15 Miles by Rob Scott

Author:Rob Scott
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Publisher: Orion Publishing Group
Published: 2010-08-19T04:00:00+00:00

5:29 p.m.

I’d never been someone who could get lost in the Internet for hours at a time. I have friends who log in and just wander from site to site, surfing or chatting all day. I tried it a few times, working late at the barracks or when we got lucky and hit a wireless router while farting around on a drug drop. It never grabbed me, though. I half-marvelled and half-frowned at people who hunted around long enough to find weird sites - except porn; as a former Vice cop, I’m an international champion at porn. But stupid pet sites, wacky cartoon versions of famous movies or political lampoon videos edited together from hours of news footage confounded me. What’s the point? The potential in an information superhighway is astonishing, but what does Average Joe use it for? Wacking off, selling his couch, or watching grainy video of a dog jumping off a high dive to a waiting great white shark with a mole that looks like the baby Jesus. Welcome to the dark side of the information age, I guess.

I wanted to take off my suit jacket and enjoy the air-conditioning, but I was afraid I smelled so rancid that they’d toss me out. I caught a whiff of my shirt, my new shirt, and nearly swooned at the amalgam of dead, dying and decaying musk I had lodged in every wrinkle. I scratched at my bloody ankle and tried to ignore the itching, the cuts and gashes and the smell.

I typed in Lennox-Gastaut Syndrome and found a few credible-looking sites. I asked Gretchen, ‘Can I print?’

‘Yes, sir.’ She pulled open a cabinet beneath the phone bank, exposing a networked printer. ‘It comes out here.’

I ran off a few pages on the basics of the disorder, using the phrases myoclonic, tonic-clonic, tonic and atonic seizures, then tried some links. A children’s hospital in Denver had an idiot-proof summary, so I ran off most of the website, collected my pages and underlined a few things I wanted to ask Doc Lefkowitz specifically at the autopsies.

Next I Googled the words and phrases from Carl’s boxes. I tried them all at once first, not really expecting much, but Pleiku. Montagnard, Gia Lai Province, 17th Air Commando Squadron, Major Steven Watts, LZ Nancy, MACV, Chinook CH-47, General Creighton Abrams, McGeorge Bundy, Special Forces, Central Highlands, Robert MacNamera hit paydirt straight away.

The search engine noted that once I’d worked through the top sites listed, I had another eight million to review if I really wanted the whole story.

‘Eight million? You’ve got to be shitting me!’ I found myself saying out loud. I had this weird propensity for talking to the screen. ‘How is this something I’ve never heard of? Let’s try again.’

This time, I just entered: Pleiku, Montagnard, Gia Lai Province, Special Forces, Central Highlands, September 1968, and added: Captain Carl James Bruckner.

It took some cross-referencing, but in around fifteen minutes Carl Bruckner’s story had emerged, much of it from a website dedicated

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