It took an hour to get to the Kennedy. Jackson’s fighter flew badly, would not hold course in any specific attitude. He had to adjust trim constantly. Sanchez reported some movement in the aft cockpit. Maybe it was just the intercom shot out, Jackson thought hopefully.
Sanchez was ordered to land first so that the deck would be cleared for Commander Jackson. On the final approach the Tomcat started to handle badly. The pilot struggled with his fighter, planting it hard on the deck and catching the number one wire. The right-side landing gear collapsed at once, and the thirty-million-dollar fighter slid sideways into the barrier that had been erected. A hundred men with fire-fighting gear raced toward it from all directions.
The canopy went up on emergency hydraulic power. After unbuckling himself Jackson fought his way around and tried to grab for his backseater. They had been friends for many years.
Chris was alive. It looked like a quart of blood had poured down the front of his flight suit, and when the first corpsman took the helmet off, he saw that it was still pumping out. The second corpsman pushed Jackson out of the way and attached a cervical collar to the wounded airman. Christiansen was lifted gently and lowered onto a stretcher whose bearers ran towards the island. Jackson hesitated a moment before following it.
Norfolk Naval Medical Center
Captain Randall Tail of the Navy Medical Corps walked down the corridor to meet with the Russians. He looked younger than his forty-five years because his full head of black hair showed not the first sign of gray. Tail was a Mormon, educated at Brigham Young University and Stanford Medical School, who had joined the navy because he had wanted to see more of the world than one could from an office at the foot of the Wasatch Mountains. He had accomplished that much, and until today had also avoided anything resembling diplomatic duty. As the new chief of the Department of Medicine at Bethesda Naval Medical Center he knew that couldn’t last. He had flown down to Norfolk only a few hours earlier to handle the case. The Russians had driven down, and taken their time doing it.
“Good morning, gentlemen. I’m Dr. Tail.” They shook hands all around, and the lieutenant who had brought them up walked back to the elevator.
“Dr. Ivanov,” the shortest one said. “I am physician to the embassy.”
“Captain Smirnov.” Tail knew him to be assistant naval attaché, a career intelligence officer. The doctor had been briefed on the helicopter trip down by a Pentagon intelligence officer who was now drinking coffee in the hospital commissary.
“Vasily Petchkin, Doctor. I am second secretary to the embassy.” This one was a senior KGB officer, a “legal” spy with a diplomatic cover. “May we see our man?”
“Certainly. Will you follow me please?” Tail led them back down the corridor. He’d been on the go for twenty hours. This was part of the territory as chief of service at Bethesda. He got all the hard calls. One of the first things a doctor learns is how not to sleep.
The whole floor was set up for intensive care, Norfolk Naval Medical Center having been built with war casualties in mind. Intensive Care Unit Number Three was a room twenty-five feet square. The only windows were on the corridor wall, and the curtains had been drawn back. There were four beds, only one occupied. The young man in it was almost totally concealed. The only thing not hidden by the oxygen mask covering his face was an unruly clump of wheat-colored hair. The rest of his body was fully draped. An IV stand was next to the bed, its two bottles of fluid merging in a single line that led under the covers. A nurse dressed like Tail in surgical greens was standing at the foot of the bed, her green eyes locked on the electrocardiograph readout over the patient’s head, dropping momentarily to make a notation on his chart. On the far side of the bed was a machine whose function was not immediately obvious. The patient was unconscious.
“His condition?” Ivanov asked.
“Critical,” Tail replied. “It’s a miracle he got here alive at all. He was in the water for at least twelve hours, probably more like twenty. Even accounting for the fact that he was wearing a rubber exposure suit, given the ambient air and water temperatures there’s just no way he ought to have been alive. On admission his core temperature was 23.8°C.” Tail shook his head. “I’ve read about worse hypothermia cases in the literature, but this is by far the worst I’ve ever seen.”
“Prognosis?” Ivanov looked into the room.
Tail shrugged. “Hard to say. Maybe as good as fifty-fifty, maybe not. He’s still extremely shocky. He’s a fundamentally healthy person. You can’t see it from here, but he’s in superb physical shape, like a track and field man. He has a particularly strong heart; that’s probably what kept him alive long enough to get here. We have the hypothermia pretty much under control now. The problem is, with hypothermia so many things go wrong at once. We have to fight a number of separate but connected battles against different systemic enemies to keep them from overwhelming his natural defenses. If anything’s going to kill him, it’ll be the shock. We’re treating that with electrolytes, the normal routine, but he’s going to be on the edge for several days at least I — “
Tail looked up. Another man was pacing down the hall. Younger than Tait, and taller, he had a white lab coat over his greens. He carried a metal chart.
“Gentlemen, this is Doctor — Lieutenant — Jameson. He’s the physician of record on the case. He admitted your man. What do you have, Jamie?”
“The sputum sample showed pneumonia. Bad news. Worse, his blood chemistry isn’t getting any better, and his white count is dropping.”
“Great.” Tait leaned against the window frame and swore to himself.
“Here’s the printout from the blood analyzer.” Jameson handed the chart over.
“May I see this, please?” Ivanov came around.
“Sure.” Tait flipped the metal cloud chart open and held it so that everyone could see it. Ivanov had never worked with a computerized blood analyzer, and it took several seconds for him to orient himself.
“This is not good.”
“Not at all,” Tait agreed.
“We’re going to have to jump on that pneumonia, hard,” Jameson said. “This kid’s got too many things going wrong. If the pneumonia really takes hold…” He shook his head.
“Keflin?” Tait asked.
“Yeah.” Jameson pulled a vial from his pocket. “As much as he’ll handle. I’m guessing that he had a mild case before he got dumped in the water, and I hear that some penicillin-resistant strains have been cropping up in Russia. You use mostly penicillin over there, right?” Jameson looked down at Ivanov.
“Correct. What is this keflin?”
“It’s a big gun, a synthetic antibiotic, and it works well on resistant strains.”
“Right now, Jamie,” Tait ordered.
Jameson walked around the corner to enter the room. He injected the antibiotic into a 100cc piggyback IV bottle and hung it on a stand.
“He’s so young,” Ivanov noted. “He treated our man initially?”
“His name’s Albert Jameson. We call him Jamie. He’s twenty-nine, graduated Harvard third in his class, and he’s been with us ever since. He’s board-certified in internal medicine and virology. He’s as good as they come.” Tait suddenly realized how uncomfortable he was dealing with the Russians. His education and years of naval service taught him that these men were the enemy. That didn’t matter. Years before he had sworn an oath to treat patients without regard to outside considerations. Would they believe or did they think he’d let their man die because he was a Russian? “Gentlemen, I want you to understand this: we’re giving your man the very best care we can. We’re not holding anything back. If there’s a way to give him back to you alive, we’ll find it. But I can’t make any promises.”
The Soviets could see that. While waiting for instructions from Moscow, Petchkin had checked up on Tail and found him to be, though a religious fanatic, an efficient and honorable physician, one of the best in government service.
“Has he said anything?” Petchkin asked, casually.
“Not since I’ve been here. Jamie said that right after they started warming him up he was semiconscious and babbled for a few minutes. We taped it, of course, and had a Russian-speaking officer listen to it. Something about a girl with brown eyes, didn’t make any sense. Probably his sweetheart — he’s a good-looking kid, he probably has a girl at home. It was totally incoherent, though. A patient in his condition has no idea what’s going on.”
“Can we listen to the tape?” Petchkin said.
“Certainly. I’ll have it sent up.”
Jameson came around the corner. “Done. A gram of keflin every six hours. Hope it works.”