In at the Death (10 page)

“I promise, Doc.” The senior medic crossed his heart. Billie Jean laughed.

Ten minutes later, corpsmen brought a soldier with a hand wound into the aid station. He’d passed out, or he would have come in under his own power. One look at the injury told O’Doull the hand would have to go. He hated to do it, but he didn’t see any way to save the mangled remnants. He wished Vince were there to pass gas, but he could act as his own anesthetist.

“What happened to the guy, Eddie?” he asked as he put the ether cone over the wounded man’s mouth and nose. “Do you know? This is about as ugly a hand wound as I’ve ever seen.”

“I thought the same thing, Doc,” the corpsman answered. “He was by a boulder when we found him, and the boulder had blood all over it. I’m guessing, but I’d say a big old chunk of shell casing mashed his hand against the rock.”

O’Doull nodded. “Sounds reasonable. But he’ll have to make do with a hook from here on out. I hope he wasn’t left-handed, that’s all.”

“Didn’t even think of that.” Eddie looked and sounded surprised.

The amputation went as well as an operation like that could. The cutting was over in a hurry; patching things up, as usual, took longer. At last, O’Doull said, “Well, that’s about all I can do. Poor bastard won’t like it when he wakes up.”

“Any other doc would’ve done the same thing—only not as well, chances are,” Eddie said. They’d worked together a long time.

“Thanks,” O’Doull said wearily. “I’d like a drink, but I think I’ll settle for a cigarette.” He stepped outside the aid tent to light up. He’d smoked the Raleigh almost down to the butt when he happened to look at his watch. An hour and five minutes had passed since Vince Donofrio decided to walk Billie Jean home, and he wasn’t back. O’Doull swore in disgust. He didn’t care if Vince had got lucky. The medic wouldn’t think he was by the time O’Doull got through with him.

Finding soldiers for a search party was the easiest thing in the world. He waved to the first squad he saw coming up the road and told them what he needed. The Army had made him a major so he could give enlisted men orders. “Right,” said the corporal in charge of the squad. “So what do we do if we catch him laying this broad?”

“Throw cold water on him, pull him off, and haul his sorry ass back here,” O’Doull replied angrily, which made the soldiers grin. They went off with a spring in their step and a gleam in their eye.

When they weren’t back in half an hour or so—and when Donofrio, shamefaced or not, didn’t show up on his own—O’Doull started to worry. He almost welcomed a man with a leg wound. Patching it up let him think about other things besides the medic and why he might be missing. Why the devil had he let Donofrio go? But he knew the answer to that: because Vince would have sulked and fumed for days if he hadn’t, and life was too short. But if life turned out to be literally too short…

By the time another hour went by, O’Doull began to dread what would happen when the search party came back. Then they did. One look at the corporal’s face told him he hadn’t wasted his time worrying. “What happened?” he asked.

“Both dead,” the noncom said grimly. “Beaten, stomped, kicked—you name it, they got it, the guy and the gal both. We found ’em in a field not far from the side of the road. The medic’s holster was empty, so his pistol’s gone. Some goddamn Confederate’s got it now.”

“Jesus!” O’Doull felt sick. He’d never been responsible for a man’s death like this before. Plenty of wounded soldiers had died while he was working on them, but he was doing his goddamnedest to save them. Here, one word—
no
—would have saved Vince Donofrio. It would have, but he hadn’t said it. He forced out the next question: “What now?”

“Sir, I’ve already talked to a line officer,” the squad leader said. “We beat the bushes for the motherfuckers who did it. We take hostages. We put out the call for the guilty bastards to give themselves up. Then we blow the fuckin’ hostages’ heads off.” He sounded as if he looked forward to serving in the firing squad.

“Jesus!” O’Doull said again. “How many people are going to die because Vince thought Billie Jean was cute?”

“She wasn’t cute when we found her, sir,” the corporal said. “They…Well, shit, you don’t want to hear about that. But she wasn’t. Neither was he.”

O’Doull crossed himself. “I shouldn’t have let him go. But he liked her looks, and I didn’t think anything would happen this time, so—”

“You never think anything’ll happen
this
time,” the corporal said. “Only sometimes it does.”

“Yeah. Sometimes it does.” O’Doull covered his face with his hands. “Here’s one I’ll carry on my conscience the rest of my life.” Yes, this was much worse than losing a patient on the table.

