Tracks (33 page)

“Malcolm, get your men ready
for tonight,” he said after several silent moments.  “You’re Red Tape.”

“Mike, you’re Scorpion. 
We want perfection this time.  I’ll be joining you.”

Harley shot a glance at
Mai-Li.

“We get a four-day leave
starting tomorrow – if all goes well tonight.  Long-John and Copeland, you
need to get the list to me before we leave. 
Dismissed.”

Everyone got up on cue and
began filing out of the bunk.  Ali, who noticed ‘the glance’, pulled
Mai-Li along.

“He’ll find you.  Don’t
worry,” she said as they made their way back to their hut.

“I’m not sure I want him to
find me,” Mai-Li complained.

“Quite
difficult in a place like this.”

“I can’t offend the man.”

“No need to.  Just tell
him what you feel.  He’ll understand,” Ali observed.

As they walked, Mai-Li had her
nose down to the ground. 

“I don’t know what I
feel.   I need time.”

“Take it, then.  Join me
at my parents’.  Tell him you’ve made plans.”

Mai-Li slumped on her bed in
turmoil when they reached the hut, terrified of disappointing Harley. 
Uncertain of what she felt for him she realized she was in a jam.  He had
been nothing but a gentleman with her.  Agreeing to take on Lambda-B where
no one else would, then diverting to help bring out Clair and Ibrahim, 
allowing her entry into his secret realm, complimenting her… helping her climb
the tree… kissing her… she felt attracted to him in some ways and was flattered
by his attention but he was so much older.  What kind of relationship
could evolve from this?  And what happens when it’s over and they part
ways? 

She fell asleep without
resolution.  Ali put on her training suite and went out to train the
noontime crew.

CHAPTER
THIRTY

The next time Black Jack
ventured into the courtyard his eyes could not open.

A week in the pitch-black
dungeon caused a blinding effect as soon as he staggered into the open air, the
bright Sinai sun high overhead.  He held on to the soldier who escorted
him, moving gingerly toward the infirmary.

Surprisingly nonplused for a
man who had just spent a week in solitary confinement in a damp cell no bigger
than a large closet, Jack would normally have wanted to venture out on his own
but for his crippling knee injury and his eyes unable to adjust.  

Nurse Juman cleaned and
applied first aid treatment before Doctor Shalabi entered to examine the
knee.  He looked it over then applied gentle pressure on a few spots,
causing Jack to grind his teeth.  His eyes were beginning to adjust and
the first thing he noticed through a graying haze was that his knee’s color was
a dark shade of purple, almost black.  He tried to read the doctor’s
impressions and whether or not he should worry and thought he detected quite a
concern.

After he had thoroughly
examined his condition, trying to determine the anticipated effects of a week
in solitary confinement under such horrific conditions, Doctor Shalabi called
both nurse Juman and the escorting soldier for a conference outside the
treatment room.  Minutes later the doctor and nurse walked back in
accompanied by the prison commandant.

Doctor Shalabi briefly
reported his prognosis in Arabic, which Jack just managed to grasp.

“His overall condition is
relatively fine both physically and mentally,” the doctor reported.  “He
runs a slight fever but I’ve detected none of the usual malnutrition or trauma
signs of a week in that terrible place.”

The commandant seemed annoyed
with the doctor voicing his personal misgivings but held himself in check for
the moment.

“But if we don’t operate on
the knee, he could lose his leg,” the doctor diagnosed bluntly.  “Though
it did not spread above the knee, there are clear signs of edema and clotted
hemorrhaging which, left untreated, could lead to gangrene and further, losing
the entire bottom part of the limb.  He is quite lucky to have survived
this far but if we don’t…”

“Alright, I heard you the
first time,” the commandant cut him off irritably.  “What hospital do you
recommend?  This is going to cause me a lot of trouble.” 

“Closest and best equipped is
Sharm,” Shalabi informed confidently.

 “But the security
arrangements stink with all the goddamn tourists over there. How long is all
this going to take?” 

“I can call them in advance to
prepare an operating room.  Barring any emergency, they should be able to
prepare in advance.  If all goes well, recovery should take three days at
the minimum.”

“Three days!” the commandant
exclaimed.  “I can’t afford this prisoner staying there three days. 
I’ll need half my already stretched force to escort him.  That’s a
twenty-four hour round the clock shifts in an insecure place.  Not to
mention if word gets out to the media through these reckless doctors and
nurses!”

