Nobody was getting any sleep tonight. As soon as the left the V.A. hospital and got back in the van, Hannibal told B.A. to drive them to the Federal Building; they were going to tear the place apart and go through all records until they found something that made the connection with the whole case. Where before Hannibal was a man with a mission, now he was just a man possessed; upon leaving the hospital he had suddenly become Edward Hyde, there was a murderous glare in his eyes and everybody could tell he wasn't going to rest until they had the top of the pyramid in their grasp. They traveled in silence though somewhere along the way, Jean whispered quietly to Murdock and Face, "What do you think's gotten in to him?"
Murdock shrugged and replied, "He's taking what happened tonight very personally."
"Well he was almost shot, Murdock," Face reminded him.
Murdock shook his head, "It's not that, it's about Decker."
"Decker's going to be alright," Jean reminded him.
"I know, but that's not what this is about…it's something personal for Hannibal, something I don't think he's going to be too willing to share with us. So in the meantime I would just recommend everybody keep their mouths shut and don't make any sudden movements."
"Does he really think we're going to find anything at the Federal Building?" Jean murmured to him.
"He must, it's all he has to go on right now," Murdock told her.
"Yeah? Well tell me something, Murdock," Jean said, "I know you guys all have the capacity to kill, Hannibal's already proven that one…would he have it in him to ever kill Decker?"
"The man's still here, what does that tell you?" Murdock asked, "It's not a question of could he kill Decker? The answer's yes of course, but he doesn't, and there's a reason for that."
"Murdock," Hannibal looked at their reflection in the rear view mirror, his tone more agitated than usual, "What're you talking about back there?"
"Nothing," he answered.
Jean suddenly had the feeling she was dealing with a live grenade that already lost its pin a long time ago and it was just a matter of time before it exploded.
The first place they started looking was in Decker's own office, it was the one room in the building they knew would be currently unoccupied so they had the freedom to search the place without fear of being caught. However, they went through every record in the filing cabinets and every report on Decker's desk and were coming up empty again.
"Hannibal, what're we supposed to be looking for anyway?" Face asked.
"I don't buy that what happened tonight was an accident or a coincidence, or just a lucky shot," Hannibal said, "I think that whoever's involved in this knows Decker's in it now too and wants him out of the way to preserve the cover of the other Decker."
"And you think we're going to find anything here to tie them all up?" Jean asked.
"Could be," Hannibal answered as he flipped through a stack of papers on the desk.
The phone on the desk rang and everybody jumped. Face looked at his watch and asked, "Who's going to be calling here at 3 o' clock in the morning?"
"Maybe a wrong number from Hawaii," Murdock suggested.
"I don't know but I'll find out," Jean said as she reached for the receiver.
"Are you insane?" Face asked her.
"No, just one of the new incompetents, remember?" she replied as she grabbed the receiver, "Hello? Who?" she covered the mouthpiece and mouthed "Bullen" before lowering her hand and speaking into the receiver again, "Who? Colonel Decker? Well he's not here right now…why not?"
Through the corner of her eye Jean saw Murdock doing something and turned to see what it was and she saw him turning on an electric fan on the desk and feeding a bunch of papers in through the frame for the blades to catch, and she caught on to his idea. Struggling to hold back a laugh, she said into the phone, "I'm sorry sir, but there's a hurricane blowing down here and you'll have to talk a little louder." She held the receiver by the fan and said over the noise, "Whew! It certainly is the windiest day we ever did see around here, whew! It sure is windy!"
Murdock was also struggling not to laugh, Face had his hand planted over his mouth to keep from joining them, Hannibal and B.A. watched this from the other side of the room and Hannibal looked only mildly amused, B.A. just looked plain clueless on the matter.
"Decker you said?" Jean said into the phone, "Yeah, he's not here. Well how should I know where he went? I'm just the cleaning lady…oh yeah?" she asked in an irritated tone and added, "Well same to you and I hope your dog dies." She put the phone on the switch hook but picked it up again before the call disconnected and said, "Just a moment, sir, I'll transfer you back to your party," and hung it up again.
