The Lieutenant's Nurse Read online

  “Start off with the lowest dose and pray for the best,” Evelyn said to her, as she walked out the door.

  There was nothing else she could do. Dr. Brown was legendary. He was Hollowcreek General Hospital.

  A BUMP IN THE NIGHT

  November 30

  Clark stood at the door feeling awful. Sunflowers would be little consolation for a blast to the face, but they were all he had. He knocked twice. When no one answered, he knocked harder. Then the door swung open. Eva stood there, wide-eyed, looking beautiful despite her gash and swollen eye. If he hadn’t known better, he’d have thought someone false cracked her.

  “Clark, what a surprise,” she said.

  He pulled the flowers from behind his back. “You deserved roses, but all I could find were these. I’m so sorry—”

  At first he thought she was going to turn him away, but she waved him off like it was nothing. “Would you like to come in? I was about to apply another pack of ice before going up to dinner.”

  Big Jo was apparently out, and he was glad for it.

  “Can I help in any way?” he asked, standing in the middle of the room, unsure of where to sit.

  She smiled and then winced. “You can keep me company, tell me more stories about Hawaii or Japan or wherever, as long as they don’t involve tennis. Jo has not been back since morning, and I don’t know whether to be concerned or pleased,” she said.

  Clark sat on the only chair. He wondered how much she remembered about getting to the sick bay, and how he had half walked, half carried her down there, worried she might pass out again. Her skin was smooth as cream and she smelled like violet or lavender or one of those purple flowers his mother loved so much.

  She sat back on the bed, leaning into a pile of pillows to prop her up and held a small packet of ice wrapped in cloth to her cheek. “I’m usually not squeamish about blood, unless it’s mine, then all bets are off,” she said.

  There had been a boatload of blood. Enough that he’d had to take a few deep breaths to steady himself. Being in the navy didn’t necessarily cure one of squeamishness. A weakness he was not proud of.

  “You’re one up on me, then,” he said. “I don’t do well with blood in general.”

  “Being a doctor’s daughter made me immune, or so I thought. I’ve never actually had stitches myself or any type of surgery,” she said, closing her eyes and sinking back.

  “I imagine it’s different when you, or someone you care about, is hurt,” he said, thinking of Beth. He tried to shut the memory out of his mind but it was always there, just beneath the surface. A gash in his soul that would never heal. “Dr. Wallace must be a skilled surgeon, because those stitches look like they were done by a Singer machine.”

  At the mention of Wallace, she perked up. “Lucky me. What are the odds there was a trauma surgeon on deck? He’s someone I’d like to learn from and he seems more reasonable than many doctors I know. I do anes—” She stopped midsentence and looked flustered, then changed course. “I’m going to try to attend his lectures in Honolulu.”

  He contemplated asking what she’d meant, but got the feeling she didn’t want to talk about it. “Lucky may not be the word I’d have chosen,” he said.

  She brightened, trying to maintain a straight face. “Please don’t make me laugh, and not lucky you hit me, lucky for Wallace being on hand.”

  “After last night’s bingo, I get the feeling that luck follows you around on a leash,” he said.

  “You’re wrong there,” she said in a flat voice.

  She did look awfully thin. Her cheekbones were more pronounced than they should have been. Her collarbones, too. He was all too familiar with the haunting ravages of hardships and loss, and got a feeling she was, as well. You could see it in the hollows of her eyes and the sharp angles of her face. Maybe that was what was drawing him to her almost like an invisible force.

  Watching the way she kept switching arms to hold the ice on her cheek, Clark finally had to intervene. He scooted the chair to the side of her bed. “Let me hold that for you.”

  For a moment, he thought she would refuse, but her arm flopped down. He took the cloth from her hand and touched it to her cheek.

  She closed her eyes again and sighed. “Thank you.”

  A pool of purple was forming under her eye, just below where her lashes hit. What an asinine maneuver. He blamed it on his reflexes. And his stupid drive to win. But no game was worth splitting a woman’s cheek open.

  “I feel like such a louse. How can I make it up to you?” he said.

  Eva must have been thinking hard, because she took her sweet time in answering. “How about teaching me a few phrases in Japanese? If Hawaii is full of Japanese people, it might help me to know a little,” she said, raising an eyebrow his way.

  Despite himself, he’d been thinking more along the lines of dinner in Waikiki or taking a drive to the Pali Lookout, but he sensed a hesitance on her part. Just a whisper, but there.

  “You got it,” he said.

  God, why was he so easy all of a sudden?

  * * *

  Dinner was spent discussing war theories again. The army guys were certain Japan was going to go for the Dutch East Indies for their oil, while the plantation manager said no, it would be the British stronghold of Singapore. The general public only knew what they read in the papers or heard on the radio. Enough to raise alarm, but what Clark knew was even more troubling. The recent change in naval call signs, the withdrawal of all Japanese merchant vessels from Western Hemisphere waters, hell, there were possibly even carriers in the Mandate Islands. Yet the scuttlebutt going around was all the same. Japan would never attack us. The US is too big and too powerful.

