by Tom Clancy
"My name is Anthony Wilson. I'm supposed to look after you. You are in the VIP suite of St. Thomas's Hospital. Do you remember why you're here, sir?"
"Yeah, I think so," Ryan nodded. "Can you unhook me from this thing? I have to go." The other reminder of the IV.
"I'll ring the sister—here." Wilson squeezed the button that was pinned to the edge of Ryan's pillow.
Less than fifteen seconds later a nurse came through the door and flipped on the overhead lights. The blaze of light dazzled Jack for a moment before he saw it was a different nurse. Not Bette Davis, this one was young and pretty, with the eager, protective look common to nurses. Ryan had seen it before, and hated it.
"Ah, we're awake," she observed brightly. "How are we feeling?"
"Great," Ryan grumped. "Can you unhook me? I have to go to the john."
"We're not supposed to move just yet, Doctor Ryan. Let me fetch you something." She disappeared out the door before he could object. Wilson watched her leave with an appraising look. Cops and nurses, Ryan thought. His dad had married a nurse; he'd met her after bringing a gunshot victim into the emergency room.
The nurse—her name tag said KITTIWAKE—returned in under a minute bearing a stainless steel urinal as though it were a priceless gift, which under the circumstances, it was, Ryan admitted to himself. She lifted the covers on the bed and suddenly Jack realized that his hospital gown was not really on, but just tied loosely around his neck—worse, the nurse was about to make the necessary adjustments for him to use the urinal. Ryan's right hand shot downward under the covers to take it away from her. He thanked God for the second time this morning that he was able, barely, to reach down far enough.
"Could you, uh, excuse me for a minute?" Ryan willed the girl out of the room, and she went, smiling her disappointment. He waited for the door to close completely before continuing. In deference to Wilson he stifled his sigh of relief. Kittiwake was back through the door after counting to sixty.
"Thank you." Ryan handed her the receptacle and she disappeared out the door. It had barely swung shut when she was back again. This time she stuck a thermometer in his mouth and grabbed his wrist to take his pulse. The thermometer was one of the new electronic sort, and both tasks were completed in fifteen seconds. Ryan asked for the score, but got a smile instead of an answer. The smile remained fixed as she made the entries on his chart. When this task was fulfilled, she made a minor adjustment in the covers, beaming at Ryan. Little Miss Efficiency, Ryan told himself. This girl is going to be a real pain in the ass.
"Is there anything I might get you, Doctor Ryan?" she asked. Her brown eyes belied the wheat-colored hair. She was cute. She had that dewy look. Ryan was unable to remain angry with pretty women, and hated them for it. Especially young nurses with that dewy look.
"Coffee?" he asked hopefully.
"Breakfast is not for another hour. Can I fetch you a cup of tea?"
"Fine." It wasn't, but it would get rid of her for a little while. Nurse Kittiwake breezed out the door with her ingenuous smile.
"Hospitals!" Ryan snarled when she was gone.
"Oh, I don't know," Wilson observed, the image of Nurse Kittiwake fresh in his mind.
"You ain't the one getting your diapers changed." Ryan grunted and leaned back into the pillow. It was useless to fight it, he knew. He smiled in spite of himself. Useless to fight it. He'd been through this twice before, both times with young, pretty nurses. Being grumpy only made them all the more eager to be overpoweringly nice—they had time on their side, time and patience enough to wear anyone down. He sighed out his surrender. It wasn't worth the waste of energy. "So, you're a cop, right? Special Branch?"
"No, sir. I'm with C-13, Anti-Terrorist Branch."
"Can you fill me in on what happened yesterday? I kinda missed a few things."
"How much do you remember, Doctor?" Wilson slid his chair closer. Ryan noted that he remained halfway facing the door, and kept his right hand free.
"I saw—well, I heard an explosion, a hand grenade, I think—and when I turned I saw two guys shooting the hell out of a Rolls-Royce. IRA, I guess. I took two of them out, and another one got away in a car. The cavalry arrived, and I passed out and woke up here."
