Vanguard (33 page)

“
In the midst of it, the world learned of the shocking discovery of an American citizen imprisoned inside the Parnaas refugee camp – and his dramatic rescue and repatriation to American soil by the Refugee Crisis Coalition. Tonight, Michael Nariovsky-Trent and Sophie Swenda, in their only televised interview together, tell
Current Event
about the resistance against the Soviet occupying force…their firsthand experiences inside Parnaas…and the extraordinary connection between them that has lasted nearly a decade, and finally led to love.”

A series of clips showed the Soviet invasion, the Parnaas camp, and footage of Michael and Sophie in the studio with Annabelle Hunter. The opening music started, and Sophie’s iPhone vibrated itself off the coffee table and onto the floor. Every phone in the house rang, but nobody moved. Sophie knocked back her shot, then put the glass down quickly so no one could see her hands shaking. Michael pulled her against him, wrapping his arms around her.

First came the basics of the geography and political history of northern Europe, followed by a brief outline of the Soviet invasion the summer before. Maxwell cradled Signe in his arms when they ran the footage of the fall of Vollka.

“
As the US scrambled to evacuate American citizens trapped inside Orlisia, one American was determined to get back inside the country of his birth – Dr. Michael Nariovsky-Trent, son of former US diplomat Maxwell Trent and Signe Nariovsky, once the prima ballerina of the Orlisian National Ballet. His parents met in the late 1970s when Maxwell was attached to the US embassy in Vollka. Michael was born in 1982 and lived in Orlisia until he was fifteen years old, when his mother immigrated to New York City and married her longtime love and father of her son.”
Pictures of Michael and his parents flashed on the screen, and Sophie wondered how they had obtained them.

“
Three weeks after the Soviets invaded Orlisia last year, Michael left his family home in New York City, boarded a flight to Kaliningrad in the Soviet Republic, and disappeared.”

The screen cut to the studio interview they had taped.

“Where did you go after you landed in Kaliningrad, Michael?” asked Annabelle Hunter. He looked sinfully good on screen in a French blue button-down and charcoal gray slacks.

“I had contacts inside Orlisia. Someone met me in Kaliningrad, and we made our way to the border shortly thereafter. It was not difficult to cross at night in an isolated area.”

“What were you doing in Orlisia?”

“I was part of the resistance.”

“The resistance against the Soviet invasion?”

“Yes.”

The voiceover continued.
“Dr. Michael Nariovsky-Trent’s mission in Orlisia was not to take life, but to preserve it. He graduated with his medical degree from Harvard Medical School in 2007 with a near-perfect grade point average. After his surgical residency at Massachusetts General, he received job offers from some of the country’s best hospitals. Instead of taking a prestigious hospital position or starting a lucrative private practice, he served a nine-month assignment with Médecins Sans Frontières in central Africa. He was offered a second assignment not long before the war broke out in the country of his birth.”

“You were a soldier.”

The camera cut to Michael, whose green eyes narrowed at the question. He shook his head. “I am a doctor, not a soldier. My job was to save the lives of my comrades.”

“What was it like, working on the front lines of the resistance?”

He took a deep breath, audible on camera.

“It was, as you might expect, very intense. There was mortar fire. Aerial bombardment. Weapons fire. Landmines. My experience with Médecins Sans Frontières in Africa had given me limited experience with battlefield medicine, but this was beyond anything I could have imagined. It leaves a terrible scar on your psyche.” His eyes had a faraway look in them. “It is very difficult to fall sleep at night when you are afraid you may not live until morning.”

“How long did you serve as a field doctor before the Soviets caught up with your resistance cell?”

“Close to two months.”

“What happened then?” As Sophie watched, she shifted around a bit, pressing herself a little closer into Michael’s warm body.

“It was the afternoon of September 10. It had snowed, and the temperatures had fallen below freezing at night. I was on the far side of our compound, walking toward the hospital tent to check on my patients when the planes appeared. The first bomb destroyed the hospital.

“Those of us remaining after the first attack fled into the woods. The Soviets strafed the area, destroying everything we had. It was over in about twenty minutes, air only with no ground troops. Of the hundred of us in this group, maybe fifteen survived.

“We salvaged what little we could from the wreckage and headed south. We were about seventy miles north of the border at this point, having moved steadily south over the last several weeks to avoid Soviet bombings.” He paused, and the camera cut to Sophie, her hand over her eyes as she tried not to cry on camera. That had been the first time she’d heard him speak in such detail of those events, and every word had hurt.

“We decided to head for the border, hoping to locate other members of the resistance. It took nearly two weeks to cover the first twenty miles of the trip. I lost two patients along the way who had been seriously injured in the initial attack. Good men, with families.” On the screen, he looked down at the table in front of them, where his hand held Sophie’s so tightly that her knuckles had turned white. “I was operating in the forest at night with little more than a scalpel and my bare hands. What more could I do?”

In the living room beside them, Signe let out a choked sound.

“After we buried Arno, the second one to die, we could move faster. No more wounded men to slow us down.” His face twisted with grief. “We stayed on the move as much as possible. It got so cold at night that I thought I would never be warm again.

“It became difficult to keep track of the days. We reached the Parnaas area in a week or so, and remained there for several weeks. There were fewer bombings in this region, but greater risk of being caught. Everyone said the Soviets were rounding up Orlisians and putting them in some kind of a camp.”

“How did you end up in the Parnaas camp?”

“I went out to buy supplies on the streets. The black market was the only place we could buy decent food, medicine, clothing. The people who lived in the house where we were hiding warned me not to go, that the patrols had grown more aggressive as of late. I did not listen.

