The
Truman
was under way again and heading out to sea, its massive propellers driving it across the water at over thirty knots. Derrick suspected that as soon as the ship emerged from Somali waters, the Navy would launch a squadron of planes to offer air support to the battle group during the long trip around the Horn of Africa. No one knew exactly how the Somali government and the world community would react as news of the incident spread, but Derrick was certain it would generate controversy and dominate headlines for weeks.
He and Rodriguez followed the aircrewman into a cramped waiting room, where they were greeted by a thirty-something African-American officer dressed in gray and blue coveralls.
“I’m Commander Adrian Johnson, the JAG attorney on the Admiral’s staff,” he said. “I’ll be your liaison for as long as you’re aboard.” Johnson gestured at a female sailor beside him. “This is Ensign Miller. She’ll take your bags to DV Row, where you’ll be staying. We have a post-incident briefing at 22:00. Until then, we’re free. Where would you like to go?”
“Take us to the hospital,” Derrick said. “I want to see Quentin.”
In the aftermath of the shooting, his mind had become a haunted place, stained with memories he couldn’t shake. Daniel Parker:
Paul, they’re all pointing their guns at us. You have to do something now.
Ibrahim:
I am not the one breaking our agreement. If you do not act quickly, the Captain will die.
And Vanessa Parker from the skies:
Bring them home to me, Paul. Bring my husband and son home.
Derrick had lost hostages before, but never had the failure felt so personal. None of them had taken him back to the house in Annandale. None of them had reminded him of Kyle.
He followed Johnson out of the waiting room and into the warren of the ship. Below the flight deck, the carrier was a world unto itself. As on the
Gettysburg
, the levels, decks, and compartments on the
Truman
were organized in a triple-coordinate system intended to demystify the ship’s layout. The carrier, however, was so colossal and its innards so labyrinthine that the Bullseye plaques offered little more than ornamentation. Soon Derrick lost all sense of space and distance and trailed the JAG officer like a pack mule.
“Where are the pirates?” he asked.
“The SPs are being sanitized in the medical bay,” Johnson replied, using the official shorthand for “suspected pirate.” “We’ll admit them to the brig as soon as they’re scrubbed. We set aside classrooms for the interrogations. Your friends from the Bureau are chomping at the bit.”
Of course they are
, Derrick thought.
Ibrahim and his crew just shit on the entire United States government. They’re going to hit them with a sledgehammer. Besides, they’ve been cooped up in this floating anthill for the past five days. This is their chance to do something.
He glanced at Rodriguez. “I think you should go make friends with the boys from New York. I want an inside track on the interview process.”
Rodriguez nodded. “I’m happy to babysit.”
“How long before the pirates are extradited?” Derrick asked Johnson as they walked down a long corridor studded with oval hatches.
“The wheels are already in motion for Justice to take the ball,” the JAG officer replied. “As soon as we get to Djibouti, we’ll put them on a plane and send them Stateside.”
“What about the SEALs? They’re going to need to deliver statements.”
Johnson looked Derrick in the eye. “Captain Redman and his team will participate in the investigation as the needs of justice require. But their involvement in this incident is highly classified. For the sake of national security, their names will never be divulged nor the precise nature of their duties revealed to the public.”
The pirates aren’t the only ones being sanitized
, Derrick mused.
Redman may never face scrutiny. Unless . . .
The thought struck him like an epiphany.
Unless the truth comes out in the legal proceedings.
He filed the idea away and trailed Johnson into the hospital. The lobby was at once sterile and surreal. Doctors, nurses, and corpsmen scurried about, looking at charts and attending to the sick. Patients waited for treatment in chairs along the wall. A receptionist directed traffic from behind a counter with a sliding-glass window. It felt like the emergency room intake in an urban hospital. Derrick found it hard to believe he was on a ship in the Indian Ocean.
Johnson greeted the receptionist. “Andrea, I need an update on the status of Quentin Parker. Can you find me someone who assisted with the cas-evac?”
