Chapter Two Thousand Seven Hundred and Eighty-Seven
1st August 1979
Riesengebirge National Park, Giant Mountains
Because of the nature of the Forest Service, the word Paramilitary had been used, Sepp found himself with his Section comprised of nine other volunteers training to do that sort of thing. It had proven difficult because it was completely foreign to anything from his prior experience. Senior Ranger Strumpf said that it was alright because they had all had to learn to walk before they could run.
The battered old Mauser G98 rifle that Sepp had been given had first been issued in 1915, decades before he had been born, according to the numbers stamped on the disk on the buttstock. He had no idea what the other letters and numbers meant. According to Strumpf, it was a good hunting rifle as opposed to the G44 which was only good for putting as much lead into the air as possible, or a Thorwald Sniper Rifle which was great if you were hunting lorries over a thousand meters away. In time, Sepp’s Section would be trained in how to use those if they wanted. In the meantime they would learn to use the G98, which was good for anything that they might encounter in the Riesengebirge provided they could get the first shot on target. It was getting the shot on target that was proving to be far more of a challenge than spending the last week learning how to do rifle drills. Sepp squeezed the trigger on the rifle and saw dust fly into the air a meter or so to the left of the target.
“You’re flinching Deisler” Strumpf said, “By the time you feel the recoil, the bullet has already hit what you are aiming at.”
Sepp put that down as something else that was painfully obvious that he had not known about until that moment.
Neuquén, Argentina
As she was nearing the end of her day, Kiki was updating patient information from her handwritten notes. The computer system had sped up the process considerably, but it always came back to ballpoint pens, yellow legal pads, preprinted forms, and clipboards. Someday the technology might exist to do away with those, but that day probably wouldn’t arrive for long time.
When Kiki’s father had brought volunteers to Argentina, they had mostly been the sort of naïve ideologists who thought that enthusiasm made up for experience with almost all of them being just out of Medical School in their respective countries. The Hospital Administration knew as well as Kiki that warm bodies with some Medical training were desperately needed. Still they made it clear that the volunteers from Médecins Sans Frontières were her responsibility, so Kiki found herself teaching again and like before she was certain that she was complete rubbish at it.
There was an exception though, namely Ellen Ainsworth, a Nurse who had a lifetime of negotiating hospital bureaucracy since even before she had volunteered to join the Commonwealth Forces through Canada during the Second World War. Having grown bored with retirement after having worked for decades at a hospital in her native Wisconsin, she had volunteered again. The trouble that Kiki had with her was that much of that time had been spent in the USAF Reserves. It was whispered that her involvement with the American Alphabet Agencies went back to the days of the OSS. Kiki knew full well that it would have been the perfect way for the OSS to keep track of the Soviet and Pacific theaters beyond the known observers and Embassy staff without the effort required of actual spies. Even without the massive humanitarian crises that the war had brought, the war had resulted is desperate need for medical personnel, so no one qualified would have been turned away unless there had been a very good reason. Kiki would have to be incredibly foolish to assume that the American CIA had lost interest in her, especially with her final rank in the KZS as a consideration.
Fort Meade, Maryland
For Ritchie, there had been a few developments that improved his life and also helped him remain on good terms with Lucia. He remembered that there had been many occasions when she got angry with him and revealed exactly where she was from in the form of her berating him in Spanish. Now that they were living on a military base which thrived on gossip, Ritchie was extremely away that the two of them would have to keep their disputes, the sort that all couples had, low key.
As it had turned out, the Base had an entire shop for use of the Personnel to repair their own vehicles if they had the expertise. As it had turned out it was very different scene than working in his own garage with Bobby, who had spent far more time drinking Ritchie’s beer than helping him work. There were even a few men who had a working knowledge of Volvo engines.
The other was that he had found a car for everyday use the same way that he had found his old Nova years earlier. This time is was a Toyota Corolla that had been basically inoperable with the man who owned it about to be transferred to Hawaii and didn’t have time to get it fixed, so he had sold it for a song. Ritchie had gotten it back into working order discovering that the key issue was that the oil had never been changed, so it had taken considerable effort to get all the sludge which had caused the engine to seize out. Say what you will about the Japanese, the engine in the Corolla had actually survived that sort of mistreatment.
