Our ship escaped a direct hit but it had been strafed several times. If the Amelia Earhart was a person, she would be one of the walking wounded. One of the cargo winches had been destroyed, collapsing across the deck, strewing busted metal parts, thick cables and struts across the width of the ship, damaging some of the vehicles underneath. Above me I saw that one of the twenty-millimeter anti-aircraft guns had been destroyed. There were two men down at the gunners’ station. As I watched, another gunner, his face black with gunpowder and oil, covered the dead men’s faces. The radio antenna had collapsed with the winch and hung over the side of the bridge deck, where I could see the master shouting orders from his bullhorn.
A team of seamen wielded hoses, putting out small fires fueled by oil spilled from the gun mounts and damaged vehicles. Water flooded the deck, making moving around treacherous. In this temperature it would freeze quickly.
I was relieved to see Tom on his feet, but his uniform was covered in blood. It couldn’t be his blood, as he seemed unhurt. He and one of his men were inspecting the five-inch gun on the bow. Then they test-fired it. The sound made my nerves clang.
And everywhere – on the deck, on the vehicles, on the side of the bridge, and on the bulwark of the level where the mess hall was – were holes and tears made by the German airplanes strafing us. Bruce had stood at the window of that mess hall, and Gil had actually gone outside; either of them could have been killed. Even a few of the lifeboats were punctured. And these holes were three times bigger than any bullet hole I’d ever seen – if you could call a three-inch-long projectile from a German aircraft cannon a bullet. Anyone who received a direct hit from one was a dead man. Including the two gunners who’d been brought down from the gun emplacement, there were seven corpses covered in tarps, lined up in a row on deck.
I would have given a month’s pay for the emergency siren to stop blaring.
Only Olive and I were on deck. When the fighting stopped, the Smits took their girls down to their berth. Ronan and Blanche persuaded Bruce to leave, too. No one wanted the kids to see the hell on deck. Gil stayed in the wardroom to smoke. His hands were shaking so much that it took him three tries to get his cigarette lit.
Olive and I had this notion that we could help, but once we were outside, we stayed out of the way. It was too chaotic for us to even speak to anyone. Until we saw two stretchers carried by seamen coming toward us. The men on them were alive.
The pharmacist’s mate gripped one end of a stretcher. He stopped when he saw us.
‘Ma’am!’ he called out to Olive. She immediately went to the wounded men. I followed her. The first injured man had lost his left arm below the elbow. A tourniquet had stemmed the flow of blood, but his clothes were soaked with the blood he’d already lost. The second man lay on his stomach on the stretcher, unconscious. The back of his shirt was stiff with blood, too. It was Nigel.
‘What happened to him?’ I asked.
‘Shrapnel in his shoulder, I think,’ the pharmacist’s mate said to me. ‘Deep.’ Then he turned back to Olive. ‘Ma’am,’ he said, ‘I don’t know what to do. There’s a hospital on the Evans, but the launches are busy looking for survivors.’
‘This man,’ Olive said, taking the pulse of the seaman from his only wrist, ‘won’t live long enough to be moved anywhere. We have to do something now. Let’s get him down to the first-aid room.’
The stretcher-bearers lifted the cruelly injured man on to the gurney in the first-aid room.
‘What’s his name?’ Olive asked, rolling up her sleeves.
‘Able-bodied Seaman Mike Oleson, ma’am,’ another stretcher-bearer answered. ‘I’m Seaman Andy Davis. He’s my pal. Can you save him?’
Olive stared directly into the eyes of the pharmacist’s mate. ‘The only possible way to save this man’s life is to take off his arm above the elbow,’ she said. Already pale, the pharmacist’s mate went ghost-white, gripping the edge of the gurney to stay on his feet. ‘Pull yourself together,’ Olive said to him.
‘Yes, ma’am,’ he answered. ‘I can do it.’
‘Do you have any plasma?’
‘No, ma’am.’
‘That’s too bad. What’s his blood type?’
The pharmacist’s mate checked the man’s dog tag. ‘Type A, ma’am.’
Olive turned to the stretcher-bearer who was the injured man’s friend. ‘Andy,’ she said, ‘go find someone with type-A blood and bring him back here right away. Someone big and young. Don’t let anyone stop you.’
‘Yes, ma’am,’ he said, leaving immediately.
Meanwhile, I was cutting the man’s clothes off, finding a blanket to warm him and dripping water from a sponge into his mouth.
‘We need anesthesia and an amputation kit,’ Olive said. ‘I sure hope you have them.’
