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After driving hard most of the morning, Ella Mamedov finally made it back to Ismailly. She sped down the main road and sent up a cloud of dust when she came to a sliding stop on the dirt parking lot in front of the checkpoint building. She beeped the horn and was deeply concerned when the guards did not come running out. She couldn’t call them from Baku or from her car because they were still under “Communications silence’ for fear that their phones and radios might be tapped. She ran from the car with her pistol ready and went into the building. Her fears were quickly realized when she saw that the guards telephone line was ripped from the wall and their radio base station equipment smashed. She ran out of the building to get into the car and drive up to the mountain cave, but when she opened the car door, she heard a groan coming from the side of the building. She slowly eased herself around the corner with her gun ready to check on the sound, and she was shocked to see the two guards lying in the shade with their legs bleeding. She quickly called for an ambulance and started re-wrapping their bandaged wounds as she tried to speak to the more lucid of the two men.
“Gasim, what happened here?”
The groggy man gained consciousness and managed to say, “An American came in, we heard explosions coming from up by the cave.”
Ella looked up toward the mountain with a look of dreaded concern on her face.
She made the men as comfortable as she could before she drove up to the cave.
When she got to the plateau, Ella was in total disbelief as she stood amid the still smoldering rubble around the cave area. She always thought that she felt safest in the cave, it was strong on the outside and warm on the inside, especially when she was near Tafar. But he was gone now, and so was the cave. She fretfully walked over to the edge of the plateau to look down at the military compound. It too was still burning and an occasional explosion was heard from the armaments that were still blowing up. She didn’t have the heart to go down there because she felt a large sense of responsibility for the deaths of the men who she told to guard the area with their lives. She thought that maybe if she had stayed with them, they would have been more organized in their defense of the area.
Ella drove back down to the checkpoint with tears in her eyes and saw an ambulance leaving the area. At least she could be grateful that the two lone survivors were now on their way to receive medical attention.
She stood by her parked car at the checkpoint building and stared straight ahead not knowing what to do. She thought about going back to her parent’s house, after all, it was only a few blocks away. Maybe she could just go to sleep on their couch and hopefully not wake up. She literally had nothing left except for the uniform on her back. Everything else that she held near and dear had been destroyed. After she weighed her options in tearful silence, the desire to return to her family’s home was not as strong as her need for revenge. Whoever caused this grief and devastation in her life needed to die. But who? She looked around the area outside the checkpoint building for some kind of clue before she saw it, not ten feet away from her. The camera pointed down from underneath the eaves on the top of the building to capture everything that went on in the parking lot. She ran into the building and went into a closet in the back of the room. She climbed up on a bench in the closet, and pulled a tape cartridge out of a recorder that was on the top shelf. Each pair of guards brought their own tapes to record during the duration of their eight-hour shift. She pulled out a small combination television and VCR out of the closet and put the tape in a VCR. She rewound the tape to the beginning and played it at a fast speed until she saw someone other than the guards. It wasn’t long until she saw the attack, the lone man shot both of the guards and left them for dead as he drove the jeep up the mountain road. She rewound the tape slowly and paused it on the frame that gave her the best look at Henry Carr’s face. She sat there fixated, staring intently at the man whose face she would never forget, the man she must kill to avenge her beloved Tafar.
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