“Thirty knots.”
“Increase to forty-five.”
“Increasing to forty-five.”
One of the planesmen glanced over from his steering column at the operator on trim, rolling his eyes heavenward. “Watch the dials, sailor,” said Zeldman sharply.
“Yes, sir.”
“Revised ETA Holy Loch?” asked Robert Brentwood.
“Four hours,” answered Zeldman. “Including corrections for currents plus or minus fifteen minutes.”
“Very well. No active sonar. Passive only.”
“Passive only.”
“Call me when we’re ten miles off.”
“Yes, sir.”
As Brentwood left the redded-out control center, Zeldman heard one of the sailors whisper to another. “What’s Bing up to?”
Zeldman let it go as if the scratchy noise of the ocean had drowned out the whisper.
“Don’t know,” answered another of the men on watch. “Probably wants to get his book.”
Zeldman still held off saying anything. Now and then you had to let the rein loose a tad — up too tight, they were as apt to make a mistake as they were when too relaxed.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
The midnight moon was bright, and a mile or so beyond the
“When will I know?” William Spence had asked her, and she had to wait until he had finished coughing before she replied, asking, “Know about what?” She knew what he meant but didn’t want him to worry unnecessarily.
“The X rays.”
“Oh — tomorrow morning, I guess.”
“I’m coming apart,” he said, the violent coughing starting up again, so that she got up and slipped the elastic about his head, placing the plastic mask over his nose and mouth, altering the rate of oxygen flow until the small, black plastic marble was unseated, jumping up and down inside the flow indicator.
Spence was perspiring so much, the sheet was clammy about his chest, and Lana could tell the other pain, from the amputations, was also tormenting him, the medication wearing off again, the pain boring into him again. But she knew she couldn’t give him any more morphine for half an hour. If it were up to her, she would have given it to him now — it wasn’t going to make much difference. The lungs in the X rays had been a diaphanous white. He was so weak that his so-called “walk” to the washroom had degenerated during the last twelve hours to nothing more than a shuffle. They had performed a miracle of modern surgery in keeping him alive after the trauma of the evacuation from the
While holding his cough-wracked body, Lana recalled the X-ray technician as he had stood looking gloomily at the film, watching it rock to and fro with the action of the ship, the very motion somehow an obscene mockery of real life.
“There will,” Matron had told her matter-of-factly, “be moments of serenity, even reverie. In the end they’re quite content.”
“With a double amputation?” Lana had asked tartly.
“You’d be surprised, my dear,” Matron had replied.
No, thought Lana, you’ll be surprised. This boy is going to fight with everything he’s got.
“The X ray doesn’t tell us the whole story, nurse,” the MO had advised her in a more understanding tone. “Even so, I’m surprised the prednisone didn’t help — I’d thought there was definitely an allergic component that the prednisone would deal with. Well, all we can do now is watch him. Could be a turnaround before we reach Halifax.”
She had been with him eight hours straight, and now in the calm following the wracking coughs, every one of which she had felt like a blow to her own body, Lana leaned over him and with a cool, white facecloth, as white as the ice, he thought, she dabbed his body cool, gently patting him dry. She saw him smile, or rather his eyes moving suddenly, full of life, the rest of his face covered by the semitransparent green mask. “What are you grinning about, Mr. Spence?” she asked with playful severity.
“I can’t help it,” he said, his voice sounding nasal from behind the mask. “I don’t need this mask anymore.”
“You sure?”
“Yes.” Closing his eyes, he lifted his left arm and lowered it gently onto her hand. She did not take it away but reached up with her left hand to turn off the oxygen flow, its soft hiss fading, the sound of the waves from the calved berg still slapping the ship’s flanks. She was standing by him, her right hand still beneath his bandaged arm. He looked up at her and wordlessly she sat down by him, her hand still beneath his arm, her other hand gently stroking him and seeing the miracle of the pain not gone but momentarily defeated by her gift of touch. She raised her left hand higher, kissed her finger, and gently stroked him again. He groaned in ecstasy, his head beginning to move slowly, joyously, from side to side, and in that moment, out of all the pain and the evil of Jay La Roche, Lana emerged as gentle as a virgin, but knowing much more, lowering her head, her long, soft hair falling on him, then she kissed him there, the firm but pliant wetness of her lips encasing him, drawing him into her, her tongue sliding hard and fast and then slowly, lovingly, as he groaned, his whole body beginning to arch and rock, arching again, then arched as if frozen in time, shuddering before he collapsed against the bed, bathed in sweat, his eyes glistening with life, looking at her, then slowly filling with such calm that they said nothing until the pain, like a vindictive husband wanting to kill, attacked again.
Quickly, alarmed, she looked at the clock, rearranging her clothes and hair. It was still ten minutes to go before the next injection. Now the flush of love in his face left him, like a red curtain torn aside, his face stunned with ferocious pain, white, as pale as moonlight. She took the hypodermic, injected him, and knelt by him, ready with the mask should the coughing return. It never did, and as she told him she loved him, he went into a deep sleep, a tiny spot of blood seeping through on the stump of his right hand, as scarlet against the bandages, she thought, as a rose against hard snow.
She pressed the buzzer and the cardiac arrest team arrived. He revived on the second “jump,” but later that night the oscilloscope’s hiccuping green sine wave went flat, and in place of the lively “bips,” there was a long, steady tone.
“In all my career,” Matron fumed before the chief surgeon and the ship’s chief medical officer, “I have never seen such a flagrant violation of procedure.”
The MO, the young captain who had referred to Spence as Lana’s “boyfriend” a couple of days ago, could see the pain in Lana’s face, and for his part, the morphine shot she’d given the patient too early would hardly have made any difference. He told the chief surgeon so. And in his view it certainly didn’t warrant a court-martial, as Matron was pressing for.
The matron’s head shot up, looking over at the surgeon.
“It’s hardly the morphine I ‘m concerned about, Mr. Reilly.” Even now she insisted on the British convention of referring to chief surgeons as “Mister,” its usage conveying a higher status than “Doctor.”’ “Though giving the patient the injection earlier is, in my professional opinion, also thoroughly reprehensible.”
