Blame the Dead by Ed Ruggero

Author:Ed Ruggero
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

25

4 August 1943

0300 hours

Harkins took Colianno with him to find First Sergeant Drake, though the paratrooper clearly wanted to stay behind with Ronan and Donnelly.

“They’ll be fine in the ward tent,” Harkins said. “There’s got to be a dozen people in there, not even counting the patients.”

Colianno hit the jeep’s starter and pushed it into gear.

“You think they’re going to be OK,” Colianno said, “but since we don’t know who jumped Lieutenant Donnelly, we don’t know for sure. Could have been one of the docs on duty, or one of the orderlies in the tent right now with them. You should have left me with them, Lieutenant.”

Harkins got into the passenger side of the jeep. “I need you with me to make sure I don’t shoot Wilkins and Boone on sight.”

“Is that supposed to be a joke?”

“We’ll come back as soon as we can. Before dawn, for sure.”

“OK,” Colianno said. “Where we going?”

“Let’s go wake up First Sergeant Drake.”

Drake’s sleeping tent was near the middle of the hospital compound, in line with the tent that held both the orderly room and Boone’s office, a supply tent for nonmedical supplies, and, just a few dozen yards way, Boone’s sleeping tent. Harkins wanted to approach on foot, so he had Colianno park the jeep on the hospital’s main street.

“First Sergeant?” Harkins said as he knocked on the post beside the door flap. “It’s Lieutenant Harkins.”

Drake reached the door so quickly Harkins wondered if he’d been waiting for visitors. The big man appeared in a T-shirt, boxer shorts, and his GI shoes, no socks.

“What’s the matter?” he asked Harkins.

“There’s been an assault. Can I come in?”

“Shit,” Drake said. He turned away from the door and Harkins followed him inside, motioning for Colianno to wait.

Drake used a match to light a kerosene lamp, then adjusted the wick until there was enough light for Harkins to see. There was a cot with a single sheet, a lumpy pack of some sort that Drake might have been using as a pillow, a field desk piled with papers held down by rocks functioning as paperweights.

“Who got attacked?” Drake asked.

“Nurse Donnelly.”

Drake sucked his teeth. Harkins could see that it irked him—was a blot on his professionalism—that the hospital seemed to be spinning out of control.

“How is she doing? She hurt?”

“Shaken up, I guess. No major damage that she’d admit to.”

“She’s a tough one, Donnelly is,” Drake said. He found his pants in a tangle on the floor, shook them out, pulled them on one leg, then the other, stepping back into his shoes. “Surprised you came to me first,” he said.

Harkins knew what the first sergeant meant. “Yeah, she made me promise not to just start shooting people.”

“I heard all about you and Captain Wilkins. You think it was him? Maybe he was pissed because you beat his ass today?”

“I don’t know, but sure as hell he isn’t going to talk to me. Neither will Boone.”

“Colonel Boone?”

Harkins thought about how embarrassed Drake had been listening to Boone’s verbal assault on Ronan.

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