Cherry Ames 04 Chief Nurse (17 page)

Pretty fair of him, after all! Cherry thought gratefully and hurried on.

“These are the conclusions, sir—just possibilities—

but, well, perhaps you would like to consider them.” And Cherry told the Commanding Officer about the chances of a new enemy weapon, and the likelihood that
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enemy troops were hidden for a surprise attack on a forward island. She finished and waited, uneasily studying Colonel Pillsbee’s feverish face.

“Very interesting, Lieutenant Ames,” he observed.

“Yes, I agree, such things are
possible.
It is also
possible
that the sun may fall out of the sky. But it is not very likely. My dear young lady, years of experience have taught me that it is necessary to be cautious and slow before leaping to any wild ideas. We must prove ideas before we believe in them.”

Cautious and slow! At a moment like this! She had to make him see—she had to convince him! Desperately, she tried another tack.

“What do you think, sir, of the possibility of the enemy hiding on Islands 20 or 21, for a surprise attack?” Colonel Pillsbee gave her an impatient glance, but he deigned to answer. “There again, Lieutenant, we do not have sufficient evidence to weigh, to be certain that that is a tenable viewpoint.”

“But, sir—” Cherry swallowed hard and mustered up courage to speak out of turn to the Commander. “Even if there’s just
one
chance, isn’t it safer to——” Colonel Pillsbee ran his hand over his forehead and eyes in such a gesture of illness and weariness that Cherry forbore to insist any more. Besides, she knew her duty stopped with reporting the information. The Commanding Officer would do whatever he saw fit
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for the security of this island. But his next words astonished her.

“Lieutenant Ames, believe me, I am just as deeply concerned about the safety of Island 14 as you are. For your peace of mind, let me say, however, that I consider your report and your so-called conclusions relatively unimportant, in view of—” he hesitated, then said with slow emphasis, “in view of other military action being planned.” Cherry hesitated, thinking. The “other military action being planned” was something she had already guessed from what she had seen at the airport at night, from the quantity of the supplies coming in, and from the special mission planned for Gene. Of course she did not know what it was, but it might be an offensive action. Well, perhaps that did put her information in the shade. It was true she did not have full knowledge of the military situation, as Colonel Pillsbee did, and perhaps if she saw her “mystery” facts in relation to the full story, they might be unimportant. But even so—even so—there might be immediate danger and the C.O. apparently was not going to do anything at all about it!

“You may consider the matter closed, Lieutenant Ames. Your participation ends here. Good afternoon.” He was dismissing her! Terribly discouraged, Cherry saluted and left. Her feet, carrying her slowly down the hill, felt like lead. She reported a secret weapon—

the chance of hidden enemies—and Colonel Pillsbee
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promised only to think it over, and act slowly and cautiously! Cherry had confidence in the wisdom of the Commanding Officer’s decisions, but this time, Old Safe and Sane might be too slow—and too late!

Cherry walked miserably along the edge of camp. She suddenly realized that she should call up the airport and tell her brother of Gene’s and her further deductions.

Charlie was probably reporting what he knew to the Intelligence Officer right now. Perhaps the Intelligence Officer would consider this more urgent than the Commanding Officer did! And if he should, Captain May was in a position to urge Colonel Pillsbee to take some immediate steps. Cherry felt as if a load had been lifted from her, and she ran all the way back to her own Headquarters tent.

The tent was deserted except for some corpsmen, working in a far corner, as she lifted the field telephone and tried to reach the airport.

There was a short wait, then a man’s voice came through.

“Lieutenant Charles Ames, please,” Cherry requested.

“It’s—it’s rather urgent.”

Again a wait. Then the man’s voice said, “Lieutenant Ames is—well, he’s not around.” And Cherry heard the roar of a plane motor behind his voice.

“So Charlie is being sent on a flight, he’s about to take off—and they can’t tell me over the telephone.

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But he wasn’t scheduled for a flight!” Cherry thought to herself. She felt frightened and mixed-up. She said into the telephone, “Why is he being sent—I mean, is there still a few seconds to get an urgent message to him?”

