Egress
By
James Strauss
The decision was the fastest and most fateful he had ever made, but living with the result was going to be problematic, even if the life he had left was to be very short in duration. Josh stood with his back pressed into the hard cold granite. He was balanced on a small triangle of rock hanging out from the wall of a thousand foot cliff. He could not even look down, as the slight leaning might cause him to topple forward and plunge five or six hundred feet to the surf smashed riprap below. The wind was attempting to pry him loose from his precarious position, as well. Somehow it was able to wedge itself between his back and the surface of the unforgiving surface. Josh could only put a little pressure rearward without losing his balance.
The large rock had passed by him without a sound. If Josh hadn’t craned his head upward in a useless attempt to see his teammate, located three hundred feet above, he wouldn’t have spotted it in time. He would only have caught the whisper of air as it passed, doing more than a hundred miles an hour, and then glanced down to see what it was, before being jerked from the wall to join it on the rocks below.
The other end of his climbing rope had been tied around the rock. With no conscious thought at all he’d reached to his waist and clicked open the carbineer the end was attached to. Less than a second later the piton he’d looped the rope through, and the rope itself, were jerked free and gone.
He breathed with difficulty, the adrenalin of fear and shock coursing its way through his body. He was used to the feeling. Josh knew what to do. He was a pro.
He did nothing. He waited. He thought about doing nothing and waiting, knowing that any formation of ideas in his electrified and chemically stimulated brain would be counter productive and might lead him to do something that would kill him. Although training was not that far behind him, he considered himself field experienced.
The wind was a nagging source of bother and discomfort. Josh pressed back as best he could, trying not to shiver. His precarious position, facing out toward the Straits of Magellan, was tenuous at best. He could not stand in place waiting for rescue. There was going to be no rescue. The rope could only have been tied to the rock and tossed over by his teammates above. He had not been intended to survive. The team egress following the mission had been to descend the rock face in three hundred foot increments, drive pitons in to take the weight, then descend again until they reached the bottom. Once there they were to have congregated, uncovered a pre-positioned Zodiac, and then made the sixty-mile run into Punta Arena.
There was no Zodiac below. That was Josh’ first rational conclusion. The second was that he had no rope, other than a short ten-foot connector coiled around his shoulder. The third was that the face of solid granite wall he balanced against had no seams on its surface.
The piton he’d driven into a small crevice had taken five minutes of pounding with his Bongo hammer. He hadn’t been worried about balance then, as he’d been attached to the rope. His natural fear of heights had not been much of problem either. But all that had changed in less than two seconds. Josh tried to relax and think. He did a quick mental inventory.
He had his Bongo hammer, curved like a hook on its back, with two holes for running line through, up at the hammer and down at the base of the handle. It dangled from his left hand. He had the ten feet of rope. He had his belt, dark sweater and black canvas climbing trousers. He had good boots with long laces and thick socks. He had a few extra pitons and some carabineers on a leather belt. He had about a dozen cigarettes and a lighter. That was it. No hat. No coat. No water. No food. No communications.
Josh brought up his free hand to look at it. He’d missed the gloves. Supple leather gloves. He had those.
He also had no way out. He couldn’t go up or down. He couldn’t even turn around, balanced as he was. He couldn’t bend to access his boots or laces. He could do nothing but stand in place, trying not to be forced from the wall by the ever -increasing wind, until he could longer stand up. Josh new that his time was very limited. He was in the best shape he was going to be in. Every minute, exposed as he was, would lead to the degradation of his condition.
He could not turn around to drive in another piton. He knew that if he could he would only delay the inevitable. There was no percentage in moving. There was no percentage in staying where he was. He turned his head to the left and studied the wall opposing him. The face he was backed up to was curved. A narrow canyon indented to his left. Out from the other side of that shallow indentation was another wall. It ran out a good twenty feet farther out than his own. Its surface was covered by clinging bushes and vertical pines of some sort. Pines with thready looking branches, which extended horizontally along the cliff but not outward. The wall was a good fifteen feet from him.
Josh knew he was looking at his only chance. He began to calculate the distances and the physics. It was entirely possible for him to make the fifteen-foot leap, he knew. He was six feet tall and his arms went out another two and half feet or so. If he launched himself toward the wall he had only to cover seven or eight feet to make contact, snag a branch or root and then secure himself.
Gravity, he thought. Thirty-two feet per second per second was the formula for the physics of a falling body. His falling body. He would have to crouch down to give himself the spring power to make the jump, which meant he would have to leap farther. He would fall about fifteen feet down, he knew, just in getting across. By that time, his body would be moving toward the opposing wall at speed plus almost twenty miles per hour, straight down from the draw of gravity. He weighed two hundred and twenty pounds. He wouldn’t be snagging anything. He wouldn’t be able to hold onto anything. He’d hit the far wall and then plunge to his death, probably with handfuls of needles and roots griped tightly in his hands. A shiver of near terror ran up and down his body.
He thought about tossing the Bongo away, but then swung it up to his face.