"What was that about?" Face asked.
"Bullen wants to know where Decker is and what he's up to," Jean said, "This is why we put him in the V.A. under an alias in the first place, so nobody could find him."
"That's right, and also," Hannibal added, "So nobody knows where he is, they don't know he's in the hospital, so as far as anybody knows, Decker could be anywhere, ready to strike again at any time, that's what we want them to think."
"Right, but what do we do now?" Jean asked.
Hannibal returned his attention to the papers he'd picked up off the desk and told the others, "I found something, Decker must've scribbled it down to track the source later on…something about a C-5B en route to or from Nicaragua."
Jean was half asleep and her eyes were just about fully closed, but she leaned over to Murdock and asked him, "C-5B, that's a transport plane, right?"
"Yep," he answered, "Right up there with the Globemasters. It's what we refer to as a FRED."
"A what?" she asked.
"Murdock," Hannibal cut the pilot off as he opened his mouth and he told Jean, "It just means there's a large upkeep to them."
"Well something that size I can see why," she said, "But what do you think it means, Hannibal?"
The look on Hannibal's face told them that he was already latching onto a plan as he explained, "Those planes hold 70 people, have 31,000 cubic feet for cargo storage."
Jean turned to Face and asked him, "How many kilos would it take to fill that up?"
"In Nicaragua?" Face asked in response.
"It's possible," Murdock said, "Drugs are a big business anywhere you go in the world."
"Does it say where the plane is located?" Face asked.
Hannibal looked through the papers again and said, "Yeah, he wrote down something about the directions to an airstrip at an abandoned base."
"Do those have a lot of takeoffs at night?" Jean asked Murdock.
"Could be," Murdock said, "Those pilots are trained to fly in all conditions."
"Yeah but a plane that big," she said, "If anything would go wrong…"
"Let's go check it out," Hannibal told them, "I want to see if maybe ol' Decker kicked over a rock and found a king cobra without knowing it."
Following Decker's chicken scratch directions, they found themselves a good five miles from civilization and did find themselves at an old air base that looked like it had been put out of commission in the early 70s. And, they found the plane.
"Holy cats, that thing's huge," Jean observed.
"That's the idea," Hannibal said.
Murdock went up to the plane and ran his hand along the side like a man in love, "She's in prime condition, Colonel…practically showroom new."
"Know much about these planes, Murdock?" Jean asked him.
He hummed as he looked up at it and recalled, "Top speed 580 miles an hour, it's 65 feet tall, those wings go out 220 feet, sustains a maximum weight of 840,000 pounds."
"Too bad you guys can't keep one of these on hand for missions," she noted, "You'd have plenty of room for everything."
"Yeah," Murdock said fondly, "But these babies need a minimum crew of four people to keep everything in ship shape."
"Uh, Murdock," Face made his way around one side and caught up with them, "How do they load this thing up?"
"Through the nose of course," Murdock answered.
"Hmm, paying through it wasn't enough, eh?" Face replied, "Think there's anything in it now?"
"Wouldn't hurt to look," the pilot agreed.
"As big as this thing is it reminds me of the Hindenburg," Jean told Murdock, "I wonder what it would look like fallen apart and in flames?"
"It'd be a mighty fine mess I'll tell you that," he replied, "Probably about two billion dollars' damages to build a new one."
"Murdock, I got a question," Jean told him, "How much dynamite would it take to blow this sucker up?"
Murdock turned back and looked at her as if he was seriously considering the question.
"Murdock, can you get this thing opened up?" Hannibal asked him.
"If I can't then the angry mudsucker can," he answered, "Between the two of us we ought to be able to give this thing a nose job it'll never forget."
Jean went over by Hannibal while Murdock and B.A. worked on opening the cargo hold and she asked Hannibal, "How do you think Decker found out about this?"
