own-O'Doull started to worry. He almost welcomed a man with a leg wound. Patching it up let him think about other things besides the medic and why he might be missing. Why the devil had he let Donofrio go? But he knew the answer to that: because Vince would have sulked and fumed for days if he hadn't, and life was too short. But if life turned out to be literally too short…
By the time another hour went by, O'Doull began to dread what would happen when the search party came back. Then they did. One look at the corporal's face told him he hadn't wasted his time worrying. 'What happened?' he asked.
'Both dead,' the noncom said grimly. 'Beaten, stomped, kicked-you name it, they got it, the guy and the gal both. We found 'em in a field not far from the side of the road. The medic's holster was empty, so his pistol's gone. Some goddamn Confederate's got it now.'
'Jesus!' O'Doull felt sick. He'd never been responsible for a man's death like this before. Plenty of wounded soldiers had died while he was working on them, but he was doing his goddamnedest to save them. Here, one word-no-would have saved Vince Donofrio. It would have, but he hadn't said it. He forced out the next question: 'What now?'
'Sir, I've already talked to a line officer,' the squad leader said. 'We beat the bushes for the motherfuckers who did it. We take hostages. We put out the call for the guilty bastards to give themselves up. Then we blow the fuckin' hostages' heads off.' He sounded as if he looked forward to serving in the firing squad.
'Jesus!' O'Doull said again. 'How many people are going to die because Vince thought Billie Jean was cute?'
'She wasn't cute when we found her, sir,' the corporal said. 'They…Well, shit, you don't want to hear about that. But she wasn't. Neither was he.'
O'Doull crossed himself. 'I shouldn't have let him go. But he liked her looks, and I didn't think anything would happen this time, so-'
'You never think anything'll happen this time,' the corporal said. 'Only sometimes it does.'
'Yeah. Sometimes it does.' O'Doull covered his face with his hands. 'Here's one I'll carry on my conscience the rest of my life.' Yes, this was much worse than losing a patient on the table.
'We'll get 'em,' the corporal said. 'Or if we don't, we'll get enough of the bastards who might have done it to make the rest of the assholes around here think twice before they try anything like that again.'
'Fat lot of good any of that will do Vince,' O'Doull said.
'Sir, I'm sorry as hell about that. It's part of the war around these parts,' the corporal said. 'Sooner or later, I expect we'll put the fear of God into the Confederates.'
That wouldn't do Vince Donofrio any good, either. O'Doull didn't say so-what was the use? The noncom saluted and led his squad away. Eddie came up to O'Doull. 'Not your fault, Doc,' he said. 'You just did what anybody else would've done.'
'I guess so,' O'Doull said. 'But if it went wrong when somebody else did it, it'd be his fault, right? So how come it's not mine?'
'You couldn't know he'd run into bushwhackers,' the corpsman said.
'No, but I could know-hell, I did know-he might, and I let him go anyway. Shit.' O'Doull wanted to get into the medicinal brandy, but he didn't think he deserved it. He wished a wounded man would come in so he'd be too busy to brood about what had happened-he could drown his sorrows in work as well as alcohol. But the poor slob who'd have to stop something so he could get busy didn't deserve that.
After a while, deserving or not, a soldier with a smashed shoulder came in. Acting as his own anesthetist again, O'Doull did what he could to clean out the wound and fix it up. Eddie assisted, long on willingness but not on skill. Have to get a new senior medic, O'Doull thought. He'd worked with Granny McDougald for a couple of years, with Vince Donofrio for only about three months. Now somebody else would have to figure out his quirks and foibles.
The local commandant wasted no time. Soldiers seized hostages that afternoon. They gave the men who'd ambushed Vince and Billie Jean forty-eight hours to surrender. If not…Well, if not it was a tough war all the way around.
'Has anybody ever given himself up?' O'Doull asked Major Himmelfarb, who'd sent out the ultimatum.
'It does happen once in a blue moon,' the line officer answered. 'Some of these bastards are proud of what they've done. They're willing-hell, they're eager-to die for their country.' He shrugged. 'We oblige 'em.'
