would like you to answer some questions for him.’
‘I’d shrug, but I’ve got a big hole in my shoulder and it really hurts. What d’you need to know?’
Deftereos took him through a standard post-trauma questionnaire, which wasn’t all that different from the experience a civilian might have answering an ER survey at hospital, except for the questions about exposure to chemical or biological weapons and so on. By the time they were done, Melton felt a little hungry and asked if he might have something to eat.
The corpsman checked a note at the end of his bed and nodded. ‘Nothing heavy, sir. A cup of soup maybe, to begin with.’
‘Thanks. Listen… Tony, wasn’t it? You hear anything from back home about what happened? Have there been any developments in the last few days while I’ve been out of it?’
A sad shake of the head was the initial reaction to that. ‘No, sir,’ Deftereos replied. ‘Nobody’s had any word out of home. And the news coverage we were getting – you know, satellite photos, webcams and stuff – it’s drying up, because of the firestorms over there. Some whole cities have gone up. Not just a couple of blocks here and there – the whole thing, sir. They reckon the clouds are like a nuclear winter or something over Europe. Like when Saddam torched those oil wells in the last war, only much worse.’
Melton remembered that from before he checked out. He recalled resting in the alleyway, looking straight up at a hard blue sky and wishing some of those clouds would drift south and cool things down a bit. He tried to recall some more details but it was like pushing those same dirty, polluted clouds around the inside of his head. Nothing really cleared up.
‘I’m not feeling too bad,’ he told the corpsman. ‘D’you think I could get up and walk over to the mess tent for my soup?’
Deftereos grimaced slightly. ‘In fact, I was gonna ask if you could, sir. We’re real shorthanded here. Doc’s written that you should be mobile by now. You got no leg or spinal injuries, nothing internal. Just have to watch your sutures on the shoulder and some stitching on your rear end, where they took out some real big splinter. You’ll have to move slowly, is all. I’m sorry, sir…’
‘That’s fine,’ grunted Melton as he pulled himself up. ‘If you could just give me a hand up, that’d be great.’
He bit down hard on the pain that welled up as he rose from the bed. No stranger to injuries and discomfort, he knew he’d have to get used to moving around with both. He was very much a non-essential part of this operation and considered himself lucky to have made it this far. It seemed a lot of the boys he’d been covering hadn’t. A mild headspin unbalanced him and he leaned against Deftereos, but it passed with a few deep breaths.
‘You gonna be okay, sir?’ asked the corpsman.
Melton nodded. ‘I’ll be fine, Tony. You get back to looking after your patients. Just give me some directions.’
Deftereos pointed at the main tent flap as a puff of wind caught it. Melton could see a throng of uniformed personnel hurrying in both directions outside. ‘You head out, turn left, and move through three intersections, then it’s on your left again. About a hundred and fifty yards. You won’t miss it.’
Melton thanked him and began the slow shuffle out of the tent. It remained quiet in there, with most of the wounded men sleeping in their cots. A few orderlies and corpsmen moved about checking on them. Some were in scrubs, others in their desert fatigues, a mix of various services, something that wouldn’t normally happen in an army combat support hospital. But regardless of their branch, not one spared him as much as a glance. He was walking and mostly in one piece. He just wasn’t a priority.
He felt adrift, disconnected from the world. He understood Shetty’s feelings about not wanting to let go of the familiar. Melton had never been part of a unit that’d been shattered before, but it sounded like that’s what had happened to Euler’s platoon. He’d embedded with them, nearly died with them, been right there in amongst them as they fought their way through southern Iraq. It had been such a bullshit mission in one way, rushing forward to engage the Iraqis who’d attacked them, just to give themselves enough elbow room to get the hell out of Iraq when the war was all but called off by events – or just
The hospital tent opened up onto a thoroughfare, a wide street of sand in yet another huge military camp, laid out as always in a grid pattern. Soldiers and Marines moved about in groups of two or more, all in full battle rattle, many with a bad case of the thousand-yard stare. Melton blinked at the raw power of the sun after the relative gloom of the tent’s interior. The field hospital enjoyed the benefit of a slight rise in an otherwise flat landscape, affording a view of the frame tents, generators and vehicles. The combat support hospital was attached to a number of other units in the area, near as he could tell. A five-ton truck rolled past him, filled with body bags, the bumper number clearly defined.
‘Jesus,’ he muttered, watching the REMF vehicle roll down towards a container. ‘I’ve died and gone to the rear.’
The truck stopped in front of the container, where a detail of soldiers waited. With great care, two soldiers at a time would remove a single body bag from the truck and carry it into the container. Melton could see a refrigeration unit attached to the side. A couple of soldiers from 3rd ID glanced at the body, then looked away. Melton overheard them talking as they passed.
‘Those poor dumb bastards really got zapped,’ one specialist said.
‘Glad I wasn’t there,’ the other, a private first class, replied. ‘Stupid fucking mission anyway.’
‘Amen to that,’ Melton said under his breath.
He gazed over a vista of thousands of tents and makeshift arrangements of prefab huts, motorised trailers, converted shipping containers, vehicle parks, supply depots and chopper pads. A cluster of antennas sprouted next to a tight knot of command vehicles and shelters. The camp had to cover a couple of klicks of real estate, thought Melton. He cautiously craned his head skywards, and was able to pick out the twinkling points and occasional contrails of at least a dozen jets flying Combat Air Patrol.
‘Division main will want that on the double,’ someone said to an underling. The underling nodded to the soldier, who was standing in the back of a communications shelter. Melton read the bumper number without thinking: 223
‘Guess that commo puke didn’t have to worry about shooting himself in the foot after all,’ he thought aloud. ‘I must be at 3rd ID’s main camp.’ Now where that was exactly, he had no idea.
The ground was rockier, harder, than he remembered from that last big post. It made walking a little more