"Not IRA. ULA—Ulster Liberation Army, a Maoist offshoot of the Provos. Nasty buggers. The one you killed was John Michael McCrory, a very bad boy from Londonderry—one of the chaps who escaped from the Maze last July. This is the first time he's surfaced since. And the last" — Wilson smiled coldly—"we haven't identified the other chap yet. That is, not as of when I came on duty three hours ago."
"ULA?" Ryan shrugged. He remembered hearing the name, though he couldn't talk about that. "The guy I—killed. He had an AK, but when I came around the car he was using a pistol. How come?"
"The fool jammed it. He had two full magazines taped end to end, like you see all the time in the movies, but like they trained us specifically not to do in the paras. We reckon he bashed it, probably when he came out of the car. The second magazine was bent at the top end—wouldn't feed the rounds properly, you see. Damn good luck for you. You knew you were going after a chap with a Kalashnikov?" Wilson examined Ryan's face closely.
Jack nodded. "Doesn't sound real smart, does it?"
"You bloody fool." Wilson said this just as Kittiwake came through the door with a tea tray. The nurse flashed the cop an emphatically disapproving look as she set the tray on the bedstand and wheeled it over. Kittiwake arranged things just so, and poured Ryan a cup with delicacy. Wilson had to do his own.
"So who was in the car, anyway?" Ryan asked. He noted strong reactions.
"You didn't know?" Kittiwake was dumbfounded.
"There wasn't much time to find out." Ryan dropped two packets of brown sugar into his cup. His stirring stopped abruptly when Wilson answered his question.
"The Prince and Princess of Wales. And their new baby."
Ryan's head snapped around. "What?"
"You really didn't know?" the nurse asked.
"You're serious," Ryan said quietly. They wouldn't kid about this, would they?
"Too bloody right. I'm serious," Wilson went on, his voice very even. Only his choice of words betrayed how deeply the affair disturbed him. "Except for you, they would all three be quite dead, and that makes you a bloody hero, Doctor Ryan." Wilson sipped his tea neatly and fished out a cigarette.
Ryan set his cup down. "You mean you let them drive around here without a police or secret service—whatever you call it—without an escort?"
"Supposedly it was an unscheduled trip. Security arrangements for the Royals are not my department in any case. I would speculate, however, that those whose department it is will be rethinking a few things," Wilson commented.
"They weren't hurt?"
"No, but their driver was killed. So was their security escort from DPG—Diplomatic Protection Group—Charlie Winston. I knew Charlie. He had a wife, you know, and four children, all grown."
Ryan observed that the Rolls should have had bulletproof glass.
Wilson grunted. "It did have bulletproof glass. Actually plastic, a complex polycarbonate material. Unfortunately, no one seems to have read what it said on the box. The guarantee is only for a year. Turns out that sunlight breaks the material down somehow or other. The windshield was no more use than ordinary safety glass. Our friend McCrory put thirty rounds into it, and it quite simply shattered, killing the driver first. The interior partition, thank God, had not been exposed to sunlight, and remained intact. The last thing Charlie did was push the button to put it up. That probably saved them, too—didn't do Charlie much good, though. He had enough time to draw his automatic, but we don't think he was able to get a shot off."
Ryan thought back. There had been blood in the back of the Rolls—not just blood. The driver's head had been blown apart, and his brains had scattered into the passenger compartment. Jack winced thinking about it. The escort had probably leaned over to push the button before defending himself… W
ell, Jack thought, that's what they pay them for. What a hell of a way to earn a living.
"It was fortunate that you intervened when you did. They both had hand grenades, you know."
"Yeah, I saw one." Ryan sipped away the last of his tea. "What the hell was I thinking about?" You weren't thinking at all, Jack. That's what you were thinking about.
Kittiwake saw Ryan go pale. "You feel quite all right?" she asked.
"I guess." Ryan grunted in wonderment. "Dumb as I was, I must feel pretty good—I ought to be dead."
"Well, that most emphatically will not happen here." She patted his hand. "Please ring me if you need anything." Another beaming smile and she left.
Ryan was still shaking his head. "The other one got away?"
