discarded when he came ashore on the island. It was all restored by magic.
Somehow they had even managed to refill the magazines of his pistol.
“Mick.”
He turned around and saw Karin in the door. His equipment forgotten, he
took her in his arms and kissed her. The burns made him clumsy but neither
of them noticed. “Where have you been? Why didn’t you come with me?”
“Looking after Stigi and telling my superiors what had happened,” she said
in a small voice. “I could not come until my squadron leader released me.”
He held her in his good arm close to his unburned side.
“Listen to me. I’ve got two more years left on this tour.” If they don’t
courtmartial me over this, he thought. “I’ll serve out my time and resign
my commission. Then somehow, somehow, I’ll find a way to come back.”
Karin looked deep into his eyes. “I will be waiting.”
There was a discreet cough behind them.
“Time, my Lord,” Arianne said. “Trooper, if you wish to accompany him to
the chantry you may.”
The wizards and others were already assembled when Gilligan and Karin came
into the chantry.
As they came in, Wiz handed Gilligan a small wooden tablet. “Before you
go, you might want to memorize this.”
Gilligan looked down at it. “Is this what I think it is?”
“Yep, it’s an 800 number. Direct line to the Wizard’s Keep from any phone
in the USA. Just don’t use it unless you really need to.”
Gilligan looked up at Wiz. “I’m not going to ask how you did this.”
Wiz shrugged. “It wouldn’t do any good. It was one of Danny’s projects. We
figured we might need to contact people over there again and Danny set
this up.”
Gilligan stared intently at the scrap of wood and his lips moved as he
burned the number into his memory. After a minute he handed the tablet
back to Wiz.
“Is this legal?”
Wiz hesitated. “Like I said, it was one of Danny’s projects.”
This time there were two circles of blue-robed wizards in the chantry.
Bal-Simba stood at the head of one of them and Arianne led the other.
Mick and Karin embraced for one final time, then Arianne waved him to the
center of her circle, next to his gear. Judith took her position in the
other and the chants began.
I hope to God I can pull this off, Major Michael Francis Xavier Gilligan
thought fervently as he faced the three men across the table. He had
managed to get his blues on over his bandages and the meeting was in an
office rather than his hospital room, but he still felt lousy from the
burns and spacey from the pain killers.
This wasn’t a formal inquiry. Gilligan had only been back at the base for
twelve hours. It was more of preliminary attempt to find out what had
happened over the Bering Sea.
“Now Major Gilligan,” the debriefing officer began, “you say you can’t
remember anything from the time you bailed out until you found yourself on
the island?”
“Nossir. I think I cracked my head on the way out, but the first thing I
really remember is being on that island with the radio.” He paused. “Ah, I
was delirious most of the time, sir.”
The debriefing officer didn’t respond, but the black man behind him, the
one wearing the flight suit with no insignia, half-nodded. Obviously he
had already seen a report of Gilligan’s description of his
“hallucinations.”
It was thin and he knew it. Especially in light of what must be on
Smitty’s tape. But it was the best story he could come up with and he’d
stick to it for as long as he could.
“The cold salt water apparently restricted the damage from those burns.
You’re extremely lucky, do you know that?”
A flash memory of blue eyes and a little dusting of freckles over a
straight nose. “I figure I’m about the luckiest man in the Air Force,”
Gilligan said sincerely.
The debriefing officer nodded and the man sitting next to him in the
flight suit with no insignia remained impassive.
Step by step they went over Gilligan’s story-what there was of it.