Honor Bound (Honor Bound 1)
Page 225
“Presumably, you have it written down somewhere?”
“Sí, mi Coronel,” Habanzo said, more than a little awkwardly stuffing his small automatic back into its shoulder holster and then producing a notebook.
[FOUR]
Room 305
Dr. Cosme Argerich Military Hospital
Calle Luis María Campos
Buenos Aires
0205 20 December 1942
Siren screaming, the ambulance, a 1937 Ford station wagon, pulled up to the emergency entrance of the hospital. The driver and his assistant jumped out, walked quickly to the rear, opened the doors, and pulled out the stretcher holding First Lieutenant Cletus Howell Frade, USMCR, under a thick wool blanket.
He raised his head. A gurney was being hastily wheeled to the station wagon under the supervision of a very large and sternfaced nurse. He was moved, none too gently, from the stretcher onto the gurney. The wool blanket from the ambulance was jerked off and replaced by a thinner cotton cover.
The gurney was then wheeled into the hospital, now accompanied by a man in a business suit, who made little effort to hide the .45 automatic he carried, riding high on his hip.
The gurney was rolled onto an elevator. It rose (three floors, Clete guessed) and stopped. It was then rolled down a corridor and into an operating room, which made Clete more than a little nervous.
He was transferred to an operating table. Its cold stainless steel was cool against his back and buttocks. A short, unpleasant-looking, mustachioed doctor in a white jacket bent over him, pried his eyelids apart, and shined a small flashlight in his eyes.
“I’m all right, Doctor,” Clete said.
The doctor ignored him. He made a sweeping gesture with his hands, and the nurse snatched the thin hospital blanket away and then pulled off his boxer shorts.
Jesus Christ!
As the nurse wrapped a blood-pressure collar around his arm, the doctor applied a stethoscope to his chest and then his throat. She gave him a sharp shove so he would roll onto his side; and a moment later, he felt the annoying and humiliating insertion of an anal thermometer. He watched as someone dropped his bloody shorts into a stainless-steel tray.
The anal thermometer was finally removed, his temperature announced orally, and then repeated by a woman in hospital whites holding a clipboard.
He was moved back onto his back. His blood-pressure reading was announced orally, repeated by the woman with the clipboard, and then the large nurse inserted a needle in his left arm to draw blood.
That completed, the doctor made another sweeping gesture with his hand. And the nurse, using what looked like a miniature spatula, began scraping his body.
Martín said that was probably brain tissue.
He felt slightly nauseous when she carefully scraped the brain tissue off the first spatula with a second one. The tissue was dropped into a second stainless-steel tray.
He was then given two
sponge baths, first with water, then with alcohol. His face, chest, and legs stung uncomfortably. And when he moved his left leg, the large nurse firmly pushed it down against the operating table.
His chest stung, and he put his hand to it. Her hand grabbed his.
“I itch, goddamn it, take your hand off!”
She did not. There was a test of arm strength.
“Let him,” the doctor said.
He scratched, and was sorry he did; he felt a sharp pain.
A tray of instruments appeared. The doctor took a scalpel in one hand and a ferocious-looking set of tweezers in the other. Starting at Clete’s forehead, he began to remove tiny pieces of tile, dropping each piece into still another stainless-steel tray.