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At the top level, the three of us ran from the elevator as far and as fast as we could. I told the Russian I would take him to our office where he would be safe. But then I remembered that our flight base no longer existed. Everything served the airlift now, which in turn, was controlled by the armed forces.
With no definite place to go to, we hid in a washroom. "Would you like to go on a mission with us?" I asked him.
He shrugged his shoulders.
"A rescue mission?" I said, "evacuating Canada!"
His face lit up; "Canada!" he said. "Yes, I would love to assist you to help Canada!" he replied.
He introduced himself as Igor Arenski, and immediately thanked us for "saving" him.
"You are very courageous to stand against so many," he said to me.
"Courageous?" I said. "No, that wasn't courage! That was stupidity, an act of desperation. I was scared to death! You may not be aware of how many people carry guns in the US. If the shot had been fired one second earlier, you might be dead now, or I, or Jennie."
"I feel honored that you took such risks for me," Igor replied.
"To be honest, it wasn't totally for your sake. If anyone had been killed, it might have hampered the rescue operation. On the other had, you are a human being as much as any one of the people that we've been putting our life on the line, to rescue. This will be our sixth rescue flight."
When nothing happened for some minutes, I peered cautiously out of our washroom to see if the hall was still clear. When it seemed safe, we sprinted on to our flight base room.
"You've come to the wrong place," a woman said as we stated our purpose. "This office coordinates supplies, nothing more." She looked tired and not eager to help.
So off we went again, from one office to another. All I wanted was to find out who ran the damn show.
Eventually I got lucky. I knew we had come to the right place when someone asked: "Can you fly a 747, and bring it down on the face of a dime?"
"Of course," I replied, quite eagerly by then.
"That's all they have left on Vancouver Island to land on, a short piece of highway. It's not much of an airfield, " the official explained.
I nodded. I told him I knew about the highway. I told him I had called earlier.
He shook his head. "I was sure you wouldn't come," he said.
I could smell the acid odor of evaporated sweat. His hair was a mess, his dark blue shirt soiled with coffee stains.
"I wasn't sure at the time. I am now," I said.
"Then it was you, that I talked to earlier. So, you are willing to go," he said and looked me over.
"That is why we are here," I said.
"That's fine," he said without looking up for a second time. He opened a walkway through the counter. "Come, I'll tell you about it."
"But why do you want to take a 747 in there?" I asked him as we passed some desks to his corner.
He stopped and looked at me over the top of his rimless glasses as if I had asked a stupid question. "It carries more people. Why else? Also it has a better weight distribution through its four sets of wheels. You should know all that." It was easy to see that the man was tired.
"Here is the situation," he said as we came to the corner of the room where he had a large map pinned onto the wall. The entire room looked like the New York Stock Exchange after a day of heavy trading. Every desk was littered with slips of paper and folders.
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Stories
about
Healing
from novels by Rolf A. F. Witzsche
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