“You trust his health to us,
Commandant, Sir, and if you bring him back here too early and the area gets
infected, you’ve done nothing!” Shalabi retorted standing up for his
profession, who he knew despised military brass most of all.  These were
the people whose job was wounding people, which he had to fix.

“Two days is all he gets to
recover, Shalabi,” the Commandant hissed pointing at Jack, “and they better be
ready for us when we get there or we’ll be turning right back.”

The commandant stormed out of
the room mumbling to
himself
, slamming the door shut
behind him, causing a tray of drugs to fall to the floor.

Nurse Juman hurried to pick up
the fallen receptacles, each filled with the different medicine and
prescription pills.  She nervously arranged them on the tray and put it
back in its place, glancing periodically at the doctor who, in disgust, raised
his hands in the air and turned to prepare a large syringe intended to stop the
clotting in Jack’s knee.

Jack closed his eyes and bit
his lip as the doctor administered the needle in several places.  Jack
remained in the treatment room for ten additional minutes to make sure there
were no ill effects to the treatment.  Finally Nurse Juman sterilized and
bandaged the knee.  Jack was escorted to the patient room and given the
last available bed at the far end by the lone barbed window.

As he lay on his back, he
became aware of all the things he had craved to see and feel while in the
dungeon.  The mattress felt like heaven.  The bright shining light
through the window; the people around him; inmates or not, at a certain point
down in the gutter, he wished he was among them.  Anything was better than
being shut in like an animal.  Thoughts about his upcoming trial were
quickly replaced by craving very basic things such as light, air, a decent
toilet, and most of all, fellow people.  It was not a matter of missing
the company of people.  Jack had often preferred to be on his own,
sometimes making three or four days treks in the Catskills, just to get away. 
It was a fear they would forget him there forever and no one would discover his
fate.  After the second day he began to worry they would never let him
out.  It was his biggest mental challenge, which he constantly tried to
rationalize to himself and constantly failed.  It suddenly seemed so
simple to just leave him there and throw away the key.  It would certainly
save everyone a lot of trouble.

He had persevered with his
exercise sessions of sit-ups and had reached a count of over one hundred and
fifty respectively for each session, still the cell was becoming smaller and
smaller as time went on; more cramped, more humid, and more threatening. The
stench of his bodily wastes had become unbearable.  

The one bright spot was the
provision of water.  At least they understood that without it, he would
never survive.  Twice a day he would get a fresh bottle rolled under the
iron door.  Food was administered sporadically.  It was stale and
anything but nutritious.  Jack preferred to exploit it to a minimum and
only for the sake of keeping his sanity. 

Though he could distinguish
between night and day he soon lost his sense of time and could not figure how
long he had been there. When they finally came to release him, he actually
thought they had come a day early.

He felt feverish.  The
doctor had told the commandant he had developed a slight fever, but in fact it
was quite a high fever that remained constant his entire confinement
time.  He silently thanked the good doctor for insisting on the treatment
in a conventional hospital but wondered what it would be like to go under the
knife of his captors.  A knee operation was no walk in the park not to
mention the administration of anesthesia, which had always terrified him.

Before he fell asleep, Jack
realized that at least for the moment, he was content, something he could not
imagine being possible not two weeks before.  An Egyptian prison in the
middle of the desert was maybe the last place he would ever have imagined
himself feeling content.  But there it was, having survived the dungeon;
the patient room in the infirmary was paradise.  Everything was relative.

He slept the entire day and
night before they woke him for breakfast the following morning.  The
nurses were distributing fresh vegetables, cottage cheese and pita bread on
plastic trays, a cuisine Jack had not had in a while.

He looked around the
room.  There were ten beds, five each side.  He could not see the
face of the man facing him, apparently still asleep, but all the rest were
propped up in their beds, and were hungrily chewing on their food.  The
rumors about the infirmary Jack had heard in the cellblock were true.  It
was the one place everyone wished to get to.  It had a reputation which he
now understood having met the doctor and Nurse Juman.  They were good
people in a rough neighborhood.  The inmates respected it and the
infirmary became a neutral zone of rest and recuperation.  But to get
there, one needed to be very sick or be cut up pretty badly. 

Jack noticed all the patients
had large bandages over some part of their bodies or limbs.  There were no
sheets. 
Just blankets and the brown mattresses.
 
The year-round heat in A-Tur dodged the expense.  Compared with the
cellblocks, no one complained.