The back of the Bongo hammer was a hook. A well curved strong hook. As smoothly as he could manage it, without allowing the wind to pry him loose from the rock wall, Josh worked the coiled rope from his shoulder. It was a harder task than he thought it would be. His hands were shaking from fear and the cold.
It took almost fifteen minutes to wind and fasten all ten feet of the rope around and through the holes in the Bongo, and then around his wrists and forearms. He could not secure the end of the rope so he used his mouth to wrap it around and around the final loop securing his arms. He breathed deeply and began preparing for the jump. His arms were joined together from wrists to elbows as one triangular hook. At the end, grasped firmly between his rope-coiled hands was the reversed Bongo.
He sprang from the small outcrop he’d balanced upon, his concentration fully focused on a root system located fifteen feet down the opposing wall. His leap was not spectacular. His balance had been bad and the small triangular outcrop had not allowed his boots great purchase on its edge. He plummeted across the chasm and down, extending his ‘hook’ as far out before him as he could stretch. The hook caught. Josh’s body swung down and smashed into the cliff face.
The impact didn’t knock him out, but he was stunned for several minutes, his breath coming finally in great wracking sobs. Pain radiated down from his hands and arms, pinned tightly together by pressure from the rope. The hook had caught upon one of the larger roots radiating across the solid rock wall, and his body hung down, the full weight of it concentrated near the Bongo.
Josh stared at the end of the rope in front of him. He realized at once that if he had been able to tie the end off, as he wanted to, then he’d never have been able to get the knot out in his current predicament. His feet had no purchase under him. His full weight hung suspended from the hooked end of the Bongo. Working as fast as he could with his head and mouth he unwound the rope. He knew he had to move quickly or he’d lose the feeling in his hands. Without warning the rope began to give way, unwrapping itself from his wrist and arms. Josh grabbed the root with his right hand, and then flipped the Bongo down to the clip on his belt. The rope hung dangling from his side.
There was only one way to go. The rocks and straits over five hundred feet down led nowhere. The cliffs fronted a breaking sea that went on for miles and miles. The water was too cold to swim in. There was nothing to burn. Going down was merely a choice to die more slowly than a fall would have allowed. But he had pitons, the hammer and a good chunk of rope. Even more importantly, he had hope.
Three-foot gains were all he could manage on the open spaces of bare unbroken rock. Where there were roots and branches he did better. Driving the pitons into the slimmest of cracks was hard work. He quickly warmed. There was no margin for safety. He suspended himself from one piton while pounding another, something he would never have considered, given time and almost any other circumstance. If one piton failed to hold he would know only a few seconds of rushing air before a terribly short spot of pain.
But the pitons held. It was almost dark when he reached the upper edge. The climb had taken hours. His hands and arms lacked the strength to pull him up over the edge. He had to drive one more piton on top of the cliff itself. Once there he laid down a few feet from the precipice, his face pushed against small pebbles and tufted grass. He couldn’t believe he was alive. He couldn’t believe that it felt so good to simply be alive. He finally gathered himself together and stood to look out over the Magellan Straits. It was a beautiful vista. Harsh and gray in the light of a setting sun, but wonderfully filled with the movement and aroma of life itself. Josh breathed it in deeply.
He was surprised to find his rucksack sitting near the edge nearby, until he pulled open the zipper and looked inside. He was not surprised by the tools of his trade. He was an Explosive Ordinance Disposal expert. The charges he hadn’t used at the refinery, as well as the timers and remote detonation devices, were old hat to him. It was the British Passport that stunned him. A British Passport with his photo and information inside its burgundy covers. Josh was a U.S. citizen and had been one all of his life. He had to sit down to consider. His parents had been British citizens. He’d never held a British Passport. He stripped off his gloves and massaged the document, opening and closing its crisp pages. Instinctively, he knew it was real. There was a London address listed as his residence. He somehow knew that that would turn out to be real, as well.
It took moments for all of it to come home to him. The refinery was right across the unguarded and unmarked border of Chile. He had wondered why the team was assigned to blow an American refinery on Chilean soil. The British and the Chileans enjoyed an enmity that had long predated the Falklands war, and remained following it. Josh realized then that he had never been intended to survive the mission. His rucksack was left, with the damning passport inside, to assign blame. Josh was to be the ‘lone assassin,’ like Lee Harvey Oswald, or Sirhan, or any of the rest of them. People believed in lone assassins. They did not exist in the real world, but the reality of the modern era was controlled by television and movies.
Josh took out a cigarette with steady hands. He puffed, letting the smoke be sucked over the edge of the precipice that had almost claimed him. The team had hired a van in Punta Arenas. It had dropped them near the very tip of Chile on Argentine soil. Puntas Dungeness. That had been their ingress. Josh had wondered why the egress, or departure, was by Zodiac. Why were they required to use the words ingress and egress anyway, when entry and departure would serve? The Agency was an arcane labyrinth of codified and mysterious words and phrases. Josh thought deeper.
How could they ever enter the harbor of Punta Arenas without suspicion, in a Zodiac? He had left such questions unasked of the team leader. He wondered what would have happened if he had asked any of them.
