by Tom Clancy
The blind-side tackle caught the gunman perfectly. His back bent like a bow and Ryan heard bones snap as his victim pitched forward and down. A satisfying klonk told him that the man’s head had bounced off the bumper on the way to the pavement. Ryan got up instantly—winded but full of adrenaline—and crouched beside the body. The man’s pistol had dropped from his hand and lay beside the body. Ryan grabbed it. It was an automatic of some sort he had never handled. It looked like a 9mm Makarov or some other East Bloc military issue. The hammer was back and the safety off. He fitted the gun carefully in his right hand—his left hand didn’t seem to be working right, but Ryan ignored that. He looked down at the man he’d just tackled and shot him once in the hip. Then he brought the gun up to eye level and moved to the right rear corner of the Rolls. He crouched lower still and peeked around the edge of the bodywork.
The other gunman’s AK was lying on the street and he was firing into the car with his own pistol, something else in his other hand. Ryan took a deep breath and stepped from behind the Rolls, leveling his automatic at the man’s chest. The other gunman turned his head first, then swiveled off-balance to bring his own gun around. Both men fired at the same instant. Ryan felt a fiery thump in his left shoulder and saw his own round take the man in the chest. The 9mm slug knocked the man backward as though from a hard punch. Ryan brought his own pistol down from recoil and squeezed off another round. The second bullet caught the man under the chin and exploded out the back of his head in a wet, pink cloud. Like a puppet with severed strings, the gunman fell to the pavement without a twitch. Ryan kept his pistol centered on the man’s chest until he saw what had happened to his head.
“Oh, God!” The surge of adrenaline left him as quickly as it had come. Time slowed back down to normal, and Ryan found himself suddenly dizzy and breathless. His mouth was open and gasping for air. Whatever force had been holding his body erect seemed to disappear, leaving his frame weak, on the verge of collapse. The black sedan backed up a few yards and accelerated past him, racing down the street, then turning left up a side street. Ryan didn’t think to take the number. He was stunned by the flashing sequence of events with which his mind had still not caught up.
The one he’d shot twice was clearly dead, his eyes open and surprised at fate, a foot-wide pool of blood spreading back from his head. Ryan was chilled to see a grenade in his gloved left hand. He bent down to ensure that the cotter pin was still in place on the wooden stick handle, and it was a slow, painful process to straighten up. Next he looked to the Rolls.
The first grenade had torn the front end to shreds. The front wheels were askew, and the tires flat on the blacktop. The driver was dead. Another body was slumped over in the front seat. The thick windshield had been blasted to fragments. The driver’s face was—gone, a red spongy mass. There was a red smear on the glass partition separating the driver’s seat from the passenger compartment. Jack moved around the car and looked in the back. He saw a man lying prone on the floor, and under him the corner of a woman’s dress. He tapped the pistol butt against the glass. The man stirred for a moment, then froze. At least he was alive.
Ryan looked at his pistol. It was empty, the slide locked back on a dry clip. His breath was coming in shudders now. His legs were wobbling under him and his hands were beginning to shake convulsively, which gave his wounded shoulder brief, sharp waves of intense pain. He looked around and saw something to make him forget that—
A soldier was running toward him, with a police officer a few yards behind. One of the Palace guards, Jack thought. The man had lost his bearskin shako but still had an automatic rifle with a half foot of steel bayonet perched on the muzzle. Ryan quickly wondered if the rifle might be loaded and decided it might be expensive to find out. This was a guardsman, he told himself, a professional soldier from a crack regiment who’d had to prove he had real balls before they sent him to the finishing school that made windup toys for tourists to gawk at. Maybe as good as a Sea Marine. How did you get here so fast?
Slowly and carefully, Ryan held the pistol out at arm’s length. He thumbed the clip-release button, and the magazine clattered down to the street. Next he twisted the gun so that the soldier could see it was empty. Then he set it down on the pavement and stepped away from it. He tried to raise his hands, but the left one wouldn’t move. The guardsman all the time ran smart, head up, eyes tracing left and right but never leaving Ryan entirely. He stopped ten feet away with his rifle at low-guard, its bayonet pointed right at Jack’s throat, just like it said in the manual. His chest was heaving, but the soldier’s face was a blank mask. The policeman hadn’t caught up, his face bloody as he shouted into a small radio.
