Cause of Death (38 page)

"We don't know that they'll do that," he said to me.

"And you'll take the chance they won't?"

"And what if he comes to," Marino said. "Hand's going to recognize you and tell all his assholes who you are. Then what?"

"He's not going to come to."

Wesley stared out a window, and it wasn't very hot in the RV, but he looked like it was summer. His shirt was limp from dampness, and he kept wiping his brow. He did not know what to do. I had one idea, and I did not think there could be another one.

"Listen to me," I said. "I can't save Joel Hand, but I can make them think he's not dead."

Everyone just stared at me.

Then Marino said, "What?"

I was getting frantic. "He could die any minute," I said. "I've got to get in there now and buy you enough time to get in, too."

"We can't get in," Wesley said.

"Once I'm in there, maybe you can," I said. "We can use the robot to find a way. We'll get him in, and then he can stun and blind them long enough for your guys to get in. I know you have the equipment to do that."

Wesley was grim and Marino looked miserable, I understood the way they felt, but I knew what must be done.

I went out to the nearest ambulance and got what I needed from paramedics while other people found ice. Then Toto and I made our approach with Lucy at the controls. The robot carried fifty pounds of ice while I was in charge of a large medical chest. We walked toward the front door of Old Point's main building as if this were any other day and our visit was normal. I did not think of the men who had me in their scopes. I refused to imagine explosives or the barge loading up material that could help Libya build an atom bomb.

When we reached the door, it was immediately opened by what looked like the same bearded man who had appeared to get the hostage phone not long ago.

"Get in," he gruffly said, and he was carrying an assault rifle on a strap.

"Help me with the ice," I said.

He stared at the robot with its five bags held fast in grippers. He was reticent, as if Toto were a pit bull that might suddenly hurt him in some way. Then he reached for the ice and Lucy programmed her friend through fiber optics to release it. Next, this man and I were inside the building with the door shut, and the security area had been destroyed, X-ray and other scanning devices ripped out of place and riddled with bullets. There were blood drips and drag marks, and when I followed him around a corner, I smelled the bodies before I saw the slain guards who had been gathered into a ghastly, gory pile down the hall.

Fear rose in my throat like bile as we passed through a red door, and the rumble of combines shook my bones and made it impossible to hear anything said by this man who was a New Zionist. As I noticed the large black pistol on his belt, I thought about Danny and the .45 that had so coldly killed him. We climbed grated stairs painted red, and I did not look down because I would get dizzy. He led me along a catwalk to a door that was very heavy and painted with warnings, and he punched in a code as ice began to drip on the floor.

"Just do as you're told," I vaguely heard him say as we walked into the control room. "You understand me?" He nudged my back with his rifle.

"Yes," I said.

There were maybe a dozen men inside, all dressed in slacks and sweaters or jackets, and carrying semiautomatic rifles and machine guns. They were very excited and angry, and seemed indifferent to the ten hostages sitting on the floor against a wall. Hands were tied in front of them, and pillowcases had been pulled over their heads. Through holes cut out for eyes, I could see their terror. The openings for their mouths were stained with saliva and they sucked in and out with rapid, shallow breaths. I noted bloody drag marks on the floor here, too, only these were fresh and led behind a console where the latest victim had been dumped.

I wondered how many bodies I would later find should mine not be among them.

"Over there," my escort ordered.

Joel Hand was on his back on the floor, covered by a curtain someone had ripped from a window. He was very pale and still wet from the pool where he had swallowed water that would kill him, no matter what I tried to do. I recognized his fair, full-lipped face from when I had seen him in court, only he looked puffier and older.

"How long has he been like this?" I spoke to the man who had brought me in.

"Maybe an hour and a half."

He was smoking and pacing. He would not meet my eyes, one hand nervously resting on the barrel of his gun, which was aimed at my head as I set down the medical chest. I turned around and stared at him.

"Don't point that at me," I said.

"You shut up." He stopped pacing and looked as if he would crack my skull.

"I'm here because you invited me, and I'm trying to help." I met his glassy gaze and my voice meant business, too. "If you don't want me to help, then go ahead and shoot me or let me leave. Neither one is going to help him. I'm trying to save his life and don't need to be distracted by your goddamn gun."

He did not know what to say as he leaned against a console with enough controls to fly us to the moon. Video displays on walls showed that both reactors were shut down, and areas in a grid lighted up red warned of problems I could not comprehend.

"Hey, Wooten, take it easy." One of his peers lit a cigarette.

"Let's open the bags of ice now," I said. "I wish we had a tub, but we don't. I see some books on those countertops, and it looks like there's a lot of stacks of paper over there by that fax machine. Bring anything like that you can for a border."

Men brought to me all sorts of thick manuals, reams of papers and briefcases that I assumed belonged to the employees they had captured. I formed a rectangular border around Hand as if I were in my backyard making a flower bed. Then I covered him with fifty pounds of ice, leaving only his face and an arm exposed.

"What will that do?" The man called Wooten had moved closer, and he sounded as if he were from out west somewhere.d to radiation," I said. "His "He's been acutely expose system is being destroyed and the only way to put a stop to it is to slow everything down."

I opened the medical chest and got out a needle, which I inserted into their dying leader's arm and secured with tape. I connected an IV line leading to a bag on a stand that contained nothing but saline, a harmless salty solution that would do nothing one way or another. It dripped as he got cooler beneath inches of ice.