The team had assembled in Ushuaia, further down toward the tip of
Tierra del Fuego. They’d come in on a private Pilatus turbine. That had surprised Josh too. There is plenty of commercial traffic at the world’s southernmost airport, located just three miles outside the city proper. Why had they flown in on an expensive and distinctive private plane? The reason for all of the abnormal mission activity was answered by the passport. There was simply no need for much secrecy or cover on the part of the remainder of the team. Josh had been intended to suck all suspicion up with his damning rucksack contents and broken, very dead, body. He realized also that there might indeed be a Zodiac at the base of the rocks. It would fit. It wouldn’t be operational, but it was likely to be there.
Josh flipped the unfinished cigarette over the clip, looked up once to thank the great creator for his extension of time on earth, then grabbed his gloves, the ruck, and headed for the road. He shredded the passport as he walked, thankful that his U.S. document had been left in the plane. He had three twenty-dollar bills in his pocket. It would have to be enough.
Techni Austral ran the bus and ferry service from Puntas Arenas to Ushuaia.
Twenty-one dollars later he was stretched across the back seat, his beaten body down for a rest. The truck traffic on the highway had not been a factor in hitching a ride into town.
The first truck had stopped. Once language difficulties ensued, the ride had been very quiet. There’d been no attempted discussion about blown up oil depots.
Josh slept most of the ten hours it took to get to Ushuaia. His original enjoyment, crossing the other way on the ferry, was no longer a factor in his travel. He’d spent twenty more dollars to overnight in Puntas Arenas, waiting for the only bus, which left every other day at seven a.m. But he had not slept. The adrenalin and fear had not let him. He was headed for Ushuaia but he had no plan. No plan to do anything there, and no plan for conducting the rest of his life.
Getting a cab to the airport from Ushuaia had only taken a few more dollars. The plane was in the hanger, where they’d left it. Their team leader was a pilot as well. Josh vaguely wondered why he could no longer remember the names of the team. Their treatment of him as terminally disposable had effected his own thinking about them.
There was nobody inside the hanger at all. Josh walked around the exterior. The place was deserted. Ushuaia Airport sprang to instant life when there was a commercial flight in or out, but just lay there, as if dead, when nothing was happening on the tarmac.
Josh fished a small silver key out of his pocket. He’d found it in a drawer in the bathroom when they’d been on the long flight in. Pilatus 12C aircraft had tremendous range but flew slow to achieve such figures. Josh tired the key in the door’s lock.
It turned. He smiled for the first time since going over the edge of the cliff.
“Thank you, God,” he said, looking up to his higher power.
He went aboard with his rucksack. His stuff was in the pocket behind one of the plush seats where he’d left it. He took the credit cards, his U.S. passport, but left the rest, including a wonderful Ghurka wallet. He worked at the back of the plane for almost an hour before deplaning. He wanted there to be no chance that his former teammates would discover that he was still among the living.
He deplaned, locked the craft back up, stashed his ruck behind a pile of spent fuel drums at the side of the hanger, and jogged back into the city. The jog did him good. In less than a half an hour he was standing across the street from a pub called The Galway. It wasn’t very Irish, the place, but it prided itself on being the southernmost Irish Pub in the world, similar to claims for the airport.
Josh hunched down in the parking lot adjoining the pub. He knew what he was looking for and spotted them almost immediately. They were being creatures of habit, which was counter to all operational training. The three American’s sat in the outer bay window, drinking and carrying on. It was the same pub and table they had assembled at when they’d been a foursome, prior to kicking off on the mission. Josh watched the blond team leader sip from a coffee cup.
“Ah, yes,” he said aloud, but to himself. The team leader drank Jamison’s whiskey in neat shots when he was not flying, but only coffee prior to going aloft.
Josh didn’t wait any longer. He slowly walked away before beginning his jog back to the hanger. He passed no one along the way. Once there, he settled in with his rucksack behind the barrels to wait. The men did not come for hours. Josh had not fallen asleep but he had nearly nodded off a few times, pinching himself to stay awake and using the fear of being defenseless if the men were to find him before they departed.
They had firearms. All he had was a bag filled with high explosives.
But they didn’t. There was no preflight check-up of the plane. The men simply opened the hangar doors wide, pulled the chocks from under its wheels, and pushed the aircraft out. Unaccountably, they returned inside, once the hangar door was closed again.
“What do you say, guys” the team leader intoned, standing next to barrel that had been cut in half and upended. He lit something. Smoke began to rise from the barrel.
Josh, from his hiding place, smelled the aroma of incense. It took him back to his Catholic childhood.
“We commit the soul of Josh to your care, oh God,” the blond said. “We hope that he will forgive us our transgressions against him when we cross over to join him.”
“Amen,” the three men said together.
“He wasn’t a bad shit, you know,” the team leader said, flatly.
“Bit of a dumb fucking new guy though,” one of the other men commented.
