Eagles fly, p.26
Eagles Fly, page 26
He could not do this. Sharpenberg had been correct. A doctor, no matter how good he was, simply could not operate on himself.
But he stared at his reflection in the mirror for a long time, blood down his chin and in his mouth, the clamps hanging obscenely from his mutilated nostril, and again he took a deep breath. He had run out of options. This was the only way. And after a while he continued, slowly, carefully, cutting tissue away from cartilage, and finally removing an entire section of both the left and right nostrils, leaving large, empty cavities high beneath the bridge.
The Novocain began to wear off within the hour after the first incision, and the pain came at him in waves, until he gave himself more injections.
During the second hour of the operation his eyes began to swell shut, and he had to stop long enough to inject the area with mild muscle relaxant, so that he could see to continue.
In the third hour his stomach began acting up, the bile rising up his throat to gag him.
And in the fourth and final hour he began losing control of his hands, his work becoming less and less precise, his vision going double.
He had begun at 5:00, and at 10:00 P.M. he had inserted the last of the silicone implants, had taken the last of the stitches, and had fallen off the chair in a faint. He lay unconscious on the cabin floor until seven o’clock the next morning, his face swollen and on fire.
In two weeks the swelling in all but his nose had subsided, although his eyes and cheeks would remain deeply bruised for at least another month. Most of the major pain had passed, and he had again built up his system to begin on his lips, this operation easier and less painful.
During those two weeks he had monitored the progress of the President’s World Peace Proposal, marveling at the fact that not one voice had been raised in question about Engstrom’s extraordinary commission. The names of the men sounded to Kelsey like a litany of his father’s old cronies. Most of the names he had heard his father mention at one time or another over the years. But what was most incredible to Kelsey was that his own father had been appointed to the commission to represent the United States. The father of the man who supposedly assassinated President Barnes was serving on such a commission? It was unbelievable, except it was happening.
For ten days after he had inserted the silicone implants in both his upper and lower lips, Kelsey was unable to eat anything but lukewarm soup, and on the first day he tried eating solid foods, he vomited. But when his stomach had calmed down he had tried again, keeping a little of the macaroni and cheese inside of him.
From that moment until he began on his cheeks, his recovery went fast.
At times during the long winter mornings and the days when he was supposed to be sleeping, Kelsey sat huddled in his bed, listening to the radio, too deeply in pain to sleep even with pills. The loneliness during these times was crushing, and the pain deep. inside his soul at the loss of Marion was even worse than the terrible physical pain. He would rock himself back and forth like a small child with a toothache, the motion somehow soothing, and listen mindlessly to the music and news broadcasts, waiting out the hours until it was time to take another of his severely limited supply of painkillers. Waiting for the time when the operations would be completed, and he would not have to feel the constant pain, the constant headaches, the constant nausea.
The United Nations General Assembly was called into special session on February 15, a little more than two months after Barnes had been assassinated, and the first evening on which Kelsey had been able to skip a painkiller.
The operations were completed, most of the swelling had gone down, and his hair had grown back over his ears, hiding the angry red postop scars,
He felt like he had been run over by a truck, but the impossible part was over now, and each day he could feel his strength coming back, and each day he had to avoid thinking about the future.
This night, however, his future came crashing down on him with the first news on the UN meeting that had been called by the World Peace Commission on behalf of President Engstrom.
“World peace is finally and at long last within the grasp of mankind.” Engstrom spoke from the United Nations. The broadcast was coming live from the General Assembly, and Kelsey sat in front of the bay windows, which looked over a completely ice-locked Lake Michigan, and listened.
“I am inviting the leaders of all the world governments and their representatives to meet here one month from this day on March fifteenth, to sign a World Peace Government Charter.
“I am telling the peoples of the world on this day that I and members of my World Peace Commission have worked these months toward a goal that mankind has striven for since the dawn of time.
“I am telling the peoples of the world on this day that I have personally spoken with most of the world’s leaders, who have agreed in principle to this concept of everlasting peace.
“And I am telling the peoples of the world on this day that I will call for the creation of a legislative world governing body composed of the kings and queens, the prime ministers and presidents, from the world over. One government, under one flag, unified under one legislature for world unity and everlasting peace.”
It was happening, Kelsey thought, just as his father had wanted it to. Incredibly, awesomely, it was happening, and he had thirty days to stop it. One man against an entire world.
He wondered briefly what threats Engstrom and his World Peace Commission—which was nothing more than a new name for the Odessa—had made worldwide in order to insure success for their insane plan.
Instant annihilation? Nuclear holocaust? Biological war?
Whatever it was, Kelsey knew in his soul that it would work, that the world’s leaders would indeed meet at the United Nations in one month’s time. The entire world would be there or watching, and so would Kelsey. Only he would be there for a different purpose.
32
It was the evening of March 11, and the snow that had fallen most of the day had finally stopped, but the wind still howled around the corners of the cabin, rattling the windows and shrieking off the rocky lakeshore.