“They captured me as I left the market. I had no identification and had obviously been living rough. The soldiers knew what I was. I was interred in Parnaas in early January.”

Parnaas. The Soviets refer to it as a prison camp. Nearly five times the size of a standard UN-run refugee installation with more than 125,000 residents. That’s like putting the entire population of Ann Arbor, Michigan, into an area the size of ten city blocks.

The voiceover went on to describe Parnaas in greater detail. They showed satellite images of the camp, and some grainy footage from the ground, taken covertly.

“What did it feel like when you entered the camp, Michael?”

“I could see tanks, barbed wire around the perimeter. Soldiers with guns and dogs patrolling the fences. They searched me, gave me a blanket, and told me to stay alive if I could.” He ran his hand through his short hair. “I was entering a concentration camp, and I did not think I would leave there alive.”

“But you did. You’re here now.”

“Yes, I am here.” On the screen, his eyes shot over to Sophie’s face for a moment, and he smiled a little. “But it was a very near thing.”

“What was it like inside?”

“Crowded. Filthy. Cold,” he said. “I woke up once to find the person sleeping beside me had died in the night. Very little food or clean water. The farmer’s field beneath us had been planted with potatoes, which undoubtedly saved our lives. And it was cold, so cold.” He shuddered visibly on screen. “We were prisoners of war, destined to become the Soviet Republic’s new workforce.”

“Did you have any idea that help was on the way?”

Michael looked down at the table again at their joined hands. “I dreamed of her at night sometimes,” he said in a quiet voice.

Annabelle Hunter leaned forward. “Dreamed of who, Michael?”

“Of Sophie,” he said, even more quietly.

Sophie Swenda, a native of the city of Chico, California, was just seventeen years old when she met Michael Nariovsky-Trent. They traveled together in the world-renowned Global Youth Leadership program in 2002. GYL is an experiential learning program reserved exclusively for the world’s most promising students. Tens of thousands apply; only a gifted handful are accepted to travel in the yearlong program across all seven continents of the world.

Sophie was near the top of that very short list. She already knew she wanted to pursue a career in international development when she started GYL. Her experiences in the program, especially in countries like Senegal and China, reinforced her convictions that not only should international development be done, it should be done differently.

Sophie’s face flamed as they ran clips from some earlier interviews and photos from her time in university. Amateur footage of Will and Sophie in Darfur when they’d tested the concept for the new refugee camp. The publicity around the formation of the coalition. Even the damn page three article in the
Times
.

“Sophie, did Michael tell you that he was going to Orlisia when he left in July?”

“Not directly, no,” her televised self said on the screen, “but I knew where he was going.”

“You knew how dangerous it was for him to enter Orlisia?”

“Yes.”

“But you didn’t stop him.”

“I wanted to,” she said. “I tried to. But there was no stopping him. He would go whether or not I gave him my blessing. I would have gone with him, but he needed to do this alone.” She paused for a moment to collect her thoughts. “Letting him go was one of the most difficult things I’ve ever done.”

“Did you hear from him while he was in Orlisia?”

“Yes. He would send me a short message every day.” She took a breath and squeezed Michael’s hand on screen. “On September 10 of last year, the messages stopped. I knew something terrible had happened.”

“Was that when you started planning to get into Orlisia by forming the coalition?”

“No,” she replied. “I want to distinguish between my personal and professional interests here. Aid agencies began planning for intervention the day the invasion took place.” She used one of her key messages for the interview. “At Refugee Crisis International, it’s our job to improve the conditions of people who inhabit refugee camps. That is what we do best. It’s what I do best. As soon as the Parnaas camp started to form, we knew we would be going in.

“I didn’t know Michael Nariovsky-Trent would be in Parnaas. I hoped he would be. I even prayed for it. I won’t deny that it was a huge motivator for me. But that possibility didn’t distract me from my work. If anything, it made me better at it. It gave me the courage to help bring the coalition together. The patience to find consensus with the Soviet government on our entry plan. It made me try harder, work longer hours, and give more of myself than I’d ever given to a crisis before.

“We did not spend a single dime of donor money on the search for Michael. It was funded privately. Certainly the mission did not suffer in any way by my desire to find him. If anything the mission was more successful because of his presence in my life.”

In the living room, Sophie hid her face in Michael’s shoulder with embarrassment, but she was nonetheless pleased that they had used that clip in its entirety.

The voiceover went on to describe Commandant Jaros, showing pictures of the refugees with the brandings on their foreheads. Then it segued into a piece on the diseases that plague all refugee camps: dysentery, cholera, other water-borne illnesses, and, in their case, pneumonia.

“Did you know that aid workers had finally entered Parnaas, Michael?”

“Yes, conditions in the camp definitely improved upon the arrival of the coalition. We had clean drinking water almost immediately. Medical care. Emergency rations. Plastic sheeting for better shelters. People were still terrified of the Soviets and the Commandant, but knowing international aid workers were present made us feel hopeful. We thought maybe we would get out of there alive, and not die or become slaves.”

“Did you know that Sophie was with the coalition?”

His eyes softened. “No, but I hoped. I heard a rumor of an American aid worker who defied the guards and spoke Orlisian very well. A woman. I wanted so badly to believe it was Sophie. I would walk in the camp, searching for her. But we could not approach the administrative buildings where Sophie tells me she spent the majority of her time as leader of the coalition.”

Annabelle turned to Sophie on screen. “You did the same thing, didn’t you? Walked through the camp, searching for Michael.”

“Yes. I tried not to. I had a job to do, and it was not about running from tent to tent looking into the face of every man in the camp. But I had to find him.”