The three walked out without extinguishing the incense. Josh watched it curl and float inside the hanger until they switched the lights out. He heard the plane’s engines stutter, and then ignite. In only seconds the plane was revving loudly, the sound growing quieter as it distanced itself down the taxiway from the hangar.
Josh stepped outside the door. He stood watching the lights of the Pilatus as it turned at the end of the runway. The team leader gave the powerful turbine full power. The expensive plane needed only half the runway to lift off. Once it was fully in the air it banked sharply south, as if headed to Antarctica, not far away. Josh knew it would hold that turn until it came to a North heading, as the team made it’s way back to Miami.
Josh held a small remote control device in front of him. He stared at the banking plane for several seconds before flipping up the fail-safe lever and pushing the red button. His eyes never left the plane. There was a brief spark in the air, and then the plane’s lights began to spin slowly, around and around.
“Kind of hard to fly without a tail, isn’t it, you seasoned veteran bastards,” Josh breathed.
He didn’t stay, instead returning to the inside of the hangar and flicking on the lights.
“Your transgressions are not forgiven guys,” he intoned, standing at the half barrel from which incense still issued forth. “And I do so hope you are around when I cross over.”
Showing posts with label Ushuaia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ushuaia. Show all posts
Friday, April 30, 2010
Tuesday, August 4, 2009
"Ushuaia" A story of hope....
“USHUAIA”
El Prat was never really finished properly, following the twenty-fifth Olympiad in ninety-two. Not the last part of the last terminal, anyway, where the tattered and beaten Montenegro Airlines plane had dumped me from the flight in. Barcelona was supposed to be one grand city, but I was not going to see it, and that didn’t bother me in the least. As cold and rotten as the rain had been at Golubovci when I had shambled aboard that morning, Barcelona’s warmer overcast sky, visible just beyond the terminal windows, seemed to offer little better.
All the other passengers had filed dutifully toward baggage claim, somewhere else, probably a long ‘somewhere else’ inside the vast facility. Instead of following along I had taken a nearby seat and fallen into it. I had no baggage. No checked and no carryon. Going home in disgrace did not require luggage, or belongings of any sort. Your body was required to take the journey, so you could stand and be told what a sad human being you had turned out to be, and, without it being directly said, how it was not their fault that you were such a miserable representative of species homo sapiens.
But I did have cigarettes. American, no less. The good stuff, not that cheap-burning Balkan crap. If I’d had drugs…well hell, I didn’t, so, as with the remainder of my life, it didn’t much matter. The people from the plane were mostly gone. Stragglers here and there, straggling aimlessly, like so many people do at airports around the world. I observed them by habit, as I didn’t care at all about them. No players among them, I knew. Even deep covered operations specialists were not difficult to spot, if you had been in the business, and the field, for awhile. I’d been both.
9/11, back home and so many years back, had changed everything I thought, as I began looking around for a place to smoke even part of a cigarette. Airports were hermetically sealed environments following 9/11, where smoking had gone the way of the pay phone and coin-metered parking out front. I watched a beautiful, but stressed out, woman head toward the opening to the washroom. Barcelona, not home, so it was one of those single unisex things I didn’t care for. Although the woman was dragging a seven or eight year old girl along with her I mostly noticed her. Tall, elegant, and wearing a beautiful knee length black dress. I noted that she walked powerfully, moved strongly, but she gave the appearance of somehow being wounded at the same time. I was a predator, and she had the look of prey. I smiled, turning away. Fortunately, for both of us, I was neither a predator of women or children. Unless it was required of the mission. And there would be no more missions.
I had a decision to make. The greatest decision of my life. The decision about my life. And I needed a cigarette to help me along. I looked back toward where the woman and her child had disappeared into the unisex bathroom opening. Just beyond that opening was a large metal door with yellow writing angled across it. Spanish was not one of my languages, not the writing of it anyway, but it didn’t take a genius to figure out that the message was a ‘keep out’ message. But I could not see any lock on the door’s surface.
Looking around carefully first I arose from the chair and headed for the door. I took out my pack of Marlboros, to use as a cover in case I was encountered. Even so, just trying to use a door marked 'not-to-be-opened' might be a huge violation, not explainable by a person simply wanting to have a smoke.
“Screw it, like it makes any difference at all,” I said to myself in disgust, pushing down on the European-style door lever. I pulled. No alarm. I opened it all the way, stepped into another world, and looked around in surprise. I gently closed the door behind me, leaning down to make sure that there was no hidden device or lock along the height and depth of its edge. I took out a Marlboro and lit it. I leaned against the hard concrete wall opposite the door. I suddenly realized what I was in. I was in a long walled off corridor open to the sky. At one time the corridor must have led somewhere, but the vagaries of construction, and probably security, had caused both ends to be walled off. I looked up at the gray sky. The walls had to be over thirty feet high.
I heard the sound of deep sobbing. I walked a short distance down the long enclosed length of the concrete box. The sound was coming from a vent just above my head as I stopped. I blew out a great puff of smoke and watched it swirl right into the vent. A child coughed lightly from inside the vent. The vent led into the bathroom I concluded. The woman was sobbing inside there, with her child nearby.
