Yesterda's War 5 - Untimely Conflicts, page 9
When Robin heard over the radio that Beatrice had been found, he immediately ran towards the interrogation room. Alan had already arrived and was working on Beatrice. But Robin was blocked by Colin from going into the interrogation room.
“Robin, you better let us take care of her. I promise we’ll get her home alive. She’s in very good hands. Alan is the best medic that we have ever known. You just don’t want to see this right now, OK? Colin told Robin as he held the latter back while the team’s medic frantically worked on Beatrice to stabilize her for evacuation out of that room of horrors.
Robin frantically pled, “But I’ve got to see her, mate! I need to know that she’ll be alright!”
“I know, boss. But Alan’s got his hands full right now. You’ll only make his job a lot harder if you go in there. Just let him do his job first. I promise that you’ll get to see your Beatrice soon. OK?”
Robin then heard the medic talk over the radio about body parts in a bowl and then suddenly erupted in utter fury.
“Grab everything to bring back home with her! I don’t want to leave a single part of her behind for those bastards.” Robin ordered. “See if you can find a container with a lid to put it in and some ice too. Quickly!”
A pair of Robin’s troops ran to find what he had requested while Colin remained with him.
“I need for the rest of you to look around and see if you can find any documents that might tell us who was responsible for this. I swear that I am going to hunt them down and make them all pay dearly for what they did to my lovely Beatrice here.” Robin angrily told the rest of the commandos there.”
“Aye, we’ll take care of things for you, Mate.” Colin confidently told his friend.
“There’s a freezer back here with a bunch of ice in it.” Greg reported over his radio.
“Get every piece of ice that you can haul back to keep Beatrice’s parts cold for the trip home.” Robin ordered, barely able to contain his anger at Beatrice’s captors and fear over her condition. The order may have seemed morbid at the time, but they obeyed nonetheless because he was not only their commander. He was also their friend.
Ten minutes later, two of Robin’s commandoes carried Beatrice out on a stretcher. Alan walked alongside her holding an IV bag full of plasma. She was covered from the neck down by a sheet and a blanket that the commandoes had found somewhere. But her eyes were closed.
“Why are her eyes closed, Alan?” Robin frantically asked. He wanted to talk to Beatrice and see if she was going to be alright.
“She was in a lot of pain, so I had to give her a shot of morphine. I’ve got an IV of plasma going right now, but she’s going to need some blood as soon as possible. Do you know what her blood type is?” Alan asked.
“Yea, I remember that Beatrice and her twin sister Sarah were the same type, AB Positive.”
“That’s great. We should be able to find a match for her very quickly since she is a universal acceptor. But we need to get her in the truck and out of here as quickly as possible.”
Beatrice was quickly loaded in the back of one of the trucks. The papers and other ‘materials’ that Robin ordered brought back, were also quickly loaded up as well before Robin and his team raced away in the night from the abandoned factory.
Robin and the others rushed back directly towards Haiphong as quickly as they could, stopping only briefly at a hospital along the way to grab as much blood, plasma, antibiotics and medical dressings as they could as well as more ice to pack around the special ‘package’ that they were also carrying.
They couldn’t risk Beatrice being discovered at a Vietnamese hospital by anyone associated with her kidnapping. Fortunately, Alan wasn’t just a medic but also worked in Derby as a physician’s assistant. He continued to take care of Beatrice while they rushed her home. So they got her back on board the flying boat and immediately took off for Derby. By the time that they lifted off, the first rays of light from the rising sun were visible.
After the flying boat was back in the air, Robin walked up to the cockpit and asked the navigator, who also served as the craft’s radio operator, to contact Judith Cavill and let her know that they were on the way home. Robin also instructed the radio operator to have an ambulance and the Derby emergency room ready for a priority patient.
When the seaplane arrived in Derby, just as soon as it rolled up the seaplane ramp on its beaching gear, not only was an ambulance waiting on it, so was an armed platoon of Derby militia and all three of Beatrice’s siblings.
Beatrice was still unconscious when she was brought down by stretcher to the ambulance. Once she was inside, the vehicle raced to the Derby Hospital, followed closely by an escort of military trucks. Judith, James and Sarah were inside one of the trucks as were Robin and Alan.
An entire wing of the hospital had been cleared out and secured by the time that the ambulance and its security arrived.
The militiamen quickly dismounted their vehicles and formed a security cordon where a gurney was waiting for Beatrice. She was taken from the ambulance, placed on the gurney and moved immediately to the emergency room. After only a short time there, she was then moved into surgery. One of Robin’s commandos walked in with the special container and asked them to keep it on ice, without explaining what was inside of it.
Judith, James and Sarah walked up to Robin who impatiently waited outside of surgery while several doctors worked on Beatrice.
“I can’t express our thanks enough for bringing my sister back home alive, Robin.” Judith said.
“I couldn’t just sit around and do nothing. I would have moved heaven and earth to bring my lady back home. Thank you for giving me the means for doing so, Judith.”
“I just wish that we could have done more to give you the ability to rescue her sooner.” Judith grimly replied.