The voice demanded sharply, “Who is this? And what is this urgent matter?”

Cherry said meekly that this was Lieutenant Ames’s sister.

“Oh. Just a moment.” There were voices conferring in the background, and then a different voice came over Cherry’s field telephone.

“Hello, this is Captain May. Don’t be alarmed about your brother. He is just taking the place of a man in another transport crew who fell ill. A routine flight. It’s a sort of hurry-up, last-minute substitution.”

“Thank you, Captain May,” Cherry said gratefully.

“Well, I guess that’s all, then.”

“You told the signalman you had an urgent message,” Captain May caught her before she hung up.

“Was it a personal message, or something you wish to relay?”

“It’s not a personal message,” Cherry said uneasily,

“but it’s nothing I dare relay over the telephone. It really is urgent.” She hesitated, thinking what a golden chance this was to report the danger to the Intelligence Officer. But she remembered conscientiously that the
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Commanding Officer had told her her part in the matter ended here.

But Captain May decided for her. His crisp voice said,

“I’m going to be in the hospital area in about half an hour.

Perhaps this is something I should hear about. I’ll stop by to see you, Lieutenant Ames.” And he hung up.

That was how Cherry, in spite of Colonel Pillsbee’s instruction, came to tell the Intelligence Officer her own interpretation of the mystery. He pumped the information out of her. Cherry had no choice but to tell him. He already knew all the facts from Charlie, but facts only—it was Cherry who rashly leaped from those facts to conclusions. He listened acutely, his pencil jotting notes on the back of the diagram of the Jinx. She was half glad, half distressed, at the unorthodox thing she had done. It was dangerous to interfere in anything as vital as this, dangerous to incur the Colonel’s wrath, but was it not more dangerous
not
to report this? What made up her mind was what Captain May said, after she had finished.

“I think your conclusions are right, Lieutenant Ames, proven or not. I’m going to Colonel Pillsbee at once.

There may not be a minute to lose.” The matter was out of her hands now!

The next thing Cherry knew, she was called out of Mess and up the hill, for the bitterest rebuke she had ever had from Colonel Pillsbee.

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“Not an hour after I give you orders, I find you have broken them!” Colonel Pillsbee fumed. He was as near to open anger as his rigid self-discipline and his ingrained politeness would permit.

Cherry shuddered. From his stern face, she knew this was the end.

“Unfortunately, Lieutenant Ames,” he addressed her sternly, “this is not the first occasion on which I have found it necessary to reprimand you. But this time you have defied a major Army regulation.” He paused, then slowly and deliberately announced:

“Your three-month probationary period is now up. You know that I, as well as Major Pierce, must write a report on you. Very well.” His bony fingers tapped the desk.

“I shall write to Washington, this very evening, to recommend that you be relieved of your post as Chief Nurse!”

But Colonel Pillsbee never wrote that letter. That evening, shortly after twilight, as soon as the first darkness came, guns roared and fire spat down from the sky. The enemy, whom Cherry had suspected to be in hiding, showed themselves with a vengeance. They opened an offensive attack on the Americans on the forward islands, and their deadly Zeros swooped down in the night and bombed Island 14.

c h a p t e r x

Under Fire

through the noise and smoke and blackness, Cherry ran for the slit trench. She hurled herself flat in the dirt and grabbed the arm of the unseen person she had landed on.

“Any nurses in this trench?” Cherry gasped out.

“Yes!” Vivian shouted back. “Bertha and Marie and me.”

“We’ve got to get to the patients!” Cherry jammed down her helmet, felt for the gas mask which the nurses carried at all times, and stood up in the shallow trench.

A bursting shell screamed on the beach and Cherry’s figure was silhouetted in its red light. “Come on!” she ordered.

She ran, with the three nurses stumbling behind her, through a wild confusion of flying dirt and smoke and
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whistling shells. She was not thinking; her previous military training automatically thought for her now.