“What are we doing, Mom?” I heard the child say. I listened intently. After a moment of more quiet sobbing, there was silence. Then the woman spoke in a whisper loud enough for me to hear.
“Get on your knees. We’re going to pray to God. We‘ve been deserted here
and have no money. If the authorities take us in, it won’t be long before they have us
back in that horrid country with those horrid people.”
The accent was American I concluded. The world was a hard place. I imagined one of the countries the woman must be talking about. Saudi, Iran, Jordon.
Cultures that were implacable, with respect to their women and children. Rendition had been invented by them, and the Israelis, not by Americans. To be on the run from one of those countries was to be in terrible jeopardy.
I drew in more smoke, then watched it snake back into the vent. I heard no more coughing. Instead I heard praying.
“Please Lord,” the woman intoned, followed by the little voice of her child, repeating the same words. “We are in deep trouble. Please send someone to help us. Anyone. We can’t make it on our own.” I heard all the words twice, but it was the little girl’s that went in toward what was left of my soul. Then I shook my head, threw the cigarette down and ground it out with my foot. It was a cold cruel world.
It took its toll on all of us and I had my own problems. I tip-toe'd to the door, opened it noiselessly, then slipped back into the real world again. I moved away quickly until I was well down the terminal corridor.
It seemed like a half-mile walk to the main building where the counters were located. I had an electronic connecting ticket to Washington but I had made that decision. I wasn’t going back there so I needed a ticket. I picked the United line, as it was fairly short and my original connect had been on that. Maybe they had a flight to South America that did not connect in the United States.
I felt someone behind me, but then, I was in line at an airline counter. Instinctively, I glanced back anyway. I almost groaned aloud. It was the elegant broken down woman and her child. I quickly turned my head, but not quick enough.
The little girl spoke up at me.
“You’re him, aren’t you?” I grimaced down at her, in question.
“Huh?” I said, intelligently.
“You smell like him.” I stared, having nothing to say to that comment.
I looked at the woman, but her attention was on everything else around. Her eyes darted all over the place, like those of a cornered animal. The girl kept staring at me, waiting for something.
“I smell?” I finally asked, against my better judgment. She nodded, knowingly.
“My Mom and I prayed for help. I smelled you when we prayed. You’re him, the one God sent.” I stared, my expression one of total disbelief. The girl had coughed at the smoke from my cigarette while in that bathroom I realized, then
picked up the same aroma from my clothes. My mind raced. A lot of people smoked, especially in Europe. The girl could not possibly know that the smoke was from me personally. I started to comment, then stopped, looking into the steady deep pools of her eyes. She knew. I knew that she knew. She knew that I knew that she knew. No words needed to be said.
“Por favor?” a woman’s impatient voice said, from the side. I jerked toward the sound. I was next. The counter clerk was motioning toward me. I looked up at her, then back at the child, who smiled, her knowledge of my role total and complete.
“Jesus Christ!” I whispered bitterly, taking my wallet from my pocket, and then approaching the counter. I took out my personal Visa, the only credit care I owned myself. The Agency cards were not going to work to get me anywhere, I knew, not anymore. My last ten thousand dollars was invested in the Visa card. Or at least my only ten thousand, and it was all credit. I shrugged. What did it matter.
“Here,” I said, shoving the card across the counter, “fly these two people to anywhere they're going.” I pulled back. The woman moved to the counter.
“What?” she asked. “What’s going on? What are you doing?” The woman looked from the clerk to me, than back again. The clerk shrugged like I had, but with more meaning.
“Here, you need tickets out of here. Use my card. Take care of your child.”
I said the words in embarrassment, as the woman stood staring at me in silence.
I watched conflicting expression flow across her face like the surface of a river’s white water rapids.
“We needed help Mom, and God sent him,” the small girl said, in her penetrating little voice. She pointed up at my chest. I could tell that the woman did not know what to do.
“Take the tickets. Get the hell out of here,” I said sharply. The woman’s face broke, then she caught herself, thankfully stifling a sob. I stepped away to give her room. The little girl stepped with me.
“Where are you going?” she asked me, conversationally, as if what was happening was just a normal part of her everyday life. I sighed.
“Ushuaia,” I said, thinking that that would stop her, but it didn’t.
“Ushuaia?” she intoned, getting the pronunciation all-wrong. I didn’t correct her, preferring to wait until she and her Mom were out of my life.
“Why are you going there?” the girl went on, as I wondered that she had not even asked where Ushuaia was. I answered as if she had asked.
“Its in South America, down near the tip, in a place called Terra del Fuego.
There’s a bar down there I’m going to drink at. I’m done. I’m all done. “ I finished saying the last words with my eyes closed, imagining the total relief I would find down there, as there was just no point in living on anymore. The bar in Ushuaia was as good a place to end it all as anywhere.
“Can I draw you?” The little girl brought me back with her odd question.
“Huh?” I said, returning to my earlier intellectual response. I noted that the girl had produced a small notepad and pencil from somewhere.