“At ease, Trooper,” Ryan said as firmly as he could. It was not impressive. “We got two bad guys down. I’m one of the good guys.”
The guardsman’s face didn’t change a whit. The boy was a pro, all right. Ryan could hear his thinking—how easy to stick the bayonet right out his target’s back. Jack was in no shape to avoid that first thrust.
“DaddeeDaddeeDaddee!” Ryan turned his head and saw his little girl racing past the stalled cars toward him. The four-year-old stopped a few feet away from him, her eyes wide with horror. She ran forward to wrap both arms around her father’s leg and screamed up at the guardsman: “Don’t you hurt my daddy!”
The soldier looked from father to daughter in amazement as Cathy approached more carefully, hands in the open.
“Soldier,” she announced in her voice of professional command, “I’m a doctor, and I’m going to treat that wound. So you can put that gun down, right now!”
The police constable grabbed the guardsman’s shoulder and said something Jack couldn’t make out. The rifle’s angle changed fractionally as the soldier relaxed ever so slightly. Ryan saw more cops running to the scene, and a white car with its siren screaming. The situation, whatever it was, was coming under control.
“You lunatic.” Cathy surveyed the wound dispassionately. There was a dark stain on the shoulder of Ryan’s new suit jacket that turned the gray wool to purple-crimson. His whole body was shaking now. He could barely stand and the weight of Sally hanging on his leg was forcing him to weave. Cathy grabbed his right arm and eased him down to the pavement, sitting him back against the side of the car. She moved his coat away from the wound and probed gently at his shoulder. It didn’t feel gentle at all. She reached around to his back pocket for a handkerchief and pressed it against the center of the wound.
“That doesn’t feel right,” she remarked to no one.
“Daddy, you’re all bloody!” Sally stood an arm’s length away, her hands fluttering like the wings of a baby bird. Jack wanted to reach out to her, to tell her everything was all right, but the three feet of distance might as well have been a thousand miles—and his shoulder was telling him that things were definitely not all right.
There were now about ten police officers around the car, many of them panting for breath. Three had handguns out, and were scanning the gathering crowd. Two more red-coated soldiers appeared from the west. A police sergeant approached. Before he could say anything Cathy looked up to bark an order.
“Call an ambulance right now!”
“On the way, mum,” the Sergeant replied with surprising good manners. “Why don’t you let us look after that?”
“I’m a doctor,” she answered curtly. “You have a knife?”
The Sergeant turned to remove the bayonet from the first guardsman’s rifle and stooped down to assist. Cathy held the coat and vest clear for him to cut away, then both cut the shirt free from his shoulder. She tossed the handkerchief clear. It was already blood-sodden. Jack started to protest.
“Shut up, Jack.” She looked over to the Sergeant and jerked her chin toward Sally. “Get her away from here.”
The Sergeant gestured for a guardsman to come over. The Private scooped Sally up in his arms. He took her a few feet away, cradling her gently to his chest. Jack saw his little girl crying pitifully, but som
ehow it all seemed to be very far away. He felt his skin go cold and moist—shock?
“Damn,” Cathy said gruffly. The Sergeant handed her a thick bandage. She pressed it against the wound and it immediately went red as she tried to tie it in place. Ryan groaned. It felt as though someone had taken an ax to his shoulder.
“Jack, what the hell were you trying to do?” she demanded through clenched teeth as she fumbled with the cloth ties.
Ryan snarled back, the sudden anger helping to block out the pain. “I didn’t try—I fucking did it!” The effort required to say that took half his strength away with it.
“Uh-huh,” Cathy grunted. “Well, you’re bleeding like a pig, Jack.”
