Eagle Day - Robert Muchamore Page 0,6

stop.

She didn’t need to answer, because by this time PT was in plain sight and clearly too young.

‘I can see you’re busy,’ Rosie gasped apologetically. ‘But I think my brother came up here on a lifeboat. Skinny kid, eleven years old. Someone told me he was passed out.’

The pregnant woman screamed again as a bloody finger showed Rosie the way.

‘On the jetty. A man named Gaston is looking after him.’

PT ran on ahead. The stone path ended and he jumped off a ledge into a splash of lapping water, with silt underfoot and two empty lifeboats bobbing a few metres offshore.

‘Mind your step,’ PT warned, as his hand traced the crumbling sea wall leading to the jetty. ‘I don’t know how deep this gets.’

The water stayed below their knees and the only danger came on the slippery steps leading up the side of the fishing jetty.

‘Paul!’ Rosie shouted with joy, as she reached the wooden decking and sighted her brother sat against a rotten post at the base of the jetty.

Gaston was a skinny old man who’d been giving Paul sips of water. Rosie hurried across, but she went stiff when she got close enough to see details.

Paul’s left eye was open, but the right was swollen over. A vortex had sucked him deep underwater as the went down. When his life vest pulled him back to the surface he’d smashed into razor-sharp barnacles on a section of the ship’s hull.Cardiff Bay

He’d been lucky enough not to get dragged down under the metal, but the barnacles left cuts that started on his right cheek then stopped around his chin. Shallower wounds began in the middle of his chest and ran down to his bellybutton. The lower portion of his right arm was set at a twisted angle and clearly broken.

Shock and a badly swollen cheek left Paul’s face expressionless, but he raised the fingers of his left hand and quietly mouthed, ‘Rosie.’

‘Are you the sister?’ Gaston asked.

Rosie nodded. ‘Is anyone on the way? A nurse? A doctor?’

‘There is only me. I worked in an army hospital during the last war,’ Gaston explained. ‘I have a few supplies at my house. I can clean his cuts and set his arm, but my back is bad, I can’t carry him.’

The normal thing would be to telephone for an ambulance or find the local doctor, but with German bombings, millions of refugees and many medical staff having fled further south, Rosie realised that the frail army medic was Paul’s best chance.

‘What about that woman down there?’ PT asked. ‘She’s miscarrying. Judging by the blood, she could die.’

Gaston nodded ruefully. ‘Wounds and broken bones I’ve dealt with. What do I know of a woman’s problems?’

Rosie looked back at PT, slightly irritated. She wanted her brother attended to, even if the woman’s plight more threatening. ‘Can you lift him?’ she asked.was

Paul made a dull groan as PT scooped him up off the wooden jetty. Gaston moved as fast as old legs allowed, leading the way through an overgrown field to a line of sagging cottages.

Paul was laid out on a dining table while Gaston’s wife boiled water and found an old medic’s pouch filled with yellowing bandages and dried-out creams that apparently dated from the last war. Rosie tucked a cushion under her brother’s head and stroked his hand, calming his nerves and telling him that everything would be OK.

Others in the area knew Gaston had been a medic. Half a dozen injured passengers had reached the village and people began knocking at the front door asking for advice. Near eighty years old and deaf in one ear, the old man quickly grew stressed.

‘I’m just one man,’ Gaston shouted to his wife. ‘Tell them when the boy is done I’ll look at someone else.’

The elderly medic worked methodically. An electric bulb hung over the dining table, but two flickering gas lanterns were brought in to supplement it. Paul had been lifted between the lifeboat and the jetty, so at least his wounds were free of mud, but Gaston swabbed Paul’s cheek with a solution of hot salt water before painting on iodine, which stung even worse.

Rosie tried not to cry as her brother sobbed in pain. Considering that Paul screamed the house down if he got shampoo in his eyes she thought he was being quite brave. But the cuts on his face filled with blood as soon as they were clean.

Gaston scratched his stubbly chin and made a decision. ‘It needs stitching or he’ll