War Photographer's Notebook

Chapter 1551 The Noise of Death

In the Gaza Hospital, Edelweiss, who was covered in dust and with blood all over her hands and even her dirty face, took out the wine flask that Wei Ran had given her as a birthday gift, unscrewed the lid and took a big gulp. She looked worriedly at the closed door of the operating room next to her, and secretly clenched the exquisite wine flask in her hand.

In the operating room, the seriously injured Rama was receiving treatment. She was worried about whether Rama could survive, worried about the sewing machine, Wei Ran and the hot air balloon who decided to stay, worried about the cradle who agreed to leave together but also stayed in the refugee camp, and even more worried about Hanwad and Dalal whom she had never found.

  Are they both dead too?

Edelweiss clenched her hip flask tightly and looked at the dial of the Soviet watch on her wrist. It was already 6:29 in the morning, but she didn't hear any good news.

"Is there any doctor?"

At this time, a young nurse asked in French and English, "There is a shortage of medical staff right now. Is there anyone with medical experience? A veterinarian, or someone who can just bandage a wound will do!"

"I!"

Edelweiss seemed to have regained strength for a moment, and hurriedly put away the kettle and answered loudly, "I am a general practitioner from MSF. I can perform surgical trauma operations! I can deliver babies."

"Great! Come with me! There's a seriously injured person here who needs amputation surgery!"

Before the nurse finished her words, she had already pulled Edelweiss into another operating room filled with the smell of blood.

At the same time, the sewing machine and cradle were already standing next to the temporary operating table on the first floor below ground. With the assistance of nurse Sophia and several anesthesiologists, they were performing an anesthesia-free operation filled with screams and fainting on the injured who had just been brought in.

Compared with these serious medical workers, Wei Ran, after helping with the preliminary classification, assessment and pretreatment of the newly arrived wounded, took up his weapon, called out to Hanward and Dalal who had nothing to do in the room, and left the hospital again while no one was paying attention.

"where are we going?"

Hanward followed Wei Ran closely and asked, "Veterinarian, you haven't explained why you can speak Arabic."

"Yes, why didn't you say it before?" Dalal asked.

"If I knew Arabic, wouldn't Rama be unemployed?" Wei Ran asked as a matter of course.

Hearing this, Dalal's eyes flashed with disappointment for a moment, "So you don't actually need Rama to be a translator, nor do you..."

"No, on the contrary. We all need it. Not only do we need Rama to translate, but we also need little helpers like you and Ed."

Wei Ran led the two kids and ran along the wall toward the narrow alley in the distance, saying, "Although we are Doctors Without Borders, you are the ones who can truly heal the wounded and sick."

"Sir, I don't understand what you are saying." Dalal said in a daze and confusion.

Wei Ran smiled and said, "You will understand it later, when you grow up."

“How can they possibly give us time to grow up?”

Hanward said in despair, "It would be better to give me a gun while I'm still alive. Maybe I can..."

"You have to survive"

Wei Ran spoke more seriously, "Only if you survive will there be hope for Palestine. Children like you dying meaninglessly here at this age is what those warts want to see the most."

"But."

"It only takes one bullet to kill you kids, and the noise will be no louder than the sound of a bullet shell hitting the floor. No one will care about you."

While Wei Ran was talking, he had already entered the narrow alley, "But if you are a doctor, a scholar, a lawyer, or even a pop singer.

When you come back here at that time, they will only need one bullet to kill you.

But the noise made by your death will be as loud as the sound of a bomb exploding, and will attract enough people to pay attention to what is happening here."

"I still don't understand what you are saying," Dalal said.

"You will understand later. Just survive first." Wei Ran said, "Now let's talk about the arrangements."

"What do you need us to do?" Hanward immediately became alert. "Can you give us a gun? Even if..."

“Forget about the gun.”

As Wei Ran spoke, he took off two telescopes with barrels wrapped in gauze with tape from his neck and handed them to the two little helpers. In order to make them less conspicuous, he even dyed the gauze with lysol in advance.