Kelsey had gotten up four hours ago to begin his final preparations, and now he came out of the bathroom, nude, padded across the main room to the bedroom alcove, and looked at himself in the full-length mirror on the closet door.
His hair was a black, kinky mass from the hair coloring and perm kits he had purchased at an all-night drugstore near Madison, Wisconsin, three months ago.
His eyebrow line was thick, giving his entire forehead a flattened look. His cheeks were high and sharply arched. His nose was broad and flat, flaring widely at the nostrils. And his lips were heavy, jutting away from his mouth.
The dye that he had concocted from the back walnuts and the leftover hair coloring had stained his entire body a rich chocolate brown, and stepping closer to the mirror so that he could study his face, he was satisfied that the dye had completely blended the remaining bruises around his eyes and nose with his skin color.
He smiled at his reflection, his teeth gleaming white in sharp contrast to his skin.
“Salese Kotura.” Kelsey spoke his new name aloud, inflecting his voice with a British accent as best he could. “From the independent African state of Botswana, at your service, sir.”
He stepped back again from the mirror and began to shiver. It was insane. What he was doing was totally insane. Even if he was able to make it to New York by the fifteenth, there would be tens of thousands of people jammed everywhere in and around the UN building. On the one hand, the crowds would provide him with a cover. Who would pay any more than scant attention to another African black man? But on the other hand, the crowds would effectively insulate President Engstrom.
He turned away from the bedroom alcove and went back to the kitchen table, where he had left his clothes.
Over the past three months, during the terrible pain he had endured, Kelsey’s convictions had begun to diminish. At times he wanted to give it all up. What would it matter if his father and men like him finally won?
But on the night of the first UN broadcast, Kelsey’s convictions had been renewed. Once the world charter went into effect, it would perhaps mean world peace, but it would also mark the beginning of world enslavement, the end, perhaps forever, of any kind of freedom.
Over the past three months he had thought about Colleen and Marion constantly. In his mind they had combined into one woman, one love, and one deep ache inside of him. His father had killed them both. His father and men like him would continue the killing until the world was as they wanted it.
Perhaps the final solution of the Jews would begin again. Or maybe the black man would be eliminated.
Kelsey looked at his own hands and could feel rage building inside of him.
He had come this far, and he was not going to quit. Somehow he would not only make it to New York within the next four days, he would get close enough to Engstrom so that if there was no other way, he would strangle the man with his bare hands.
Kelsey reached for his underwear when a high-pitched whining sound rose over the noise of the wind and then faded. He held his breath, straining to listen for the sound, his right hand on the edge of the table, his heart pounding. And the sound came again, this time louder, apparently much closer.
A snowmobile, he realized. For a moment he lost the sound again, but then it was back, much louder, and he could hear that there were at least two of them.
He raced around the table to the kitchen cabinet where the loaded pistol had lain for three months, grabbed it, and then flipped off the lights in the main room and bathroom before he went to the back door and peered cautiously out the window.
At first he could see nothing in the darkness except for the swirling, blowing snow curling around the long drifts down the driveway that led to the main highway. But then he saw two single headlights bobbing and weaving down the road, and the wind blew the whining noise of the machines his way.
His brain raced as fast as his heart. Somehow they had found out he was here. Probably from Sharpenberg. And another stab of fear hit his gut.
Sam would never have told them a thing unless he had somehow been forced into it. And the force it would have taken to move Sharpenberg into doing anything he did not want to do would have been harsh.
There were two men, one on each machine, both of them dressed in dark snowmobile suits, heavy boots and thick mittens, and dark helmets. They stopped about twenty yards from the back of the cabin, shut off the headlights and engines, and headed on foot toward the cabin, one of them swinging around toward the front.
If he remained here, he might take one of them out, he knew, but not both.
He turned away from the back window and hurried into the bathroom, sweat suddenly rolling down his chest. Setting the gun down on the toilet seat, he unlatched the bathroom window and pulled it, but it was stuck.
One of the men came up on the back porch, and then there was silence as Kelsey renewed his efforts to open the small window.
Suddenly it came free and swung inward, banging against the bathroom wall. Kelsey froze.
There was a noise at the front porch, and he could hear someone trying to open the front door.
Grabbing the pistol, Kelsey climbed up on the tiny bathroom sink and pushed his way out the narrow window, falling out into a snowbank, scraping his shins, and nearly screaming with the shock of the cold snow and wind on his bare body.
A moment later he scrambled to his feet and hurried around to the corner of the cabin, not worried about making any noise now over the shrieking of the wind.
He cocked the pistol and peeked around the corner of the cabin in time to see a man getting ready to ram the back door with his shoulder. He stepped around the corner, raised the gun, and fired twice, the silenced pistol making almost no noise. The heavily dressed man spun around and fell backward down the steps.