Wilson nodded. "We found the car near a tube station a few blocks away. It was stolen, of course. No real problem for him to get clean away. Disappear into the underground. Go to Heathrow, perhaps, and catch a plane to the continent—Brussels, say—then a plane to Ulster or the Republic, and a car the rest of the way home. That's one route; there are others, and it's impossible to cover them all. He was drinking beer last night, watching the news coverage on television in his favorite pub, most likely. Did you get a look at him?"
"No, just a shape. I didn't even think to get the tag number—dumb. Right after that the redcoat came running up to me." Ryan winced again. "Christ, I thought he'd put that pigsticker right through me. For a second there I could see it all—I do something right, then get wasted by a good guy."
Wilson laughed. "You don't know how lucky you were. The current guard force is from the Welsh Guards."
"So?"
"His Royal Highness's own regiment, as it were. He's their colonel-in-chief. There you were with a pistol—how would you expect him to react?" Wilson stubbed out his cigarette. "Another piece of good luck, your wife and daughter came running up to you, and the soldier decides to wait a bit, just long enough for things to sort themselves out. Then our chap catches up with him and tells him to stand easy. And a hundred more of my chaps come swooping in.
"I hope you can appreciate this, Doctor. Here we were with three men dead, two others wounded, a Prince and Princess looking as though they'd been shot—your wife examined them on the scene, by the way, and pronounced them fit just before the ambulance arrived—a baby, a hundred witnesses each with his own version of what had just taken place. A bloody Yank—an Irish-American to boot! — whose wife claims he's the chap in the white hat." Wilson laughed again. "Total chaos!
"First order of business, of course, was to get the Royals to safety. The police and guardsmen handled that, probably praying by this time that someone would make trouble. They're still in an evil mood, they tell me, angrier even than from the bandstand bombing incident. Not hard to understand. Anyway, your wife flatly refused to leave your side until you were under doctor's care here. Quite a forceful woman, they tell me."
"Cathy's a surgeon," Ryan explained. "When she plays doc, she's used to having her own way. Surgeons are like that."
"After she was quite satisfied we drove her down to the Yard. Meanwhile we had a merry time identifying you. They called your Legal Attache at the American Embassy and he ran a check through your FBI, plus a backup check through the Marine Corps." Ryan stole a cigarette from Wilson's pack. The policeman lit it with a butane lighter. Jack gagged on the smoke, but he needed it. Cathy would give him hell for it, he knew, but one thing at a time. "Mind you, we never really thought you were one of them. Have to be a maniac to bring the wife and child along on this sort of job. But one must be careful."
Ryan nodded agreement, briefly dizzy from the smoke. How'd they know to check through the Corps… oh, my Marine Corps Association card…
"In any event we have things pretty well sorted out. Your government are sending us everything we need—probably here by now, actually." Wilson checked his watch.
"My family's all right?"
Wilson smiled in rather an odd way. "They are being very well looked after, Doctor Ryan. You have my word on that."
"The name's Jack."
"Fine. I'm known to my friends as Tony." They finally got around to shaking hands. "And as I said, you're a bloody hero. Care to see what the press have to say?" He handed Ryan a Daily Mirror and a Times.
"Dear God!"
The tabloid Mirror's front page was almost entirely a color photograph of himself, sitting unconscious against the Rolls. His chest was a scarlet mass.
ATTEMPT ON HRH—MARINE TO THE RESCUE
A bold attempt to assassinate Their Royal Highnesses the Prince and Princess of Wales within sight of Buckingham Palace was thwarted today by the courage of an American tourist.
John Patrick Ryan, an historian and formerly a lieutenant in the United States Marines, dashed barehanded into a pitched battle on The Mall as over a hundred Londoners watched in shocked disbelief. Ryan, 31, of Annapolis, Maryland, successfully disabled one gunman and, taking his weapon, shot another dead. Ryan himself was seriously wounded in the exchange. He was taken by ambulance to St. Thomas's Hospital, where emergency surgery was successfully performed by Sir Charles Scott.
A third terrorist is reported to have escaped the scene, by running east on The Mall, then turning north on Marlborough Road.
Senior police officials were unanimous in their opinion that, but for Ryan's courageous intervention. Their Highnesses would certainly have been slain.
Ryan turned the page to see another color photograph of himself in happier circumstances. It was his graduation photo from Quantico, and he had to smile at himself, resplendent, then, in blue high-necked blouse, two shiny gold bars, and the Mamaluke sword. It was one of the few decent photographs ever taken of him.