"I don't know, I'll have to ask him when he regains consciousness," he told her.
"But you think it's connected?" she asked.
"We're about to find out."
"But what if they get it open and there's nothing in it?"
"Then we watch tomorrow and see if somebody comes to put anything on this behemoth," he explained.
Jean took a step back from him and, standing straight, said in a more somber tone, "Permission to speak, Colonel?" When he turned to her she asked him, "What if it turns out that this is just a wild goose chase and we don't find anything here?"
"Then we're going to look somewhere else," he told her, "Somewhere is a connection to Decker and everything that's going on and I'm going to find it."
When they got the plane's nose opened up, they inspected the cargo hold and found that it was empty, but Hannibal wasn't ready to admit defeat. He told the others that they would keep an eye on the plane for the rest of the night and all the next morning; it would be moving out soon and would have to be loaded up before too long.
"You know, I know I've said this before, but I think Hannibal's finally lost his mind," Jean told Face and Murdock.
"Not yet, but he will if this keeps up," Face replied.
"You think he's right that this was something personal?" she asked Murdock.
"Anything's possible," he said, "And I'll tell you something else…if they are going to take that plane to leave the country, it wouldn't surprise me if the fake Decker's going out with it. He's got to know that the heat's on and he might be getting ready to get out of Dodge and to a safer region to preserve his own rear end."
"Hey listen," Jean told both men, "I think it would be a good idea that in addition to keeping an eye on the plane, that we take turns keeping an eye on Hannibal for the rest of the night as well."
"Sounds like a good idea," Face said, "He may know what he's doing but I think he's close to the breaking point. What happened to Decker tonight really shook him up."
"Oddly enough," Jean commented, "I thought you guys were used to death."
"You never get used to it," Murdock told her, "You just come to accept it, but sometimes you can't even do that."
For the next couple of hours before the sun came up, Face and Murdock did as they agreed; Hannibal had taken the first watch and the others were supposed to be asleep, but while his back was turned, they took turns watching him also. They didn't really think that anything would happen that would call for their assistance during the watch but they weren't too eager to take any chances after what they'd all been put through last night.
It had taken them 15 minutes driving at top speed to get Decker to the hospital after he'd been shot, and during that time everybody had done everything they could think of to keep him from losing consciousness. Hannibal was screaming at him, cursing him for trying to give up now, Jean pinched him and snapped her fingers in his ears and told him to fight off the overwhelming urge to close his eyes like he had been fighting all of them, and Murdock and Face kept pressure applied to the two entrance wounds and in doing so went through the entire content of the first aid kit. Twice Decker closed his eyes and slumped his head down, and didn't respond to anything, but they never lost him, something which Hannibal couldn't describe as anything less than a miracle. It hadn't occurred to any of them at the time of the shooting, but once Decker was out of surgery and they had time to think about it, they realized that if he had died they would've been the ones arrested for his murder, who would ever believe that it had been someone else? Well, Hannibal figured once this whole thing was over they ought to be up to their armpits in evidence of not only that, but the whole corrupt mess that they'd been chasing after for the last week.
By the time the sun finally came up, Hannibal half resembled a zombie, but he showed no sign of resting anytime soon. Instead he kept himself occupied by scouting out the surrounding area and determining what their best strategy would be once the crew did come to load up the plane. Everybody had already known to keep a slight distance from him last night, and after a night without any sleep they especially knew better than to press their luck by saying the wrong thing to him, so they kept their own comments about the possibility that it could all be a wild goose chase to themselves, deciding it would wait until further notice. Once they were off by themselves however, they spoke freely on their own theories about the matter at hand.
"What if he's wrong?" Jean asked, "Then that'll mean we were out here all night for nothing, wasting time when we could've been tracking down the right people."
"It's got to be something though," Face told her, "Decker wouldn't make it a point to come out here and see the place himself for nothing."
"Unless," Jean suggested, "He thought that you guys would be using this plane to go overseas for a new mission."