“Well, she’s alive and away from those sadistic bastards. That’s the most important thing.” Robin forcefully answered.
Robin and the Cavills waited outside while the doctors worked on Beatrice and then moved her to a secured intensive care ward. A few hours later, a doctor came out to speak to them.
“Beatrice has been through a very severe ordeal after suffering multiple extreme traumas during her captivity. But we have been able to stabilize her condition now. She should be coming out of anesthesia in a few hours. At that time, we should be able to allow family members to come in to visit her.
“Thank the Lord.” Judith quietly said, a sentiment that was echoed by everyone with her.
“It does help that we have the best hospital and doctors in all of Australia too.” James added.
“Yes. It certainly does.” Judith agreed.
Beatrice’s siblings, along with Robin, stayed at the hospital waiting on news about Beatrice. Judith had arranged with the doctors that treated Beatrice for a briefing about her injuries and condition. What Judith learned had clearly upset her because when she returned to see the rest of her family, she was pale and wiping tears from her eyes.
“What’s wrong?” Sarah asked.
“I really don’t want to talk about it right now, please.” Was all that Judith could say in reply.
It was early evening when one of the doctors that had worked on Beatrice came out to meet with the family.
“Your sister is awake now. She can see you now for a few minutes. But please be patient. She’s still very weak at this time.”
“Thank you, Doctor.” Judith replied before she walked into Beatrice’s intensive care room, followed closely by her siblings and Robin.
“Hi, there. I’m sorry that I gave you such a scare. I had no idea that things would end up the way that they did.” Beatrice said in a voice that was barely more than a whisper.
“It’s OK. We’re all just glad that we were able to get you back alive.” Judith replied, tears welling up in her eyes once again, just like her siblings.
“They wanted to know how Father got everything and how he knew so much. They knew so much about us already. But I kept our secrets safe from him, no matter what he did to me.”
Beatrice then looked over and saw the anguish on Robin’s face.
“Sweetheart, I prayed for deliverance. The Lord sent you to me. Otherwise, they were going to murder me whether or not I told them what they wanted. Thank you for coming for me, Robin.”
“You know that I couldn’t do anything less than that for you, my darling.” Robin softly replied, tears running down his face. He was not alone either.
"I guess that I won't be wearing my bikini anymore after this." Beatrice said very softly as she lay in the hospital bed, a sheet covering most of her body, but her arms and face were still visible.
“Oh well, I will still enjoy spoiling your children as your aunt.” Sarah replied with a hopeful smile while trying to wipe away the tears from her eyes.
But that smile disappeared when Beatrice slowly shook her head with a sad expression on her face and tears beginning to well in her own eyes.
“I’m afraid that I won’t be able to have any babies anymore either, Sarah.”
Those words brought an even greater chill into the room as the realization of what had been done to Beatrice began to dawn on the people who loved her most.
“Do you know who did this to you?” Judith asked.
“I don’t know his name, but it seemed clear that he was from somewhere in the Middle East. I thought that I heard that he was from Syria. It was clear that he had some medical training in addition to training in ‘something else’.” Beatrice quietly explained, barely able to contain her pain, both physical and emotional.
“We will find out who is responsible and make them pay. They are too much of a threat for us to ignore any longer. I can’t even imagine what it had to have been like for you or how you managed to remain sane amid this horror, Beatrice.” Judith firmly said.
“I constantly prayed to Jesus to save my life, even in the midst of all of the pain and loss that I endured. I was so happy when I finally saw that my prayers had been answered.” Beatrice replied, still weak after the surgery.
Then Judith turned to Robin and asked.
“How were you able to find her so quickly, Robin? Any information that you have might help us find whoever is behind this atrocity.”
“I just took the bits and pieces of information that you gave me about Beatrice’s disappearance and got on the trail as quickly as I could. You know that I did a lot of work in Indochina over the past few years, so I had a lot of contacts in low places, so to speak. It just happened that one of those contacts had a lead on where Beatrice might have been taken. We were just damned lucky that his lead got us to the right place.
I just wish that I could have gotten there sooner to stop what those bastards did to her. I brought back every single piece of her that they had cut off or cut out of her. I wasn’t about to let those bastards keep a single piece of my darling. I had to have it all packed in ice for the trip back home so that it wouldn’t go rancid.” Robin explained, the anger and emotional pain clearly evident in his voice.
“You said that you packed everything in ice?” Sarah suddenly asked.
“Yes, I surely did. It’s still all inside of it too.” He replied.
“Thank the Lord. I think that we might just have a chance here.” Sarah gasped.
“A chance for what?” A confused Robin asked.
But Sarah wasn’t listening to him. She was busy barking out orders to the various medical personnel in Beatrice’s hospital room.
“Quickly, I need someone to grab a canister of liquid nitrogen. Call Doctor Westbrook and get him down to the organ harvesting room.