The room was a rectangular,
gray and brick-built, keeping it relatively cool, with modest first aid and
emergency equipment set up among the beds.  A sentry sat on a stool by its
entrance, directing traffic.  No one was allowed in or out except the nurses
and doctor.  All inmates were escorted to and from the room and that
included the toilets.

The patients consumed their
meal in minutes.  Then all raised their trays for more, which they never
got.  Jack took his time, savoring the experience but glances from the
patients forced him to quicken his pace.  His next bed neighbor, a large
middle-aged convict with one swollen eye, nearly shut, and bandage across his
chest followed Jack’s every bite until he was done. 

Jack, still feeling feverish,
watched Nurse Juman collect the trays while the inmates simply slid back to
their original position for more recuperation.  The one across from Jack
never touched his food.  Doctor Shalabi came in to check on him and Jack
understood the patient was suffering from a concussion. 

He watched the activity for a
while.  The line of inmates coming for treatment was growing long outside
the room.  Now and then the nurses would bring out a patient for checkup
at the doctor’s.  The lucky ones remained in the patient room for another
night.

Jack dozed on and off the
entire day until supper. It was made up of canned meat, bread and jam, and more
cottage cheese with tea for dessert.

It was dark outside when they
awoke him. 

Disoriented and confused he
followed a soldier, hopping on his one good leg to the waiting ambulance where
they put him on a partially propped wheeled bed facing back, and fastened both
his legs with belts, leaving the knee in the clear.

Two soldiers joined him in the
back.  An officer-in-charge sat in the front next to the driver. 
Doctor Shalabi rushed to at the last minute handing the officer the needed
paperwork assuring him the Sharm Hospital were waiting to operate as soon as
they arrived.  The prison gate was pushed open and the antique brown
ambulance began its journey leaving the prison behind flickering in the dark.

Jack had been to Sharm el
Sheikh before.  It was a famous tourist town at the tip of the Sinai
Peninsula, on the fork of the Gulf of Suez and Gulf of Aqaba.  In the days
of Israeli rule in the seventies, it had begun to make a name for itself for
its majestic coral reefs, the fishing, deep sea diving and overall ambience
with the Sinai high mountains in the background.  It had perfect vacation
weather – hot and
dry
all year – and all the
ingredients for a vacation of any kind especially in the winter. A little
further south, right at the tip, was a national diving park known a Ras
Muhamad, where the coral scenery dropped a dead eight hundred meters to the sea
floor with all the known coral wildlife possible.  Snorkeling was enough
to see plenty, but it was a diver’s paradise, putting the Australian Great
Barrier Reef to shame.

The Israelis built a town
called Ofira there with all amenities including high rise hotels and a hospital
which the Egyptians inherited when they got the Sinai back in the eighties.

They traveled southeast along
the Gulf of Suez.  The unattended asphalt highway was a narrow road mostly
unmarked, which hugged the coastline and had its share of pits and bumps. 
Jack held on tight praying they will not hit a ditch deep enough or a bump high
enough to hurt his knee.  The ambulance moved at its full speed, a mere 50
miles an hour, the driver disregarding the obstacles.

It was dark outside. 
Jack could only see the inside of the ambulance from where he was seated,
facing back.  The only window was a slit revealing the driver compartment,
allowing communication between front and back.  Now and then he heard a
vehicle pass by but mostly he just sat there propped on the bed, drained,
watching his guards doze off.

Hours later, the sun just over
the horizon, they reached Sharm.  The driver suddenly fired up the siren
and tore in to the hospital’s emergency ward.  The back door flew open and
Jack was hurled out of the ambulance attached to the bed.  He was wheeled
through a swinging door, the officer in front following a male nurse, the two
soldiers with a second male nurse guiding Jack’s bed along.

They stopped at a window and
Jack watched as the officer handed in the paperwork.  Then he was wheeled
to a long room with several curtained stands that housed patients, their
entourage waiting impatiently around.  Jack noticed a group of foreigners,
still in their wetsuits, talking excitedly in an unfamiliar language Jack suspected
was Swedish.  There were two women and a man and they seemed up in arms
talking among themselves, pointing toward the cubicle where Jack assumed their
comrade lay behind a curtain.  Jack was wheeled to an empty cubicle
himself to wait behind the curtain until the doctor on duty came in for the
initial checkup.   Jack heard a rustle of voices behind the curtain
before the doctor came through, leaving the soldiers and officer behind.