"Good day, sir!"
24
"Sorry to keep you waiting, ma'am," the Duke's senior Hospital Corpsman said apologetically, brushing through the curtained doorway that separated the small, four-bed ward from the equally tiny sick bay office-cum-examination room.
"Forget it, Chief," Amanda replied. "How's he doing?"
"He's stabilizing. I think we've got the shock under control. His blood pressure is up, and his heart action looks good. There are signs that he's starting to come around again. I think that, for the short term, he'll be okay. No immediate danger."
Amanda noted both Bonnie Robinson's words and her grim expression. "You're qualifying yourself all over the place, Chief. What's the full story?"
"Erikson has suffered a deep puncture wound to the chest cavity."
"That sounds bad."
"It is, ma'am."
Robinson turned to the printer unit of the sick bay's compact X-ray unit and punched the processing key. After a moment, a fresh negative was extruded into the Chief's hands with a soft whir. She stepped to the rear bulkhead and clipped the negative to a glow plate.
"Come here, Captain. I'll show you."
Amanda stood at the Corpsman's shoulder as she outlined the problem. "He took the hit almost dead center in the chest. There was a clean penetration into the chest cavity, but we've got that sealed off without getting a collapsed lung. There was some damage to the right pleural sac. That sort of shadowy area indicates that there was some hemorrhaging within the pleural cavity, but not too bad. The big problem is right here."
Robinson's slender fingers moved to outline a jagged black silhouette.
"A shrapnel fragment?"
"Yes, ma'am. Drilled right in among the major blood vessels above the heart. It's a certifiable miracle that nothing critical was directly involved."
"He lucked out."
"Not by all that much, ma'am."
"You're qualifying again, Chief."
"Yeah, I am. That fragment could shift, cut through an arterial wall. It could still kill him very easily."
"What can you do about it?"
"Nothing. This is a job for a full surgical team. We've got to get Erikson medevaced out to one as soon as possible."
"Chief, the closest medical facilities we have access to are over a thousand miles away in the Falkland Islands, way off station. We've got to deal with this with what we have available right here."
Robinson shook her head with great deliberation. "I don't know what I can say, Captain. I've had the basic indoctrination into emergency surgical procedures and, with a real doctor coaching me over a video link, I might be able to pull a hot appendix if I had to. This kind of operation, though, is so far over my head, I might as well be cutting his throat directly. I'm sorry, ma'am, but that's how it is."
Amanda nodded a reply. Turning, she took the two steps to the ward doorway. Pushing aside the curtain, she looked in at the still form lying in one of the lower bunks, bound down by his web of IV tubes and oxygen cannulas. Somehow she felt it was important that she be looking at him when she made this next decision.
"What about the alternative, Chief? The fleet will be up with us in about a week. Can you hold him stable until they arrive?"
"Captain, the book says that the faster this kind of wound is treated, the better. His general physical condition is bound to deteriorate. There is danger of infection, and that fragment could shift at any time."
"I'll grant you that and more, Chief. Can you keep him alive?"
"Well, maybe if I can be advised by Fleet medical—"
"No joy. We'll be going full EMCON soon. You'll be on your own. Now, what about it?"
Chief Robinson sighed. She was one of the Duke's plank owners, having been aboard since the commissioning. During that time, she had learned that her captain never demanded miracles. She just quietly required the absolute best that was humanly possible.
"We'll try, ma'am. We'll really try."
25
Powered back to dead slow, the Duke crept through a night that was nothing but varying textures of blackness. The low-lying overcast smothered even the faintest trace of star-shine, and the only illumination in the whole world seemed to issue from the small cluster of hooded work-lights on the destroyer's bow.
The Zenith was the largest single piece of ordnance carried aboard the Cunningham. Twenty-five feet in length and triple the diameter of a LORAIN, it took up four of the cells in the forwardmost Vertical Launch System. It also required the most preparation before it could fly.
The missile and its launch rail had to be lifted hydraulically to deck level. There, its four strap-on boosters, each nearly the same length as the main vehicle, had to be struck up from belowdecks, hogged into position with the missile-loading crane, and shackled onto their respective hard-points. Heavy steel flame deflectors were positioned under the exhaust ventures and thick, insulated Fiberglas matting had to be deployed and secured to protect the RAM-tiled decks. Then the real work of systems checkout could begin.
The katabatics still raked the destroyer's decks like an icy spray of machine-gun fire. Heavy Navy-issue parkas helped to blunt the edge of the cutting wind, but many of the more delicate connections and adjustments simply couldn't be made by workers wearing gloves. The men and women of Weapons Division did the best they could. They worked until numbed fingers simply refused to respond anymore, then they swore and backed off, tucking frozen hands into pockets and armpits. When feeling returned, heralded by an agonizing tingling and burning, they swore again and got back on the job.
"How's it going up there, Dix?" Amanda inquired sympathetically into her headset.
On the low-light deck monitor that was covering the work party, she could see the Lieutenant look aft.
"We're back on the timeline, Skipper. Everything looks good. All hands-on tests read green, and there don't seem to be any parts left over."
Amanda glanced across the CIC to the Zenith operations station and its master readouts. "We concur with that. How much more time do you need?"
"Maybe five more minutes for final-phase checks and to button things up out here."
"You've got ten. Well done to all hands involved."
"Better wait till we see if this thing works first, ma'am."
The Combat Information Center had taken on the aspects of a miniature NASA mission control. The main screen had been reconfigured as an orbital positioning display, and Christine Rendino was overseeing the systems operators as they prepared to switch over to space operations mode.
"How are we looking, Chris?"
"Last update from Aerospace Command says that the Aquila B is still right in the groove. She'll be above our horizon in about twelve minutes and thirty-four seconds."
"Close, but we're in under the wire. Anything new from the Argentines?"
"Intermittent low-grade radar emissions to the north and west. Air-to-surface search stuff, but way out of range. Some operational chatter on their standard air force and navy frequencies. Nothing critical."
"Nonetheless, when we light off at maximum power to track that satellite we're really going to be calling attention to ourselves. How long will we have to radiate?"
"Maybe sixty to ninety seconds to acquire and confirm the orbit and to allow the Zenith system to set up the intercept solution. Then we can shut down. I'd suggest, though, that we go active again briefly to monitor and confirm the kill."