Executive orders - Tom Clancy [513]
How am I doing? he asked.
Well, you're pretty sick, Cathy told him. But you're fighting back very well. If you can hang in there long enough, your immune system can beat this thing down, but you have to hang tough for us. And that wasn't quite a lie.
I don't know you. You a nurse?
No, I'm actually a professor. She smiled at him through the plastic shield.
Be careful, he told her. You really don't want this. Trust me. He even managed to smile back in the way that severely afflicted patients did. It nearly tore Cathy's heart from her chest.
We're being careful. Sorry about the suit. She so needed to touch the man, to show that she really did care, and you couldn't do that through rubber and plastic, damn it!
Hurts real bad, Doc.
Lie back. Sleep as much as you can. Let me adjust the morphine for you. She walked to the other side of the bed to increase the drip, waiting a few minutes before his eyes closed. Then she walked back to the bucket and sprayed it with a harsh chemical disinfectant. The container was already soaked in it, to the point that the chemical had impregnated the plastic, and anything alive that fell into it would quickly be extinguished. Spraying the thirty or so cc's that he'd brought up was probably unnecessary, but there was no such thing as too many precautions now. A nurse came in and handed over the printout with the newest blood work. The patient's liver function was nearly off the scale, automatically highlighted by asterisks as though she wouldn't have noticed. Ebola had a nasty affinity for that organ. Other chemical indicators confirmed the start of systemic necrosis. The internal organs had started to die, the tissues to rot, eaten by the tiny virus strands. It was theoretically possible that his immune system could still summon its energy and launch a counterattack, but that was only theory, one chance in several hundred. Some patients did fight this off. It was in the literature which she and her colleagues had studied over the last twelve hours, and in that case, they were already speculating, if they could isolate the antibodies, they might have something they could use therapeutically.
If-maybe-might-could-possibly.
That wasn't medicine as she knew it. Certainly it wasn't the clean, antiseptic medicine she practiced at Wilmer, fixing eyes, restoring and perfecting sight. She thought again about her decision to enter ophthalmology. One of her professors had pressed her hard to look at oncology. She had the brains, she had the curiosity, she had the gift for connecting things, he'd told her. But looking down at this sleeping, dying patient, she knew that, no, she didn't have the heart to do this every day. Not to lose so many. So did that make her a failure? Cathy Ryan asked herself. With this patient, she had to admit, yes, it did.
DAMN, CHAVEZ SAID. It's like Colombia.
Or Vietnam, Clark agreed on being greeted with the tropical heat. There was an embassy official, and a representative of the Zaire government. The latter wore a uniform and saluted the arriving officers, which courtesy John returned.
This way, if you please, Colonel. The helicopter, it turned out, was French, and the service was excellent. America had dropped a lot of money into this country. It was payback time now.
Clark looked down. Triple-canopy jungle. He'd seen that before, in more than one country. In his youth, he'd been underneath, looking for enemies, and with enemies looking for him-little men in black pajamas or khaki uniforms, carrying AK-47s, people who wanted to take his life. Now he appreciated the fact that there was something down there even smaller, that was not carrying any weapon, and was targeted not merely on him, but at the heart of his country. It seemed so damned unreal. John Clark was a creature of his country. He'd been wounded in combat operations and other, more personal events, and every time was restored quickly