Deschin ran to the bodies in the street. He grabbed Borsa beneath the arms, and dragged him across the wet cobblestones toward the granary.
Churcher climbed out of the gutter and, ignoring his own wound, did the same with Rosenthal’s body. “Bastards!” he said bitterly as they dragged the two down a short flight of steps into the basement of the bombed-out granary. “It’s the church, Gillette. You were right.”
A few miles away, on a broad plain that stretches beneath San Gimignano, an Allied Field Hospital had been set up. Rain drummed on the canvas tents. Water gushed in runoff trenches cut beneath the sagging overhangs. Tent flaps snapped noisily in the wind.
Sarah Winslow dashed between rows of wounded men on stretchers and entered a supply tent.
A doctor and nurse, in blood-spattered operating whites, were standing in two inches of water, working feverishly on a wounded GI. He lay on a stretcher set across two fifty-gallon fuel drums. A tray containing medical instruments lay atop a third. Light came from a bare bulb hung from the apex of the tent. A gust of wind followed Sarah inside and set the bulb swinging, creating moving shadows in the operational field.
“Dammit,” the doctor said. “Steady that light.”
Sarah grasped it and stopped the movement. “Sorry, I didn’t expect you’d be in here.”
“OR’s jammed up. He couldn’t wait,” the doctor replied, and indicating the soldier’s bloody abdominal cavity, added, “Pull back on that retractor.”
Sarah did it automatically. “I’ve got a kid out there,” she said, looking torn. “He’s bleeding to death.”
“So’s he,” the doctor replied curtly.
Sarah felt like she’d been punched. She’d been in the field almost a year, but the idea of young men dying because they couldn’t be treated in time still devastated her.
“Thanks, Sarah,” the doctor said when he had things under control. “Do what you can for your kid. I’ll come find you when I’m finished.”
On his first word, Sarah turned to the shelves behind her and filled her haversack with the medical supplies she’d come for originally.
She hurried from the tent into the downpour, and ran to a wounded GI. Her knees plopped into the mud next to the stretcher. Blood seeped from beneath it, mixing with the rainwater. Sarah gently peeled away the GI’s tattered shirt, exposing a massive chest wound. She took packets of sulfur from her haversack, tore off the tops, and dumped the yellow powder into the hole.
“What’s your name, soldier?”
The kid grimaced, holding off the pain. “Cochran, ma’am,” he answered. “Tommy Cochran.”
Sarah smiled. Despite lack of sleep and stress, her face still glowed with a special beauty. “Mine’s Sarah.” She made some gauze pads into a thick wad, pushed it into his chest, and held it there.
The soldier’s lower lip was trembling like a child’s. “I’m not going to make it, am I?”
“Sure you are, Tommy,” she replied. “I’ve seen a lot of these. You’re going to be as good as new.”
She only half-lied, she thought. She had seen similar injuries — but seen few GIs survive them. Her mind drifted to Zachary, who was somewhere in the Pacific. And she hoped with all her heart that no one was doing for him what she was doing for Tommy Cochran right now. They had been married about a year when Zack enlisted in the Marines. And Sarah quickly knew she couldn’t sit home in Dunbarton waiting, wondering. She was working for a doctor in private practice, and the day he was drafted, she enlisted as an Army nurse.
She looked down and saw blood had soaked the gauze pads and was oozing in thick pools between her fingers.
“Got a cigarette?” Cochran asked weakly.
“Sure,” she said, hiding her concern. She slipped a cigarette from her pocket, lit it, and took several deep drags, then put it to Cochran’s lips. But he didn’t respond. All along she could feel his heart pushing beneath her palm — and now she felt it stop.
A muddy truck pulled to a stop nearby. Deschin jumped out and helped Churcher from the cab. He slung an arm over the Russian’s shoulders, and they started walking between the tents.
Sarah pulled Cochran’s pancho up over his face, and hurried after them. Churcher was stumbling in the ruts when she caught up and wrapped an arm around his waist to help support him.
“This way,” she said commandingly, leading them toward an aid station. Another nurse met them at the entrance and directed them inside to a cubicle, where she went about tending to Churcher’s wound.
Sarah moistened some gauze pads with a disinfectant and brought it to the cuts on Deschin’s face.
“No time,” he said, pushing her hand aside. “I left a man in San Gimignano. He’s badly wounded.”
“I’ll go with you.”
Deschin shook his head no emphatically. “Too dangerous. It’s behind enemy lines.”
“They don’t shoot nurses,” Sarah replied.
“No, they rape them.”
“Not this one.”
Deschin studied her, taken by her spunk. “Hurry then,” he said, turning to leave.
“Aleksei!” Churcher’s voice rang out from where the nurse was working on his arm. “Don’t leave my copilot to the Krauts.”
“You have my word,” Deschin said.
Sarah grabbed a haversack of medical supplies, went back to the truck with Deschin, and got in next to Ettore. Deschin was about to follow when a motorcycle ground to a stop in the mud next to him. The courier had a dispatch addressed to:
Gillette Blue
Sector 43-N
By Courier
Deschin removed the dispatch which read:
STATIC MY ASS! SAFETY RAZOR.
Deschin laughed and got into the truck. It was soon sloshing through rivers of mud that had once been cow paths and back roads. Flashes of lightning flickered behind the mountains. The three drove through the rain in silence. Deschin’s hand clutched his carbine, eyes searching the terrain for German troops.
Sarah was leaning back studying the intense Russian out of the corner of her eye. He’d brought wounded partisans to the field hospital several times. And she was reflecting on how their eyes had met, and how she’d found his unique looks and fractured English appealing. But she was very much in love with Zachary.
The rain intensified as the truck pulled up behind the bombed-out granary. Sarah slipped an arm through the strap of her haversack. Ettore took a stretcher from the truck, and they followed Deschin through the trees, over rubble that surrounded the granary, and down the staircase into the basement.
Borsa and Rosenthal lay amidst burlap sacks filled with flour and unmilled grain, where Deschin and Churcher had left them. Deschin had put one of the sacks beneath the Italian’s legs to keep them raised and minimize blood loss; it was stained crimson now, prompting Deschin to hurry to Borsa’s side.
“Giancarlo? Giancarlo, can you hear me?” Deschin asked intensely.
Borsa nodded slightly, and grimaced in pain.
The vacant stare of the dead American caught Sarah’s eye as she knelt next to Borsa. She bit a lip, prepared a syringe, pushed up Borsa’s sleeve, and shot the morphine into him. Deschin had already taken a bottle of plasma from her haversack, and Sarah pushed the needle into Borsa’s vein. The blood on his pants had congealed, and they’d become matted to his legs. She scissored the bullet-torn fabric loose, then cleansed, disinfected, and wrapped the wounds in temporary bandages.
Throughout, Deschin watched admiringly at the efficient manner in which Sarah worked. Her eyes darting, evaluating, deciding; her hands moving with swift precision. When she finished, Deschin and Ettore slid Borsa onto the stretcher, carried it across the basement, and up the staircase into the rain.