Donald Harstad: A Long December

On the way, I handed my cell phone to one of the EMTs and asked her to dial my home number and tell Sue I was all right. Then I began to feel very, very tired.

I must have dozed off, because I remember being shaken awake as the ambulance pulled up to the ER.

I was answering the questions of the admitting ER nurse when Henry walked in.

“Did they really blow up an ambulance?” he asked.

“Yeah, they sure did. Suicide bomber, for God’s sake. Got three EMTs and the driver, and I believe two officers alongside.”

The ER nurse stopped what she was doing. “What?” She hadn’t had a chance to talk to the ambulance crew that had brought me in, at least not about the details.

I told her what had happened.

“Which ambulance?”

“I think it was the Battenberg unit,” I said.

“Do you know who was on it?”

“Terri Biederman,” I said. “She’s the only one I know for sure. It was dark.”

“Isn’t she the paramedic who came back from Milwaukee? “she asked.

“That’s the one.”

“I met her…” She shook it off, and started with the admissions questions again.

I could hear most sounds now; it was just that they were buzzy sometimes, and I felt like I had a head cold.

“How close were you to the explosion?” asked Henry.

“How close? “I saw him nod. “Oh, about twenty-five, thirty feet.”

“Which side was to it? “he said, loudly.

“My back, I think.”

“Lucky,” said Henry. “Probably no ruptured eardrums.”

“Good.”

“Okay, my man,” he said cheerfully, his professional manner taking over.

“How many fingers do you see? “He held up two fingers about a foot from my face.

“Six,” I said.

“Very funny.”

“Okay, seven.”

“Humor gets you a night in the hospital,” he said, “and lots and lots of tests.”

“Two.”

“Much better…now let me have a look in your ears…”

After making certain that I wasn’t dizzy, didn’t have any hypersensitive reaction to light, and wasn’t experiencing any nausea, Henry assured me that I could be released. He also said that my hearing would return to normal. Or, at least, almost normal.

“Henry, you know if Hester Gorse came up here, or did she go to the clinic in Battenberg?”

“She’s here,” he said. “We fixed her up pretty well, and she’ll be going down to Dubuque tomorrow for a little oral surgery after the swelling has gone down.”

“Can I see her?”

“Sure, come on with me.”

We went through two sets of those bang-and-they-open doors designed for gurneys, and down a long, brightly lit corridor.

“She seemed to be in a lot of pain,” I said.

“X rays showed two teeth sheared off, and one other cracked. Must have been very painful. She’s lucky it missed the nerves in there. She could have had a permanent paralysis of the facial muscles on that side.”

That had never occurred to me.

“I was worried that it broke her jaw,” I said. Just making hospital conversation.

“If her teeth hadn’t gotten in the way,” said Henry, as cheerful as ever, “she could have had very severe bleeding in the oral cavity. She’s pretty lucky.”

It’s all in your point of view, I guess.

To see Hester in the light-blue hospital gown was a surprise. She looked a lot smaller and more, well, delicate that I’d ever imagined her. She was very pale, and had an enormous dressing on her cheek.

They had an IV drip going, and her eyes were closed.

“Hester,” said Henry, and her eyes snapped open, “you have a visitor.”

She smiled with the half of her face that wasn’t covered in gauze. “How’d it go, Houseman?”

“You knew about the ambulance?”

“Yeah, I heard it go up.” Her speech had improved greatly.

“No survivors. Suicide bomber. Can you believe that? A Goddamned suicide bomber.”

She shook her head. “I’m glad you made sure I got a separate ambulance,” she said softly. “Thanks.”

“Me, too,” I said. “And you’re welcome.”

“Did we get everybody?”

“I don’t have the slightest idea,” I said. “HRT was doing its thing when I got out, so I don’t expect too many of the bad guys made it. I think they were being dumb enough to try to shoot it out with our troops, so they probably got flattened. I don’t know, though. I’ll find out what’s happening down there. I’ll let you know. You better get some sleep. I’ll talk to you in the morning.”

I think she was asleep before I left the room. I glanced at my watch. It was only 21:51 hours, 9:51 P.M.

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 22, 2001 22:08

My car was down at the HEINMAN BOYS’ Farm, just the first of several complications that were to crop up in the next hour or so. I called the office on my cell phone and asked for a ride.

The Maitland officer was at a domestic call, and their other car was down at the old Dodd place, where all the action was. I asked Dispatch to make sure that somebody drove my car back, and decided to walk up to the office. It was about fifteen degrees by now, and the fresh air would wake me up. I also wanted time to think. Things had started happening too damned fast after the ambulances got into the yard, and I need some time to try to figure stuff out.

My biggest question had to do with what the hell all those terrorists had been doing there in the first place. It looked like they’d sure been there when we arrived, and just didn’t see us until we were standing around in the farmyard. What the hell could they have been up to that they didn’t even have a lookout posted?

My house was only a half-block out of my way to the sheriff’s department. I figured the county could afford the extra overtime if I stopped and saw Sue.

She was really glad to see me. We talked for about five minutes, mostly about how I was safe now, and how frightened she’d been when she’d seen the explosion on TV. One of the reporters had kept saying that the barn had blown up.

I told her that I had to go to the office for a while, but that I’d be very safe.

“You said that last time.”

“Well, now I’m a witness,” I told her. “We always take better care of witnesses.”

It was about three-quarters of a mile to the office, almost all residential, with the last third being up a rather steep hill with cracked and tumbled sidewalk. I took my time in the dark, not wanting to break my ankle at this late date.

I passed a house with a dog in the yard. I was just about under a streetlight, and the porch light was on, but he didn’t notice me because he had his head in the bare branches of some bushes, hot on the scent of a rabbit. It was kind of cute, because from my angle he was mostly wagging tail. I even stopped for a second, but thought better of whistling. I didn’t want him to start barking.

I knew what was distracting the dog. Not because I could smell the rabbit, too, but because I knew about dogs. What did I know about terrorists? Not much. But I knew a lot about criminals, and people of that mind-set. Most of the people we were dealing with down at the old Dodd place, I reminded myself, were not terrorists in the strictest sense. They seemed to be criminal types recruited to fill gaps. Second-stringers, but controlled by a terrorist “boss.”

If I assumed the “boss” was not present, I was left with a bunch of second-rate criminals doing their thing. I remembered one bunch we had busted years back, after the only member of the little gang with a brain and a personality had been hurt in a car wreck. The original four had broken into a toy store in Dubuque and stolen a whole consignment of those remote-controlled toy cars. After their car wreck, the other three were a piece of cake, and we got ‘em when they were actually racing several of the little cars up and down the only street in a little town. One of our marked cars had come through on routine patrol and damned near ran over some of them.