Hand was barely alive, and my heart was thudding as I looked around at these sweating men who believed that this man I pretended to save was God. One had taken his sweater off, and his undershirt was almost gray, the sleeves drawn up from years of washing. Several of them had beards, while others had not shaved in days. I wondered where their women and children were, and I thought of the barge in the river and what must be going on in other parts of the plant.voice barely said, and at least "Excuse me," a quavering one of the hostages was a woman. "I need to go to the bathroom." obody shitting "Mullen, you take her. We don't want n in here."

"Excuse me, but I have to go, too," said another hostage, who was a man.

"So do I."he was young "All right, one at a time," said Mullen, w and huge.

I knew at least one thing the FBI did not. The New Zionists had never intended to let anyone else go. Terrorists place hoods over their hostages because it is easier to kill people who have no faces. I got out a vial of saline and injected fifty milliliters into Hand's IV line, as if I were giving him some other magic dose.

"How's he doing?" one of the men loudly asked as another hostage was led off to the bathroom.

"I've got him stabilized at the moment," I lied.

"When's he going to come around?" asked another.

I took their leader's pulse again, and it was so faint I almost could not find it. Suddenly, the man dropped down beside me and felt Hand's neck. Digging his fingers in the ice, he pressed them over the heart, and when he looked up at me, he was frightened and furious.

"I don't feel nothing!" he yelled, his face red.

"You're not supposed to feel anything. It's critical to keep him in a hypothermic state so we can arrest the rate of irradiation damage to blood vessels and organs," I told him. "He's on massive doses of diethylene triamine pentaacetic acid, and he is quite alive."

He stood, his eyes wild as he stepped closer to me, finger on the trigger of his Tec-9. "How do we know you aren't just bullshitting or making him worse."

"You don't know." I showed no emotion because I had accepted this was the day I would die, and I was not afraid of it. "You have no choice but to trust that I know what I'm doing. I've profoundly slowed down his metabolism.

And he's not going to come to any time soon. I'm simply trying to keep him alive."

He averted his gaze.

"Hey, Bear, take it easy."

"Leave the lady alone."

I continued kneeling by Hand as his IV dripped and melting ice began to seep through the barricade, spreading over the floor. I took his vital signs many times and made notes, so it seemed that I was very busy in my attendance of him.

I could not help but glance out windows whenever I could, and wonder about my comrades. At not quite three P.m., his organs failed him like followers that suddenly aren't interested anymore. Joel Hand died without a gesture or sound as cold water ran in small rivers across the room.

"I need ice and I need more drugs," I looked up and said.

"Then what?" Bear came closer.

"Then at some point you need to get him to a hospital."

No one responded.

"If you don't give me these things I've requested, I can do nothing more for him," I flatly stated.

Bear went over to a desk and got on the hostage phone.

He said we needed ice and more drugs. I knew Lucy and her team had better act now or I probably would be shot.

I moved away from Hand's spreading puddle, and as I looked at his face it was hard for me to believe that he had so much power over others. But every man in this room and those in the reactor and on the barge would kill for him. In fact, they already had.

"The robot's bringing the shit. I'm going out to get it," said Bear as he looked out the window. "It's on its way now.

"You go out there you're probably going to get your ass shot off."

"Not with her in here," Bear's eyes were hostile and crazed.

"The robot can bring it to you," I surprised them by saying.

Bear laughed. "You remember all those stairs'? You think that tin-ass piece of shit's going to get up those?"

"It's perfectly capable," I said, and I hoped this was true.

"Hey, make it bring the stuff in so no one has to go out," another man said.

Bear got Wesley on the hostage phone again. "Make the robot bring the supplies to the control room. We're not coming out." He slammed the receiver down, not realizing what he had just done.

I thought of my niece and said a prayer for her because I knew this would be her hardest challenge. I jumped as I suddenly felt the barrel of a gun against the back of my neck.

"You let him die, you're dead, too. You got that, bitch?"

I did not move.

"Pretty soon, we got to sail out of here, and he'd better be going with us."

"As long as you keep me in supplies, I will keep him alive," I quietly said.

He removed the gun from my neck and I injected the last vial of saline into their dead leader's IV line. Beads of sweat were rolling down my back, and the skirt of the gown I had put over my clothes was soaked. I imagined Lucy this minute outside the mobile outpost in her virtual reality gear. I imagined her moving her fingers and arms and stepping here and there as fiber optics made it possible for her to read every inch of the terrain on her CRTs. Her telepresence was the only hope that Toto would not get stuck in a corner or fall somewhere.

The men were looking out the window and commented when the robot's tracks carried him up the handicap ramp and he went inside.

"I wouldn't mind having one of those," one of them said.

"You're too stupid to figure out how to use it."

"No way. That baby ain't radio-controlled. Nothing radio-controlled would work in here. You got any idea how thick the walls are?"

"It'd be great for carrying in firewood when the weather sucks."

"Excuse me, I need to use the bathroom," one of the hostages timidly said.

"Shit. Not again."

My tension got unbearable as I feared what would happen if they went out and were not back when Toto appeared.

"Hey, just make him wait. Damn, I wish we could close these windows. It's cold as shit in here."

"Well, you won't get none of that clean, cold air in Tripoli. Better enjoy it while you can."

Several of them laughed at the same time the door opened and another man walked in who I had not seen before. He was dark-skinned and bearded, wearing a heavy jacket and fatigues, and he was angry.

"We have only fifteen assemblies out and in casks on the barge," he spoke with authority and a heavy accent.