Chapter Two Thousand Forty-One
2nd February 1971
Colchane, Chile
Crossing the Atacama Desert at night turned out to be a bit of a treat. Kiki could see the bright stars overhead as the headlights of the car shown off into the darkness of the highway ahead. Che had fallen asleep with instructions to wake him before they reached the Bolivian border. It was how they had done it since they had left Santiago the day before. One of them would drive while the other slept or at least watched the changing countryside pass by. Sometimes they talked, but often there wasn’t a whole lot to say. Kiki and Che had been stuck together for the last couple months and by this point it was obvious they had exhausted most of the things that they might have talked about otherwise.
Rounding a turn, Kiki saw that the brightly lit border station was ahead off in the distance. She considered elbowing Che awake, but she had grown tired of playing games. She just wanted out of Chile.
Slowing as she reached the checkpoint Kiki stopped the car. She noticed armed soldiers, teenaged conscripts for the most part, standing around looking bored. They were probably too naïve to understand how lucky they were not to assigned to a unit was fighting in the war thousands of kilometers south of here.
“Good morning” A soldier, an older Noncom from the look of him, said as Kiki rolled down the window. “What brings you this way.”
“Me and my friend Ernesto are Doctors who were on a medical mission when this wretched war caught us off guard” Kiki said, “We are trying to get clear. We had a flight out of Santiago, but the airport was attacked, and our plane was blown up. This was our second plan, though we are still making it up as we go along…”
Kiki trailed off when she realized she was babbling. She also realized that every word she had said was true.
“We will try not to keep for too long then Doctora” The Noncom said, “You have your papers?”
With a bit of reluctance, Kiki produced the same passport and identification that had set off that Chilean Officer a thousand years earlier hoping that was a one-off thing. Che was awake and was not thrilled that she had failed to wake him.
“A German and an Argentinian?” The Noncom asked, an eyebrow raised.
“As I said, we want no part in this war” Kiki replied, “Hippocratic oath and all of that.”
The Noncom gave Kiki and Che an appraising look before he turned and yelled over his shoulder. “José, get your worthless butt over here! I think we’ve a solution to your little problem!”
One of the soldiers, a young man with a sheepish look on his face stepped forward.
“I would have offered him a cash bribe” Che said softly, “This works too. I would say that this is a classic case of how the love bug bites and I’ll leave the matter in your capable hands. So, you may need to use one of those vials of antibiotics that you guard so fiercely.”
Kiki knew that Che was probably correct about that. For most soldiers, a Doctor outside of their chain of command was a godsend. This was because any Doctor on the inside would need to report any cases of certain diseases they ran across to their superiors. That included the one that Che had mentioned.
----------------------------------------------------------------
An hour later, Kiki and Che were rolling down the highway again, this time on the Bolivian side of the border as the sun was rising over the mountains. The feeling that Kiki needed to constantly look over her shoulder was gone and that was profoundly liberating. Che was driving, but Kiki wasn’t ready to sleep just yet. She also feared the dreams that would come.
“Look at you, Doctora von Preussen” Che said, “Treating VD among your enemies.”
“I tend to agree with Father Lehmann” Kiki replied, “Fear and ignorance are our enemies, not boys a long way from home making questionable choices.”
“You are hardly the stereotypical German” Che said.
“What is the stereotypical German?” Kiki asked.
“Spiked helmet, God, Kaiser, and Country in that order, if they aren’t one and the same. Patriotism as a religion of sorts.”
“For starters, those spiked helmets went out of style decades ago” Kiki replied, “If you met either my father or brother, you would know why I do not think they are akin to God and I am hardly out of the ordinary in that regard.”
“Still, that was like something out of a movie” Che said.
Kiki frowned. “I get scripts from time to time from various screen writers who want to base their work on my life” She said, “Most of them seem to lean into the spoiled Princess line, which I hate or making me out to be some sort of saccharine sweet moral paragon which is worse. I’m sure you have figured out by now that I am none of those things.”
The image came unbidden to Che’s mind was the aftermath of what she had done to that Chilean Officer. She had killed him silently with his men just a few meters away, and they had been listening for any trouble. The fact that she only seemed to regret that her knowledge of human anatomy had been what had enabled her to do it, not the deed itself was a bit disquieting. That was learned behavior and just who had she learned it from?
“As for patriotism…” Kiki said with a snort, “Right now all of Germany is celebrating the centennial, starting on the 18th of January which is the hundredth anniversary of the formation of the German Empire and running through the 10th of May. That tells you everything you need to know.”
“What happened a hundred years ago on the 10th of May?” Che asked.
“The Treaty of Frankfurt am Main officially ending the Franco-Prussian War” Kiki replied, “Suga, my sister-in-law, says that it is because no one really wanted to freeze in the cold for fireworks twice in January, and they get to rub the whole thing in the face of France once again. That’s patriotism for you in a nutshell. My cave is better than yours, Cro-Magnon bullshit.”
“Isn’t Cro-Magnon in France?”
“You know what I mean” Kiki replied as she resumed looking out the window in silence.