Sons of Thunder (25 page)

He spent the past three years praying she’d simply—wander back into his life.

“Got a light, sir?”

The voice came from a sergeant sprawled by the door, his leg encased in a field dressing. He held up a Camel. Coughed.

“Sorry, no. But I’ll track one down for you.”

Thankfully, this morning’s rain had diffused the scourge of war, but it created a swamp in the yard. No wonder they’d moved the patients inside.

The German 88s continued to batter the horizon. An acrid haze of smoke hung in the air, scratched his eyes. Burning rubber. Or—animal.

Dino picked his way over to the well, pumped it, bent his head down, and let the spray hit his neck. At least the knot between his shoulder blades eased. He hadn’t realized his own exhaustion. He’d done sixteen hours on his feet before, but not after dodging land mines and scrabbling his way through smoke, chaos, and death to the operating room.

He counted his blessings, however, that he hadn’t been assigned to the First Airborne Surgical team. He only recognized a handful of his fellow surgeons who had the fiber to drop in with the rest of the 101
^st
as a part of the 326 Medical Company.

He’d come in on foot. The easy way.

The high rumble of a plane engine tremored in the sky. A few soldiers looked up, searching for it. Dino braced himself as, in the distance, a 105 anti-aircraft gun erupted, spitting at the bird from the ground. His entire body shook with the sound.

Yes, he could go deaf under the battering of the German guns.

Behind the cough, he made out the whining, mechanical roar of a tank. In a way, the metal beasts frightened him most of all. More than the 105s’ flak guns with their thunder, or the MG42 machine guns with
their ripping growl, a tank’s clanky rumble could travel up his spine and crush him with its menace. He’d seen them rip apart the beaches, eviscerate the strongholds of the Germans. Crush a bunker filled with grimy soldiers.

With everything inside him, Dino wanted to flee the thunder of the tanks.

Still, he stayed by the pump, water saturating his collar, dripping down his spine as the tank cleared the road and rumbled into the courtyard.

A slew of American soldiers rode atop it as if it might be some sort of massive beast of burden. It argued itself to a stop, and they scrambled down, began shouting. One in particular—obviously a commander—gestured toward the back, and sure enough, from the tail appeared two men on stretchers, borne by their buddies. They jogged them to the triage area.

“We need some help over here!” the commander yelled, no question in his demeanor, with his wide shoulders, the stain of blood turning his fatigues black. He held his Tommy gun in one white-fisted hand.

Something about the voice, the faint soured tone of an accent, faltered Dino’s step.

Still, Dino ran to the injured men. The first clutched his helmet across his chest, moaning—or singing? One look at his unfocused gray eyes told Dino they’d overdosed just a smidge on morphine. A field dressing, sopping with blood, draped his lower leg, and closer examination made Dino grimace. “We have a near amputation at the ankle.” He nodded to the nurse who directed the litter inside. This one he might be able to save.

The next victim—he looked eighteen—or even sixteen—where did they get these kids?—lay white-faced, and miraculously, or perhaps
pitifully, awake. A medic, probably with bullets chipping up dirt and pinging off his helmet, had made a crude but admirable attempt at stitching an abdominal wound. This one would need a resection of bowel, perhaps, maybe even a repair of the small intestine.

“Get this soldier upstairs, stat.” Dino got up, shaking off his fatigue. Turned to follow the boy.

A hand grabbed his arm. “Save him, Doc. He’s a keeper.”

Dino stared at the commander, his helmet pushed back to reveal muddy dark hair, dark blue eyes. His face bore days of filth, grime embedded in his grizzle, and he reeked of swamp and blood and smoke. The battery only made him appear a bona fide hero.

As if he’d walked through Hades…and lived.

No
, it couldn’t be. Dino couldn’t speak, his mouth opening, his chest imploding. No—

And then the commander saw it too, his face paling as he stepped back, blinking, holding up his hand as if pushing away the truth.

The disbelief.

“Markos…,” Dino whispered.

A half laugh, half chortle, mostly a huff of joy— “Dino.
Dino!”
And then the commander slung his arm around Dino’s neck, pulling him to himself. “Oh, God, thank You! Dino!”

Dino didn’t know how to embrace this man, his brother. Instead, he just stood like an idiot as Markos thumped him on the back, nearly buckling his knees. “Dino!”

He set him back, and Dino drank him in. Wider. Taller. Darker. Strong hands, built for battle. Of course he’d have a troop of soldiers following him. “I—thought you were dead.”

Oh, perfect. And the irony. He made a face—

Markos just stood there grinning, one side of his mouth tipping up, a
different kind of mischief in his eyes. “I was.” He clamped Dino around the neck, touched his forehead to his, eyes shining. “I was.”

Then, as Dino scrambled for—well, any intelligible response—Markos leaned back, banging him on the shoulder. “I should have known you’d become a doc. Go—take care of my soldier, little brother.”

He should feel joy.

“Doctor, his pressure is dropping.” Vivi stood beside Dino, her finger pressed to the pulse of Markos’s soldier—Private Burke—while Dino’s hands probed deep into the boy’s gullet, searching for the last perforation, the one that kept filling the cavity with blood.

“I need more O neg.”

Take care of my soldier, little brother.

Relief, perhaps. That’s what he should be feeling.

“He’s crashing, doc.”

“I can’t find the bleeding.” He didn’t mean the bite of his words, but he’d spent more than two hours repairing the damage done by the fragments of a land mine—a lacerated liver, one kidney destroyed, his stomach turned into chewed meat, his intestines tangled. “I’m missing something.”