"He ought to know us better than that," Face said, "Why would we steal a plane this big?"
"I don't know," she said, "Why did you steal an airbus when you guys went to Mexico the last time?"
"Quiet, quiet," Murdock warned them as he saw Hannibal coming their way.
"What's going on?" Hannibal demanded to know, very short temperedly.
"Nothing, Colonel," Murdock answered, "Did you find anything?"
Hannibal clamped his teeth down on his cigar and nodded, "Mm-hmm," and gestured for them to follow him. They did and saw what he had found, several sets of tire tracks cutting through the tall dead grass out to the airstrip.
"So they brought their cars out here, so what?" Jean asked.
"No," Hannibal answered, and twisted the toes of his boot against one tire track in the sand, "Not the right build for that."
"How do you know?" she asked.
"Because," Hannibal told her, "I've seen enough jeeps in my life to know what kind of tracks they make, there is a difference."
She shrugged her shoulders, "Jeeps, cars, what difference does it make?"
"Maybe none," he said, "But they do look recent, whoever has been here, I'm willing to bet they'll be returning soon."
"And that's why we're here, Colonel," Murdock said, trying to convince Hannibal that they were on his side of this.
"Hannibal, wouldn't it make more sense if we were in the plane waiting for them so that when they got here they'd be on board and have severely limited options as to how to retaliate when we got the drop on them?" Jean suggested, "I mean think about it, it's a large plane but it's no tank, if they opened fire in there they'd jeopardize everything."
Hannibal shook his head, "No good, we'd be enclosed in the same place and they'd have a better chance of getting a lucky shot in with us, we want the wide, vast, open area to be our cover."
"Yeah but Hannibal…"
He glared at her and snapped, "I said we're going to stay out in the open and that is an order, corporal, if you don't like it then you know the way back to town."
Jean leaned back against Murdock and Face and as the breath hissed out through her almost closed mouth, she looked like he might as well as smacked her, and it didn't go unnoticed by the two men behind her either.
"Understood, Colonel," she replied coldly, and turned and walked away.
She heard the footsteps in the sand as Murdock and Face ran to catch up with her, Murdock snagged her by the arm and told her, "Jean, he didn't mean that."
"Of course he did," she shrugged him off, "He never says anything he doesn't mean, that's what makes him him." Jean turned to Face and asked him, "How long would it take you to get a few sticks of dynamite and double back here so we can blow that plane up? If that doesn't take care of the situation at hand, then ain't anything going to."
Face looked at Murdock and neither said a word but they could tell the conman was considering the idea. Finally he nodded and went to get the van.
Murdock turned to Jean and said to her, "I'm not going to say what the Colonel did was right, but you've got to expect it, he does have a tendency to get like this on occasions."
"And which occasions are those?" Jean asked, "Was he like this when you got shot? Or B.A.?"
Murdock knew there wasn't any good way to answer that.
"I thought you said he was only like this when he got sick," Jean said.
Murdock felt his eyes open to twice their previous size when she said that, it was a possibility he hadn't considered before.
"Oh my God," Jean said when she saw the look on his face.
Hannibal's insistence to stakeout the base paid off. Before seven A.M. two military buses drove up to the base and out stepped about sixty young men in uniform; no doubt some were the real deal but Hannibal was willing to bet more of them than not were just imposters dressed for the part. From where they were hidden away around the base, they could see a few older men in uniform as well; now these Hannibal could tell were the genuine articles, he let out an exasperated huff and shook his head, some things never changed.
Face lay on the ground close to Hannibal and he was wringing his hands anxiously and asked, "What're we going to do, Hannibal?"
"Give it a minute," he told the lieutenant, "When they start boarding the plane, then we'll move in."
They heard B.A. grunt from his position also close by, "Don't make no sense, Hannibal, nobody needs a plane that big just for smuggling drugs."
"I know," he replied.
They stayed where they were and waited, and watched as the crew opened up the plane's nose. While that was going on, Face looked down the way the buses came and saw two semis coming up the same path.