Robin, tell this nurse here where exactly you have Beatrice’s ‘parts’. We need to get them in deep freeze if we are going to have a chance here. ”
“A chance for what?” Robin still had no clue what Sarah was doing. But standing nearby, Judith quickly realized what Beatrice’s twin sister was thinking of though. They just couldn’t explain it to Robin because the source of the information that they were thinking of came from their father’s 21st Century computer database.
“Yes, you’re right. We might just be able to save them.” Judith exclaimed, quickly giving Robin a big hug before rushing out of the hospital room, followed immediately by Sarah and a host of doctors and nurses.
When a Cavill starts giving orders inside of a hospital named the Harold Cavill Memorial Medical Center, everyone jumps. Very quickly, doctors and nurses were rushing back and forth despite the score of armed men that guarded the hospital floor where Beatrice was being treated.
Robin just stood there next to Beatrice’s bed. He had no idea of what Beatrice’s siblings were doing. He simply had to trust that they were doing ‘something’ to help their battered sister. Even Robin had not been let in on the secret of the computer database from the future.
He had no idea that Beatrice’s sisters were quickly working to have her ovaries and the eggs that they contained frozen in liquid nitrogen in the hopes of preserving their viability for a technology that had yet to be invented in this timeline. But Beatrice and her siblings did a lot of things that didn’t seem to make sense to Robin. They just came up with ideas that worked better than what everyone else in the world seemed to have been doing at the time.
Chapter Twelve:
James Cavill Memorial Hospital
Derby, Western Australia
April 11, 1962
Judith walked into the hospital and headed directly towards the private hospital room where Beatrice was still recovering from her injuries. He was carrying flowers and a box of chocolate candies as he walked past the quartet of armed security guards from the Derby militia that stood vigil outside of Beatrice’s room. This security was in addition to a dozen more militiamen, both in uniform and in uniform that patrolled the hospital as a whole.
But Judith had free access to Beatrice despite the heavy security. So she walked straight into Beatrice’s room without anyone saying a word except for the one aborigine guard who simply said. “Hello, Miss Cavill.
“Hi, Sweetheart. How are you feeling now?” Judith asked Beatrice who was still lying down in her hospital bed. Judith’s younger sister was still pretty weak after what she had experienced during her kidnapping, followed by a subsequent infection that had set into her wounds and nearly taken her life.
“I’m feeling a little better now. It’s just still a little hard to take in what happened.” Beatrice quietly replied.
“I wanted to give you some good news, Beatrice. Remember when you told your twin sister that wouldn’t be able to provide her with nieces and nephews for her to spoil? Well, that may not be true after all.”
“What do you mean, Judith? They took everything from me.” Beatrice replied, remembering what had been done to her while in captivity.
“Well, that dumb boyfriend of yours had the crazy idea of bringing back ‘all of you’ while he was rescuing you. So he packed everything that he could find in ice and brought it home. When he told us about what he had done, we were able to then harvest your eggs and save them by freezing them in liquid nitrogen.”
A look of amazement suddenly appeared on Beatrice’s face and that of her boyfriend.
“You mean?” Beatrice asked.
“Yes, you can still have children in a way. It might take us a couple of years to get everything set up, but it is certainly possible. All we have to do is fertilize your eggs with the appropriate donor’s sperm. Your twin sister has already offered to carry your babies to term in her own womb whenever you want.”
“How did you come up with this?” Robin asked.
“You can thank your inquisitive twin sister for that. She read something recently in a medical journal about a new fertility technique being developed.”
What Judith did not say was that Sarah had read this from the futuristic computer database that their father had brought back from the 21st Century. Harold Cavill had brought with him a box of dozen silica glass disks, a drive capable of reading these disks, a pair of external data storage devices along with his portable computer. Harold’s children had originally thought that they merely contained backup data similar to the information contained in Harold’s computer.
What Sarah had discovered was that these storage devices contained substantially more information than Father’s computer. While that computer contained something like forty terabytes of data inside, each of the external drives contained over one hundred terabytes of information on many additional subjects. But the disks contained far more information than that. Each of those glass disks apparently contained something like 500 terabytes of data. Sarah had the AI on the laptop search each of the disks and do a general cataloging of the data. Upon examining the content catalog of the disks, Sarah found that some of this information included medical data. One of the data files was on something called in vitro fertilization.
“Since we were able to save many of your eggs, this technique can be used to still allow you to be a mother to your own children, so to speak. It will take us a few years to get the process introduced properly introduced into our hospital and our doctors trained on the procedure since it is so new.” Judith explained.
“Oh my. I never thought that my prayers would be answered in this way. Thank you, Judith. I will have to thank Robin as well. Where is he?” Beatrice asked.
“He’s not here right now. He was here day and night after he brought you home. You were unconscious for a lot of the time because of the infection. A few hours ago, he got a lead on the people behind those bastards who held you captive.”
“So now he’s gone all commando again, hasn’t he?”
“Yes, I’m afraid so. Before you ask, I have no idea when Robin is going to get back either. He is determined to get payback from the people who did this to you. I pity anyone who gets in the way of that.”
“I hope that Robin will be careful out there. Obviously, the people out there that he is hunting have a lot of resources.”