“We’ll get ’em,” the corporal said. “Or if we don’t, we’ll get enough of the bastards who might have done it to make the rest of the assholes around here think twice before they try anything like that again.”

“Fat lot of good any of that will do Vince,” O’Doull said.

“Sir, I’m sorry as hell about that. It’s part of the war around these parts,” the corporal said. “Sooner or later, I expect we’ll put the fear of God into the Confederates.”

That wouldn’t do Vince Donofrio any good, either. O’Doull didn’t say so—what was the use? The noncom saluted and led his squad away. Eddie came up to O’Doull. “Not your fault, Doc,” he said. “You just did what anybody else would’ve done.”

“I guess so,” O’Doull said. “But if it went wrong when somebody else did it, it’d be his fault, right? So how come it’s not mine?”

“You couldn’t know he’d run into bushwhackers,” the corpsman said.

“No, but I could know—hell, I did know—he might, and I let him go anyway. Shit.” O’Doull wanted to get into the medicinal brandy, but he didn’t think he deserved it. He wished a wounded man would come in so he’d be too busy to brood about what had happened—he could drown his sorrows in work as well as alcohol. But the poor slob who’d have to stop something so he could get busy didn’t deserve that.

After a while, deserving or not, a soldier with a smashed shoulder came in. Acting as his own anesthetist again, O’Doull did what he could to clean out the wound and fix it up. Eddie assisted, long on willingness but not on skill.
Have to get a new senior medic
, O’Doull thought. He’d worked with Granny McDougald for a couple of years, with Vince Donofrio for only about three months. Now somebody else would have to figure out his quirks and foibles.

The local commandant wasted no time. Soldiers seized hostages that afternoon. They gave the men who’d ambushed Vince and Billie Jean forty-eight hours to surrender. If not…Well, if not it was a tough war all the way around.

“Has anybody ever given himself up?” O’Doull asked Major Himmelfarb, who’d sent out the ultimatum.

“It does happen once in a blue moon,” the line officer answered. “Some of these bastards are proud of what they’ve done. They’re willing—hell, they’re eager—to die for their country.” He shrugged. “We oblige ’em.”

No one came forward to admit to killing Vince Donofrio and the girl whose finger he’d sewn up. Major Himmelfarb asked O’Doull if he wanted to watch the hostages die. He shuddered and shook his head. “No, thanks. I see enough bullet wounds every day. It won’t bring Vince back, either.”

“That’s a fact.” Major Himmelfarb looked as if he wanted to call O’Doull soft but didn’t think he could. Instead, he went on, “Maybe it will keep some other dumb, horny U.S. soldier from getting his dick cut off. We can hope so, anyway.”

“Right,” O’Doull said tightly, wishing the other officer hadn’t told him that. Sometimes you found out more than you wanted to know. He hoped the medic was dead by then.

U.S. custom was to assemble the people from the nearest town—here, it was Loganville, Georgia—to witness hostage executions and, with luck, to learn from them. Nobody in the CSA seemed to have learned much from them yet. O’Doull listened to one flat, sharp volley of rifle fire after another in the middle distance: twenty-five in all. Before they got to the last one, he did dip into the brandy. It didn’t do a damn bit of good.

He kept wondering if Billie Jean’s father or brothers or maybe even husband (had she worn a wedding ring?—he didn’t remember, and Vince wouldn’t have cared) would show up at the aid station. Then he wondered if those people were part of the crowd that had got the girl and the medic. Would they have lulled them into a false sense of security before springing the trap? He never found out.

Eddie stayed in the aid tent as his first assistant for three days. Then the replacement depot coughed up a new senior medic, a sergeant named, of all things, Goodson Lord. He was tall and blond and handsome—he really might have been God’s gift to women, unlike poor Donofrio, who only thought he was.

O’Doull greeted him with a fishy stare. “How hard do you chase skirt?” he demanded.

“Not very much, sir,” Lord answered. Something in his voice made O’Doull give him a different kind of fishy look: did he chase men instead? Well, if he did, he’d damn well know he had to be careful about that. Queers didn’t have an easy time of it anywhere.

“Make sure you don’t, not around here,” was all O’Doull thought he could say. “The guy you’re replacing did, and they murdered him for it.” Sergeant Lord nodded without another word of his own.

When a U.S. soldier came in with a bullet in the hip, Lord proved plenty capable. He knew much more than Eddie, and probably more than poor Vince had. The aid station would run just fine. That was O’Doull’s biggest concern. Everything else took second place, and a distant second to boot.

