In Love and In War
Rating: 6
Part One:
For as long as she could remember, Glorianna Douglas knew there were certain days where you just weren't supposed to get out of bed. Glorianna supposed that being stuck in a downed helicopter, with a dead crew, in the middle of the Vietnam jungle, and injured to boot definitely qualified as one of those days.
With a tired sigh she peered cautiously outside the helicopter and wondered what exactly a person was supposed to do while waiting to be rescued. At least the pilot had lived long enough to place the distress call.
To keep herself busy she fidgeted with the makeshift bandage on her left thigh. The wound was not bad, a stray bullet had torn a piece of flesh off it didn't hurt nearly as bad as she had previously imagined being shot would, and thankfully the bullet wasn't lodged in her thigh. Glorianna noticed that her hands were shaking. In an effort to stop it she brought her knees up and wrapped her arms around them. That didn't work, in fact it only made thing worse because now her whole body seemed to shake. There was no getting around it she was definitely on the verge of terror.
That thought made her scowl briefly. Back home in Montana she thoroughly enjoyed wandering around her family's ranch with only her horse and sometimes her dogs for company. Even being out alone at night with coyote's howling in the distance didn't bother her. Of course the coyote's didn't carry semi-automatic weapons . . .
Definitely shouldn't have gotten out of bed.
Action, she decided some sort of action was definitely needed to keep her mind from succumbing to panic. After all didn't her youngest brother Thomas always tell her she was a doer not a waiter? Laying blame was an action, not one that would go down in the history books but she wasn't going to be picky. At that point her voice of reason slipped in the pearly gem of wisdom that she had accepted this assignment of her own free will, but Glorianna quickly smashed that notion to pieces. After all how could she work herself into a proper rage if she started blaming herself?
Satisfied with her reasoning, Glorianna began to delegate blame. First of all she blamed the US Army for getting involved in a war that they in all likelihood had no business getting involved in, in the first place. Then she decided to blame her father for being a General, that A) got her the job as a codebreaker and B) encouraged her code breaking skills since she was a child. Next of course came her four brothers, and that Glorianna could justify because they were brothers. From there it snowballed to include helicopter designers, economists, and the stupid fool that invented war and codes in the first place.
When she finished her mental tirade Glorianna looked down at her watch and was dismayed at the short amount of time that had passed. It was only one fifteen in the afternoon.
Where was her rescue party? Glorianna eyed the bodies of the helicopter crew with a good deal of trepidation. She did not relish the thought of spending the night alone out here with a bunch of corpses.
Well if she had learned anything form her military upbringing; it was always be prepared. With that thought in mind she started to verify as she had done earlier that all of the guns she had collected were full of ammo and ready to fire. She may be a civilian but she didn't want to be the Douglas that went down without a fight. However, even more important than her firepower Glorianna made sure that the small bundle of papers she carried was together and ready to be destroyed if she deemed necessary.
Deemed necessary . . . That thought echoed in Glorianna's head and she reached into her bag and pulled out what could very likely be the army's most important notebook. The notebook itself wasn't all that special but written in it were all the notes Glorianna had made while she worked on breaking the most recently recovered Viet Cong code.
Glorianna didn't bother to even open the notebook; she knew it all by heart, thanks to her excellent memory. She doubted the North Vietnamese Army could do much with it anyway because it was written in her own personal code which she had yet to find anyone who could crack it and if she did she would make the necessary improvements. Still there was no point in taking chances. Once she found her lighter, Glorianna didn't hesitate; she lit the book on fire and threw it outside of the helicopter. It was almost painful watching her work go up in flames, and she watched until nothing but ashes were left. Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on how she looked at things, it only took the paper a matter of seconds to burn. So now there really was nothing to do but wait.
Back to Shannon's Room
Back to the Common Room