rolled off it—Pick’s first—with a double bump, and then to one of the buses. The buses had enormous rear doors that permitted the gurneys to be wheeled aboard them.
The way he was strapped in, he could raise his head. But all he could see out the bus’s windshield was the open door of the bus ahead of his.
He laid his head back down.
Several minutes later, he heard the door being closed, and when he looked up, he saw a white hat come down the aisle, get behind the wheel, and start the engine.
The bus turned out of the line.
The next thing Pick saw was a sign: WELCOME TO THE U.S. NAVAL HOSPITAL, SAN DIEGO!
XV
[ONE]
ROOM 308, MATERNITY WARD U.S. NAVAL HOSPITAL U.S. NAVY BASE, SASEBO SASEBO, JAPAN 0815 25 OCTOBER 1950
Captain F. Howard Schermer, MC, USN, as Hospital Commander, was not required to make routine morning or afternoon rounds with members of his medical staff—after all, he had a lot else to occupy his time—but of course he had the unquestioned right to do so.
When he had the time, in other words, he often would join one of the teams making rounds to keep his fingers, so to speak, on the pulse of the hospital. And he would usually ask Commander J. V. Stenten, NC, USN, his Chief of Nursing Services, to accompany him. Between the two of them, very little that needed correction escaped notice.
Since McCoy, Mrs. Ernestine and later McCoy, Major K. R. had been admitted, Captain Schermer had found the time to make morning and afternoon rounds of the maternity ward every day, and Commander Stenten had been free to accompany him.
There were several reasons for this, and chief among them was that both Captain Schermer and Commander Stenten genuinely liked the young couple sharing the sumo wrestler’s bed. But Schermer was also aware that he had a delicate situation in his care of Major and Mrs. McCoy.
It hadn’t been, for example, the first time General of the Army and Mrs. MacArthur had come to Sasebo to visit the wounded and ill. Since the war had started, they had made ten, maybe twelve such visits. But never had Mrs. MacArthur brought a box of candy to a maternity ward patient.
And never, to his knowledge, had the hospital had in its care a CIA agent who had suffered wounds behind enemy lines. And whose commanding officer, a brigadier general, the assistant director of the CIA for Asia, obviously had an interest in both of them that went beyond official to in loco parentis.
Captain Schermer, followed by Commander Stenten and then by the Rounds Staff, marched into room 308, where the patients were lying beside one another reading Stars and Stripes and So, You’re Going to Be a Mother!
“Good morning,” Captain Schermer said. “And how are we this morning?”
“I don’t know how we are, Doctor,” Mrs. McCoy replied. “But speaking for my husband and myself, I’m pregnant and uncomfortable, ready to go home, and he’s pawing the ground to get out of here.”
Commander Stenten chuckled.
Captain Schermer picked up their medical record clipboards from the foot of the bed and studied both.
“Well,” he said. “Why don’t we get Major McCoy into a wheelchair, and have Dr. Haverty have a look at you?”
One of the nurses rolled a wheelchair to his side of the bed, and another started to pull the drapes around the bed.
“I won’t need that, thank you,” McCoy said, and got out of the bed and slid his feet into slippers.
Dr. Schermer thought: He seems to be able to do so without pain.
Or without much pain.
Or he’s very good at concealing pain.
As the privacy drapes were drawn around the bed and Lieutenant Commander Robert Haverty, MC, USNR, Chief of Gynecological Services, and a nurse went behind it, McCoy walked to the window and rested his rear end on the sill.
Dr. Schermer walked over to him.
“She means that, sir,” McCoy said. “She wants to go home. Is there any reason she can’t?”
“To the States? I’m afraid she doesn’t meet the criteria for medical evacuation, and I don’t think a flight that long would be the thing for her to do.”
“She means Tokyo, sir,” McCoy said. “We have a house there.”
“You know what happened when she came here from Tokyo,” Schermer said.
“She couldn’t get a sleeper—for that matter, even a first-class seat—on the train, so she sat up all the way, all night, on a wooden seat in third class,” McCoy said.
“I didn’t know that,” Schermer said as Commander Stenten stepped