Letty walked back up the hill for a short distance, crossed the highway, and got the TV truck between herself and the people on the bridge. She hurried down to the TV truck, eased up to the right side, which was pushed against the brush on the shoulder of the road, and rapped on the closed door.
The camerawoman, Ochoa, pulled the door open a couple inches and looked out. “You can’t be here,” she said.
“Did they call for a chopper?”
“Yes. It’ll be here fairly soon.” She started to push the door closed, but Letty blocked it with her hand.
“When you get a chance, send a message from Letty. Tell them, ‘Letty says council is safe with Kaiser.’ Get that out right away.”
Ochoa nodded and said, “？‘Safe with Kaiser.’ I don’t know what that means, but you gotta go.”
Letty walked away, up the hill again, and when she felt she was far enough up, recrossed the street and then walked back down again, rejoining the crowd. One of the women, in her early thirties and pregnant, said to another woman, “I can’t take this much longer.”
“You gotta be patient,” the second woman said. “They’re okay, they said they wouldn’t hurt anyone.”
“Then why won’t they let us see them?”
“Because . . . I don’t know. Maybe they’re just jerks.”
“I’m gonna ask again.”
“Don’t make them angry. There’s that one guy, I think he wants to shoot somebody. Anybody.”
Letty asked, “Your husbands are in there? Customs people?”
Both women nodded.
“Okay, over there . . . the lady in the blue mask . . . If you talk to her, she might let you visit. She’s the boss, I think.”
Hawkes and Low were talking to the nurses, then Hawkes turned away, got on her walkie-talkie, spoke to someone, said something more to Low, and started up the hill toward the TV truck.
The pregnant woman called out, “Ma’am? Ma’am?”
Hawkes looked across the street at her, still walking, and the woman hurried toward her, skipping once.
Letty trailed, with a couple of other woman who’d heard their conversation. “Us girls would really like to see our men inside there, couldn’t you just let us go in for a couple words? Couldn’t hurt nobody.”
Hawkes kept walking toward the TV truck, but she turned and shouted down the hill. “Hey! Hey! Rand!”
When she got Low’s attention, she pointed to the pregnant woman and shouted, “Talk to this lady.”
* * *
Letty and the others walked down the hill as Low walked up. The nurses were huddled around a man on a blanket. Letty used Low’s body to block their line of sight to her, should one of them turn around to look. The pregnant woman said to Low, “That lady said it would be okay if we went inside to talk to our husbands . . . We wouldn’t do anything, we just want to see them.”
“Ah, crap . . .”
He shouted at a militiaman on the edge of the crowd. “Hank! Hank! Talk to these girls.”
The women walked over to Hank and Letty said to the militiaman, “The lady and that gentleman said it would be okay if you let some of us girls in to talk to our men . . .”
“Sure. Thought they should have already done that. Don’t be pulling anything funny in there.”
Letty went over to the crowd and said, “If you’ve got a man inside, they said we can go in.”
Three more women joined the group going in. The pregnant woman stepped up to Letty and asked, “Who the heck are you? You’re not from town.”