A
rmstrong Grimes and his platoon leader crouched—sprawled, really—in a shell hole northeast of Covington, Georgia. Armstrong was wet and cold. A hard, nasty rain had started in the middle of the night and showed no signs of letting up. The Confederates had a machine gun in a barn half a mile ahead. Every so often, it would fire a burst and make the U.S. soldiers keep their heads down.

“Wish we had a couple of barrels in the neighborhood,” Armstrong said. “They’d quiet that fucker down in a hurry. Even a mortar team would do the trick.”

“Well, it’s not that you’re wrong, Sergeant,” Lieutenant Bassler replied. “But what we’ve got is—us. We’re going to have to take that gun out, too. We leave it there, it stalls a battalion’s worth of men.”

“Yes, sir,” Armstrong said resignedly. It wasn’t that Bassler was wrong, either. But approaching a machine gun wasn’t one of the more enjoyable jobs infantry got.

“For once, the rain helps,” Bassler said. “Bastards in there won’t be able to see us coming so well.”

“Yes, sir,” Armstrong said again. He knew what that meant. They’d be able to get closer to the gun before it knocked them down.

“You take your squad around toward the back of the barn,” Bassler said. “I’ll lead another group toward the front. We ought to be able to work our way in pretty close, and then we’ll play it by ear.”

“Yes, sir,” Armstrong said one more time. He didn’t have anything else to say, not here. Bassler wasn’t just coming along. He’d given himself the more dangerous half of the mission. You
wanted
to follow an officer who did things like that.

“All right, then. I’ll give you ten minutes to gather your men. We’ll move out at”—Bassler checked his watch—“at 0850, and I’ll see you by the barn.”

“0850. Yes, sir. See you there.” Armstrong scrambled out of the hole and wiggled off toward the men he led. The machine gun opened up on him, but halfheartedly, as if the crew wasn’t sure it was really shooting at anything. He dove into another hole, then came out and kept going.

“Password!” That was a U.S. accent.

“Remembrance,” Armstrong said, and then, “It’s me, Squidface.”

“Yeah, I guess it is, Sarge,” the PFC answered. “Come on. What’s up? We goin’ after that fuckin’ gun?”

“Is the Pope Catholic?” Armstrong said. “Our guys go to the right, the lieutenant goes to the left, and when we get close whoever sees the chance knocks it out. Will you take point?”

Squidface was little and skinny and nervous—he made a good point man, and a good point man made everybody else likely to live longer. But even the best point man was more likely to get shot than his buddies. He was there to sniff out trouble, sometimes by running into it.

“Yeah, I’ll do it.” Squidface didn’t sound enthusiastic, but he didn’t say no. “Who you gonna put in behind me?”

“I’ll go myself,” Armstrong said. “Zeb the Hat after me, then the rest of the guys. Or do you have some other setup you like better?”

“No, that oughta work,” Squidface said. “If anything works, I mean. If the guys at the gun decide to go after us—”

“Yeah, we’re screwed in that case,” Armstrong agreed. “You got plenty of grenades? Need ’em for a job like this.”

“I got ’em,” Squidface said. “Don’t worry about that.”

“Good. We move at 0850.”

Armstrong gathered up the rest of his squad. Nobody was thrilled about going after the machine gun, but nobody hung back, either. At 0850 on the dot, they trotted toward the barn. The rain had got heavier. Armstrong liked that. Not only would it veil them from the gunners, the drum and drip would mask the noise they made splashing through puddles.

Somewhere off to the left, Lieutenant Bassler’s men were moving, too.
Maybe it’ll be easy
, Armstrong thought hopefully.
Maybe the guys at the gun won’t know we’re around till we get right on top of them. Maybe
—

The gun started hammering. Despite the rain, Armstrong had no trouble seeing the muzzle flashes. They all seemed to be aimed right at him. He yipped and hit the dirt—hit the mud, rather.

Nobody behind him screamed, so he dared hope the burst missed the men he led, too. He peered ahead. He didn’t see Squidface on his feet, but nobody with his head on straight would have stayed upright when the machine gun cut loose.

He hoped the platoon commander and his guys were taking advantage of all this. They could be getting close…

Then the hateful gun started up again. This time, it was aimed away from Armstrong and his squad. “Up!” he shouted. “Get cracking!” He splashed forward. And there was Squidface, up and running, too. Armstrong breathed a silent sigh of relief. He’d feared he would lope past the point man’s corpse.