"Hannibal, what's that?" he asked.
"I don't know," he said, "But I've got a bad feeling about it."
They watched as the trucks pulled up close to the plane. One of the drivers went around to the back and opened it up, and out stepped another man in uniform with an automatic rifle as he herded out dozens of young women who looked terrified out of their minds, not a one of them looked older than 25.
"Oh my God," Hannibal drudged out.
"Hannibal," the murderous growl was back in B.A.'s voice as he picked up his gun and said, "I got a good idea what's in that other truck."
"Yeah, me too," Hannibal said as he got up, "Alright, we're going in, everybody watch what you're doing."
Hannibal, Face and B.A. went to the front first, their machine guns aimed on the soldiers and Hannibal announced, "Alright, that's far enough!" gaining the attention of everybody out on the airstrip. For one brief moment, the men forgot about herding the women into the cargo hold of the plane and looked at their uninvited guests in nothing short of being absolutely dumbfounded by this interruption.
Hannibal remained calm but firm as he addressed the women and told them, "Sorry you had to make the long trip, ladies, but if you'll kindly step over to those buses we will refund your tickets and complete your round-trip back home."
"Hey pal," one of the soldiers pointed his gun at Hannibal, "Who the hell do you think you are?"
"Me?" Hannibal shrugged innocently, "I'm the little man that turns off the light in electric iceboxes."
He saw the man reach for the trigger to put a few holes in him, but before he could, Murdock rose up from his own hiding spot and opened fire with a grenade launcher, that for the occasion had been loaded with smoke canisters, and as soon as they made impact a whole screen built up and blinded everybody. Hannibal knew they had to act fast so he and Face ran in and helped the women get out of the line of fire before the shooting started. Meanwhile, B.A. went around to the second semi and threw up the door on the back and confirmed what he had suspected; the second truck had been filled to the brim with small children, all of whom were equally terrified out of their minds.
"It's alright, we're here to help," he told them, and pointed the way out of the direct firing line and said, "Over there, quick."
Most of the children jumped out of the truck and ran, though B.A. grabbed a few smaller ones and carried them over, using his own body to shield them once he heard the shooting begin.
By this time, Murdock had joined the others and gotten in the middle of it and they used the smokescreen to their own advantage to take a few of the men by surprise and KO them, but it wasn't long before some others opened fire and then it became serious. The commandoes happily returned the fire, though by some stroke of fate each side was missing the other perfectly, but Hannibal knew the gravity of the situation, they were vastly outnumbered and they would run out of ammo long before these goons did.
One soldier was shot from behind and he fell to the ground screaming and writhing in pain; for a split second Hannibal and Face turned and saw that the shots came from within the plane's cargo hold, and Jean emerged with a Ruger Mini-14 in hand and continued firing indiscriminately on the parade of men in green camouflage. Her split second distraction gave the men the opportunity to blindside the soldiers nearest them and disarm them.
"Hannibal!" over the ongoing commotion of gunfire and people screaming, Hannibal was able to hear Jean calling his name at the top of her lungs and he turned to see her pointing to a man behind him and she told him, "LOOK!"
He turned and saw that the man behind the soldier he'd been kicking the crud out of wore a jacket with a colonel's insignia on it and the name on the breast pocket was…
"Decker!" Hannibal was out for blood now, he made his way between the two men and grabbed the phony colonel by the throat and said, "So you're the one responsible for all this mess." He kicked the man in the stomach and rammed his fist into the imposter's nose, and when he fell back, Hannibal kicked him again as he went down, as hard as he could.
He was aware of somebody calling his name and suddenly felt two sets of arms grabbing him and he realized it was Murdock and Jean, and they were both screaming at him that they had to get out of there. He dragged his feet and turned to them both and asked one, then the other what the matter was. They tried to move him but he was too strong and too stubborn and demanded to know what was going on.
KABOOM!
