tightly for a few seconds, and when he opened them, he was in control
again.
General alert, he snapped. All squadrons to "Red" standby, he knew they
faced an international crisis. I want air cover over the area they went
down. They may have ejected. Put up two Phantom flights and keep an
umbrella over them. I want helicopters sent in immediately, with
paratrooper guards and medical teams - Command bunker moved swiftly into
general alert procedure.
Get me the Prime Minister, he said, he was going to have to do a lot of
explaining, and he spared a few vital seconds to damn David Morgan
roundly and bitterly.
The airforce doctor took one look at David's charred and scorched head
and he swore softly. We'll be lucky to save this one.
Loosely he swathed the head in Vaseline bandages and they hurried with
David's blanket-wrapped body on the stretcher to the Bell 2o5 helicopter
waiting in the orchard.
The Bell touched down on the helipad at Hadassah Hospital and a medical
team was ready for him. One hour and fifty-three minutes after the
Mirage hit the irrigation canal David had passed through the sterile
lock into the special burns unit on the third floor of the hospital,
into a quiet and secluded little world where everybody wore masks and
long green sterile robes and the only contact with the outside world was
through the double-glazed windows and even the air he breathed was
scrubbed and cleaned and filtered.
However, David was enfolded in the soft dark clouds of morphine and he
did not hear the quiet voices of the masked figures as they worked over
him. It's third degree over the entire area - No attempt to clean it or
touch it, sister, not until it stabilizes. I am going to spray with
Epigard, and we'll go to intramuscular Tetracycline four-hourly against
infection, It will be two weeks before we dare touch it. 'Very well,
doctor. Oh, and sister, fifteen milligrams of morphine six hourly. We
are going to have a lot of pain with this one. Pain was infinity, an
endless ocean across which the wave-patterns marched relentlessly to
burst up the beaches of his soul. There were times when the surf of
pain ran high and each burst of it threatened to shatter his reason.
Again there were times when it was low, almost gentle in its throbbing
rhythm and he drifted far out upon the ocean of pain to where the
morphine mists enfolded him. Then the mists parted and a brazen sun
beat down upon his head, and he squirmed and writhed and cried out. His
skull seemed to bloat and swell until it must burst, and the open
nerve-ends screamed for surcease.
Then suddenly there was the sharply beloved sting of the needle in his
flesh, and the mists closed about him once more.
I don't like the look of this at all. Have we taken a culture, sister?
'Yes, doctor. 'What are we growing? 'I'm afraid it's strep. 'Yes. I
thought so. I think we'll change to Cloxacillin see if we get a better
response with that With the pain, David became aware of a smell. It was
the smell of carrion and f 3ings ong dead, the smell of vermin in dirty
blankets, of vomit and excreta, and the odour of wet garbage festering
in dark alleys, and at last he came to know that the smell was the
rotting of his own flesh as the bacteria of Streptococcus infection
attacked the expose tissue.
They fought it with the drugs, but now the pain was underlined with the
fevers of infection and the terrible burning thirsts which no amount of
liquids could slake.
With the fever came the nightmares and the fantasies to plague and goad
him even further beyond the limits of his endurance.
Joe - he cried out in his agony, try for the sun, Joe.
Break left now, Go! Go! And then he was sobbing from the ruined and
broken mouth. Oh, Joe! Oh God, no! Joe. Until the night-sister could
no longer bear it and she came hurrying with the syringe, and his
screams turned into babbling and then into the low whimper and moan of
the drug sleep. We'll start with the acriflavin dressings now, sister.
When they changed the dressings every forty-eight hours it was under
general anaesthetic for the entire head was of raw flesh, a bland
expressionless head, a head like a child's drawing, crude lines and
harsh colours, hairless, earless, streaked and mottled with yellow runs
and patches of soft pus and corruption.
We are getting a response from the Cloxacillin, it's looking a lot
healthier, sister. The naked flesh of his eyelids had contracted,
pulling back like the glistening petals of a pink rose, exposing the
eyeballs to the air without respite. They had filled the eyes sockets
with a yellow ointment to soothe and moisten them, to keep out the
loathsome infection that covered his head. The ointment prevented
vision.
I think we'll go for an abdominal pedicel now. Will you prep for
afternoon theatre, please, sister? Now it was time for the knife, and
David was to learn that the pain and the knife lived together in
terrible sin.
They lifted a long flap of skin and flesh from his belly, leaving it
still attached at one end, and they rolled it into a fat sausage, then
they strapped his good arm, the one without the plaster cast, to his
side and they stitched the free end of the sausage to his forearm,
training it to draw its blood supply from there. Then they brought him
back from theatre and left him trussed and helpless and blind with the
pedicel fastened to his arm, like a remora. to the belly of a shark.
Well, we have saved both eyes, the voice was proud, fond almost, and
David looked up and saw them for the first time. They were gathered
around his cot, a circle of craning heads, mouths and noses covered by
surgical masks, but his vision was still smeary with ointment and
distorted by the drip irrigation that had replaced it. Now we will go
for the eyelids. It was the knife again, the contracted and
bunchedelids split and re-shaped and stitched, the knife up ey and pain
and the familiar sickly taste and stink of anaesthetic that saturated
his body and seemed to exude from the very pores of his skin.
Beautiful, really lovely, we have cleaned up the infection nicely. Now
we can begin. The head was cleansed of its running rivers of pus, and
now it was glistening and wet, bald and bright red, the colour of a
cocktail cherry as granulation tissue formed. There were two gnarled
and twisted flaps for ears, the double row of teeth startlingly white
and perfect where the lips had been eaten away, a long white blade of
exposed bone outlined the point of the jaw, the nose was a stump with
the nostrils like the double muzzles of a shotgun, and only the eyes
were still beautiful, dark indigo and flawlessly white between lids of
shocking crimson and neatly laid back stitches.
We'll begin at the back of the neck. Will you prep for this afternoon's
theatre, please, sister? It was a variation on the theme of the knife.
They planed sheets of live skin from his thighs and meshed them to allow
a wider spread, then they laid them over the exposed flesh, covering a
little at each session, and evaluating each attempt while David lay in
his cot and rode the long swells of pain.
That one is no good. I'm afraid we will have to scrap it and try again.
While his thighs grew a new crop of skin, they planed fresh sheets from
his calves, so that each donor-site became a new source of pain.
Lovely! An edge-to-edge take with that graft Slowly the cap of skin