right-and might kill him anyway. 'How are we fixed for plasma?' he asked Sergeant Lord.
'We've got enough,' Lord answered.
'Good,' O'Doull said. 'Grab a big needle-chances are we'll want to pour it in as fast as we can.'
Sweat made the corpsmen's faces shine when they brought in the wounded soldier. Heat and humidity were starting to build toward summer. O'Doull noticed only out of the corner of his eye; most of his attention focused on the corporal on the stretcher. The man had bloody foam on his lips and nostrils. Sure as hell, he'd taken one through the lung.
'Get him up on the table,' O'Doull told the corpsmen. To Goodson Lord, he said, 'Get him under.'
'Right,' Lord said. He jammed the ether cone down on the noncom's face as soon as the corpsmen put him in position. The plasma line went in next. The corporal already seemed unconscious, so O'Doull started cutting even before the anesthetic would have fully taken hold. Seconds counted here.
When he opened the guy up, he found the chest cavity full of blood. He hadn't expected anything different. He had a fat rubber tube ready to go to siphon it out of there. How bad was the wound? Did he have time to tie off the major bleeders in the lung, or would he have to do something more drastic?
He needed only a moment to decide he couldn't do anything that took a long time. His vorpal scalpel went snicker-snack and took out the bottom two lobes of the right lung. That left him with just a few vessels to tie off, and he knew where they were-he didn't have to go looking for them. You could live with a lung and a third. You could live with one lung if you had to, though you wouldn't have an easy time if you did anything strenuous for a living.
With the worst of it done, he repaired the wound in the corporal's back. 'What's his BP?' he asked as he worked.
'It's 95 over 68,' Goodson Lord answered, checking the cuff. 'Not real great, but it's pretty steady, anyway.'
'All right.' O'Doull dusted the inside of the chest cavity with sulfa powder, then started closing up. He'd read in a journal that the powder probably helped less than people said it did. He used it anyhow. Why not? It wouldn't hurt.
'What do you think?' Sergeant Lord asked while he finished. He left a honking big drain in the incision. That could come out later.
'If shock doesn't get him, if he doesn't hemorrhage…' O'Doull shrugged, wishing for a cigarette. 'I've done what I can. Maybe he'll make it. I can hope so, anyway.' The corporal would be dead for sure if he hadn't got here. If he lived-If he lives, score one for me, O'Doull thought. That wasn't a bad feeling to have, not even a little bit.
L ieutenant Michael Pound had fought through the Battle of Pittsburgh. He'd seen what a city looked like after two armies jumped on it with both feet. Now, on the outskirts of Birmingham, Alabama, he was seeing it again.
Confederate General Patton was holed up inside Birmingham, and he wasn't coming out. The USA had forced him out of Atlanta, but he refused to pull what was left of his army out of the Alabama factory town. He refused to surrender, too. 'If you want me, come and take me,' he told the U.S. officers who went in to parley with him.
'I don't want to dig the son of a bitch out a block at a time,' Sergeant Mel Scullard grumbled. 'Expensive goddamn real estate, y'know?'
'Yeah.' Pound nodded. 'Maybe we won't have to.'
'How come, sir?' the gunner asked. 'Can't just leave him there.'
'No, but if we gave one to Newport News and we gave one to Charleston, how long will it be before we give one to Birmingham, too?' Pound said.
Scullard laughed a particularly nasty laugh. ''Bye, George!' he said, waving. 'See you in hell, like you deserve!'
'That'd be pretty good, all right,' Joe Mouradian agreed. 'But what if they blow us up, too? We ain't that far outside of town ourselves.'
'Urk.' Pound hadn't thought of that. The more he did, the more it worried him. The brass would be eager to get rid of Patton. After Jake Featherston and maybe Ferdinand Koenig, he was the most dangerous character the Confederacy had. If one of those superbombs took him out but hurt or maybe killed some of their own guys, how much would the fellows back in Philadelphia care? Not a whole hell of a lot, not unless a dedicated cynic like Michael Pound missed his guess.
He stuck his head out of the cupola for a quick looksee. He wasn't sure what a superbomb could do to Birmingham that lots and lots of ordinary bombs and artillery shells hadn't already done. The place had been torn up and burned more times than anybody could count. Everything that wasn't green was gray or black, and just about all the walls he could see either listed or had chunks bitten out of them or both.
But the remnants of Patton's Army of Kentucky still lurked in the ruins. They were stubborn men with automatic weapons and stovepipe rockets. They wouldn't be winkled out easily or cheaply. Maybe a superbomb could get rid of them the way DDT got lice out of clothes.
As if to prove the Confederate States were still in business, somebody squeezed off a burst from one of their carnivorous machine guns. Pound ducked down into the barrel. He didn't want to win a Purple Heart, not this late in the game. He didn't want to buy a plot, either.
'Anything worth going after, sir?' Scullard asked.
'Not…right this minute,' Pound answered. He prided himself on being an aggressive soldier. And he was still ready to go forward whenever anybody told him to. Without anything obviously urgent ahead, though, he was just as well pleased to sit tight.
This must be what the end of the war feels like, he thought. Yeah, you were still willing. But how eager were you when pushing too hard might get you killed just when things wound down?
Sitting tight didn't mean sticking his head in the sand like an ostrich. Standing up in the open cupola wasn't smart right now. All right-next best thing, then. That was looking out through the periscopes built into the cupola. He couldn't see as much with them as he could head and shoulders above there, but…
'Powaski!' he shouted to the bow gunner and wireless man. 'Ten o'clock! Somebody sneaking up on us, maybe 150 yards!'
'I'm on it,' Powaski answered over the intercom. The bow gun wasn't useful very often. Pound had heard talk that the next generation of barrels would dispense with it and go with a four-man crew instead of five. This once, though, it was liable to be a lifesaver.
It started to chatter now. Pound watched tracers spang off brickwork and fly every which way. The turret hummed as Scullard traversed it so he could bring the coaxial machine gun-and maybe the cannon, too-to bear.
Like any well-trained gunner, Powaski squeezed off short bursts. You didn't want to burn out your machine- gun barrel and have to change the son of a bitch. But the butternut bastard behind the bricks got the bow gunner's rhythm quicker than he had any business doing. As soon as Powaski eased off the trigger after a burst, he popped up and let fly with a stovepipe rocket.
'Aw, shit!' Pound said. It was a long shot for one of those babies. Maybe this one would fall short or fly wide left or right like a bad field goal…
Maybe it would, but it didn't. It caught the barrel right in the glacis plate. The thick armor there nearly kept the hollow-charge warhead from penetrating. Nearly mattered with everything but horseshoes and hand grenades- and, it turned out, hollow-charge warheads, too.
Powaski and Neyer both screamed. Pound didn't think either of them had a prayer of getting out. And inside a barrel, nine million different things could catch fire, especially when a white-hot gout of flame played across them.
Pound screamed himself: 'Out!' Some of the things that could catch fire were his boots and his coveralls. They could, and they did. He screamed again, without words this time. Then he shot out through the cupola. He never remembered opening it, but he must have.
Next thing he knew, he was on the ground beside the burning barrel, on the ground and rolling away. Mel Scullard had got out, too. More of his clothes than of Pound's were burning.
Drop and roll and beat out the fire. That was what they taught you. Doing it while you were actually burning…Well, if you could do that, you were disciplined indeed. Michael Pound surprised himself-he was. He got