More men ran in from the other direction. It seemed that a hundred sirens were converging on the scene with men—some in uniform, some not—leaping out to join the party. A uniformed policeman with more ornate shoulder boards began to shout orders at the others. The scene was impressive. A separate, detached part of Ryan’s brain catalogued it. There he was, sitting against the Rolls, his shirt soaked red as though blood had been poured from a pitcher. Cathy, her hands covered with her husband’s blood, was still trying to arrange the bandage correctly. His daughter was gasping out tears in the arms of a burly young soldier who seemed to be singing to her in a language that Jack couldn’t make out. Sally’s eyes were locked on him, full of desperate anguish. The detached part of his mind found all this very amusing until another wave of pain yanked him back to reality.
The policeman who’d evidently taken charge came up to them after first checking the perimeter. “Sergeant, move him aside.”
Cathy looked up and snapped angrily: “Open the other side, dammit, I got a bleeder here!”
“The other door’s jammed, ma’am. Let me help.” Ryan heard a different kind of siren as they bent down. The three of them moved him aside a foot or so, and the senior officer made to open the car door. They hadn’t moved him far enough. When the door swung open, its edge caught Ryan’s shoulder. The last thing he heard before passing out was his own scream of pain.
Ryan’s eyes focused slowly, his consciousness a hazy, variable thing that reported items out of place and out of time. For a moment he was inside a vehicle of some sort. The lateral movements of its passage rippled agony through his chest, and there was an awful atonal sound in the distance, though not all that far away. He thought he saw two faces he vaguely recognized. Cathy was there, too, wasn’t she—no, there were some people in green. Everything was soft and vague except the burning pain in his shoulder and chest, but when he blinked his eyes all were gone. He was someplace else again.
The ceiling was white and nearly featureless at first. Ryan knew somehow that he was under the influence of drugs. He recognized the feelings, but could not remember why. It required several minutes of lazy concentration for him to determine that the ceiling was made of white acoustical tiles on a white metal framework. Some of the tiles were waterstained and served to give him a reference. Others were translucent plastic for the soft fluorescent lighting. There was something tied under his nose, and after a moment he began to feel a cool gas tracing into his nostrils—oxygen? His other senses began to report in one at a time. Expanding radially down from his head, they began to explore his body and reported reluctantly to his brain. Some unseen things were taped to his chest. He could feel them pulling at the hairs that Cathy liked to play with when she was drunk. His left shoulder felt ... didn’t really feel at all. His whole body was far too heavy to move even an inch.
A hospital, he decided after several minutes. Why am I in a hospital ... ? It took an indeterminate period of concentration for Jack to remember why he was here. When it came to him, it was just as well that he could contemplate the taking of a human life from within the protective fog of drugs.
I was shot, too, wasn’t I? Ryan turned his head slowly to the right. A bottle of IV fluids was hanging on a metal stand next to the bed, its rubber hose trailing down under the sheet where his arm was tied down. He tried to feel the prick of the catheter that had to be inside the right elbow, but couldn’t. His mouth was cottony dry. Well, I wasn’t shot on the right side... Next he tried to turn his head to the left. Something soft but very firm prevented it. Ryan wasn’t able to care very much about it. Even his curiosity for his condition was a tenuous thing. For some reason his surroundings seemed much more interesting than his own body. Looking directly up, he saw a TV-like instrument, along with some other electronic stuff, none of which he could make out at the acute angle. EKG readout? Something like that, he decided. It all figured. He was in a surgical recovery room, wired up like an astronaut while the staff decided if he’d live or not. The drugs helped him to consider the question with marvelous objectivity.
“Ah, we’re awake.” A voice other than the distant, muffled tone of the PA system. Ryan dropped his chin to see a nurse of about fifty. She had a Bette Davis face crinkled by years of frowns. He tried to speak to her, but his mouth seemed glued shut. What came out was a cross between a rasp and a croak. The nurse disappeared while he tried to decide what exactly the sound was.
A man appeared a minute or so later. He was also in his fifties, tall and spare, dressed in surgical greens. There was a stethoscope hanging from his neck, and he seemed to be carrying something that Ryan couldn’t quite see. He seemed rather tired, but wore a satisfied smile.
