by Ian Slater
The West Germany battery commander glimpsed an aircraft’s lizard patch underside for only a fraction of a second, but it was all he needed to convince the Sturmbannführer to unleash his mobile batteries of all-weather Rolands.
Three minutes later his crews reported that fifteen of the twenty-four missiles had found their mark, three of the nine misses being due to “circuit malfunction,” a grab-all soldier’s phrase covering everything from a slight wobble of the launch sleeve to a problem with the Roland’s oxidizer. Sometimes the soft ground gave way beneath the trucks under the impact of the back-blast, and this could throw the rocket off course.
A short while later the Rolands’ crews noticed that some of the debris coming down, wing segments, bore the distinctive red, white, and blue ball of the Royal Air Force. It was not long after this that the commander realized he had destroyed fifteen of twenty-four Canberra bombers.
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
North Atlantic
The big Chinooks, making the distinctive wokka wokka sound that gave them their nickname, lived up to their reputation as one of the most reliable helicopters ever made. For William Spence, however, slipping between consciousness and blackouts from the pain, the noise of the rotors slicing their way over the heaving darkness of the Atlantic was a torture, the promise of deliverance fading by the second as he lay strapped into one of the six stretchers. How long he had been in the helicopter, minutes or hours, he did not know. At times the pain was merely a sore heaviness in his extremities, at others, so stilettolike that his body involuntarily heaved and jerked violently against the restraint straps. And always, added to the buffeting, in gusts of foul weather, there was the oppressive, stifling smell of oil. Lost in his delirium, he thought it was the smell of the Chinook’s fuel, causing his nose to feel as if it were plugged with cotton wool, sinuses so blocked that all his breathing was by mouth, his lips cracked dry by the time the chopper was approaching the tiny slice of light that was the NATO-designated hospital ship, USS Bahama Queen, four hundred miles northeast of Newfoundland. The red-cross-painted landing pad was the stern platform of the twenty-thousand-tonner — a converted cruise ship, or “Love Boat,” as they were called, which had quickly been pressed into service as a hospital relay ship by the U.S. government.
So hasty was the conversion that many of the plush luxury fittings were still aboard. And while nurses like Lana La Roche and her three colleagues had enjoyed walking on shag carpets down the passageways where private and semiprivate rooms now served as wards and a series of operating rooms, the senior surgeon had ordered all such carpets, drapes, and so forth removed in order to create a more aseptic environment. Normally it was a job that would have been done in the Halifax yards, but war and the fate of Convoy R-1 had meant making do with what was available, which, for Matron, given the perennial shortage of nurses, meant having to tolerate the “eager beavers,” as she called Lana and what she saw as Lana’s “clique.” There was no clique, but Matron was convinced, as she told a disinterested nurse’s aide, that the younger nurses congregated about the La Roche girl “no doubt because of her connections.” Lana’s and the other girls’ bravery in volunteering for sea duty was not, in Matron’s view, anything to be lauded — it was a nurse’s duty to be where she should be in times of need — and she remained convinced that “the La Roche girl” was merely grandstanding.
“She’ll be gone in six months,” Matron declared confidently to those few she had selected as her “chums” in the head nurses’ mess. “That type never stays,” she pronounced, sipping her tea from one of the Bahama Queen’s Royal Doulton cups unlike the thick, institutional mugs she was used to. “Here one minute, girls like that. Gone the next. Novelty wears off.”
“I would’ve thought,” dared one of her chums, “that she’d be much better off with her husband. I mean, all that money. Servants probably.”
Matron put her cup down, shaking her head at the other’s naïveté. “That’s just it, don’t you see. Those kind of people with too much money get bored. Simply run out of things to do. ‘Don’t you know,’ “ she said, affecting an upper-class condescension.
“I would have thought she could have chosen something a bit less dangerous,” another contested.