“I don’t care what you do,” I answered, truthfully. I moved to the side to wait
Until I had to sign something. I did not have to wait long. The clerk gestured, the woman stood aside and I signed the credit card slip, then some other papers. I accepted my card back, but did not put it away.
“I don’t know how to thank you,” the woman began, as I tried to shake my head and stop her. “No, without you I don’t think we would have made it," she went on, "you saved our lives and I don’t know how to thank you.”
“I don’t need any thanks, just get your child back home or wherever you’re going.” The woman nodded. I knew she was aware of my discomfort. She took her papers, turned, then turned back and kissed me on the cheek. She smiled for the first time, as I shrank back in surprise, bringing my hand to my cheek. The woman grabbed the little girl by one hand and made to depart. The girl pulled back.
“Wait,” she yelled, then held up the other hand to me. I took the piece of paper she pushed at me, then watched as both she and her Mom half-walked and half-ran out into the main terminal area. I watched until they were gone.
“Por favor?” the United clerk said, once again.
“Connect me all the way through to Ushuaia, Argentina,” I said, pushing the Visa back across the counter. The woman went to work. I waited for almost ten minutes. All at once she looked up.
“The card’s no good. You don’t have enough money for that trip.”
I stared.
“What?’ was all I could say for a moment. “But I had ten thousand of credit on that card,” I said, in a shaky voice.
“Oh,” the woman said. “Now I understand. That woman and her child used up nine thousand dollars of your credit.” I stared, my eyes going round.
“Where the hell did she buy tickets to, Timbuktu?” I could not believe what I was hearing.
“Washington D.C.” the woman said, flatly.
“D.C.” I almost yelled. “It doesn’t cost that kind of money to fly from Barcelona to D.C.!” I waited for a reply, fuming.
“It does in first class. You said fly them anywhere. They were going to D.C.
At the last minute and with a full plane, first class is all that was available. Do you want to fly somewhere else?” I shook my head, still in total shock. I took out my electronically issued boarding pass. I handed it across the counter.
“Are they on that same flight?” I asked, knowing the answer. The woman checked her computer. She nodded, as I knew she would.
“Please tell me that they don’t have seats next to mine,” I murmured, all the strength of my voice gone.
“Oh no,” the woman replied, brightly. They’re in first class. You’re back in economy.” I just looked at her, slowly taking my boarding pass back. “You better hurry, you’re flight leaves in twenty minutes,” she finished.
I nodded, saying nothing. I stepped away, hearing “por favor” behind me.
I walked numbly toward the center of the terminal. I stopped under the flight display to find my gate. I remembered the piece of paper in my hand. I unfolded it. It was a wonderful little pencil piece of some expressed talent. It was a drawing of a smiling man bending over to talk to or accept something from a female child. Under the drawing was written the words “Not Done.”
I could not help smiling to myself. I didn’t believe in God. If I did believe in God I wouldn’t have liked Him. But I walked toward the United gate smiling, with a strange new purpose in my step. I talked to Him, whom I did not believe in, while I walked. Indeed, it appeared I was not done.
http://www.jamesstraussauthor.com
http://www.themastodons.com
copyright 2009
El Prat was never really finished properly, following the twenty-fifth Olympiad in ninety-two. Not the last part of the last terminal, anyway, where the tattered and beaten Montenegro Airlines plane had dumped me from the flight in. Barcelona was supposed to be one grand city, but I was not going to see it, and that didn’t bother me in the least. As cold and rotten as the rain had been at Golubovci when I had shambled aboard that morning, Barcelona’s warmer overcast sky, visible just beyond the terminal windows, seemed to offer little better.
All the other passengers had filed dutifully toward baggage claim, somewhere else, probably a long ‘somewhere else’ inside the vast facility. Instead of following along I had taken a nearby seat and fallen into it. I had no baggage. No checked and no carryon. Going home in disgrace did not require luggage, or belongings of any sort. Your body was required to take the journey, so you could stand and be told what a sad human being you had turned out to be, and, without it being directly said, how it was not their fault that you were such a miserable representative of species homo sapiens.
But I did have cigarettes. American, no less. The good stuff, not that cheap-burning Balkan crap. If I’d had drugs…well hell, I didn’t, so, as with the remainder of my life, it didn’t much matter. The people from the plane were mostly gone. Stragglers here and there, straggling aimlessly, like so many people do at airports around the world. I observed them by habit, as I didn’t care at all about them. No players among them, I knew. Even deep covered operations specialists were not difficult to spot, if you had been in the business, and the field, for awhile. I’d been both.
9/11, back home and so many years back, had changed everything I thought, as I began looking around for a place to smoke even part of a cigarette. Airports were hermetically sealed environments following 9/11, where smoking had gone the way of the pay phone and coin-metered parking out front. I watched a beautiful, but stressed out, woman head toward the opening to the washroom. Barcelona, not home, so it was one of those single unisex things I didn’t care for. Although the woman was dragging a seven or eight year old girl along with her I mostly noticed her. Tall, elegant, and wearing a beautiful knee length black dress. I noted that she walked powerfully, moved strongly, but she gave the appearance of somehow being wounded at the same time. I was a predator, and she had the look of prey. I smiled, turning away. Fortunately, for both of us, I was neither a predator of women or children. Unless it was required of the mission. And there would be no more missions.