  Back at Pearl, all the guys in the Dungeon were edgy. The Japanese were backed into a corner and Admiral Yamamoto was a reckless firebrand, according to Clark’s boss, Ford. Smart as the dickens, too. In fact, Ford had recently put his crew on a twenty-four-hour schedule, manning the place seven days a week, working to decode, translate and track enemy messages.

  The trouble was, Clark could never talk to anyone about this. A lonely business, but one he was built for. He loved all of it—the Japanese language, the codes, the camaraderie built on a mountainous challenge with sky-high stakes.

  Bored with the chitter chatter, he kept searching the room for a thin, dark-haired woman with arched eyebrows. Eva had said she might or might not come up, as she’d had a mild headache when he’d left her. A loud racket from the ballroom reminded him that the band was warming up, and he wandered through the lounge and the bar and the card room, ending up at the same spot on the deck he’d found her last night. The railing was unoccupied, but the sky was stamped full of stars.

  It took him a little time to locate the North Star, and from there, his eyes traced the constellations that he recognized. Big Dipper, Scorpio, Orion. A funny thing that the night sky looked the same here as it did in Japan, but was all twisted around from Australia. He would have been able to stay out here all night, just staring up and listening to the waves below.

  “You weren’t lying,” said a voice right next to him.

  A small yell escaped before he could help himself. “Geez, woman, you got me good. I guess you owed me one.”

  She looked pleased with herself. “This sky really is something else.”

  “I was just trying to chart a line to Honolulu, see where we’re headed.”

  “You can do that?”

  “If you hold your hand out at arm’s length, you can measure degrees that way. All three hundred and sixty of them,” he told her. “That one there is Polaris, the North Star.”

  “I see a gazillion.”

  He leaned nearer and pointed. “See the Big Dipper? If you draw a line down from the two stars that make the top of its bowl, you will always end up at Polaris. In Hawaii, it’s about twenty degrees off the horizon, wh
ich is like your hand stretched wide like you’re waving.” He demonstrated. “Three fingers is about five degrees, and your pinky is one.”

  “If mine is one, yours must be three or four degrees,” she said.

  “It’s relational, though, because our arms are different lengths.”

  She glanced up at him with wide eyes. “How do you know so much?”

  “The navy. We need to be prepared in case our navigation goes out, or we’re lost at sea,” he said.

  “It doesn’t sound like you spend much time at sea, though,” she said.

  “Not anymore.”

  He had a strong urge to explain to her what he did in detail. About the Japanese Flag Officers Code that they were racing to crack, and the smoky basement that he worked out of, full of nutty characters and IBM machines. When he had first arrived on Oahu and walked through what looked like a broom-closet door, down the sixteen steps and into the murky walls of COM14, it was like stepping into a pool hall. One filled with burn bags of cryptologic worksheets. It had taken him a while to get used to the smoke, and just when he had, they figured out that all they’d had to do was open the fresh-air intake.

  He snapped himself out of the memory, much preferring to be where he was now. “So about those language lessons, is there anything particular you want to learn to say?”

  “Greetings, everyday kinds of things, I guess?”

  “Konnichiwa and ohayou gozaimasu are greetings.”

  She laughed. “Say it again, more slowly.”

  “Kon-ni-chi-wa.”

  “We had Latin in school, but this sounds so different.”

  “It’s not a Romance language, so not only are you starting from scratch, but you have to change the way you think to really speak and understand it,” he said.

  “The foreignness of it is appealing, but I’m not sure my tongue is designed for such words,” she said.

  “Last I checked, all humans had the same kind of tongues. And brains and hearts, for that matter,” he said.

  A faint smile crossed her face. “You make a good point, I often feel the same. It’s a shame that not everyone can see it that way.”

  He was about to give his best shot at a reply when she asked, “What made you join the navy, Clark?”

  He usually gave the same response—they recruited me—but felt the need to give her more. “I did well in school, and with my background in physics I was recruited, but it turned out to be my ease with language that sent me overseas and got me into the intel. I was never the guy who wanted to be out in the trenches blowing people up. I wanted to be the guy who could figure out what was coming down the pipes and prevent attacks on American soil.”

  A burst of wind flicked at her hair. “Do you think there will be an attack on American soil?”

  He wished he could say no, but that would make him a liar. “I sure hope not, but you never know. In the Dungeon, we work on staying one step ahead of the Japanese.”

  “The Dungeon?”

  “Where I work.”

  “Sounds mysterious,” she said.

  “Just a smoky room filled with a bunch of eccentric men.”

  “I have to admit when I left home, I had so much on my mind that the last thing I was thinking about was us going to war,” she said.

  If that was the case, there must have been trouble. Talk of war was rampant. He was dying to know more about her, but afraid to push.

  “War may happen sooner than we all think,” he said.

  The words slipped out. She deserved to know.

  Eva’s whole body wilted. “Well, then, shall we set up a time for tomorrow? In the lounge?” she asked.

  “How about one o’clock?” Clark said, at the same time hearing footsteps behind them on the deck. He half turned his head.

  “Excuse me, are you Lieutenant Spencer?” a man in a white uniform asked.

  “That’s me.”