Hannibal felt an immense heat on his back, and immediately felt the hard ground hit him against the face and realized he'd fallen down; it was only after he realized this that it occurred to him that his legs were killing him. He tried to ignore the pain in his legs as he forced himself to turn over onto his back but he only made it halfway, but it was enough to see that the cause of his injuries came from the 200 ton plane that had just exploded.
"Wha…" all of a sudden his brain didn't work right and he couldn't even form the words that he was asking inside of his head.
"How much dynamite was that?" Jean asked Murdock as they hovered over Hannibal, trying to assess the damage he'd sustained in the explosion.
Murdock leaned over to her and asked, "WHAT?"
Jean screamed into his ear, "HOW MUCH?"
"20 sticks, was that enough?" he asked her.
Hannibal half turned half fell the rest of the way onto his back and he was sorry he did; he told them to help him up and without any questions they each grabbed one arm and pulled him to his feet. It took him a couple of tries to keep his balance but he managed and he walked over to the other colonel who was still lying on the ground and he gave the man another kick for good measure. Then he told Face and Murdock, "Get him up. Face, where's the van?"
Face pointed, "Over there, why?"
"Why?" Hannibal repeated, "I'm calling this in." He turned to Murdock and asked, "Did you get that number for General Bullen?"
"Yes," Murdock answered as he followed Hannibal.
"B.A.!" Jean ran over to the sergeant who had stayed with the women and the children and was trying to the best of his abilities to keep everybody calm, even though that was a cause lost from the start. "B.A., are you guys alright?"
"Nobody got hit if that's what you mean," he answered, "But everybody's scared stiff and I don't blame them." He looked back to the burning wreckage of the plane and asked, "What idiot had the idea to blow up the plane?" Jean held her hand out for him to shake and he did a double take, "You?!"
"It's like you always say," Jean said as she shrugged her shoulders, "They ain't flying."
B.A. looked again to the remains of the airplane and laughed dryly, "Yeah, you got that right."
"B.A.," Jean said, "I think Hannibal was hit."
"What?"
Jean pointed back the way Hannibal had walked off and to the bloodstains on the ground and she told B.A., "He's leaving a trail behind him, but he won't let us take a look at him."
"Typical Hannibal," he told her.
"Hello, General Bullen?" Hannibal said gruffly into the van's phone, "I've got a newsbreak for you that's going to make finding the A-Team look like chickenfeed. Can you hear the noise out here?" he held the phone out the window to pick up the people screaming and the sounds the fire was causing, then he put the receiver back to his ear and said, "I'll tell you the way, but if you're going to bother coming you better bring the whole damn Red Cross with you, we've got about 300 people here in need of medical treatment, and bring a few guns to execute the miserable excuses for soldiers who are behind it. Don't even wait until dawn, just shoot them on sight, when you get here you won't have to ask why."
Decker could feel his head swimming, and that was one of the few things that he was aware of. He'd woken up sometime during the night and in a fit of coherency he demanded that he be taken off the morphine; he was aware he'd be in the hospital for a while but he didn't intend to spend his stay there doped to the gills like a common junkie who didn't have any idea where he was. He'd been shot before so the pain wasn't anything particularly new, it had just been a long time since he'd gone through something like this. He did remember when he first woke up that Crane had been there at his side, always loyal, dutiful, trustworthy Crane, the one person Decker knew he could always count on.
It took him a few hours to remember what had happened when he was shot and he questioned Crane about what happened to Smith and the rest of the A-Team. Crane had been very vague about the details at first, saying only that they had left to find the man who had shot him. It was only after one of the nurses made her rounds and inquired as to how he was feeling after the transfusion that Crane filled him in on the rest; that being the fact that Decker had lost so much blood on the way to the hospital that he almost died, and that Hannibal Smith of all people had agreed to give his blood to save Decker. This was a revelation that hit Decker harder than any drugs that were available in the building, and he was still trying to process that information. Crane had decided that it would be best to wait until another day to drop the other bombshell on Decker, that they were in the V.A. hospital in what used to be Murdock's own private room, and that Murdock himself had requested the transfer out of ICU, deciding that too much information too fast might not set well with the colonel.