‘We’ve got ether and a kit,’ the mate said, opening the storage cabinet door. But when he brought out the amputation kit and opened it, the collection of saws and knives sent a frigid chill down my spine. My legs felt as if they would give way. Olive noticed me sinking.
‘Louise,’ she said, ‘go outside in the hall and sit down. Monitor Nigel. If his vitals change at all, call me.’
I tried not to stagger when I left the room. Just as I did, Andy came down the hall dragging a burly seaman with him and went into the first-aid room. I collapsed next to Nigel and took his pulse. It seemed steady to me, although he was still unconscious. The wound in his shoulder was small and circular. Maybe something like a bolt head had been driven into him.
Popeye came striding down the hall. He stopped and knelt next to me. ‘He OK?’ he asked about Nigel.
‘He seems stable,’ I said. ‘He has a piece of shrapnel in his shoulder. Olive is going to remove it when she’s done with the other guy.’
‘What other guy?’ he asked.
‘Mike Oleson,’ the other stretcher-bearer said. ‘His left hand and lower arm were blown off.’
‘He’s still alive?’ Popeye asked. ‘He didn’t bleed to death?’
‘No,’ I answered. ‘Someone got a tourniquet on him. Olive is going to amputate his arm. And his friend found a blood donor.’
‘Good Lord,’ Popeye answered. ‘Does she know what to do?’
‘Olive has been an operating-room nurse for years,’ I said.
‘Then I hope she succeeds. Seaman,’ he said to the stretcher-bearer, ‘you stay here. Anything Miss Nunn and Mrs Pearlie need, you find it for them.’
‘Chief,’ I asked, ‘how many dead are there?’
‘Ten, so far,’ he said, ‘and there are more bodies floating in the ocean. The Evans sent both launches to look for more, and survivors, if there are any.’
‘The convoy?’ I asked.
‘Three cargo ships lost. And the Robin.’
An hour passed. It seemed to me that Nigel wasn’t as deeply unconscious. When I spoke to him, he turned toward me, and once he opened his eyes.
The door to the first-aid room opened and the pharmacist’s mate and Oleson’s pal brought Oleson on a stretcher out into the hall, followed by Olive wearing a blood-stained apron. Oleson was breathing. His lower left arm was missing and a massive bandage padded the stump.
‘You did it!’ I said to Olive.
‘It’s early days yet,’ she said. ‘Find a bunk for him,’ she said to the pharmacist’s mate. ‘Take Andy with you. Keep a close watch on the patient. Any change and I want to know. If he starts to stir, he’ll need morphine. Then see if he’ll take some fluids.’
‘Yes, ma’am,’ the pharmacist’s mate said.
The burly seaman who’d been commandeered to donate blood appeared in the doorway. He held on to the jamb. ‘You took too much blood from me,’ he said to Olive. ‘I don’t feel right.’
‘Trust me, you’ll live,’ Olive said. ‘Drink lots of liquids and rest for a couple of days. You’ll make more blood.’ She spotted the seaman that Popeye had left behind to help us. ‘Help our blood donor to his bunk,’ she said.
‘Yes, ma’am,’ he answered. ‘But the chief said I was to stay here to help you and Mrs Pearlie.’
‘Well, then, come back when you’ve finished.’
That left Olive and me in the hall with Nigel. ‘Think you can help me carry the stretcher into the first-aid room?’ she asked.
‘Sure,’ I said, ‘he’s skinny.’
Nigel opened his eyes. He lay on his stomach, his face turned toward me. We’d stripped off his shirt so Olive could clean the area surrounding his wound. Nigel winced. ‘That hurts,’ he said.
‘Morphine coming up,’ Olive said. She drew liquid from a vial into a syringe. ‘Here it comes,’ she said to Nigel. She plunged the needle into the area near his wound. ‘I don’t think we’re going to need an anesthetic,’ she said. ‘Once the morphine takes effect, I’ll probe for the shrapnel.’
‘Do you remember what happened?’ I asked Nigel.
‘Sort of,’ he said. ‘The chief had sent me to check the lifeboats for any damage from the strafing in case we had to abandon ship. I was halfway up the ladder to the boat deck when I felt something slam into my back. I lost my grip and fell. I woke up out there in the hall.’
‘I’m going to probe now, so hang on,’ Olive said. She inserted forceps into Nigel’s wound and poked about. Nigel gripped the gurney and grimaced, but Olive was done already. She pulled a small rounded piece of metal out of Nigel’s wound and held it up to the light.
‘I’ll be damned,’ she said. ‘It’s a bullet!’