Kelsey raced to where the man was sprawled in a heap in a snowbank at the foot of the stairs, and rolled him over. His eyes were open and glassy, and Kelsey was about to reach inside the collar of the man’s suit to check for a pulse when something slammed into his left arm, knocking him on his back in the snow.
He looked up in time to see the second man barging out the back door, firing his gun, and something hot grazed Kelsey’s side, causing him to cry out in pain.
Blindly he raised his own pistol and began firing as fast as he could pull the trigger. The man jerked once to the right and tried to raise his own gun, but then was flung backward through the screen door, and still Kelsey fired up at the house, until the hammer fell with a click on an empty chamber.
The pistol slipped from Kelsey’s hand and he fell back in the snow, his body screaming in pain from his wounds as well as the freezing cold.
They had come for him. They knew he was here, and they had come to kill him. They had probably already killed Sharpenberg and perhaps everyone else at the clinic for helping him. Which meant that they knew what he was up to. They knew about the medical supplies and they probably knew about his operations.
He screamed into the night, his voice drowned out by the wind, and he felt himself going faint, drifting away.
If he remained here, he would die. It would be as simple as that. His father would have won.
He forced his battered body up, staggered to his feet, and lurched drunkenly up the steps, falling over the body of the man half in the cabin and half out.
Crawling on his hands and knees Kelsey managed to drag the dead man’s body inside so that he could close the door. He went to his medical kit in the bathroom, where he fumbled out a hypodermic syringe that he filled with a stimulant. He plunged the needle into his hip and forced the drug into his bloodstream, then waited, counting by thousands to ten when suddenly his head began to clear in waves, almost like taking a cold shower on a hot day.
His left arm was numb and hung uselessly at his side. A quick examination told Kelsey that the bullet had gone completely through the flesh, missing most of the major muscles and completely missing the bones.
The wound in his side was nothing more than a graze, although he would be sore for a week.
He shivered violently from the cold and the delayed reaction of shock by the time he finished bandaging his side and his left arm, in which the feeling was beginning to return.
The pain was excruciating, although it was nothing in comparison to the pain he had endured during his operations, and he decided against any painkillers.
They knew he was there now, and when these two did not report back, others would come looking. He got dressed, being careful not to bump his side or his wounded arm.
When he was ready he went back outside and dragged the body of the man by the back porch into the house and searched his pockets, coming up with a couple of hundred dollars and several credit cards under the name of Felsen Holding, Inc., which was a subsidiary of his father’s electronics firm.
The other dead man’s pockets contained less than a hundred dollars and only one credit card under the name of Felsen Holding, but Kelsey found a set of car keys.
The stimulant was doing its work, and although he was in pain and he felt light-headed, he was thinking clearly.
Their car was probably up on the highway from where they had taken the snowmobiles the final mile down the snow-blocked driveway. He would make his escape the same way they had come for him.
Kelsey dressed in one of the snowmobile suits after he had packed his remaining medical supplies, the dark jacket he had worn when he first came here, and one of the guns he had taken from the dead man. The other gun he stuck in his belt beneath the bulky suit.
He had nearly five hundred dollars in cash plus several credit cards, so getting to New York and making his final preparations would not be difficult.
Before he turned off the cabin lights, Kelsey took a quick look around to make sure there would be nothing here to give away his purpose, forgetting completely about the first volume of the desk encyclopedia he had found in the bedroom alcove. The book was lying open on the floor next to the bed, at the heading Botswana.
Outside, he trudged across the yard to where the snowmobiles were parked and climbed on one of them, wedging the cloth sack in front of him.
The machine started instantly, and Kelsey headed as fast as he dared back up the driveway toward the highway. Parked on the side of the road was a dark, medium-sized, nondescript Buick sedan with a double-wide snowmobile trailer hooked to a bumper hitch.
Kelsey left the machine below the road, out of sight in the ditch, and carrying the bag with his things, scrambled up to the road and threw it on the front seat. He struggled out of the snowmobile suit before he slid in behind the wheel.
He started the car and got the heater going, then stuffed the snowmobile suit in the backseat, pulled the jacket out of the bag, and struggled it on, having trouble for just a moment with his wounded arm.
With shaking hands, Kelsey put the car in gear, made a careful U-turn on the highway, and headed southwest back down the peninsula.
33
Kelsey had originally planned driving directly to Green Bay, sixty-five miles southwest of Sharpenberg’s cabin, and there abandoning the car and taking a flight to New York City. But it was past one in the morning by the time he arrived in Green Bay, and the airport was deserted, not even the coffee shop open, so he had pushed on, heading toward Milwaukee, another hundred miles or so south.
A few miles below Green Bay, Kelsey stopped long enough to give himself another shot of stimulant from his nearly exhausted supply. He unhooked the snowmobile trailer in a closed wayside park on the shore of Lake Michigan.
The wind had finally died down, and there was a lot less snow on the ground by the time Kelsey finally pulled into Milwaukee. It was five in the morning, and he was exhausted and hungry when he parked behind an all-night diner on the north side of the city.
