At the time all he had been aware of was the rending, cracking sound of the starboard wing and several feet of the rear fuselage detaching from the rest of the airframe, as the wreck skidded sideways and the air filled with dust, and lumps of airframe and pulverised stones.
Briefly, he had been knocked out.
He had come too with the stench of petrol in his face hanging half out of his cockpit. The aircraft had come to rest on its right-hand side and in a second, he had fallen out onto the bone-hard ground, picked himself up and like an automaton started dragging Ted Forrest out of his seat.
His friend had obviously been thrown forward into the mount for the 0.303 machine gun but there was too much blood to be explained away by a mere broken nose.
Laying the unconscious man in the shadow of the wreck Abe tried not to panic. Ted Forrest had a nasty-looking, gory scalp wound; he could see the yellow-white of the exposed skull through the shredded fabric of his leather flying helmet. That might have been what knocked him out thirty or forty minutes ago. Abe had lost track of time, that was what happened when you were surviving minute by minute.
No, no, no…
He made no attempt to remove his friend’s helmet.
For all he knew it might be all that was holding an undisplaced skull fracture in place.
There was blood in Ted’s flying suit, soaking the left side of his furs. Almost as an afterthought, Abe realised his friend’s left calf was broken.
That would have to wait.
His friend was still breathing.
Pulse okay…
He looked awfully pale though…
He scrabbled in the chaos of the rear cockpit to retrieve the second small emergency medical kit. He would check what was left of the pilot’s med kit later but did not entertain high hopes of salvaging anything useful.
Checking that the second kit was correctly stowed was the navigator-observer-gunner’s job…
He found it, dislodged from its broken bracket it was wedged beneath the attaché case carrying the Old Man’s despatches, and the boffins’ reports from the spying cruise north of Santo Domingo last week.
Abe injected the contents of the first of the three intact ampoules of morphine into his friend’s thigh◦– he prayed at least one or two of the ampoules in the broken front cockpit kit had survived◦– and started to peel off his jacket, ignoring for the moment the still angrily weeping head wound. In the scale of things that injury was possibly, superficial.
He unbuckled the injured man’s pistol belt, pausing to divest himself of his own gun before he explored beneath his friend’s shirt, his hands coming away bloody.
A through and through: entry below the rib cage and exit above Ted’s right hip.
His friend groaned, blinked at him uncomprehendingly.
“What…”
“We crashed,” Abe said tersely.
“Oh, right…”
“You’re a little bit bust up but it’s nothing I can’t fix.”
Ted Forrest’s stare was a little glazed.
“What happened to your shoulder, Abe?”
Bizarrely, it was not until then that Abe recollected feeling something ‘pluck’ or more accurately, ‘kick’ at his left shoulder when those 157s roared past…
Or had that happened in the attack on the Karlsruhe?
It did not matter, he would figure it out later…
Some of the blood he had assumed was Ted’s was actually his, dripping persistently down his left arm.
Even though he knew it was a really bad idea he gingerly flexed his injured shoulder. Everything seemed to work, albeit stiffly. No bones broken, maybe he had got lucky.
“They just winged me, old man,” he assured his friend. “I’ll give the wound a good wash in the sea when I’ve looked after you.”
Abe used all the sulphonamide powder in the emergency kit packing the neat entry wound and not quite so discrete exit wound above his friend’s hip, tore up his vest and tied a makeshift binding around the inadequate sterile bandages. Next, he carefully eased off Ted Forrest’s helmet, breathing a heartfelt sigh of relief when he discovered that the gash was nowhere near as lengthy, nor deep apart from a one-inch section of the wound, as he had feared.
Ted hardly winced as he clumsily sewed up the scalp wound.
Abe was exhausted, somewhat knocked about himself and as he had been repeatedly reminded during his studies at the Queen Eleanor Medical Centre in Albany, by much wiser practitioners than he suspected he was going to be any time soon, it was always much harder psychologically, tending to a badly injured patient whom one knew, or was close to. He had only known Ted for a few weeks but they had lived intensely in those weeks and ‘clicked’ from day one, become like brothers and after today, would forever be linked by their mutual travails.
Eventually he examined his friend’s broken left leg.
He returned to the wreck and salvaged three lengths of detached wing-struts, hacking at them with the small hand-fire axe which he had discovered embedded in the side of the fuselage roughly rib-high, or snapping them over his knee to get them to approximately the right length, and recovered several lengths of wire◦– previously, stressing the wings◦– and knelt beside the semi-conscious man on the ground.
He put the axe aside.
That would come in handy later if they lived long enough to worry about butchering meat, or gutting fish to eat.
“I’m sorry, Ted,” he apologised, choking on the words. “We’ve only got two more shots of morphine and you’re going to need both of those to get through the next twenty-four hours. Your left calf is broken, there’s no skin break or so far as I can see major soft-tissue trauma, certainly nothing we need to worry about now,” he paused, “but I have to pull you about something rotten if I’m going to set the bone before the leg has a chance to go bad on us.”
He had placed a wadge of doped canvas torn from the shredded right wing between his friend’s teeth: Ted Forrest’s scream would haunt him forever.
Afterwards, Abe must have passed out because when he regained consciousness, he was lying close to his friend, whom he had obviously made as comfortable as possible at some stage.
‘Comfort’ being a relative thing in their circumstances.
The other thing he had done but had no memory of doing was to recover the signalling flare gun and three cartridges from the rear cockpit, both water bottles from the wreck◦– discovering that one had a large hole in it◦– and the attaché case stuffed full of documents, which in lieu of another suitable pillow he had placed under Ted’s head.
Abe shivered despite the warmth of the late afternoon.
That would be shock settling in…
The sun was setting, and a breeze picking up from the west.
Abe had spread his own flying jacket over his friend to try to keep him warm.
He crawled over to him.
The other man blinked at him.
“This is a bit of a pickle,” Ted Forrest decided feebly. “What’s the plan, skipper?”
Abe drew immense strength from the fleeting suggestion of a grin on the badly injured man’s drawn features.
He checked his friend’s pulse.
Steady…
Tested his brow for feverishness.
Cool to the touch.
Keeping Ted warm tonight was going to be a problem because he had probably lost a lot of blood before the crash…
First things first!
“I need to clean myself up, old man. Re-charge our water canteen, that sort of thing.”
He doubted if there were any natural springs on the island.
Praying for rain holes was the best he could hope for.