Tumbling, falling, screaming.  He awoke from a dream that returned every fortnight.  Thomas Sebastian Scott was destined to relive that day for eternity.  The first time he awoke with the dream, he found himself in the presence of an angel dressed in white.  Slowly he realized that the figure by his bed was a nurse, as she told him he had lay unconscious in a military hospital in Rawalpindi for nearly two weeks.  Yes, he would recover.  No, she knew nothing about his companions.  Yes, she understood the vehicle in which he was traveling had veered off the road and rolled down a mountainside close to the Khyber Pass.

The nurse, whom he came to know as Sharmien, was a model of efficiency.  In her starched whites, she had the professional manner of a nurse who attended him in an American hospital decades before.  Reviewing his medical chart, she began with his arrival twelve days earlier.

Sharmien told him he was lucky to be alive.  She had been at his bedside sixteen hours a day since he was admitted.  There was an American military guard at the door.  “The doctors here tell me you are a general or something, or they wouldn’t have flown in an orthopedic surgeon from Walter Reed.”  He did not respond.

For ten years now, he had relived that night.  The driver has assured him and his companions that he had traveled this road hundreds of times.  And insisted that this was hardly the first time he had driven through such a storm at night.  He had admitted that he couldn’t recall it raining quite this hard before, but…