Stay in the middle.
More bullets whapping in. The windshield in front of Jake shattered. Then something hit him in the shoulder, drove him forward into the panel. Somehow he kept his feet under him.
The shooting stopped. He was rounding a bend. He got himself into the seat behind the wheel.
How far to the sea? Would the pirates follow?
He was worrying about that when he heard the explosion, a roar that grew and grew and grew, then died abruptly.
His head swam and he worked desperately hard to breathe. Somehow he stayed conscious and kept the boat in the channel.
Eventually the darkness of the trees on the riversides merged with the night and the boat began to pitch and roll. The ocean. They were out of the river.
There was a bungee cord dangling from the wheel. With the last of his strength Jake managed to hook the free end to the bottom of the chair where he had been sitting.
He rolled Flap over to check on him. He had a terrible knot on his forehead and the pupil of one eye was completely dilated. Concussion.
“Hey, Flap. It’s me, Jake.”
The Marine moved. His lips worked. Jake put his head down to hear. “Horowitz had a brother. Tell him…Tell him…”
Just what Jake was to tell him Flap didn’t say.
Jake was so tired. He lay down beside Flap.
The boat ran out of fuel an hour later. It was rolling amid the swells of a sun-flecked blue sea when a pilot of an A-7 from Columbia spotted it. The crewman the helicopter lowered found Jake Grafton and Flap Le Beau lying side by side in the cockpit.
23
Jake woke up in a room with cream-colored walls and ceiling, in a bed with crisp white sheets. A sunbeam shone like a spotlight through a window. An IV was dripping into a vein in his left arm.
Hospital.
His curiosity satisfied, he drifted off to sleep again. When he next awoke a nurse was there taking his pulse. “Welcome back to the land of the living,” she said and lowered his wrist back to the bed. She annotated a clipboard, then gave him a grin.
“Where am I?”
“Honolulu. Trippler Army Hospital.”
“Hawaii?”
“Yes. You’ve been here almost a day now. You’re just coming out of the recovery room.”
“Le Beau? Marine captain. He here too?”
“Yes. He’s still in recovery.”
“How is he?”
“Still asleep. He’s had an operation. You’ve had one too, but yours didn’t take quite as long.”
“When he wakes up, I want to talk to him. Okay?”
“We’ll see. You take that up with the doctor when he comes around. He should be here in about thirty minutes. Is there anything I can do for you?”
“No.”
She busied herself arranging the sheets and checking that he had fresh water in a glass by the bed. He lay taking it in, enjoying the brightness and the cleanliness.
After a bit curiosity stirred him. “What day is it?”
“This is Wednesday.”
“We got shot down…December nine. What day…is it now?”
“The sixteenth of December.”
“We missed Australia.”
“What was that?”
“Nothing,” he murmured, and closed his eyes again. He was very tired.
He was still pretty foggy when he talked to the doctor, either later that morning or that afternoon. The sunbeam had moved. He noticed that.
“We operated on your left side. Your lung collapsed. Lucky you didn’t bleed to death. And of course you were shot in the shoulder. By some miracle the bullet missed your collarbone. Went clean through.”
“Uh-huh.”
“You’re also fighting a raging infection. You aren’t out of the woods yet, sailor.”
“Le Beau, how’s he doing?”
“He’s critical. He lost a lot of blood.”
“He gonna make it?”
“We think so.”
“When he wakes up, I want to see him.”
“We’ll see.”
“Bring him in here. This room’s big enough. Or take me into his room.”
“We’ll see.”
“How’d we get here, anyway?”
“The ship medevaced you two to Clark and the Air Force flew you here.”
“I may not be out of the woods, but I’m out of the jungle.”
The next day Flap was wheeled into the room. His bed was placed beside Jake’s. A bandage covered half his head. But he grinned when he saw Jake out of his one unobstructed eye.
“Hey, shipmate.”
“As I live and breathe,” said Flap Le Beau as the nurses hovered around hooking up everything. “The neighborhood is integrating. Better put the house up for sale while you still can.”
“If you don’t stop that racist stuff I’m gonna start calling you Chocolate.”
“Chocolate Le Beau,” he said, savoring it. “I like it. They hung that Flap tag on me because I talk a lot. My real name is Clarence.”
“I know. Middle initial O. What’s that stand for?”
“Odysseus. I picked it out in college after I read the Odyssey. Clarence O. Le Beau. Got a ring to it, don’t it?” He directed the question to one of the nurses, who looked sort of sweet.
“It is very nice,” she said and smiled.
“So how you feeling?” Jake asked.
“Like a week-old dog turd that’s been run over by a truck. And you?”
“Not quite that chipper.”
When the nurses were leaving Flap told the sweet one, “Come back and see us anytime, dearest.”
“I will, Clarence O.”
When they were gone, Flap told Jake, “Don’t worry. I’ll get you one too. Trust me.”
“So what’s wrong with your head?”
“Concussion and blood clot. They had to drill a hole to relieve the pressure. Another hole in my head — just what I needed, eh?”
“The captain laid you out with a butt stroke. I killed him.”
“I figured that or we wouldn’t be here. But some other time, huh? I don’t want to even think about that shit.”
“Yeah.”
“What’s for lunch? Have they told you?”
“No.”
“I am really ready for some good grits.”
“Guess we missed Australia.”
“These things happen. Don’t sweat it. You can make it up to me somehow.”
The following day they were visited by a Navy commander, an officer on the staff of Commander In Chief Pacific — CINCPAC. He interviewed both men, recorded their stories, then when they tired, left while they napped. He came back for another hour just before dinner and asked questions.
“If I can do anything for you gentlemen, give me a call.”
He left a card with his name and telephone number on the stands beside each of their beds.
They had lost a lot of weight. When the nurses first sat Jake up he was amazed at how skinny his legs and arms were.
Improvement was slow at first, then quicker. By the fifth day Jake was walking to the bathroom. He bragged, so Flap got himself out of bed and went when the nurses weren’t there. He had trouble with his balance but he made it to the john and back by holding on to things.
On the eighth day they went for a hike, holding on to each other, to see what they could see. A nurse caught them and made them retrace their steps.
The hospital was half-empty. “Not like it used to be. You were the first gunshot victim we saw in two months,” one nurse told Jake.
“Not like the good old days,” he replied.
“They weren’t good days,” he was told. “Thank God the war is over.”
On the day after Christmas they demanded clothes. That afternoon an orderly brought them cardboard boxes containing some of their clothes that the guys on the ship had packed and sent. The orderly helped Jake open his. Inside he found underwear, uniforms, shoes, insignia.