“Doctor—”

“I need five hundred milligrams of epinephrine.”

Vivian pressed the drug into the soldier’s IV. Checked for a pulse.

Anger. He definitely felt anger. “C’mon, Private!”

“Nothing yet, Doc.”

“I need that blood, nurse.”

“We’re trying—”

“Try harder!”

Vivi shot him a look, and he ignored it.
C’mon, c’mon.
“I’m getting a pulse.”

Dino pressed his stethoscope to the boy’s chest, confirmed a thready rhythm.

“I’ve got to find that leak.”

Vivi stood across from him, gauze in one hand, a suction tube in the other.

“Try to keep his chest clear. Here!” He grabbed her hand, directed the suction to the right location.

She jerked under his grip.

Okay, he knew exactly how she felt. And it had nothing to do with joy or relief or even anger.

“He’s coding again.”

Dino ran his arm across his forehead, his body trembling. Night slicked into the room, turning the operating room freakish under glaring bulb lights. For a moment, he was back in his rotation through the morgue, smelling the formaldehyde, the murky cold seeping into his bones.

“Private, you are
not
dying today!” Dino pounded on Burke’s chest with a fist, began CPR again.

“Sir—he’s gone. He’s too wounded. You can’t save him.”

“I can—just give him another round of epinephrine.”

“I’ve already given him three rounds. Sir, he came in beyond hope—you did more than anyone could have expect—”

“He’s
not
beyond hope. I just have to stop the bleeding. I can fix this!”

“Doctor!” Vivian clamped her hand on his arm. “There’s no pulse. He’s gone. There’s nothing more you can do.”

“Go…take care of my soldier, little brother.”

“Live, damn you!”

But Private Burke refused to live, of course.

Dino stood over him, Vivi’s hand clamped on his arm, a tight grip that told him perhaps he’d lost a little—or perhaps too much—of himself on the table.

He backed away from the corpse, held his hands up, as if in surrender. Blood dripped onto the floor as he stared at the mess—the tubes, the bloodied gauze, the flesh torn beyond recognition. Beyond hope.

“Time of death.” He glanced at the clock. “8:05 p.m.”

Vivi wrote it down. “I’ll clean up.”

“No. I’ll do it.” He turned his back to her, began to close the man’s wounds.

Sorry, Markos. So, so sorry.

The medics carted the private’s body away, and Dino began collecting the bloodied clothes, pads, instruments. Vivi hadn’t left, and silently she piled it all together in a sheet, dumping it into a hamper. The instruments she submerged in water for sterilization.

He caught her arm as she turned to leave, not looking at her. “Thank you.”

“I’m sorry, sir.”

He let go, but she didn’t move away. In fact, she turned to him, pressed her hand on his arm. “Doc, you’re a brilliant surgeon. You’ve put so many men back together and given them second chances. But you can’t save everyone. You’ll have plenty more opportunities tomorrow, unfortunately.”

She had a pixie nose and green eyes, and if he didn’t have so much scar tissue, he might have reached out to her. Instead, he stood there, feeling her warm hand on his arm, tasting the burn in his throat.

“I have to go find—my brother. And tell him I lost his man.”

CHAPTER 19

“Please tell me Private Burke is alive.” Markos sat propped against the rocky wall, away from the chaos of the courtyard, his fingers in a can of C-rations—what might be beef stew but looked just as appetizing as one of the muddy bogs indenting the French countryside. Smoke bit the air, the glow from burning houses or tires pulsing against the night. In the courtyard, men smoked cigarettes, coughing, slapping at mosquitoes. Firelight lit their faces, brutal shadows hollowing their eyes.

Dino stared at his clean hands, at the way they shook. Fisted them. “I’m sorry, Markos. He was in bad shape.”

Markos winced. Looked back down at his dinner. “He was a fighter, that kid.”

A fighter. Dino’s exhaustion shuddered through him as his eyes traced his brother’s form. He’d filled out—well, they both had, probably, but with Markos nearly thirty, he reminded him of their father, wide-shouldered, seaweed-tough hands. A square jaw, his face grizzled with whiskers, which parted at an open wound on his cheekbone. “Probably someone should take a look at that cut.”

“It’s fine. People are missing legs. I think I can handle a little scrape.” Markos took a slug from his canteen, wiped his mouth with his sleeve. “I missed our drop zone by miles—had to walk through most of the night before I found anyone from the 101
^st
. Dead troopers everywhere. I finally hooked up with a crew from Fox Company, and we bedded
down in a farmhouse. Woke up to find a slew of Jerries parked outside, chowing down breakfast—apparently, they’d liberated a number of eggs from the remaining chickens. Burke decided that he was hungry—and before I could put together a plan, he lit out of our bunker, hosing them all down. Took out the entire group.” He shook his head. “But not before they managed to tear him in half.” He pulled out a tin, the lid partially opened. “We saved him some eggs.”

Dino dug his thumbs into the palms of his clean hands, now chilling in the night. “I’m sorry, Markos.”

“It’s war.” Markos put the tin away. Stared at him, as if seeing him for the first time. Dino stood under his scrutiny, wondering if he saw the boy who’d dived off the boat in search of a turtle. Or perhaps the teen who resented him on the voyage to America. Perhaps the young man who wrestled him up the stairs after Uncle Jimmy’s beating.

He closed his eyes before Markos could see the man—whoever that was who had slept with the woman Markos loved.

“I never expected to see you here.”

“Where did you suppose I’d be?” Dino didn’t mean the sharp tone, but he let it remain, a knife between them in the dusky night, cutting away the images of the past.