Flashback

“Yes. I know my father took me to the Statue of Liberty when I was five, and in my head I have a recollection of being there. But in reality I only remember the memory—what my father told me. I just put together the details and re-created the scenario, but not the experience itself.”

“But isn’t that what’s happening with your dementia patients, the ones you’ve been testing at Greendale?”

“Those are more interactive, autocreative.”

“So you’re saying that I’m experiencing meaningless vignettes put together from some old horror flicks.”

“I don’t know where they’re coming from.”

He thought for a moment. “Maybe I am crazy.”

“Doubtful, but I can suggest something to help counter the experiences.”

“I’ve got enough meds. And that’s the problem. They’re working too well.”

“Too well? What does that mean?”

“It means that I don’t want to bury them. I want to catch them. I want to go back.”

A sucking silence filled the space between them.

Her eyes narrowed. “What are you saying?”

“Memorine. I’ve seen how it works on people with dementia—sending people back in their heads. I’ve seen what the stuff can do.”

Rene’s eyes flared at him. “Jack, what you’re suggesting is ridiculous. It’s also impossible.”

“Maybe, but to me it’s worth a try.”

“Not to me. One, it’s a trial drug not for public consumption. Two, it’s not something you can fine-tune, just dial a date and pop a pill to relive it. Three, if I gave you samples it would also cost me my job. And that’s not going to happen.”

He leaned forward and lowered his voice. “But nobody would have to know if a few pills are missing.”

“Jack, every pill, every capsule, every cc of patient medication is accounted for, rigorously documented on forms and signed off by doctors, nurses, and pharmacists.”

“You mean to say that you can’t cop a few tabs and write down that Mrs. Smith took them?”

Rene looked at him in disbelief. “No, I can’t.”

“Or you won’t.”

“And I won’t. Besides, we don’t know what the effects would be on you.”

“But you said there were no effects on non-Alzheimer’s patients. Besides, they couldn’t be any worse than what I’d already experienced. Unfortunately, that’s gone the way of Zyprexa.”

“Pardon me?”

He tapped his head with a finger. “My VCR’s dead. Not even a lousy LED light. That stuff killed the flashbacks. I haven’t had one for days.”

“Then maybe you should count yourself lucky.”

So much for that idea, Jack told himself, and he dropped the subject.

When it was time to go, Jack said, “By the way, doesn’t it seem odd that the same jellyfish that knocked me into a coma happens to be your Alzheimer’s drug?”

She thought of that for a moment, “Just a coincidence. No more so than if you’d gotten stung by a bee. Ever hear of apitherapy?”

“No.”

“Bee stings can be fatal to some people, by causing such a severe allergic inflammatory reaction that the person can go into shock and die. But in small doses, the toxin is sometimes used to treat other inflammatory conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis or neuralgia. Just a matter of the right dose.” And she stood up to go.

“While we’re playing Scrabble, maybe you can tell me just what species of jelly it was. They said it was rare, but nobody ever gave it a name.”

“Solakandji.”

71

THE WOMAN WITH THE CHILD FROZE when she saw him.

Louis had just buried his parachute in a flowerbed and was crawling on his belly toward the water, his weapon in his right hand, two ammo clips and a grenade belt over his left shoulder. An enemy gunship was rounding the bend in the river. He could make out men in the machine-gun nests. One scream from her, and Commie soldiers would be all over him like ants. And if they didn’t kill him on the spot, they’d haul him off to another prison camp and finish him off for good. Or, worse, take him back to the Red Tent to beg Chop Chop and Blackhawk for death.

Louis fanned the woman and kid with his carbine, looking down the barrel capped by the black military-issue silencer.

Thwump. Thwump.

And she and her kid would be gone—and he’d be out of harm’s way and back on his mission.

God damn you, woman!

Less than twenty-four hours ago, Louis and other select combat paratroopers were summoned to a group briefing at battalion HQ where recon officers displayed large photos of a small village with a cluster of buildings around a pavilion that was HQ of high-ranking North Korean officers who had fled Pyongyang. Because American POWs were believed housed in the same locale, they couldn’t carpet-bomb the site. So, their mission was to make a surgical combat parachute assault—their drop zone being a mountain clearing northwest of Jinan. Their assigned target was that pavilion.

At Kimbo Airfield, Louis and the others boarded the Dixie Dame, a C-119 transport piloted by Captain Mike Vigna. They would take the plunge from six hundred feet up, knowing that if anything went wrong, they were seconds away from an abrupt death. Each man had been issued ammunition, rifle, grenades, pistol, extra ammo, three days’ assault rations, and a T-7 parachute. Louis must have weighed over 250 pounds with all that was strapped to him. But he didn’t mind, since among the attendees ID’d by recon was NK 23rd Brigade commander Lieutenant Colonel Chop Yong Jin and Russian military advisor Gregor Lysenko. Who made Operation Buster special. What Louis had been waiting for all these months.

Colonel Chop Chop was the most hated man in the NK command—the same guy who had ordered his soldiers to pillage South Korean villages and massacre unarmed civilians. Same guy who had disregarded all international conventions on the treatment of POWs. Same bastard who had captured five GIs from King Company and left their bodies in a railway tunnel. And the same guy who had ordered the mutilation and death of Fuzzy Swenson and the summary execution of Louis’s buddies from the first platoon.

That was four months ago, and since then Louis had declared his own private war against Colonel Chop Yong Jin and General Gregor Lysenko. Although Command had given him a copy of those men’s photos, their faces had permanently scored themselves into Louis’s memory banks that night in the Red Tent.

He checked his watch. Right now, Marie was in bed in Wethersfield, Connecticut, and here he was in the middle of a gook village on the Yesong River. It had been a bad drop.

Unexpectedly, Jinan was being defended by automatic weapons, including forty-millimeter ack-acks. At 20:15, just fifteen hours ago, under a clear, moonlit spring night, the Dixie Dame took off. The plan was to fly due north along the usual C-119 route, then break off over the sea and drop to seven thousand feet, where they’d make a left correction, drop again toward the water until they were at eight hundred feet, then bank right until they made landfall.

All went according to plan as Vigna pulled up off the sea and rode the contours of the land. At about five minutes before target, the jumpmaster gave his command to hook up to the cable running down the aisle of the plane and face the door. But as they were doing equipment check on the next man’s chute, antiaircraft batteries opened up at them. Within seconds, Louis felt the plane get punched. In moments, they began bucking wildly.

The jump door flew open, and Louis felt the 120-mile-an-hour rush of air. He could barely register the fire ripping at the right wing or the groan of the plane or the other bodies pressing him against the opening. All he remembered was the green light and the shout: “Go?”

Hours later he woke up to morning light feeling stiff but unhurt. He had passed out under a thick willow, its branches stretching to the ground like a curtain—a perfect blind. He had just buried his chute among some tulips,