“Would you please move that contraption,” came a doctor’s angry voice. “This is a hospital, not Hollywood Squares.”
Marte smiled graciously and asked where she might conduct the interview with Captain Brentwood, who was visiting his “wounded comrades.” The doctor, oblivious to the correspondent’s charm, raised his lab coat’s blood-spattered arm and pointed brusquely to an orderly behind them, near the elevator. “Ask him.”
“Thank you. Captain Brentwood’s a Medal of Honor recipient,” Marte said, “and—”
But the doctor had already walked away, informing incoming paramedics that they’d have to use their ambulance gurneys as beds for their patients. “No more room.”
Marte Price worked her charm on the orderly, who steered them to a room down by a supply room.
“They’re all dead in there,” the orderly said. “It’ll be quiet, though.”
After entering the dark room, there was something wrong with the light switch. Marte’s cameraman, turning on his video’s light, started in fright. So did David. “Jesus!” said the cameraman. A man was standing by one of the beds. “Who are you?”
“Captain Rorke.”
Marte Price’s shock at hearing the strangely disembodied voice in the nearly dark room was immediately pushed aside by her realization that she’d lucked out. “Rorke? John Rorke?”
“Gold, Jerry,” the cameraman told Marte. “Pure gold.”
She knew it. Forget the wounded. An exclusive interview with the Utah captain — they’d have to find his cap, she thought, or one like it, wet and oily, if possible — would be more impressive. “Can we bring in more lights?” she asked Rorke.
“Maybe one. No more. She’s in enough pain already. It’ll blind her.”
David Brentwood, his eyes now accustomed to the semidarkness, the pervasive atmosphere of burned oil and flesh about him and the wokka-wokka sound of rescue helicopters, still bringing in wounded, was momentarily brought back to the cave during the Pave Low’s approach.
Now, in the glow of the other light that was brought in, he saw the patient, her face badly scorched, a skull cap of white bandages where her hair had been, and a semi-oval, torso-length frame, like a wooden cage, from her neck down to her waist. Rorke, seeing David’s concern, explained to him that the frame was to keep the sheet from touching the part of her that must have been burned above the waterline as she struggled, like hundreds of others, to escape the encroaching firespills spawned by ruptured hydraulic lines on the sub.
David sensed that Rorke’s vigil was more than that of a commander trying to comfort his crew. “What was she doing on the sub?” he asked softly. He knew Congress was pushing for women on subs, since other countries had already initiated such a program, but David guessed this would be the first female combat death on a sub.
Rorke didn’t answer, and it took a few seconds for David to realize that the skipper of America’s most potent weapons platform — the ex-skipper, rather — wasn’t refusing to answer but was suffering from tinnitus, the ringing in the ears that so often followed the noise of massive detonations. In Rorke’s case it had been the horrendous roar of explosions that ripped his prized boat apart and killed most of his crew.
“What was her job?” David asked Rorke, his voice raised above the noise of the cameraman setting up.
“Civilian specialist,” John Rorke replied.
David nodded knowingly. “What’s her name?”
“Alicia,” said Rorke softly. “Alicia Mayne,” and David understood, in a flash, that Rorke had been in love, was in love, with the dying woman.
In one of those moments that sometimes only complete strangers share in the darkened interior of a night flight or train, knowing they’ll probably never meet again, when the heart is unashamed and free, Brentwood, a man whose natural inclination was to always mind his own business, never to intrude, asked, “Can she hear you at all?”
“If I lean close.”
“Stay close,” David told him. “Close as you can.”
David knew Rorke didn’t want to be part of any interview but probably felt duty bound to do so. David walked over to Marte Price. “Let’s do a ward tour,” he said. “I’ll speak to some of the wounded.”
She thanked him but said that first she wanted an interview with Rorke.
“No, you do me with the wounded.”
“Captain Brentwood, I’ll decide when and who—”
David looked over at the submariner. “Captain Rorke will do an interview with you. CNN exclusive. In an hour.” He turned to the cameraman then. “Let’s go down the corridor, try to keep out of the staff’s way—” He had to stop talking until the thudding of a Coast Guard chopper’s blades faded from the hospital’s parking lot. “I’ll give you an interview. I’ll give you my background on the way,” he told Marte Price.
Marte saw there was no arguing with this Brentwood. He’d come across initially as a lamb — now he was a lion. This medal thing had gone to his head. “I’ve already got your background,” she said. “You’re supposed to be the shy and retiring type. The ’Aw, shucks’ hero.”
“Do we have a deal?”
“An exclusive with you, Captain Rorke?” Marte asked. “Fox guys are everywhere.”
“Exclusive,” agreed Rorke.
Before he left the room to join the PR rep, Marte Price, and her cameraman in the blinding white light of the corridor’s heavy traffic of hospital staff, David spoke quietly to John Rorke. “You need anything, Captain?”
“I don’t think so.”
“You were last wounded in Afghanistan, right?” Marte Price asked David as they moved down the hellish corridor.
“Yes,” he told her. “That’s right.”
“At Tora Bora?”
“Yes.”
“Can you tell me what happened?” In the public ward, they could hear the desperate cries of the wounded not yet treated with painkillers, pending diagnosis from doctors who, despite help from the Whidbey Island Navy medics, remained overwhelmed.
“We’re out of morphine!” a harried nurse reported. They’d all begun calmly and professionally, but the sheer fatigue of overload was drowning the best intentions.
“Use Demerol.”
“It’s gone.”
A drugged young submariner was pleading with a doctor not to amputate his leg. It had in fact already been taken off, but he was feeling the phantom sensation of it, his arms and legs bandaged so heavily that he couldn’t remove the sheet or bed covers to check, and everyone else was too busy.
With Freeman asleep, Aussie Lewis had been monitoring the IR feed from Darkstar’s last leg home between Cape Flattery near Tatoosh Island eastward to Port Angeles when he noticed what appeared to be a sea-air-interface anomaly very close in to the coast, which was indented by caves, both hot and cold. The zoom didn’t help much because the number of pixels making up the picture diluted the color of the surrounding sea as well, so there now appeared a less distinct variation between the color of the suspected anomaly and the water about it. But the zoom did show him that the patch he’d zeroed in on wasn’t so much circular as a tadpole shape.
On his own recognizance, Aussie called the Coast Guard at Port Angeles, keeping his voice low, so as not to wake Freeman, whose sheepdog-like snoring reverberated through the motel room. He explained what he’d seen and on the general’s behalf requested that the Port Angeles Coast Guard station send out a fast RIB to have a look-see.