“Dr. Hancock!” the woman called out, hailing a middle-aged man in a lab coat talking to a young nurse. “Weren’t you on the flight deck when the casualties were brought in?”
The doctor nodded gravely, as if he’d just seen a ghost. “I brought the boy down myself. I was in the Trauma Bay when they brought his father in.”
Johnson turned to Derrick. “Dr. Hancock is our Senior Medical Officer. He can answer your questions.” He waved to Rodriguez. “I’ll take you to the classrooms.”
When they left, Hancock gave Derrick a poignant look. “I don’t understand. The last we heard they were about to be released. Now this.” His eyes moistened and he looked away. “I’m sorry. It’s just that my son is the boy’s age.”
Derrick felt a stabbing pain in his stomach.
Kyle was eighteen, too.
He shook his head, struggling to remain impassive. “I wish I could give you a reason.”
“Bastards,” the doctor said under his breath. “I hope they rot in hell.” He shook his head and collected himself. “So what can I do for you?”
Derrick thought of Mary meeting Vanessa in Nairobi. The knife twisted in his gut. “I need something to tell the family. They’ll want details.”
Hancock angled his head. “Let’s find a place to talk.”
Derrick followed the Senior Medical Officer down a series of hallways to a room with two gurneys, an array of medical equipment and filing cabinets, and track lights on the ceiling. Both gurneys looked like they had been recently used.
“This is the Trauma Bay,” Hancock explained. “It’s where we do stabilization care. When the helicopter landed with the boy, I had a team on the flight deck. The corpsman on the chopper had already intubated him to get him breathing again. He had an entry wound here—” He put his hand on his chest slightly to the right of his sternum and about two inches below the clavicle. “He also had a flesh wound with tissue damage below his right shoulder. He was losing consciousness and bleeding internally. We brought him down on the elevator. By the time we got him here, he was unresponsive.”
Hancock walked to the first gurney. “Our surgeon—Dr. Alvarez—made a scan with the ultrasound and saw that he was in cardiac arrest. The bullet had punctured his heart, and the blood had leaked into the pericardium, causing a tamponade. Dr. Alvarez made an incision in his chest and stopped the bleeding. He massaged the heart, bringing it back to rhythm, and put chest tubes in to manage the lung injury. Then he prepped him for the OR.”
The doctor pointed toward the wall. “They’re in there now. It’ll be another hour or two before we know the outcome. About the time we sent the boy into surgery, they brought his father in.” Hancock took a belabored breath. “The damage was severe. He’d been shot half a dozen times in the chest and head. Part of his skull was missing. There was nothing we could do. The wounds were not survivable.” His voice dropped almost to a whisper. “I was the one who pronounced him dead.”
Derrick steeled himself against the sorrow and recalled the gunshots. In the first round, he had heard six or seven shots in a rapid burst. They must have been aimed at Daniel. There were four shots in the second round and three shots in the last round. If Quentin had only two wounds, as Hancock indicated, that meant that whoever shot him missed at least once and possibly twice. In such close quarters, it made little sense, unless the gun malfunctioned or the shots were fired in extreme haste. He made a mental note to mention the enigma to the investigators.
“What did you do with the Captain’s body?” Derrick asked.
“We treated him like a soldier,” the doctor replied. “We put his remains in a Conex box for the trip home. They’ll take him to Dover. His family can collect him there.”
Derrick met Hancock’s eyes. “Can I see him?”
The doctor nodded, gesturing toward the hallway. He led Derrick to a utility elevator and stepped inside. “We put him in the hangar bay for ventilation.”
Seconds later, the doors opened on a cavernous space bustling with sailors performing maintenance on a trio of fighter jets. Hancock walked toward one of the massive flight elevators that stood open to the air. Off to the side Derrick saw a polished aluminum container with an American flag draped over it. A sailor stood beside it. He came to attention when Hancock approached.
