Chapter 28

Cindy and Sandra were flying a routine pass over LS3 when they say the white cloth panel being displayed. As leader of the flight, Cindy radioed back to base at LS1 what they had seen. There were two small boats freshly arrived, and there were no humans to be seen. Cindy ordered Sandra to land and investigate while she flew cover.

As Sandra's ultralite rolled to a stop, a man stepped out from behind one of the new boats and started shooting at her. Sandra was hit twice, once in the leg and once in the abdomen. Sandra was in considerable pain, but she was able to use the radio to tell Cindy what had happened.

Cindy spotted the man with the gun while he was still trying to shoot Sandra. This incensed Cindy beyond reason, so she made a strafing run, firing both of her AK-47s. She hit the shooter with a number of bullets; Cindy was the best shot with the AK-47s in the Air Force.

Another man poked his head from behind the boat when Cindy pulled away for a second pass. He raised his own AK-47 and tried to line up on Cindy. By now, Cindy was really pissed, so she lined up for a rocket run. She put two of her rockets into the boat near where the man had been standing and literally blew the shit out of him, along with his guts and blood.

Cindy now realized her mistake and climbed for enough altitude to be sure to get through to LS1. Jenifer was manning the radio and took note of the report. She had recorded the full report on a digital voice recorder that they had salvaged from the trimaran, so she rang the emergency alarm. I happened to be the closest leader when the alarm went off, so I was there right away, if not sooner. I listened to the report from Cindy and sounded the alarm for an immediate meeting of the rescue team at the radio hut.

We had rehearsed this, so we all knew our jobs. Ed Saunders had built an ultralite large enough for one passenger, so Juliette was prepared to fly JoAnn to the scene and Ed would fly cover in a plane fitted with two 12-gauge shotguns loaded with explosive slugs. They took off for LS3 while the rest of us prepared our ground portion of the rescue.

I now had a regular driver, Maureen, for my command golf cart. She had just finished the routine maintenance on it, so it had a fully charged battery. She hooked on a trailer with a dog cage loaded with two dogs. This trailer was specially fitted with an ambulance rig and containing a set of emergency surgical tools, with the concomitant anesthetics, etc. It was fitted with a special chair for Alice, our surgeon, to ride on.

Another golf cart was also brought up with a trailer. This one was able to carry a squad of eight troopers, plus a machine gun crew, led by Charlie Johnson. The last vehicle in the team was one of the mobile big guns in case we ran into a T. Rex. We were ready to leave within 15 minutes and sped away at about 20 MPH. We would be at LS3 within 100-110 minutes if we did not run into a big carnivore.

Juliette landed with JoAnn within 15 minutes of gaining flying room. They touched down beside Sandra's plane and rushed to her aid. Sandra's leg had been broken by the bullet, but that was the extent of the bone damage; however, there was a lot of damage to the surrounding flesh. The wound actually looked like it resulted from a ricochet, so a lot of the bullet's energy had been dissipated by the time it struck Sandra's leg.

The bullet in her abdomen was a different story. She was bleeding profusely there, so JoAnn did what she could to slow down or stop the bleeding and began an infusion of plasma. There were four pints of plasma in the supplies that JoAnn had brought with her, but she dispatched Cindy back to base to pick up some more, as much as she could carry. She thought that she had enough plasma on hand to hold for the approximately 45 minutes it would take for Cindy to return with the additional plasma. It was obvious that Sandra was in need of immediate surgery; hopefully, she could hang on until Alice arrived. Alice had given Sandra a dose of morphine for the pain, but hoped that she would not need more than that before Alice arrived on the scene.

While all of this was going on, Ed had checked for survivors in the hut. He found a woman, Dagmar Hollbein, and three children. She said that they had been under attack by pirates when the waterspouts hit. Both boats had been transported, and the pirates continued shooting after they landed here. Her husband had his Dutch Army rifle with him, along with some ammunition, so he stayed in the boat to fight while sending her and the children to hide in the hut. She had barred the door after seeing the sign and putting out the signal cloth. They had been in the hut for about a day and a half.

Ed and Dagmar left the children in the hut and went to their boat to see what had happened to her husband. They found him still holding his rifle, but dead of a bullet through his neck. The spilled blood was completely dry, so they figured that he had been dead for at least 24 hours. Dagmar broke into hysterics when they found her husband, but JoAnn had something to use to calm the poor woman down. Juliette and Ed managed to get Dagmar into bed in the hut before she passed out from whatever shot she had been given.

The children were all early teenagers, so they were able to accept the news of their father's death without breaking down, but they were all three obviously affected by the news. The two girls began to cry, but in sorrow, not in hysterics, so the Saunders left them in the hut with their mother. The boy was extremely angry and began to curse in Dutch. The boy could speak English, he was just too upset at first to make the effort. Finally, Ed was able to get through by asking his help in investigating the pirate vessel.

Ed and Bernie, as the boy wanted to be called, looked over the remains of the pirate's boat. It was effectively destroyed, though there were probably things that still could be salvaged from it. Miraculously, one of the pirates was still alive, though not likely to remain that way much longer. They tried to question him, but he professed to speak only Spanish, which none of them had, so they left him to suffer and die while Ed went back to be with Sandra, and Bernie went back to the hut.

Our convoy finally arrived, and Alice rushed to examine Sandra. The bleeding had been copious enough to finish off the four bottles of plasma, and Alice knew that they were going to need whole blood for the operation coming up. Alice needed to operate as soon as possible, but she was reluctant to do it out here in the boondocks with no sanitation at all. Given that the local microbes were not able to do much of any damage to a human, it was still possible to leave trash in the wound. Alice wanted as much cleanliness as possible for the operation.

One of the shipping containers had been rigged up as an operating room, so that was the place Alice wanted to use to work on Sandra. We took a close look at the plane used to ferry JoAnn here and figured out how we could convert the passenger seat into a bed large enough to accommodate Sandra. We got to work on that right away while Ed stripped every nonessential item from his plane so that Alice could ride back with him. It was going to be an uncomfortable trip, but Sandra needed to be moved; she was already doped up on morphine and Vallium, so she was unconscious and would not be bothered by the flight. Alice in the other plane was the one who would be miserable, but only for 15 minutes or so.

Everybody got ready, and the flight was made back to LS1. As soon as Sandra was removed from the plane, Juliette took off to return to LS3 to pick up JoAnn. Both she and Alice would be necessary for the operation to be successful. A couple of women had trained to be nurses, so they were pressed into service to be the gofers.

Meanwhile, we loaded the Hollbeins onto my trailer with as much of their personal items as we could carry and made our way back to LS1. On the way, we had a little excitement. We encountered a T. Rex and two Utahraptors working on a Triceratops corpse. The two Utahraptors attacked first, but we had so many shotguns available, there was really no contest. The Utahraptors were literally blown to pieces by fire from 13 shotguns. I asked Charlie not to waste machine gun bullets, so he opened up with his shotgun.

The T. Rex was attracted by the noise and came to investigate. That's when the big gun went into action and put two 2.75 caliber explosive slugs into its chest. This was enough to separate the T. Rex into several pieces, and it was dead before it stopped running. The Hollbeins now appreciated what all of our firepower was normally used for.

To keep from going crazy, the remaining Saunders flew back to LS3 to pick up Sandra's ultralite. Cindy flew it back to LS1, and they all went over it with a fine-toothed comb to look for any bad effects from the pirate's bullets. All they could find was a little scratched paint and a couple of holes in the wing. These were repairs that could be made in a few minutes, so they decided to put them off until later when they were not so worried about Sandra.