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Aaron took his place behind Reagan’s elevated back. Adelberg was to his left; Cheyney stood on the other side of the table. From their three vantage points, the surgeons studied the president. All admired his physique: it was hard to believe he had recently turned seventy, because he had the body and muscle tone of a fifty-year-old who lifted weights.

Aaron picked up a No. 10 scalpel and prepared to make a six-inch incision. He started just under the left nipple, slicing the skin in an arc through the chest tube hole and toward the back. He could have made a far longer incision, but a smaller one would require less recovery time and he could always enlarge it if he had to. As Aaron cut through sinew, fat, and skin, Cheyney retracted the tissue, making it easier for Aaron to see what he was doing and to continue slicing deeper into the chest.

Once the incision was deep enough, Aaron used a retractor—a tool also called a rib spreader—to pry apart the president’s fifth and sixth ribs, creating a six-inch-wide space. By this point he could see the lung and heart inside the chest cavity; he also noticed that the seventh rib had splintered where it had been struck by the bullet. After cauterizing the blood vessels he had just sliced open, he turned his attention to a large pool of blood and clots deep in the chest cavity. With a gloved hand, he scooped out the gelatinous material and deposited it in a kidney-shaped basin. In combination with the blood collected by the Pleur-evac, this brought Reagan’s total blood loss to 3.1 liters, or about half of his total blood volume.

Aaron then lined the chest with sterile surgical sponges to soak up blood so he could inspect organs and tissue. With the help of a powerful light strapped to his head, he began by checking the pericardium, the sac containing the heart. It was uninjured, which meant the heart was fine, too. Next he gently touched and inspected the aorta, which he found free of damage. He looked over the diaphragm; it, too, was intact. Aaron was relieved. If any of these organs or structures had been damaged, the president would be in far more trouble.

Aaron now turned his attention to the track of the bullet. He followed it through the skin, into the chest, and into the lower lobe of the left lung. But the hole puzzled him. The wound on Reagan’s skin was a narrow slit no more than half an inch long, suggesting that the president had been hit by a fragment, not an intact round. But the path of injury through the lung looked as if it had been bored by a drill bit the diameter of a dime. Aaron couldn’t figure out how that was possible.

As he felt the splintered rib and studied the wound track, Aaron realized that the projectile had ricocheted off the rib and begun to whirl end over end, chewing up tissue as it moved through the body. From the X-ray, Aaron knew that the bullet had come to rest in the lower lobe of the left lung, about an inch from the heart. Now he just had to find it.

* * *

WITH HIS BACK to the conference room’s table, Al Haig watched the television in horror as it flashed to a live feed of an administration spokesman addressing the media—from the White House press room.

“He’s right upstairs here!” Haig said, glaring at the screen.

It was a little after four. No one was supposed to speak to reporters without first consulting the officials in the Situation Room; Haig had made that very clear. But there was Larry Speakes, the deputy White House press secretary, talking to millions of Americans, and he was floundering. Reporters were hurling question after question at him and Speakes didn’t have answers.

“Is the president in surgery?” asked Lesley Stahl, an aggressive correspondent for CBS News who was growing increasingly frustrated by the lack of information from the White House.

“I can’t say,” Speakes answered.

“We have gotten confirmed reports,” Stahl fired back. “So have other network news, so have the wires, can’t you help us with that, Larry?”

Again Speakes dodged the question: “As soon as we can