Griffin W.E.B. - Honor Bound 01 - Honor Bound

Then he laid both pistols back on the table.

"The revolver has less recoil than the automatic," he observed calmly. "I would have thought the reverse."

A few seconds later, puffing from the exertion of running up the stairs, Comandante Habanzo rushed into the room with a .32 ACP Colt automatic in his hand.

"What are you doing with that?" Martin asked.

"I heard shots."

"You heard a car backfiring," Martin said. "Habanzo, do you remember offhand the number of the Military Hospital?"

"No, mi Coronel."

"Presumably, you have it written down somewhere?"

“S?, mi Coronel," Habanzo said, more than a little awkwardly stuffing his small automatic back into its shoulder holster and then producing a notebook.

[FOUR]

Room 305

Dr. Cosine Argerich Military Hospital

Calle Luis Maria Campos

Buenos Aires

0205 20 December 1942

Siren screaming, the ambulance, a 1937 Ford station wagon, pulled up to the emergency entrance of the hospital. The driver and his assistant jumped out, walked quickly to the rear, opened the doors, and pulled out the stretcher holding First Lieutenant Cletus Howell Frade, USMCR, under a thick wool blanket.

He raised his head. A gurney was being hastily wheeled to the station wagon under the supervision of a very large and stern-faced nurse. He was moved, none too gently, from the stretcher onto the gurney. The wool blanket from the ambulance was jerked off and replaced by a thinner cotton cover.

The gurney was then wheeled into the hospital, now accompanied by a man in a business suit, who made little effort to hide the .45 automatic he carried, riding high on his hip.

The gurney was rolled onto an elevator. It rose (three floors, Clete guessed) and stopped. It was then rolled down a corridor and into an operating room, which made Clete more than a little nervous.

He was transferred to an operating table. Its cold stainless steel was cool against his back and buttocks. A short, unpleasant-looking, mustachioed doctor in a white jacket bent over him, pried his eyelids apart, and shined a small flashlight in his eyes.

"I'm all right, Doctor," Clete said.

The doctor ignored him. He made a sweeping gesture with his hands, and the nurse snatched the thin hospital blanket away and then pulled off his boxer shorts.

Jesus Christ!

As the nurse wrapped a blood-pressure collar around his arm, the doctor applied a stethoscope to his chest and then his throat. She gave him a sharp shove so he would roll onto his side; and a moment later, he felt the annoying and humiliating insertion of an anal thermometer. He watched as someone dropped his bloody shorts into a stainless-steel tray.

The anal thermometer was finally removed, his temperature announced orally, and then repeated by a woman in hospital whites holding a clipboard.

He was moved back onto his back. His blood-pressure reading was announced orally, repeated by the woman with the clipboard, and then the large nurse inserted a needle in his left arm to draw blood.

That completed, the doctor made another sweeping gesture with his hand. And the nurse, using what looked like a miniature spatula, began scraping his body.

Martin said that was probably brain tissue.

He felt slightly nauseous when she carefully scraped the brain tissue off the first spatula with a second one. The tissue was dropped into a second stainless-steel tray.

He was then given two sponge baths, first with water, then with alcohol. His face, chest, and legs stung uncomfortably. And when he moved his left leg, the large nurse firmly pushed it down against the operating table.

His chest stung, and he put his hand to it. Her hand grabbed his.

"I itch, goddamn it, take your hand off!"

She did not. There was a test of arm strength.

"Let him," the doctor said.

He scratched, and was sorry he did; he felt a sharp pain.

A tray of instruments appeared. The doctor took a scalpel in one hand and a ferocious-looking set of tweezers in the other. Starting at Clete's forehead, he began to remove tiny pieces of tile, dropping each piece into still another stainless-steel tray.

There is a moral in this,Clete thought, wincing at the pain: When you shoot someone in the forehead, be sure of your backstop.

He smiled at his own wit. The doctor smiled, very insincerely, back at him.

Jesus Christ, you must be losing your marbles. You killed a man, and that's nothing to smile about. Not only killed him, shot him in cold blood. Well, maybe not cold blood. You were pretty goddamned pissed after seeing what they did to Se?ora Pellano. But the bottom line is you killed a defenseless man.

He closed his eyes and kept them closed until he sensed the doctor stand up after he finished working his way down his body with the scalpel and tweezers.

The large nurse then appeared with a stainless-steel bowl and what looked like a small paintbrush. She carefully wiped each small wound with an alcohol towel—it stung painfully. And then she painted each wound with the purple substance that was in the stainless-steel bowl—it stung even more painfully.

The doctor looked down at him once more.

"Thank you, Doctor," Clete said.

The doctor ignored him and disappeared.

The large nurse nudged him again, and he slid off the operating table back onto the gurney. The thin cotton blanket was once more draped over him, and the gurney was wheeled out of the operating room and down the corridor.

The man with the barely concealed .45 marched alongside.

"Wait!" he ordered curtly.

"I have inspected the room, Sir," another man said.

The man with the .45 grunted, and went into a room to conduct his own inspection. He came back out, carrying a telephone.

"You inspected the room, did you?"

The second man looked sheepish. The man with the .45 shook his head at him in tolerant disgust, then motioned for the gurney attendant to push Clete into the room.

"In the bed, please, Se?or," the man with the .45 said.

"I have to urinate," Clete said.

"Over there," the man said.

Clete walked naked to a small room equipped with a toilet, a bidet, and a shower.

When he returned, the room was empty.

It was also hot. The heavy vertical shutters had been lowered. When he went to them, he saw that the lowering belt had been padlocked. It could not now be moved.

Shit!

He went to the door. It was locked. He banged on it, and finally it was opened. There were two men, obviously armed, in the corridor. The man with the .45 who had been in the operating room was not there.

"I want the window open," Clete said. "It's as hot as a furnace in there."

"Sorry, Se?or," the taller of the two men replied. "That is prohibited."

"By who?"

The man shrugged.

Clete went back inside, and as he walked to the bed, heard the door being locked.

He lay down on the bed, put his hands under his head, and started to wonder about what was going to happen next. Then he heard the door being unlocked again. It opened, admitting a hospital attendant who handed him a small gray paper-wrapped package and left. The door was locked again.

Clete opened the package and found it contained a tiny bar of soap, a tiny towel, shaving cream, a razor, toothbrush (no toothpaste), a glass, a hospital gown, and cotton slippers.

"To hell with it," he said aloud. "It's too hot in here to put that on."

He lay down on the bed, and again began to wonder what would happen next.

[FIVE]

Clete woke up suddenly, and with a reflex action, he looked at his Hamilton. It was eight-fifteen in the morning. On the crystal of the chronograph he noticed a small piece of whitish substance, flaked with now darkened blood. The large, unpleasant nurse did not look for brain tissue on his watch.