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Ella Mamedov left her pistol and knife in the glove box of her car in the hospital parking lot. Having changed from her military uniform, she looked plain enough to pass for a common Azerbaijani woman as she entered the hospital.
It didn’t take long for her to find the policemen that were coming and going from a guarded room at the end of the first floor east wing. She passed by the room slowly to get a look at the patient, and sure enough Max Landau laid in the bed with his eyes closed and several intravenous tubes pumping blood and other liquids into him. She stood near another patient’s room pacing and acting like a nervous relative. As more policemen gathered to relieve others, Ella overheard them talking and found out that everything the servant said was true about the CIA capturing Amin and his soldiers and that they were being sent to the U.S. terrorist prison camp at Guantanimo, Cuba. Her eyes were filled with tears as she walked down the hallway to exit the hospital. In less than twenty-four hours, her entire life had crumbled. She now envisioned herself holed up behind her parent’s bakery in Ismailly, until she could decide what to do with her life. If Amin’s militia was indeed decimated, there were too many people that would seek revenge for some of the atrocities and other despicable things that the paramilitary group had done.
She walked dejectedly to the front door of the hospital, but before she went through the exit, she heard one policeman talking on the phone as he stood guard at the door.
“Yeah, the CIA is on their way to Amin’s military camp in Ismailly, they said that they’re going to burn it to the ground.”
Those words echoed repeatedly in Ella’s head as she continued walking toward her car. The cool wind from the Caspian Sea dried her tears and a new look of determination was on her face as she said to herself, “Not if I could help it.”
She pulled out of the hospital parking lot and quickly realized that she was too exhausted to drive. She looked at her watch and did not realize it was nearly 3:00 A.M, and driving off the road and killing herself on the boring ride to Ismailly wasn’t going to help anyone, so she pulled off the road and fell asleep.
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