“So,” he said, “we’re awake. How are we feeling?” Ryan managed a full-fledged croak this time. The doctor-?-gestured to the nurse. She came forward to give Ryan a sip of water through a glass straw.
“Thanks.” He sloshed the water around his mouth. It was not enough to swallow. His mouth tissues seemed to absorb it all at once. “Where am I?”
“You are in the surgical recovery unit of St. Thomas’s Hospital. You are recovering from surgery on your upper left arm and shoulder. I am your surgeon. My team and I have been working on you for, oh, about six hours now, and it would appear that you will probably live,” he added judiciously. He seemed to regard Ryan as a successful piece of work.
Rather slowly and sluggishly Ryan thought to himself that the English sense of humor, admirable as it might otherwise be, was a little too dry for this sort of situation. He was composing a reply when Cathy came into view. The Bette Davis nurse moved to head her off.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Ryan, but only medical person—”
“I’m a doctor.” She held up her plastic ID card. The man took it.
“Wilmer Eye Institute, Johns Hopkins Hospital.” The surgeon extended his hand and gave Cathy a friendly, colleague-to-colleague smile. “How do you do, Doctor? My name is Charles Scott. ”
“That’s right,” Ryan confirmed groggily. “She’s the surgeon doctor. I’m the historian doctor.” No one seemed to notice.
“Sir Charles Scott? Professor Scott?”
“The same.” A benign smile. Everyone likes to be recognized, Ryan thought as he watched from his back.
“One of my instructors knows you—Professor Knowles.”
“Ah, and how is Dennis?”
“Fine, Doctor. He’s associate professor of orthopedics now.” Cathy shifted gears smoothly, back to medical professional. “Do you have the X-rays?”
“Here.” Scott held up a manila envelope and extracted a large film. He held it up in front of a lighting panel. “We took this prior to going in.”
“Damn.” Cathy’s nose wrinkled. She put on the half-glasses she used for close work, the ones Jack hated. He watched her head move slowly from side to side. “I didn’t know it was that bad.”
Professor Scott nodded. “Indeed. We reckon the collarbone was broken before he was shot, then the bullet came crashing through here—just missed the brachial plexus, so we expect no serious nerve damage—and did all this damage.” He traced a pencil across the film. Ryan couldn’t see any of it from the bed. “Then it did this to the top of the humerus before stopping here, just inside the skin. Bloody powerful thing, the nine millimeter. As
you can see, the damage was quite extensive. We had a jolly time finding all these fragments and jigsawing them back into proper place, but—we were able to accomplish this.” Scott held a second film up next to the first. Cathy was quiet for several seconds, her head swiveling back and forth.
“That is nice work, Doctor!”
Sir Charles’ smile broadened a notch. “From a Johns Hopkins surgeon, yes, I think I’ll accept that. Both these pins are permanent, this screw also, I’m afraid, but the rest should heal rather nicely. As you can see, all the large fragments are back where they belong, and we have every reason to expect a full recovery.”
“How much impairment?” A detached question. Cathy could be maddeningly unemotional about her work.
“We’re not sure yet,” Scott said slowly. “Probably a little, but it should not be overly severe. We can’t guarantee a complete restoration of function—the damage was far too extensive for that.”
“You mind telling me something?” Ryan tried to sound angry, but it hadn’t come out right.
“What I mean, Mr. Ryan, is that you’ll probably have some permanent loss of use of your arm—precisely how much we cannot determine as yet—and from now on you’ll have a permanent barometer. Henceforth, whenever the weather is about to change for the worse, you’ll know it before anyone else.”
“How long in this cast?” Cathy wanted to know.
“At least a month.” The surgeon seemed apologetic. “It is awkward, I know, but the shoulder must be totally immobilized for at least that long. After that we’ll have to reevaluate the injury and we can probably revert to a normal cast for another ... oh, another month or so, I expect. I presume he heals well, no allergies. Looks to be in good health, decent physical shape.”