Abuse of Power - Michael Savage [10]
Only one thing resonated with him. At the center of the newscasts and speeches, the one piece that was never far from anyone’s mouth was that while debris and shrapnel had caused several minor injuries, there had been only one fatality: Officer Thomas Drabinsky of the SFPD bomb squad, whose attempt to defuse the device had ended as he was en route to the target. There was one thing about him that no one mentioned, however, probably because it was too bizarre a thought for anyone to process. It was something he heard from the marines in Iraq and air force personnel when fighter pilots went down.
Tragic as the loss was, Thomas Drabinsky accomplished something that not a lot of people got to do: he died with his boots on and he would not be forgotten.
Jack had seen enough forgotten soldiers in his time. He’d tried to rectify this when he was still on the air, had used the last two minutes of his show to honor the fallen in Iraq and Afghanistan, to put names and faces to these men and women he so admired. It was a reminder to his viewers that the enemy they fought wasn’t some abstract notion, but a real, living danger to the western world. Nine/eleven was a decade past, and too many of us were becoming complacent—including and especially our so-called representatives in Washington.
He had even started a fund, raising money for the kids of fallen vets, and for training guide dogs—by prison inmates, no less—to aid those who had left arms, legs, eyes, and ears in the Mesopotamian war zones.
Jack checked with the hospital at nine A.M. Max was sleeping and her injuries weren’t serious. She had a gash on the side of her head that took twenty-seven stitches to close, but there was no concussion—her camera had taken the hit for her. It thanked her with a smack to the temple that looked, to Jack, like the recoil of a .357 Holland & Holland Magnum. However, he was not surprised when she called early in the afternoon and told him that she wanted to get to recuperate at home. What she said, actually, was, “The deductible on the health coverage I was forced to buy is going to kill me faster than my injuries, so get me out of here.” She said she’d cleared it with her doctor, and calling a cab, Jack went and collected her.
After taking her home, putting her to bed, and making sure the nice old woman who rented her the attic space would look in on her, Jack went back to the boat and began editing the footage they’d shot over the last several days, retooling it to focus on Drabinsky himself. Nothing she had shot at the blast site had survived, but in the end it wasn’t needed. The money shot was not the explosion, it was the proud, smiling face of the fallen warrior.
It took Jack most of the day to assemble it, and when he was done he realized he had something special. He also knew he could make anywhere from fifty to a hundred grand with the package, but decided to offer it to the networks free of charge. His entire reason for becoming a journalist was not to sleep on silk but to sleep well, knowing he had done the right thing.
This was the right thing.
* * *
Jack had known Tony Antiniori for a little over a year, but the moment he’d met the guy they’d felt an immediate kinship. And that was the kind of compliment he didn’t hand out often.
A former Green Beret paratrooper, Tony had done three tours in Vietnam, had cross-trained as both a medic and a rifleman, and was still active in the National Guard, teaching combat medicine to young recruits headed to Afghanistan.
He was sixty-nine and still teaching field medicine to the young recruits. Maybe that was part of what kept him young, having to shame the know-it-all