“Tosh!” said Matron. “Russians wouldn’t dare attack a hospital ship. Oh no,” she went on, seeing one of her chums about to interject. “I don’t think it’s because they wouldn’t like to — that they’re humane. Certainly not. People are capable of anything. I know that. But they won’t because the brouhaha internationally would be very bad publicity. Not good propaganda at all. Ms. Brentwood, as she prefers to be called, knows that very well.”
The red bar-shaped light came on. They were bringing in the first wounded, the most serious ones from the convoy; others, less seriously hurt, had been lifted to the nearest ships in the convoy to have their wounds attended to later in Halifax.
As the nurses hurried to the emergency bays, rubber soles squeaking along carpetless passageways, it struck Lana how well insulated the ship was, for the big Chinook was almost upon them and yet the sound of both its rotors was barely audible. Until she reached the floodlit stern. Opening the last door, she saw rain pelting through the air above the landing platform, a platform that only weeks before had been a swimming pool, tourists languidly drowsing their hours away en route to — where, it didn’t matter, the journey itself being the occasion. She bowed her head in the face of the driving noise and spray, then withdrew, as ordered by the deck officer, to what had been a “pub” aboard the cruise liner. At least, she thought, there was no doubt about the destination of this ship, the purpose of one’s life aboard her, as stretcher after stretcher was lowered and unloaded by seamen straining and slipping on the weather-wild deck.
Despite the stabilizers of the Bahama Queen, the ship was rising and falling enough to make unloading the Chinooks a precarious business as they hovered twenty feet above the deck like some great insects in the night, intravenous bottles swinging with even the slightest roll in the choppy sea, everyone anxious for the ship to be under way so she could get her nose into the wind and reduce the yaw.
Refusing the bright yellow wet-weather gear available to her, Matron was the first nurse to meet the incoming wounded on the blustery deck. She, like the officer of the deck, had ordered the others to wait inside, and watching her, several of the nurses warned that she’d catch her death of a cold, but Lana doubted it. “The cold would be too afraid,” she told her friends.
Yet Lana admired “Battle-ax,” as Matron had become known among the junior nurses, and when one of them commented, “It’s a grandstand play, that’s all. Wants to show how macho she is,” Lana, looking out at the matron’s stout frame, no more than a white woolen cardigan over her uniform, and rubber boots, which Matron insisted on calling “gum boots,” to protect her from the elements, disagreed.
“I don’t think she wants to look tough,” said Lana.
“Well then, what’s she doing it for?” asked Elizabeth. “She got a death wish?”
“I think she wants to be the first one the men see when they come aboard.”
“Lordy,” said Elizabeth, “that face ain’t gonna cheer them up, honey. One look at her, they’ll want to head back to war.” The other nurses laughed except for Lana, her arms crossed, mood pensive as her group of four waited to be assigned one of the wounded.
“No, I think it’s important to her,” Lana continued, “that the wounded see a nurse’s uniform. Know they’re going to be looked after straightaway.” Lana paused for a moment, trying to recall the words from one of the Halifax lectures: “Remember, emotional first aid in the first few hours is psychologically…”
Elizabeth chimed in, “…as important to recovery as hands-on medical treatment.”
“Very good, Liz,” clapped one of the others.
Elizabeth was nodding toward the deck as the last two stretchers were lowered, ropes on either end held taut by deck crew to stop them from sp
inning. “Talking ‘bout ‘hands-on treatment,’ children, I’d like to get my hands on that bosun. I’d give that sweetheart all the first aid he wanted.”
“Elizabeth!” said Lana. “That’s disgusting.”
Elizabeth smiled across at her friend. “Lana, this war’s just startin,’ honey, and it’s gonna get a whole lot worse ‘fore it gets better.”
“If it can get better,” put in one of the two Canadian nurses.
“Exactly,” said Elizabeth. “So get it when you can, babe, before the mushrooms start sproutin’.”
“My God,” said the other Canadian girl. “You really think some crazy’ll push the button?”
Elizabeth, watching Matron trailing the last casualty into the reception area on the starboard side, where seamen were unbuckling the wounded, replied, “Some crazy started that, honey.”