Decker felt his eyes open when he heard the distant voices of somebody screaming down the hall. He recognized that voice. He turned to see the captain sitting beside his bed and said, with some difficulty, "Crane…"
"Yes, sir?" the attentive captain asked.
The voices were getting louder now, they were coming his way. "What's going on, Crane?"
Before he could answer, the door opened and the first thing Decker saw was Hannibal entering the room, and in behind him came Peck, Baracus, and Murdock. Decker rubbed his eyes to make sure he was seeing things clearly; when he opened them again he saw another man in the room, tied up, gagged and, much to Decker's confusion, a big red bow on his head.
"Smith," he tried to push himself up to get a better look at this, "What is this?"
"This is an early Christmas present from your friends at the Acme Window Cleaner company of Walla Walla, Washington," Hannibal said as he kicked the man and forced him to walk over towards the bed, "Colonel Decker, meet Colonel Decker, alias First Lieutenant Roger Mulcahy. This is the man who's been parading around putting your name on his smuggling operations involving drugs and humans."
"What?" Decker asked.
"We followed your tip about the plane heading for Nicaragua," Face explained, "Found out these guys have made the graduation from heroin to human trafficking, they were using that plane to smuggle out 50 women and close to 200 children, some of which were smuggled into this country in the first place, and all of which I might add are currently being cared for courtesy of the army before they're returned to their homes. Sorry you missed the fireworks but we thought you'd like a door prize for your troubles."
Decker's head was still spinning and it was obvious he was having trouble taking all of this in, so Hannibal said, "Your captain will fill you in on all the details once your head's cleared, in the meantime I thought you'd like to meet the man who's been causing you so much trouble recently."
"Might've known," Crane said to them, "You always do what you set out to, don't you?"
"Usually," Hannibal answered, "Now, there's a certain general who's personally going to make sure every last one of the members of the United States Army who was involved in this mess is never going to see the light of day again, and he is outside waiting on the guest of honor," he pointed at Mulcahy, "But he's going to come in here for this one. That said, I'm sure the general would be only too happy to take us down along with the rest, so we leave you now, Decker."
"Smith!" Decker said as Hannibal reached the door.
Hannibal turned back and asked, "Yes?"
It took Decker a minute to say what he planned to, Hannibal guessed that he was considering his options and finally decided that when it was all over, Decker could claim temporary insanity from pain or the drugs when he said this, "Thank you, Smith."
Hannibal went back over to the bed and looked down at the colonel and replied, "You're welcome, Decker."
"Colonel, they're coming," Murdock said from where he was watching the door.
"Okay, we've got to get out of here," Hannibal said, looking at Decker he added jokingly, "Don't be a stranger, Roddy, come and see us real soon!"
"He will," Crane told them, "You can count on that."
Once they were out the door, Murdock and Face each grabbed one side of Hannibal and helped him down the hall. Now that that was done, Hannibal quit his performance and sagged against the men as the pain in his right leg continued to throb and burn. Stubborn as always and knowing doing the procedure correctly would take a little time, Hannibal had refused to have the debris lodged into his leg from the explosion removed before turning Decker's doppelganger over to him, he'd only allowed them to tie a bandage around the wound so he didn't track blood all over the floors in the V.A. But now they had to manage to avoid General Bullen and at the same time find a doctor they could trust to remove the pieces of metal from Hannibal's leg without turning them over to the MPs who were stationed outside. Following Hannibal's call to the general, they had stuck around but out of sight and watched as Bullen and the military police moved in; today was definitely a day that for the army would live in infamy, and then they'd left for the hospital, beating the MPs and the general by mere minutes. It was only too bad that Amy was still out of town because if she could've been the one to launch this story in the press, it would've done her a world of journalistic good.