No one came forward to admit to killing Vince Donofrio and the girl whose finger he'd sewn up. Major Himmelfarb asked O'Doull if he wanted to watch the hostages die. He shuddered and shook his head. 'No, thanks. I see enough bullet wounds every day. It won't bring Vince back, either.'
'That's a fact.' Major Himmelfarb looked as if he wanted to call O'Doull soft but didn't think he could. Instead, he went on, 'Maybe it will keep some other dumb, horny U.S. soldier from getting his dick cut off. We can hope so, anyway.'
'Right,' O'Doull said tightly, wishing the other officer hadn't told him that. Sometimes you found out more than you wanted to know. He hoped the medic was dead by then.
U.S. custom was to assemble the people from the nearest town-here, it was Loganville, Georgia-to witness hostage executions and, with luck, to learn from them. Nobody in the CSA seemed to have learned much from them yet. O'Doull listened to one flat, sharp volley of rifle fire after another in the middle distance: twenty-five in all. Before they got to the last one, he did dip into the brandy. It didn't do a damn bit of good.
He kept wondering if Billie Jean's father or brothers or maybe even husband (had she worn a wedding ring? — he didn't remember, and Vince wouldn't have cared) would show up at the aid station. Then he wondered if those people were part of the crowd that had got the girl and the medic. Would they have lulled them into a false sense of security before springing the trap? He never found out.
Eddie stayed in the aid tent as his first assistant for three days. Then the replacement depot coughed up a new senior medic, a sergeant named, of all things, Goodson Lord. He was tall and blond and handsome-he really might have been God's gift to women, unlike poor Donofrio, who only thought he was.
O'Doull greeted him with a fishy stare. 'How hard do you chase skirt?' he demanded.
'Not very much, sir,' Lord answered. Something in his voice made O'Doull give him a different kind of fishy look: did he chase men instead? Well, if he did, he'd damn well know he had to be careful about that. Queers didn't have an easy time of it anywhere.
'Make sure you don't, not around here,' was all O'Doull thought he could say. 'The guy you're replacing did, and they murdered him for it.' Sergeant Lord nodded without another word of his own.
When a U.S. soldier came in with a bullet in the hip, Lord proved plenty capable. He knew much more than Eddie, and probably more than poor Vince had. The aid station would run just fine. That was O'Doull's biggest concern. Everything else took second place, and a distant second to boot.
A rmstrong Grimes and his platoon leader crouched-sprawled, really-in a shell hole northeast of Covington, Georgia. Armstrong was wet and cold. A hard, nasty rain had started in the middle of the night and showed no signs of letting up. The Confederates had a machine gun in a barn half a mile ahead. Every so often, it would fire a burst and make the U.S. soldiers keep their heads down.
'Wish we had a couple of barrels in the neighborhood,' Armstrong said. 'They'd quiet that fucker down in a hurry. Even a mortar team would do the trick.'
'Well, it's not that you're wrong, Sergeant,' Lieutenant Bassler replied. 'But what we've got is-us. We're going to have to take that gun out, too. We leave it there, it stalls a battalion's worth of men.'
'Yes, sir,' Armstrong said resignedly. It wasn't that Bassler was wrong, either. But approaching a machine gun wasn't one of the more enjoyable jobs infantry got.
'For once, the rain helps,' Bassler said. 'Bastards in there won't be able to see us coming so well.'
'Yes, sir,' Armstrong said again. He knew what that meant. They'd be able to get closer to the gun before it knocked them down.
'You take your squad around toward the back of the barn,' Bassler said. 'I'll lead another group toward the front. We ought to be able to work our way in pretty close, and then we'll play it by ear.'
'Yes, sir,' Armstrong said one more time. He didn't have anything else to say, not here. Bassler wasn't just coming along. He'd given himself the more dangerous half of the mission. You wanted to follow an officer who did things like that.
'All right, then. I'll give you ten minutes to gather your men. We'll move out at'-Bassler checked his watch-'at