"Don't take the gauze off."

While Wei Ran was reminding them, he hung the two telescopes around the necks of Hanward and Dalal respectively.

“We are needed.”

“You have an important job.”

Before Wei Ran finished speaking, he turned around and walked out of the alley, and continued as he quickly ran towards the rented house, "We'll talk about the details later, now hurry up and catch up."

Hearing this, Hanward and Dalal stopped asking questions, each covered the telescope hanging around their necks, and followed Wei Ran to run wildly along the corner of the wall.

Before entering the yard filled with the stench of corpses, Wei Ran grabbed his two helpers who were about to run in and carefully pushed the locked iron door.

"Walk by the side"

Wei Ran whispered instructions and led the two of them past the two bodies that seemed to be thrown there accidentally at the entrance of the alley, and then crossed the torn carpet.

After they crawled through, Wei Ran carefully cleaned up the traces and then crawled in.

"Follow me and be quiet"

Wei Ran gave another reminder before crawling under the car and passing through the narrow hole in the wall.

Taking a closer look at the cans of wine bottles piled under the car, Wei Ran smiled, carefully crawled over, got out from under the car, hid by the wall, and climbed up to the second floor quietly.

"Hot air balloon?" Wei Ran whispered in French.

"Who?"

A questioning sound came from the room on the second floor, and then the person inside asked, "Dongfeng?"

"That's right," Wei Ran said softly, "I'm going to open the door, don't shoot."

"Come in," the hot air balloon inside said in a more relaxed tone.

Waving to the two little helpers who were still hiding under the car, Wei Ran pushed open the door, and then frowned - the hot air balloon was damaged.

"Have you met your opponent?"

While Wei Ran was talking, he had already walked to the other person's side. At this moment, the condition of the hot air balloon was not very good. There was a blood groove about four or five centimeters long on his right forearm and the outside of his upper arm near the shoulder, just like a child's mouth.

There is no need to guess. It must have been caused by the same highly targeted bullet when the gun was fired.

This was just his good luck. If the shooter had aimed just a millimeter off, the bullet would have hit his head or chest. But luck was good luck, and the hot air balloon's treatment of the wound was definitely a makeshift one.

Fortunately, there was a first aid kit on the table that he had picked up from someone, and the two Ma Fei guns that Wei Ran had given him before were also there.

"There's a sniper outside the wall," the hot air balloon replied dryly.

"Where did you get the first aid kit?"

As Wei Ran spoke, he had already put a wound on him and used the things in the simple first aid kit to help him clean and bandage the wound.

"Lina is dead"

The hot air balloon muttered to itself, answering the question irrelevantly, "I saw with my own eyes her body being crushed by the Falange's armored vehicles. I even took a photo of it, but I couldn't do anything."

"A new round of massacre is about to begin," Wei Ran said with a hard heart, "There is no time to grieve for you now."

"Yes, that's right."

Hot Air Balloon smiled with difficulty, "I grabbed the first aid kit before dawn."

"What are your plans next?" Wei Ran asked as he bandaged the other person's cleaned wound.

“Try to protect this hospital.”

The hot air balloon paused and threw the question back, "What about you? What are your plans?"

"I'm going to change my identity," Ran said with a smile, "to the identity of the Long Spear Party."

"I thought you would stay in the hospital to help."

"The veterinarian has escaped from the refugee camp. The one who remains is Dongfeng."

As he spoke, Wei Ran quickly bandaged the two wounds for him. He naturally had his own plans for leaving the hospital. After all, he had been taught a lesson so many times by that living ancestor over the years, so he should be able to figure out some of the tricks.

Apart from anything else, he knew clearly that he could not change the course of history at all. The only thing he could do was to use his camera to record history.

Especially according to his guess, the invitation that the sewing machine had sent to him before, in a historical time and space without himself, was probably most likely an invitation from the sewing machine to the cradle, or from the cradle to the sewing machine.

In other words, he just took advantage of the invitation between the couple.