“At ease,” the doctor said. “Give us a few minutes.”
“Yes, sir,” the sailor replied, walking away.
“Take your time,” Hancock said. “I’ll be back shortly.”
Derrick knelt beside the container and put his hand on the stripes of the flag—red for courage, white for innocence. He choked up at the thought of the broken body inside.
“I’m sorry, Captain,” he said softly, daring to hope that wherever Daniel was he could hear him. “This never should have happened.” He blinked away the tears. “Your son is in good hands. I’m going to do what I can to make it up to him. I promise you that.”
He stood up again and felt a surge of anger. He clenched his hands into fists and looked out at the sea, glistening beneath the moon.
Goddammit, Ibrahim!
What the fuck were you thinking?
An hour and a half later, Derrick was back in the Trauma Bay, pacing the floor like a caged beast. He kept looking at his watch, as if the act of checking the time could speed up the clock. Finally, at 21:42 the door opened and Hancock entered with a Hispanic man dressed in stained blue scrubs.
“Agent Derrick,” Hancock said. “This is Dr. Alvarez, the ship’s surgeon.”
Alvarez nodded perfunctorily. “I have good news and bad news. The good news is he’s alive and stable. We repaired his heart and lung and gave him a blood transfusion from our Walking Blood Bank. The bad news is he’s comatose. It’s likely that his brain was deprived of oxygen before we got his heart beating again. We won’t know how severe the anoxia was until he wakes up again.”
“When will that be?” Derrick asked.
The surgeon shook his head. “It could be a day, it could be a week or two, before his cognitive functions start to return. We’ll transport him off the ship within forty-eight hours. I understand his family is in Annapolis. I recommend sending him to Georgetown for acute care and MedStar NRH for rehab.”
Derrick tried to stay optimistic. “What are the odds he’ll make a full recovery?”
Alvarez gave him an honest look. “I can’t say with any certainty. Brain injuries are very hard to predict. But he’s young and otherwise in good health. He could make a comeback.”
It’s not much, but it’s something for Vanessa to hold on to
, Derrick thought.
“What about his memory? Will he remember what happened?”
The surgeon’s expression turned thoughtful. “If you’re asking if he’ll be able to talk to you about the incident, I have no idea. It depends on the state of his brain.”
It was then that Derrick remembered something. “Do you know how many bullets hit him?”
“There were two,” Alvarez replied. “We found one lodged in his chest. The other one entered and exited through the soft tissue in his upper arm.”
Derrick shook the surgeon’s hand. “Thank you. I mean it.” Then he turned to Hancock. “Where can I make a phone call? I need to contact his mother.”
“That would be CDC,” the doctor replied. “I’ll take you there.”
Calling Vanessa Parker was one of the hardest things Derrick had ever done. Guilt seared his conscience like a brand. For some reason he thought of Michelangelo’s
The Last Judgment.
He felt like the damned man holding his face in his hands while devils dragged him into the underworld. When Hancock handed him the phone in the black light of the CDC—the nerve center of the carrier—he closed his eyes, cleared his mind, and allowed intuition to guide his words.
Mary Patterson answered her BlackBerry on the second ring. “Hello?”
“It’s Derrick,” he said darkly. “Is she there?”
Mary inhaled audibly. “It’s for you.”
Derrick heard a sniff and then Vanessa came on the line, her voice discordant with weariness and grief. “Paul? Is he alive?”
“Yes,” he answered. “He’s in the ICU, but he’s stable. The doctors saved his life.”
She began to cry. It was a while before she spoke again. “How bad are his injuries?”
Derrick passed along Dr. Alvarez’s assessment, imbuing his tone with confidence. When he finished, he heard silence on the line. He tried to imagine what she was thinking. The shock had worn off in the hours since the shooting. She was a physician. She had prepared herself for the worst. But the truth carried a burden all its own. Quentin had survived, but his life had become a question mark. It was a terrible load for a mother to carry.