I had a decision to make. The greatest decision of my life. The decision about my life. And I needed a cigarette to help me along. I looked back toward where the woman and her child had disappeared into the unisex bathroom opening. Just beyond that opening was a large metal door with yellow writing angled across it. Spanish was not one of my languages, not the writing of it anyway, but it didn’t take a genius to figure out that the message was a ‘keep out’ message. But I could not see any lock on the door’s surface.
Looking around carefully first I arose from the chair and headed for the door. I took out my pack of Marlboros, to use as a cover in case I was encountered. Even so, just trying to use a door marked 'not-to-be-opened' might be a huge violation, not explainable by a person simply wanting to have a smoke.
“Screw it, like it makes any difference at all,” I said to myself in disgust, pushing down on the European-style door lever. I pulled. No alarm. I opened it all the way, stepped into another world, and looked around in surprise. I gently closed the door behind me, leaning down to make sure that there was no hidden device or lock along the height and depth of its edge. I took out a Marlboro and lit it. I leaned against the hard concrete wall opposite the door. I suddenly realized what I was in. I was in a long walled off corridor open to the sky. At one time the corridor must have led somewhere, but the vagaries of construction, and probably security, had caused both ends to be walled off. I looked up at the gray sky. The walls had to be over thirty feet high.
I heard the sound of deep sobbing. I walked a short distance down the long enclosed length of the concrete box. The sound was coming from a vent just above my head as I stopped. I blew out a great puff of smoke and watched it swirl right into the vent. A child coughed lightly from inside the vent. The vent led into the bathroom I concluded. The woman was sobbing inside there, with her child nearby.
“What are we doing, Mom?” I heard the child say. I listened intently. After a moment of more quiet sobbing, there was silence. Then the woman spoke in a whisper loud enough for me to hear.
“Get on your knees. We’re going to pray to God. We‘ve been deserted here
and have no money. If the authorities take us in, it won’t be long before they have us
back in that horrid country with those horrid people.”
The accent was American I concluded. The world was a hard place. I imagined one of the countries the woman must be talking about. Saudi, Iran, Jordon.
Cultures that were implacable, with respect to their women and children. Rendition had been invented by them, and the Israelis, not by Americans. To be on the run from one of those countries was to be in terrible jeopardy.
I drew in more smoke, then watched it snake back into the vent. I heard no more coughing. Instead I heard praying.
“Please Lord,” the woman intoned, followed by the little voice of her child, repeating the same words. “We are in deep trouble. Please send someone to help us. Anyone. We can’t make it on our own.” I heard all the words twice, but it was the little girl’s that went in toward what was left of my soul. Then I shook my head, threw the cigarette down and ground it out with my foot. It was a cold cruel world.
It took its toll on all of us and I had my own problems. I tip-toe'd to the door, opened it noiselessly, then slipped back into the real world again. I moved away quickly until I was well down the terminal corridor.
It seemed like a half-mile walk to the main building where the counters were located. I had an electronic connecting ticket to Washington but I had made that decision. I wasn’t going back there so I needed a ticket. I picked the United line, as it was fairly short and my original connect had been on that. Maybe they had a flight to South America that did not connect in the United States.
I felt someone behind me, but then, I was in line at an airline counter. Instinctively, I glanced back anyway. I almost groaned aloud. It was the elegant broken down woman and her child. I quickly turned my head, but not quick enough.
The little girl spoke up at me.
“You’re him, aren’t you?” I grimaced down at her, in question.
“Huh?” I said, intelligently.
“You smell like him.” I stared, having nothing to say to that comment.
I looked at the woman, but her attention was on everything else around. Her eyes darted all over the place, like those of a cornered animal. The girl kept staring at me, waiting for something.
“I smell?” I finally asked, against my better judgment. She nodded, knowingly.
“My Mom and I prayed for help. I smelled you when we prayed. You’re him, the one God sent.” I stared, my expression one of total disbelief. The girl had coughed at the smoke from my cigarette while in that bathroom I realized, then
picked up the same aroma from my clothes. My mind raced. A lot of people smoked, especially in Europe. The girl could not possibly know that the smoke was from me personally. I started to comment, then stopped, looking into the steady deep pools of her eyes. She knew. I knew that she knew. She knew that I knew that she knew. No words needed to be said.
“Por favor?” a woman’s impatient voice said, from the side. I jerked toward the sound. I was next. The counter clerk was motioning toward me. I looked up at her, then back at the child, who smiled, her knowledge of my role total and complete.
“Jesus Christ!” I whispered bitterly, taking my wallet from my pocket, and then approaching the counter. I took out my personal Visa, the only credit care I owned myself. The Agency cards were not going to work to get me anywhere, I knew, not anymore. My last ten thousand dollars was invested in the Visa card. Or at least my only ten thousand, and it was all credit. I shrugged. What did it matter.
