Swift Vengeance

15

Late that night, in the privacy of my home office, I poured an assertive bourbon and put on some waltz music. I sat in front of my computer monitor, entered my search words, then closed my eyes and let the music move through me. Stood and took a few three-beat turns before opening my eyes to the “Syria improvised hospitals” search results waiting for me on the screen.

As the waltz went undanced to, I read the thirty-five-page list of articles, news broadcasts, radio stories, books, videos, and blogs related to my search. Each page contained approximately a dozen entries, and each entry’s first sentence. I opened and read the most promising. Many contained multiple references and links to source material. Most were related to the bloody 2016 siege of Aleppo. But I was after something on the IH-One drone attack of a year earlier.

An hour passed slowly. Another. I sipped and scanned, clicked and read, translated and printed, followed links on hunches, detoured, closed and opened anew. At one point I launched myself in my wheeled chair à la Joan Taucher, rolling across the old hardwood floor to land at the western window of my office. Where, looking down from the second floor, I saw the glassy black pond and the staunch palapa and the horseshoe-shaped barbecue and the chaise longues and the Ping-Pong table covered by a tarp against in-blowing rain. Grandma Liz had convinced Grandpa Dick to string Christmas lights along the edge of the palapa roof. The little twinkling bulbs seemed lonely against the vast dark beyond.

Surprisingly, Lindsey reclined on one of the chaises, facing the pond in profile, wrapped in a heavy coat, a watch cap over her ears. She took a drink from a coffee mug that did not steam, though the breath from her nostrils did. Even from this distance I could see she had the thousand-yard stare again. I felt equal parts pity and alarm.

I knew that she had left the property this afternoon, in her car, for approximately one and a half hours.

This intel courtesy of Burt. He’d tailed her from here to a nature preserve in Fallbrook called Los Jilgueros. It’s a pleasant place, big sycamores and lots of native plants, some trails and ponds. I fly right over it, in and out of Fallbrook Airpark.

According to Burt, Lindsey had parked her Mustang, gotten a backpack from the trunk, and headed into the preserve. Burt followed covertly, letting a “loud family of five with two dogs” run interference. Lindsey had strolled to a bench overlooking one of the ponds, unslung her pack, and taken out her phone. Burt hunkered cross-legged in a thicket of matilija poppies and watched Lindsey while a weasel watched him. She worked the phone, fussed with the backpack.

Ten minutes later, a boy of about nine and a man in his thirties came down the same trail. When Lindsey spotted the boy she stood up and ran toward him. The boy ran to her and they embraced. “She swung him around and around,” Burt had told me. “I’d never seen Lindsey Rakes actually happy until that moment.”

Burt said that Lindsey and the man seemed cordial but chilly. All three went back to the bench, where Lindsey pulled wrapped gifts from the backpack and the boy opened them. One of the gifts was a small drone, which the boy had no problem piloting through the trees, along the edge of a pond, across a grassy meadow, and back to the bench, landing it deftly.

“Obviously in his genes,” Burt had said, grinning, his lower teeth straight and small.

After a forty-five-minute visit, they returned to the parking lot for a long good-bye. Burt told me that Lindsey appeared to be pleading with her ex-husband.

She got into her car and threw up some mud in the dirt parking lot. Burt had followed her to Daniel’s Market in nearby Bonsall, from which she came a few minutes later, carrying a green reusable shopping bag that she swung somewhat heavily into the trunk of her Mustang.

That was when Burt had seen Jason Bayless in his black Mercedes SUV, watching the market, too. Which told us that Bayless had located Lindsey, and that Brandon Goff wasn’t the one who had hired him.

Now I looked at her through the window again and told myself that no matter her demons, she needed my protection. Maybe because of her demons. And she had been located. Anyone determined to find her — Caliphornia, for instance — would draw a short, straight line between Daniel’s Market and here. If necessary, I could get her off the property and stowed elsewhere in a matter of minutes.

After talking to Burt I’d taken another crack at Bayless, by phone, to see if I could find out who had hired him. He’d hung up.

I looked down at Lindsey yet again.

Then pushed myself across the floor and back into bloody Syria.

The listings were wide-ranging and only somewhat chronological. So I had to read every one of them. As in a boxing match, inattention could mean defeat.

Thus:

Another hour, another bourbon, but I was getting closer:

Midnight came and went. The coyotes started up in the distance, though at first I thought they were police sirens. I wondered how Clevenger was doing on his coyote epic. He hadn’t gone out yet tonight.

I watched the Christmas lights glowing along the edge of the palapa roof. ’Tis the season, I thought. Comfort and joy. But where exactly do you find them? I glanced at the short stack of Oxley posters still undistributed, though I’d plastered Fallbrook with them as best I could. I wondered if the cat would make it through the holidays, if Tammy Bellamy would ever see him again. I wondered why Lindsey had been careless enough to leave the premises in broad daylight so soon after Caliphornia had done to Kenny Bryce exactly what Caliphornia had promised to do to Lindsey. Which led me back to who had hired Jason Bayless to locate her. So much for comfort and joy.

Then, deep down on page twenty-six, I found what I was looking for.

The Doctors Without Borders website had reported in May of 2015 that one of their MSF — Médecins Sans Frontières — “field” hospitals, located in the Farafra neighborhood of Aleppo, had been hit by drone-fired missiles on April 22. Nine dead: two doctors, three nurses, four volunteers. Details were few, because IH-One was a very small improvised hospital consisting of three inflatable sterile operating rooms and ten beds tucked back into the bowels of a cave. Because the government of Assad considered Doctors Without Borders to be enemies of the state, said the news release, no MSF personnel were allowed in the Syrian Arab Republic. An enterprising photographer had managed to smuggle out a brief video of the aftermath of the missile blasts: fire, smoke, the twisted carnage of bodies and body parts, what looked like a motorcycle tire poking out of the rubble. I watched it four times, concentrating on every detail I could take in.

The report continued:

I found another article about IH-One on the Physicians for Human Rights website, based on the MSF release. No new information.

And another piece from NPR, in which two IH-One volunteers were interviewed. Little more.

But what struck me was how little. There was a short, back-page Washington Post report based on the MSF release but not published until June 15. A similar piece was published in The New York Times the next day. I found a Los Angeles Times feature on the White Helmet volunteers in Syria, one of whom cited the drone attack on an Aleppo field hospital in 2015 as one of his inspirations for doing humanitarian work at the risk of his own life.

I changed the search words to “Syria field hospitals,” with little variation in the results.

Then to “Syria makeshift hospitals,” but the same thirty-plus pages of entries kept coming up.

I spent some time on the Doctors Without Borders website, but even their coverage of IH-One in Aleppo ended with the May 2015 posting. It was easy to see that small, makeshift, improvised IH-One — supported but never staffed by Doctors Without Borders personnel — had been figuratively buried by the brutal government siege of Aleppo that began less than a year later. The suffering and deaths of so many people at the hands of their own government had commanded the attention of the world for nearly three months, finally upstaged in the United States by the election of Donald Trump. I thought back to those dark months, the only light I could come up with being the Cubs breaking their eighty-one-year World Series drought in seven dramatic games.

I shrugged and sipped the booze.

By the end of 2016, IH-One had been literally buried and forgotten.