"Where did they get this?"
"Oh, your Marine chaps were most helpful. In fact, one of your Marine ships—helicopter carrier, or something like that—is at Portsmouth right now. I understand that your former colleagues are getting all the free beer they can swill."
Ryan laughed at that. Next he picked up the Times, whose headline was marginally less lurid.
The Prince and Princess of Wales escaped certain death this afternoon. Three, possibly four terrorists armed with hand grenades and Kalashnikov assault rifles lay in wait for their Rolls-Royce; only to have their carefully-laid plans foiled by the bold intervention of J. P. Ryan, formerly a second lieutenant in the United States Marine Corps, and now an historian…
Ryan flipped to the editorial page. The lead item, signed by the publisher, screamed for vengeance while praising Ryan, America, and the United States Marine Corps, and thanked Divine Providence with a flourish worthy of a Papal Encyclical.
"Reading about yourself?" Ryan looked up. Sir Charles Scott was standing at the foot of his bed with an aluminum chart.
"First time I ever made the papers." Ryan set them down.
"You've earned it, and it would seem that the sleep did you some good. How do you feel?"
"Not bad, considering. How am I?" Ryan asked.
"Pulse and temperature normal—almost normal. Your color isn't bad at all. With luck we might even avoid a postoperative infection, though I should not wish to give odds on that," the doctor said. "How badly does it hurt?"
"It's there, but I can live with it," Ryan answered cautiously.
"It is only two hours since your last medication. I trust you are not one of those thickheaded fools who do not want pain medications?"
"Yes, I am," Ryan said. He went on slowly. "Doctor, I've been through this twice before. The first time, they gave me too much of the stuff, and coming off was—I'd just as soon not go through that again, if you know what I mean."
Ryan's career in the Marine Corps had ended after a mere three months with a helicopter crash on the shores of Crete during a NATO exercise. The resulting back injury had sent Ryan to Bethesda Naval Medical Center, outside Washington, where the doctors had been a little too generous with their pain medications, and Ryan had taken two weeks to get over them.
It was not an experience he wanted to repeat.
Sir Charles nodded thoughtfully. "I think so. Well, it's your arm." The nurse came back in as he made some notations on the chart. "Rotate the bed a bit."
Ryan hadn't noticed that the rack from which his arm hung was actually circular. As the head of the bed came up, his arm dropped to a more comfortable angle. The doctor looked over his glasses at Ryan's fingers.
"Would you wiggle them, please?" Ryan did so. "Good, that's very good. I didn't think there'd be any nerve damage. Doctor Ryan, I am going to prescribe something mild, just enough to keep the edge off it. I will require that you take the medications which I prescribe." Scott's head came around to face Ryan directly. "I've never yet got a patient addicted to narcotics, and I do not propose to start with you. Don't be pigheaded: pain, discomfort will retard your recovery—unless, that is, you want to remain in hospital for several months?"
"Message received, Sir Charles."
"Right." The surgeon smiled. "If you should feel the need for something stronger, I shall be here all day. Just ring nurse Miss Kittiwake here." The girl beamed in anticipation.
"How about something to eat?"
"You think you can keep something down?"
If not, Kittiwake will probably love to help me throw up. "Doc, in the last thirty-six hours I've had a continental breakfast and a light lunch."
"Very well. We'll try some soft foods." He made another notation on the chart and flashed a look to Kittiwake: Keep an eye on him. She nodded.
"Your charming wife told me that you are quite obstinate. We'll see about that. Still and all you are doing rather nicely. You can thank your physical condition for that—and my outstanding surgical skill, of course." Scott chuckled to himself. "After breakfast an orderly will help you freshen up for your more, ah, official visitors. Oh, don't expect to see your family soon. They were quite exhausted last night. I gave your wife something to help her sleep; I hope she took it. Your darling little daughter was all done in." Scott gave Ryan a serious look. "I was not misleading you earlier. Discomfort will slow your recovery. Do what I tell you and we'll have you out of that bed in a week, and discharged in two—perhaps. But you must do exactly as I say."