quarters on base, which made it convenient for Karen as he was alternately shunted in and out of the hospital for surgery and therapy. There was little to do otherwise but read or watch TV, which he viewed as mostly a waste, except for the football games on weekends. He couldn't watch for very long at a time, anyway. One of the aftereffects of the head injury was a difficulty in concentration. An old friend would occasionally drop by for a drink and a chat, but Roddy found himself becoming more and more at a loss for words. The talk would invariably turn to flying, and all he could think of was the flight surgeon's cautioning him not to hold out much hope for a return to flying status.