All ten casualties now unloaded, the staff in the reception room, once the ship’s stern deck casino, were now quickly returning the stretchers to the chopper.
The matron entered, soaking wet. “La Roche, your charge is Spence — first name William.” She looked at the other two Canadian nurses. “You two prep him. I want a full sheet on him as soon as possible. La Roche?”
“Matron?” Lana had given up on getting her to call her Miss Brentwood.
“Before he goes into surgery, check his tags for allergies,” said Matron.
“Yes, Matron.”
The matron paused. “Have any of you seen an amputation before? I mean in theater, not in the training films.”
None of them had.
“Well, now’s your chance. My guess is you’ll be seeing lots of them, but there’s no time like the present. There is no observation theater aboard, of course, but I could ask the surgeon.”
“I wouldn’t mind, Matron,” said Elizabeth.
“Very well.” She looked challengingly at the other nurses, her eyes settling on Lana. “I think you should. More experience you get, more use you’ll be. If, of course, you want to be useful.”
They were all shamed into it.
“Good,” Matron said. “Theater Two in—” she lifted the watch that was resting on her ample bosom—”oh four fifteen,” she said, and let the watch go. “The captain will be heading into the wind to give us as much stability as possible, but there will, of course, be sliding from time to time. That’s where you can be of some help. Pick the instrument up and into the sterilizer straightaway.”
“Is it a bullet wound?” asked Elizabeth, in a tone that told them all she’d seen plenty of those.
“We’re not sure, but both hands will have to come off. Hanging by mere threads.”
“Oh, Matron—” One of the Canadian nurses turned the color of chalk; she had been feeling a little seasick since the ship had stopped, wallowing, more at the mercy of the sea than when under way.
“If only someone had packed them in ice,” said the matron matter-of-factly. “But the helo had to pick up another four casualties.” Lana was struck by the fact that the matron’s British turn of speech became decidedly Americanized when referring to military matters, such as calling the choppers “helos” rather than “helicopters,” as the two Canadian nurses did.
“My God,” said the other Canadian. “Are there any ships left in that convoy?”
“I’ve no idea. Ours is not to reason why. All right, enough chatter. To work.” She paused. “Oh, one more thing. After you scrub up, be sure not to use your hands to maintain your balance. It’s the natural thing to do aboard ship and it’s very unhygienic.”
As they undressed the wounded Englishman, Lana carefully avoided looking anywhere else but at the man’s face. It was the first shock she was to receive that night. He looked so young as to be no more than fifteen or sixteen — never mind that the ID tags said he was nineteen. There was no allergy code on the tags.
As they cut away the young sailor’s oil- and water-sodden blue shirt, woolen sweater, and trousers, careful not to touch the raw lumps of mangled bone and flesh that had been his hands, the strong smell of oil persisted, and Lana, bending down, sniffing unselfconsciously like a bloodhound over a corpse, discovered that the oil smell seemed to be coming from his hair, and made a note of it. Elizabeth smelled it, too. “They start that bone saw up in there, they could have a fire.”
Sometimes Elizabeth’s callousness — or was it simply forth-rightness or insensitivity? — shocked the other nurses, but after Jay La Roche, it rarely bothered Lana. What did bother her in the OR was the surgeon’s knife severing the tendons. She passed out and ended up with what Elizabeth called a “king-sized lump” on her forehead, which, Matron pronounced, was “La Roche’s own silly fault.”
When she had revived enough for two of the other nurses to walk her out of the theater, Matron had assailed her with the comment, “You almost struck the surgeon! How many times do I have to tell you? If you’re going to pass out, please do so away from the table.”
“Will the boy live?” Lana asked later.
“He’s young,” someone said.
Yes, thought Lana, praying for him as fervently as she had once prayed for herself in her war with Jay. Oh, Lord, she asked as outside, the Atlantic gale howled unabated about the lighted ship, let him live.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
North atlantic
in the clear, cold dawn, blue-white bergs calved by the land ice of the Greenland mass and floating south beyond Cape Farewell into the Labrador Current now approached Newfoundland with ominous majesty, towers of purest white as the sun climbed higher above a dark blue sea and against the aquamarine sky. The chop of the previous night had now abated over the Grand Banks, and the Bahama Queen sliced through the big swells as if the urgent nocturnal activity just hours before had never happened — as if, thought Lana, the world were at peace.
She was sitting in the intensive care unit referred to as the “deluxe suite,” which it had been in its prewar days. The intravenous drip was regular, William Spence’s heartbeat a little weak, but all other vital signs were indicating the nineteen-year-old had pulled through the double amputation. “The young mend fast,” the surgeon had said, his scalpel indicating the severed hands, which, unknown to the ship’s crew, would soon be dumped over the side with the other parts and garbage. “Healthy tissue,” the surgeon had proclaimed, as one might refer to a horse worth buying. “If we’d gotten to him earlier — still, lucky to be alive.”
“Lucky”—Lana wasn’t so sure about that. Maybe one’s future was written in the stars and we called it luck, but she still harbored the conviction that you made your own luck. But if so, had it been preordained that her marriage was to be a disaster? Was God then darkness as well as light? If so, why had she prayed so fervently for this young Englishman’s life? Did she really believe? she wondered, or was she a fair-weather believer? Had her prayer accomplished anything or was prayer simply another way of so channeling, so concentrating your psychic energy that you did more than you normally would to help the situation to a successful conclusion? Especially when a young life hung by a thread.
As she watched the pristine beauty of the icebergs and the vastness of the sea, she thought of her brother Ray, who, their mother had written, was now entering yet another series of plastic surgery operations, and she realized that though she’d been unable to help her brother in the purposeless and directionless vacuum following her marriage, the young English sailor had become for her a kind of surrogate for her wanting to help, to do something, anything, and an escape from her personal ordeal, a chance to look after another victim of cruel circumstance, alone as she had been alone.
She took a lemon-glycerol swab from the kidney basin and gently daubed his lips. He was conscious now, mumbling what must have been a dozen questions, his eyes opening for a fraction of a second, then closing, the mumbling ceasing, replaced by a guttural, rumbling snore.
Elizabeth offered to sit with the wounded man to give Lana a break, but Lana said she’d stay on, and besides, there were mo
re than enough nurses for the fifty-three cases now aboard.
“All right, honey,” said Elizabeth, “but don’t you go getting attached, hear? You know what happens.”
“Elizabeth,” smiled Lana, “you can rest easy on my account. Besides,” she said sardonically, “I’m a married woman, remember?”
“That’s what I mean,” said Elizabeth in her usual forthright tone.
“He’s just a boy,” Lana replied.
“And you’ve got a soft streak in you a mile wide,” said Elizabeth. “You’re not his mama. You start with that and you’ll be all burned-out ‘fore Christmas.”
Lana smiled, touched as always by Elizabeth’s concern. “How come you know all about it, Miss Ryan?” she asked Elizabeth with mock formality.
Elizabeth looked down at her friend. “You always X-ray people?”
“Not if I can help it,” Lana replied good-naturedly. “I just think this is the case of the pot calling the kettle—”
They cracked up, both laughing at the appropriateness, or was it the inappropriateness, of the cliche, Lana dropping her head against Elizabeth’s stomach, still giggling. There was a sharp tapping noise on one of the glazed windows of the deluxe suite that looked out on the gigantic berg. Outside on the promenade deck, glaring at them through the glass with ill-concealed annoyance, was Matron. She was obviously saying something sharp to them, but the double glazing made it impossible to hear. Matron’s voice coming out from the red face in a series of barklike sounds was quickly whipped away by the wind, her blue cape ballooning, quivering violently about her in the stiff Atlantic wind. Both Lana and Elizabeth tried their best to look properly contrite, but Elizabeth, a look of abject apology on her face, murmured, “Watch out you don’t take off, you silly old bitch.” That did it — they both doubled up laughing. The blue balloon was now moving down the deck against the roll of the ship, heading for the nearest door.