Her fear was a live, useful thing that drove her to animal caution against this crashing world. She had to marshal the nurses. Here was the terrible emergency for which they had drilled and organized. They had to get to the patients—to carry them out of the ward tents and into slit trenches. Were any of the tents hit?

Panting and choking, she peered over her shoulder to see Vivian and Marie and Bertha racing to their own wards. Their trousered figures in the broken light, bent half double, seemed to run in slow motion, so long did each terrible moment last under fire. Someone seized Cherry’s arm. It was Captain Penrose, the corpsmen’s commander.

“Ward 2 is hit! I’ve detailed twenty corpsmen over there, evacuating!” he yelled.

“Any killed?”

“No, don’t think so.” Another shell crashed on the beach and drowned out some of his words. “—corpsmen are all on the job—going to Ward 2 myself—you better go on to the other wards, Ames!”

“Right!” Cherry sprinted off toward the ward tents and huts huddled under the limp palm trees. The trees swayed and their fronds nearly brushed the ground under the roar of the wind which the buzzing, low-diving Jap planes had whirled up. Then there was a shattering
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roar from the beach, so loud and close that Cherry staggered. From the heart of the island came two more earth-shaking concussions that nearly deafened her.

She suddenly realized, “That’s our own anti-aircraft!

That’s our own heavy guns taking care of us!” Then she realized the unseen planes were fleeing and screaming away, out over the water. A great pillar of flame lifted from where Ward 2 had been.

Cherry’s fear turned to fury. The beasts, inhuman killers! Bombing a hospital. Bombing the helpless wounded!

She ran, thinking faster than she ever had before, thinking clearly and purposefully. Never mind Ward 2.

The corpsmen and Captain Penrose were taking care of that. She had to get to the other wards. Find out if any other ward was hit. How many casualties? Were any of the nurses wounded and unable to work? Was Operating Room left standing? How lucky that our anti-aircraft men had driven the strafing planes away before they had more than a minute or two to kill!

There was another terrific crash, screams, and Cherry inanely noticed that the white-gleaming radium hands on her wrist watch had stopped under the shattering explosion. As she entered the first ward, she heard the mighty roar of answering American anti-aircraft fire.

The ward was in good order. She hastened through the other wards and found that they were in good order,
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too. The nurses were tense and white-faced, but calm, and working fast to evacuate their patients. The soldier-patients, most of whom already had tasted enemy fire, lay stoically tight-lipped, as corpsmen lifted them from cots onto litters on the floor, ready to be taken out should it be necessary. From Ward 2, where the fire was almost extinguished, corpsmen were carrying out litters. A spare tent was rapidly going up near by to house these bombed-out patients. Anti-aircraft on Island 14 thundered, then lulled, repeatedly, and in the lulls it was possible to hear voices again. “Everything all right?” Cherry anxiously asked over and over again. And each brave nurse replied, “My ward is all right, Cherry!” Then Cherry saw to it that the nurses received supplies, and she started some of the corpsmen to taking records of the new admissions.

In this nightmare Cherry lost all track of time. It must have been an hour, or an hour and a half later, when Major Pierce called her. She went out of Mai Lee’s tent and found him standing with one hand on his medical kit, the other on his pistol holster. He still wore a soiled operating coat, with kit and pistol strapped over it. He looked at Cherry with hard eyes.

“Captain Wilson—the young mess officer—

he——”

Cherry did not want to ask. “He was hit?”

“He’s dead.”

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Cherry’s throat constricted. That nice, tall young Texan. He’d been so generous and friendly with everybody—he’d helped make their party a success. The Japs had killed him. Young Captain Wilson, with his friendly grin, dead.

Major Pierce kicked the broken earth with his foot.

“There were three more killed. An anti-aircraft man down on the beach. An infantry messenger. And a corpsman. The corpsman—Max, you remember Max?

—he ran out in the thick of it to save a patient. Nine-teen years old, he was.” Cherry saw then that tears ran down Major Pierce’s face and he was not even aware of them. He said sharply: