Chapter 24

It was a full 90 minutes after dawn before our convoy came in sight of the main building of Brooke Army Medical Center.

But we had made it, all six vehicles, without coming under attack!

We felt joy -- even those of us who'd never seen Brooke before. Our vehicles were scattered around in front of the building's wide expanse, and Dr. Montoya and Raymond had headed inside, looking for a way to open the large vehicle-entry doors at the building's base.

That's when the airplane flew over.

It was a fixed-wing single-engine civilian craft. It was disconcerting, seeing an airplane in flight after all these weeks. It was like civilization had suddenly resumed.

Only, we didn't know if this was friend or foe. The plane didn't make any menacing gestures toward us, but its pilot definitely had spotted us. He made a big turn and came a little lower, approaching us from behind the hospital, to get a better look. I braced for machine gun fire, but it wasn't a military plane and there wasn't any evidence that it was armed with guns of any kind.

After that single extra pass, the plane buzzed off to the south, out of sight.

Shit! If this was The Enemy, they sure-as-hell had air superiority!

"That was reconnaissance," Martin Kazner said. "They'll be back, in force! Let's get everybody inside, and these trucks underground, real quick!"

There was a maddening delay while we got the big garage doors to roll up and out of the way, but eventually, we got it done. The two tractor-trailers were backed up to loading docks in the rear of the building. Those trucks contained our food and water. We debated, briefly, whether to liberate the Bradley Fighting Vehicles from their flatbeds. Raymond got into one and started it up, driving right off the flatbed onto the pavement.

Dr. Montoya struggled to start the other Bradley and repeat Raymond's maneuver, and when he couldn't get it started, I asked him to let me try. I managed to get the engine to start and, with some trepidation, imitated Raymond and, clumsily, propelled the Bradley off the flatbed.

The Humvees were quickly driven inside the garage, and the children and Tuesday were escorted upstairs into the interior of the hospital. Geneva was instructed to find a ward or a wing in the hospital's interior -- one without any bodies in it, and to keep the children together there.

Before the flatbed trucks could be moved inside, we found out we had company.

Umberto Gomez resumed his place at the big gun atop the Bradley, and I turned the vehicle in the direction of incoming automatic rifle fire. But we were facing more than rifle fire. An errant rocket blew by to our left, missing us by yards, but exploding into the side of the hospital building, near the first-floor windows.

Umberto was fumbling some with the still-unfamiliar chain gun, but he was trying. I could see two men, well away from us. They appeared to be carrying only automatic rifles. I gunned the Bradley in their direction.

The best defense is a good offense. Or something like that.

I could tell the two guys were frightened at our direct offensive move. It also helped that Brenda DiQuinzio, on the gun in the other Bradley, had opened fire on the same guys. The sound was loud, but it was sort of a flat snap, instead of the big booming noise I had expected. Brenda was firing three-round bursts, but the chain gun was so fast it made it seem almost like a single shot.

Before I could get to the two men, they were history.

But the enemy's offensive firing continued. Another rocket went by, much closer to Raymond's Bradley than the one that had missed ours. Again, all the damage done by the rocket was to the huge building behind us.

I couldn't see any more targets. I could tell they were out there, still firing at us, but it seemed impossible to know how many, or where the enemy was located. There had been no time for us to make up any kind of tactical plan. I had no idea what Raymond might do, in the other AFV, or what he might be expecting me to do.

And I knew the armor on these AFVs, although 'way better than not having any, wasn't strong enough to withstand a direct hit from that rocket launcher out there.

Fuck it! Umberto was up there above me, with his head sticking out into the world, catching lead and trying to see, so he could hit something back. He didn't have a vote. I was going to go for it. I charged ahead, blind, hoping to find a target when we got closer.

I couldn't see Raymond. His Bradley was off to my right and well behind our position. Maybe he would follow suit and join me in this hyper-aggressive move.

Whether he did or not, I was committed to it now.

Finally I heard Umberto yelling at me from above, "Right!... Go Right!", and I felt the whole vehicle shake while the gun roared over my head. I peered out to the right and saw three men -- one of them carrying a rocket launcher -- high-tailing it away from us on foot. Umberto was trying to fire on them by watching the tracer rounds closing in on their position, but he was having trouble aiming while I was jerking the Bradley around, trying to change direction. But the alternative was to hold still and let the bad guys draw a bead on us. Christ! Umberto was doing a lot of shooting and missing with that big gun!

But at least the cock-suckers were mostly running, at this point.

One of them went down -- evidently from fire from the other Bradley. "Stop moving!" Umberto hollered. "Let me shoot at them without the moving!" He sounded kind of faint and far away, which worried me until I realized that everything seemed quieter than before. The fire from our gun must have deafened me. I hoped it was only temporary.

Our attackers were all retreating. Umberto let go with another volley of fire and I saw where it hit. He was finding the range.

There were four men, now, in my field of vision, all running at top speed away from us. Man, Brenda DiQuinzio was hell on wheels with that gun! She was a natural! One of the motherfuckers stumbled, but he didn't go down. He was a lucky bastard, if he'd just been grazed by the kind of shells we were firing! All four men dived into a waiting SUV -- I think it already had a driver -- and they steamed off. Umberto kept firing, but he only hit another car -- unoccupied -- nearby. I could hardly believe the damage he inflicted on that innocent car!... If only he'd have hit their fucking SUV!

It would have been insane to follow them. God knows what defenses they had, out of our field of vision.

But, for the moment, they were gone.

Umberto jumped off the Bradley and ran the short distance to the other vehicle. "What should we do?" he asked Raymond.

"We go back," Raymond said. "They got rockets. We've gotta take these Bradleys inside with us, until we need to use them again. If we leave them out, they'll hit them, eventually."

Wisely, the people we'd left behind had pulled down the big metal door on the underground garage, but when they saw us approaching, a gesture from Raymond brought the door up again. We steered both Bradleys down the ramp and into the building. I tore up part of the ramp's concrete sidewall, trying to control my Bradley.

"Turn 'em around, to face the doors," Raymond said when we were inside the spacious parking area.

"We've got to get upstairs -- up high -- and see what we can see," Dr. Montoya said. He was very excited; he seemed almost in panic mode.

"Has anyone gone up -- up high -- to try to look outside?" I asked him.

"Roald, I think -- and Janice?... But I don't know! Hurry!"

"Where is the group? What floor?"

"I don't know! I don't know, yet!" Dr. Montoya screamed. "I haven't been up there yet!"

"Try to stay calm, Doc," I told him. "I think we've got a little time, before they try again. Let's try to set up some defenses, inside the building."

Umberto was left in position at one of the Bradley's guns in the basement/garage. His instruction was to fire at anything that tried to open the big doors.

The rest of us headed upstairs, looking for the others.

There was chaos up there. None of the three of us -- the Doc, Raymond, or I -- who had been to Brooke before had been available to guide the others to an appropriate place of safety inside the building. We found the small children, with Edward and Geneva, huddled in a small interior waiting room in a third-floor corridor.

There were dead bodies in beds in many of the rooms. Our first order of business, when we'd planned to come back here, was supposed to be to roll the dead out, still in their hospital beds where possible, and dispose of the bodies somewhere away from Brooke. Now, all that had to wait. Now we had to worry about defending ourselves.

We found Ingmar and he confirmed that Roald and Max had headed upstairs, helping each other carry a 50-caliber machine gun. The two of them were planning to establish lookout points on the next-to-top floor, at two locations.