“Well, hell, Granny, you asked,” O’Doull said. “Tell me that’s not how we usually do things.”
“Can’t,” Granville McDougald admitted. “Wish to God I could, but I damn well can’t. Besides, it looks like we’re filling Cincinnati up with everything under the sun so we can pop the Confederates in the nose.”
“Doesn’t it just?” O’Doull said. “And don’t you suppose they’ve got a suspicion that we might want to cross the river here? Wouldn’t you?”
“Not me. I’ve given up having suspicions. They end up getting confirmed, and then I’m unhappy,” the medic said. “I don’t like being unhappy. It makes me sad when I am.”
“Er-right,” O’Doull said. McDougald smiled back, calm as a cynical Buddha.
Before either one of them could go any further with it, they got called into an operating room. They had no room for a difference of opinion there. What needed doing was only too obvious: nothing any surgeon in the world could do would save an arm mangled like that one.
“Want to do the honors, Granny?” O’Doull said. “I’ll pass gas for you if you care to.”
“Sure, if you don’t mind,” McDougald answered. “A straight amputation I can manage, and he’ll get the same result from me as he would from you. It’s the complicated stuff where you’ve got an edge on me.”
To some degree, that was true. The degree was less than McDougald made it out to be. Scrupulously polite, the medic didn’t pretend to have an M.D.’s skills. But he did have close to thirty years of experience at repairing wounded men. Plenty of doctors knew less than he did, and were more arrogant about what they did know.
O’Doull knew he was an amateur anesthetist himself. He’d knocked out patients back in Quebec before operating on them. He’d done it in the field, too, but he wasn’t all that confident in his own skills.
Here, though, everything was straightforward. As soon as the man went out, McDougald got to work with scalpel and bone saw, taking the mangled arm off above the elbow. He tied off bleeders one after another, closed the dreadful wound, and sighed. “Whatever that poor guy was, he won’t be when he wakes up.”
“Maybe he was left-handed,” O’Doull said.
“Mm-maybe.” McDougald was a lefty himself. “Odds are long, though. And even if a one-armed man has his good arm, he’s still got a hard road in front of him.”
“Better than dying,” O’Doull said.
“I suppose you’re right. I never once heard a dead man say he’d rather be the way he was than short an arm,” McDougald said.
“You never…” O’Doull’s voice trailed away as he worked through the possibilities in that. “How many dead people do you usually talk with?”
“Oh, not that many,” Granville McDougald said. “Harder than anything getting a straight answer out of ’em.”
“I believe you,” O’Doull said. “Have you noticed it’s pretty damn hard getting a straight answer out of you, too?”
“Out of me? Nah.” McDougald shook his head. “I’m as transparent as glass. The only problem with that is, too many of our people are as breakable as glass, which isn’t so good.”
He could spin out nonsense, or sometimes stuff that seemed like nonsense but wasn’t, faster than O’Doull could pin him down on it. O’Doull mostly didn’t try; only the sheer outrageousness of the medic’s latest effort pulled a protest out of him.
Before he could do any more squawking, an officer who pretty plainly wasn’t a doctor came into the O.R. “Major O’Doull?” the stranger asked. When O’Doull admitted he was himself, the newcomer said, “I’m Vic Hodding. I’m a captain in Intelligence.”
Granny McDougald let out a soft snort. Above Hodding’s surgical mask, his cat-green eyes swung toward the medic. McDougald blandly stared back. Nobody could prove a thing, even if the editorial message came through loud and clear. “Well, Captain, what can I do for you?” O’Doull asked, wondering if he really wanted to know.
“We’ve got a wounded man we brought back from the other side of the Ohio,” Hodding replied. “He knows some things we really need to find out. What are the drugs that would help pull them out of him?”
“Rack and thumbscrews often work wonders,” McDougald said, hardly bothering to hide his scorn.
Hodding glanced toward him again. “Who is this man?” he inquired of O’Doull with a certain dangerous formality.
“Never mind,” O’Doull answered. “If you need help from me, you don’t need to know. And if you don’t need help from me, I’ll be damned if I tell you. And I’ll do everything I know how to do to stop you from making trouble for him.”
Captain Hodding took that more calmly than O’Doull expected-more calmly than he would have himself, he thought. “He must be good at what he does,” the Intelligence officer remarked. O’Doull said nothing. Hodding went on, “Anyway, we need answers from this guy. Strongarm stuff may just get us lies-and besides, we don’t like to do it, no matter what Mr. High And Mighty there says. What goes around comes around, and the Confederates are too likely to pay us back if we get rough.”
O’Doull could see what Granny McDougald was thinking. So then they pay us back with needles instead. Oh, boy. But needles were less likely to wreck a man for life than some of the other things interrogators did.
“What do you think this guy knows?” O’Doull asked. Vic Hodding stood mute. O’Doull made an impatient noise. “Look, I’m going to be there while you’re questioning him, right? So what the hell are you flabbling about? You don’t want me there, go find some other guy to do this for you.”
After some thought and an apparent wrestle with himself, Hodding nodded. “Yeah, you’re right, Doc. You have need-to-know.” The way he brought out the phrase would have told O’Doull he was in Intelligence even without any other evidence. He continued, “We infiltrated some people down south of the river and extracted this guy. What he doesn’t know about their trains and trucks in Kentucky and Tennessee isn’t worth knowing. We should have got him out clean, but he put up more of a fight than we figured.” He shrugged. “These things happen.”
“In films, the guy always has the secret for the new poison gas,” O’Doull said.
“Yeah, and the blonde with the big boobs teases it out of him, and he loves every minute of it,” Hodding said. “Doctors in films never treat ringworm, either. But if the Confederates have trouble moving supplies, that makes our life a hell of a lot easier.”
He wasn’t wrong. Granville McDougald murmured, “Pentothal?”
O’Doull nodded. “Best chance I’ve got.” He turned to the Intelligence officer. “Sodium pentothal may make him not care so much about what he says. Or it may not. Drugging a guy and making him spill his guts is another one of those things that work better in films.”
“All right. Do what you can,” Hodding said. “He’s likelier to blab with the stuff in him than without it, right?” O’Doull nodded again-that was true, and didn’t commit him to anything. Captain Hodding gestured toward the door. “Come on, then.”
The Confederate officer was wounded in the leg and shoulder. He glared at O’Doull. “I am Travis W.W. Oliphant, colonel, C.S. Army.” He gave his pay number.
“Pleased to meet you, Colonel. I’m Major O’Doull. I’m a doctor, and I’m going to give you something to make you feel a little better,” O’Doull said. Colonel Oliphant looked suspicious, but he didn’t try to fight as O’Doull injected him.
After a little while, the Confederate said, “I do feel easier.” Pentothal sneaked up on you. It didn’t make your troubles go away, but it did mean you weren’t likely to remember them once you came out from under it.
Captain Hodding started questioning Oliphant. The logistics specialist didn’t seem to worry about what he said. A lot that came out was drivel, but enough wasn’t to keep Hodding scribbling notes. O’Doull gave the colonel more pentothal. Too much and he’d stop making sense altogether. Not enough and he’d clam up. O’Doull found what seemed the right dosage by experiment.