  Old enough to be his father, with piercing blue eyes, the man said, “Sir, the captain suggested I might have a word with you. I’m Hank Wilson, second radio officer, sir.”

  “What is it?” Clark said.

  Wilson nodded toward Eva. “It’s a private matter, if you don’t mind.”

  “Can it wait until morning?” Clark said, annoyed at the intrusion, but he’d just about scared her off anyway with his talk of war. Dumb move.

  “No, sir, it can’t.”

  “Give me a minute, please,” he said to Eva, who looked on the verge of tearing up. He led Wilson to the far back railing, beyond earshot and where their voices would be lost over the Pacific. “What’s this about?”

  “I’ve been picking up signals on the lower marine radio frequency that I thought you might want to hear.”

  Clark felt his chest constrict. “What kind of signals?”

  “Japanese signals. Why don’t you come with me and see for yourself? It’s highly unusual.”

  Wilson had piqued his interest enough to drag him away from Eva, which might have been a good thing, otherwise he sensed he might do something stupid. Like put his arm around her waist. Or accidentally lean over and kiss her. Any fool knew that the eve of a war was not the time to start something with a woman. And on top of that, these were unexpected feelings. Since Beth, his heart had been closed down. For years now, the sight of a beautiful woman had stirred nothing in him. And then along came Eva. Wrong time, wrong place and yet here he was acting like a love-struck teenager.

  Something had to give.

  * * *

  The radio room was high up on the bridge deck, full of dials and receivers. Clark was impressed at the modern equipment and comfort of the space. Wilson slumped down in the chair and put on a set of headphones, leaving Clark standing there waiting.

  A few minutes later, he peeled the headphones off. “Dang, this is getting stranger and stranger. I’ll be glad to get your take on it.”

  “What do we have?” Clark said.

  “The Japs are just blasting away using call letters JOS and JCS and other Japanese-based stations. Nor are they using any deception of signal detection. It’s all in code, but they’ve been going at it for a good hour now. The damnedest part of it is the repeat-back is being acknowledged verbatim,” Wilson said.

  Certainly odd. “Repeat-back from where? Can you tell?”

  Wilson rubbed his eyes with his leathery fists. “Some of the signals are good enough that we got a general bearing. I can’t be sure, but the majority of them are coming from a northwest-by-west area. Which, from here, means north or west of Honolulu. Nothing but ocean out there.”

  Surely he had to be wrong. “Hold on, are you saying the repeat-back is from ships?”

  “Possibly, sir,” Wilson said.

  The bitter cold of the room, coupled with this new bit of information, caused a shiver to run from the base of his spine through to his heels. Everyone knew something was coming, but Japanese ships near Honolulu would be impossible. Someone would have had a run-in with them by now.

  “Here’s the thing,” Wilson said. “In my thirty years of crossing the Pacific, I’ve never heard JCS Yokohama Japan before 2100 hours. We can’t be picking up signals sent during daylight hours from Japanese homeland right now. It’s impossible.”

  Clark needed to know more. “Show me the DF.”

  Wilson walked him to a toaster-size box. “A huff-duff, impressive,” Clark said.

  “Matson likes to be on top of the game. These ships aren’t cheap.”

  “You think the repeat-backs are for crafts with smaller antennas?” Clark said.

  “Or submarines.”

  They took turns listening to signals, and Clark wished he had Hal or Mike, his crypto buddies, there to give their take on things. At least Wilson seemed to know his stuff. A younger, less experienced man would never have picked up that these could only be repeat-bac
ks.

  During Wilson’s turn listening, he kept scratching his head, mumbling to himself, and then finally took off the earphones and looked Clark in the eye. “If anyone should ask me, I’d say it’s the Japs’ mobilization battle order.”

  “There has to be a reasonable explanation,” Clark said, though his gut was telling him Wilson might be right.

  “What other explanation can there be?”

  “I don’t know but it doesn’t add up,” Clark said.

  “We’re running out of time. Should we tell the captain to radio Pearl Harbor?”

  “What does the captain know?” Clark asked.

  “Just that I was picking up confusing radio signals. I was purposefully vague.”

  “Good. There’s no way we can send a message without the Japanese picking it right up. We’ll have to wait until we’re in Honolulu.”

  Wilson was chewing his lip. “I don’t like this one bit.”

  “Neither do I.”

  If the Japanese fleet was north or west of Honolulu, who knew where else they might be?

  AN UNUSUAL OCCURENCE

  December 1

  At promptly 0000 hours all radio call signs of the Japanese naval forces afloat are suddenly changed. This is the second time in thirty days they have done so. The last time was November 1. The Japanese ordinarily do not change their call signs until they have been in use for at least six months.

  OFF TO THE RACES

  When Eva was thirteen, she had gone with her father to treat a woman who supposedly had been kicked by a horse. When they arrived, the husband did all the talking and hovered around the bed like a nervous Nellie. At first, Eva had been shocked at what a vicious horse they’d had because it had kicked her under both eyes, in the shoulder, thigh and in her abdomen, leaving ghastly purple, green and yellow marks.

  You might want to consider giving your horse away, she had said to the woman, before her father shot her a menacing look.