Of course, he had no intention of judging whether this behavior was noble or suicidal. If he were in her shoes, he would never let Sui Sui take risks with him.

But he had to admit that he sincerely hoped there would be more such selfless people, so that this world, which he had begun to increasingly hate, could become more lively.

He was even willing to speculate whether the quality of the sewing machine in such a desperate situation came from the nurse Ji Chunlan who sacrificed her life to save his father in the story of the prisoner-of-war camp told to him by his father and son.

He would rather believe it was, and this was one of the main reasons why he was willing to stay, in addition to excluding the rigid requirement of the metal notebook - he wanted to see if there was any shadow of nurse Ji Chunlan on this sewing machine.

If so, knowing full well that he could not save them, he hoped to at least use his camera to faithfully record some of their historical moments.

In this case, he naturally had to choose a position that was close enough and had enough "camera positions" to record everything that was about to happen.

"Then Mr. Dongfeng, what arrangements will you make for these two?" asked the hot air balloon while moving his injured arm.

"In addition to being sentinels, you two will also serve as photographers."

Wei Ran switched to Arabic in front of Hot Air Balloon's surprised gaze, "Hanwad, you are responsible for watching the hospital, Dalal, you are responsible for watching the direction of the courtyard gate."

As he spoke, he took out the half-frame camera that he had lent to the hot air balloon and handed it to Hanward under the cover of his backpack.

"I"

"I'll teach you how to use the hot air balloon later."

Wei Ran smiled and said, "He will also teach you how to hide behind the window and observe with a telescope without being discovered."

Seeing Hanward and Dalal looking at him, Hot Air Balloon nodded and accepted the task, and asked, "What about you? You."

"I'll get an identity as a Falangist later."

At this point, he took out a double-sided camouflage beanie from his backpack and put it on his head. "No matter what kind of clothes I wear, I will wear this beanie and a mask. Hot air balloon, don't shoot at me when the time comes."

After taking a closer look at the boonie pattern on Wei Ran’s head, Hot Air Balloon nodded and said, “I won’t make a mistake.”

"We both have to be out of here before half past six."

Wei Ran said as he looked at Hanward and Dalal, "Hanward, you are responsible for taking pictures. Take pictures of everything the Falange Party does. Dalal, you are responsible for watching the direction of the courtyard gate. If anyone comes over, you immediately hide in the cellar in the alley."

At this point, he took out a bottle of fuel and a lighter from his bag and placed them on the table. "Remember to pour the fuel on the sofa and light it. This way we will know that you are in trouble here."

"Okay!" Dalal took the oil bottle and lighter and made a solemn promise.

“You must hide well.”

The hot air balloon also followed up with the instructions, "If you are discovered by them and killed by them, then everything we are doing will be meaningless."

"We won't be discovered by them." Hanward held the camera on his neck with one hand and the telescope on his neck with the other hand and made a promise, "We will definitely survive."

"so be it"

Wei Ran said this and simply left the room, ran to the first floor, rummaged through the drawers, found a crowbar and went back to the second floor, lifted the carpet in a certain place, and pried open the wooden floor with the crowbar, revealing a hole that was big enough for both of them to jump onto the sofa on the first floor at the same time.

"Go downstairs from here when the time comes, don't take the outer stairs."

As Wei Ran spoke, he jumped down from the long hole and landed on the spring sofa on the first floor.

“It’s time for me to leave too”

Hot Air Balloon looked at the time on his watch, picked up the SVD, followed Wei Ran, and jumped from the narrow hole to the first floor.

Watching the two of them crawling under the car one after another, Hanward and Dalal, who were left behind, looked at each other, and they ran to the bed with the curtains drawn tacitly, lifted the corners of the curtains to wrap the telescope wrapped in gauze, one looked at both sides of the street outside the hospital gate, and the other looked at the hospital across the road outside the window.

"Remember to survive," Wei Ran said as he stepped past the corpse at the entrance of the alley.

"You too, must survive."

The hot air balloon responded with a smile, holding a sniper rifle wrapped in cloth.

(End of this chapter)