Choke Point

Utah.

Also, concerned about the welfare of the survivors of the sinkings, the commander of Fort Lewis had called Freeman, telling him it would be a good idea to have Medal of Honor winner Brentwood make himself useful at the hospital. “Be a damned good morale lift for our men and women. And it’d take him out of himself.”

“Good idea,” agreed Freeman, thinking, You wily polecat—can’t let the Navy grab Marte Price’s attention. Army Medal of Honor winner beats an admiral’s wife any day of the week, and the Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon would like what Fort Lewis did. “I’ll send him up, General,” said Freeman.

“How’d he do with the Bullpup?” the Fort Lewis commander inquired.

“Not well,” said Freeman bluntly, tired from watching Darkstar’s feed.

“So now he knows,” said the commander.

“Not sure about that,” said Freeman.

“Have him wear the ribbon, Douglas.”

Freeman called David on his cell phone. “Captain, get your butt up to the hospital. You are to go about, shake hands with those poor bastards, and smile! You know Marte Price?”

“Yes, sir. Skirt with the big tits.” It wasn’t David, but Lewis, listening in as usual.

“Lewis?”

“General?”

“You get back here. Monitor the UAV rerun. You’ve had enough fresh air.”

“Roger that.”

David flipped the cell phone shut. “Old man,” he told Aussie, “didn’t like that. What you said about the CNN reporter.”

Aussie shrugged as they headed back past the ferry terminal. To the east lay Whidbey Island, where, if all went well, the Navy would be launching the NR-1B. “Don’t shag any of the nurses up there!” he called back to David, who was already ascending the hill toward the hospital, pretending not to hear.

David knew his mission to the hospital was merely to smile and say a few words of encouragement. But after Afghanistan, he felt like a fake.

The exiting air from the hospital’s wards hit him in a toxic blast of charcoal-reeking burned flesh, oil and antiseptics. Mounds of soiled and blood-soaked sheets, blackened and singed naval uniforms, and ruined clothes that had belonged to civilians caught up in the infernos of the multiple disasters were now piling up in the corridors faster than the frantic staff could dispose of them in already overflowing Dumpsters. The ash of the hospital’s incinerator fell outside like gray snow as the staff worked overtime to cremate limbs and flesh contained in thick “recycled” paper shrouds designated by hurriedly wielded marker pens as “unusable,” any possible skin graft material being rushed in sterilized containers to the refrigerators. It was a scene so suffused with urgency and horror that David turned around to leave. The last thing anyone in this hospital needed was some Medal of Honor winner getting in the way when a split second’s delay in inserting an IV tube or in any of the surgical lifesaving procedures the ER staff were carrying out could cost someone their life.

“Captain Brentwood? David Brentwood?” The woman’s voice was accompanied by a glare of light from a shoulder-held KEMO TV camera, a scruffy looking, gum-chewing technician in obligatory faded jeans, and what Freeman would have called a half-ass beard, approaching David. The reporter, despite the long, rushed trip from Atlanta, looked as alert and as well-coiffed as any well-rested anchor. She extended her right hand, her left clasping the phallic-shaped mike. “Captain, I’m Marte Price.”

Before he knew it, David was shaking hands with the woman. She was taller than she looked on TV, where her legs, shapely as they were, were not on display; unlike her bosom, which had stopped many a channel surfer dead in his tracks. Her height added to her aura of vivacious authority. Despite his annoyance with her sudden and what he considered rude interruption, David felt a surge of excitement in his loins. Her sexuality, her perfume, was so alive and contrary to the misery and death surrounding them that he had no control over the kind of excitement she infused in him, a kind he’d not known since long before his near-mortal wounding in Afghanistan.

“Would you please move that contraption,” came a doctor’s angry voice. “This is a hospital, not Hollywood Squares.”

Marte smiled graciously and asked where she might conduct the interview with Captain Brentwood, who was visiting his “wounded comrades.” The doctor, oblivious to the correspondent’s charm, raised his lab coat’s blood- spattered arm and pointed brusquely to an orderly behind them, near the elevator. “Ask him.”

“Thank you. Captain Brentwood’s a Medal of Honor recipient,” Marte said, “and—”

But the doctor had already walked away, informing incoming paramedics that they’d have to use their ambulance gurneys as beds for their patients. “No more room.”

Marte Price worked her charm on the orderly, who steered them to a room down by a supply room.

“They’re all dead in there,” the orderly said. “It’ll be quiet, though.”

After entering the dark room, there was something wrong with the light switch. Marte’s cameraman, turning on his video’s light, started in fright. So did David. “Jesus!” said the cameraman. A man was standing by one of the beds. “Who are you?”

“Captain Rorke.”

Marte Price’s shock at hearing the strangely disembodied voice in the nearly dark room was immediately pushed aside by her realization that she’d lucked out. “Rorke? John Rorke?”

“Gold, Jerry,” the cameraman told Marte. “Pure gold.”

She knew it. Forget the wounded. An exclusive interview with the Utah captain — they’d have to find his cap, she thought, or one like it, wet and oily, if possible — would be more impressive. “Can we bring in more lights?” she asked Rorke.

“Maybe one. No more. She’s in enough pain already. It’ll blind her.”

David Brentwood, his eyes now accustomed to the semidarkness, the pervasive atmosphere of burned oil and flesh about him and the wokka-wokka sound of rescue helicopters, still bringing in wounded, was momentarily brought back to the cave during the Pave Low’s approach.

Now, in the glow of the other light that was brought in, he saw the patient, her face badly scorched, a skull cap of white bandages where her hair had been, and a semi-oval, torso-length frame, like a wooden cage, from her neck down to her waist. Rorke, seeing David’s concern, explained to him that the frame was to keep the sheet from touching the part of her that must have been burned above the waterline as she struggled, like hundreds of others, to escape the encroaching firespills spawned by ruptured hydraulic lines on the sub.

David sensed that Rorke’s vigil was more than that of a commander trying to comfort his crew. “What was she doing on the sub?” he asked softly. He knew Congress was pushing for women on subs, since other countries had already initiated such a program, but David guessed this would be the first female combat death on a sub.

Rorke didn’t answer, and it took a few seconds for David to realize that the skipper of America’s most potent weapons platform — the ex-skipper, rather — wasn’t refusing to answer but was suffering from tinnitus, the ringing in the ears that so often followed the noise of massive detonations. In Rorke’s case it had been the horrendous roar of explosions that ripped his prized boat apart and killed most of his crew.

“What was her job?” David asked Rorke, his voice raised above the noise of the cameraman setting up.

“Civilian specialist,” John Rorke replied.

David nodded knowingly. “What’s her name?”

“Alicia,” said Rorke softly. “Alicia Mayne,” and David understood, in a flash, that Rorke had been in love, was in love, with the dying woman.

In one of those moments that sometimes only complete strangers share in the darkened interior of a night flight or train, knowing they’ll probably never meet again, when the heart is unashamed and free, Brentwood, a man whose natural inclination was to always mind his own business, never to intrude, asked, “Can she hear you at all?”

“If I lean close.”

“Stay close,” David told him. “Close as you can.”

David knew Rorke didn’t want to be part of any interview but probably felt duty bound to do so. David walked over to Marte Price. “Let’s do a ward tour,” he said. “I’ll speak to some of the wounded.”

She thanked him but said that first she wanted an interview with Rorke.

“No, you do me with the wounded.”