“Here,” I said, shoving the card across the counter, “fly these two people to anywhere they're going.” I pulled back. The woman moved to the counter.
“What?” she asked. “What’s going on? What are you doing?” The woman looked from the clerk to me, than back again. The clerk shrugged like I had, but with more meaning.
“Here, you need tickets out of here. Use my card. Take care of your child.”
I said the words in embarrassment, as the woman stood staring at me in silence.
I watched conflicting expression flow across her face like the surface of a river’s white water rapids.
“We needed help Mom, and God sent him,” the small girl said, in her penetrating little voice. She pointed up at my chest. I could tell that the woman did not know what to do.
“Take the tickets. Get the hell out of here,” I said sharply. The woman’s face broke, then she caught herself, thankfully stifling a sob. I stepped away to give her room. The little girl stepped with me.
“Where are you going?” she asked me, conversationally, as if what was happening was just a normal part of her everyday life. I sighed.
“Ushuaia,” I said, thinking that that would stop her, but it didn’t.
“Ushuaia?” she intoned, getting the pronunciation all-wrong. I didn’t correct her, preferring to wait until she and her Mom were out of my life.
“Why are you going there?” the girl went on, as I wondered that she had not even asked where Ushuaia was. I answered as if she had asked.
“Its in South America, down near the tip, in a place called Terra del Fuego.
There’s a bar down there I’m going to drink at. I’m done. I’m all done. “ I finished saying the last words with my eyes closed, imagining the total relief I would find down there, as there was just no point in living on anymore. The bar in Ushuaia was as good a place to end it all as anywhere.
“Can I draw you?” The little girl brought me back with her odd question.
“Huh?” I said, returning to my earlier intellectual response. I noted that the girl had produced a small notepad and pencil from somewhere.
“I don’t care what you do,” I answered, truthfully. I moved to the side to wait
Until I had to sign something. I did not have to wait long. The clerk gestured, the woman stood aside and I signed the credit card slip, then some other papers. I accepted my card back, but did not put it away.
“I don’t know how to thank you,” the woman began, as I tried to shake my head and stop her. “No, without you I don’t think we would have made it," she went on, "you saved our lives and I don’t know how to thank you.”
“I don’t need any thanks, just get your child back home or wherever you’re going.” The woman nodded. I knew she was aware of my discomfort. She took her papers, turned, then turned back and kissed me on the cheek. She smiled for the first time, as I shrank back in surprise, bringing my hand to my cheek. The woman grabbed the little girl by one hand and made to depart. The girl pulled back.
“Wait,” she yelled, then held up the other hand to me. I took the piece of paper she pushed at me, then watched as both she and her Mom half-walked and half-ran out into the main terminal area. I watched until they were gone.
“Por favor?” the United clerk said, once again.
“Connect me all the way through to Ushuaia, Argentina,” I said, pushing the Visa back across the counter. The woman went to work. I waited for almost ten minutes. All at once she looked up.
“The card’s no good. You don’t have enough money for that trip.”
I stared.
“What?’ was all I could say for a moment. “But I had ten thousand of credit on that card,” I said, in a shaky voice.
“Oh,” the woman said. “Now I understand. That woman and her child used up nine thousand dollars of your credit.” I stared, my eyes going round.
“Where the hell did she buy tickets to, Timbuktu?” I could not believe what I was hearing.
“Washington D.C.” the woman said, flatly.
“D.C.” I almost yelled. “It doesn’t cost that kind of money to fly from Barcelona to D.C.!” I waited for a reply, fuming.
“It does in first class. You said fly them anywhere. They were going to D.C.
At the last minute and with a full plane, first class is all that was available. Do you want to fly somewhere else?” I shook my head, still in total shock. I took out my electronically issued boarding pass. I handed it across the counter.
“Are they on that same flight?” I asked, knowing the answer. The woman checked her computer. She nodded, as I knew she would.
“Please tell me that they don’t have seats next to mine,” I murmured, all the strength of my voice gone.
“Oh no,” the woman replied, brightly. They’re in first class. You’re back in economy.” I just looked at her, slowly taking my boarding pass back. “You better hurry, you’re flight leaves in twenty minutes,” she finished.
I nodded, saying nothing. I stepped away, hearing “por favor” behind me.
I walked numbly toward the center of the terminal. I stopped under the flight display to find my gate. I remembered the piece of paper in my hand. I unfolded it. It was a wonderful little pencil piece of some expressed talent. It was a drawing of a smiling man bending over to talk to or accept something from a female child. Under the drawing was written the words “Not Done.”
I could not help smiling to myself. I didn’t believe in God. If I did believe in God I wouldn’t have liked Him. But I walked toward the United gate smiling, with a strange new purpose in my step. I talked to Him, whom I did not believe in, while I walked. Indeed, it appeared I was not done.
http://www.jamesstraussauthor.com
http://www.themastodons.com
copyright 2009
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