Red Rabbit - Tom Clancy [303]
"Jack?" his wife said when she recognized his voice. "Where the hell are you?" She must have been exercised. Cathy Ryan didn't ordinarily talk like that.
"I'm at RAF Mildenhall. I have to fly back to Washington."
"Why?"
"Let me ask you this, honey: How good are Italian doctors?"
"You mean—the Pope?"
"Yep." She couldn't see his tired but curt nod.
"Every country has good surgeons—Jack, what's going on? Were you there?"
"Cath, I was about forty feet away, but I can't tell you any more than that, and you can't repeat it to anybody, okay?"
"Okay," she replied, with wonder and frustration in her voice. "When will you be home?"
"Probably in a couple of days. I have to talk to some people at headquarters, and they'll probably send me right back. Sorry, babe. Business. So, how good are the docs in Italy?"
"I'd feel better if Jack Cammer was working on him, but they have to have some good ones. Every big city does. The University of Padua is about the oldest medical school in the world. Their ophthalmologists are about as good as we are at Hopkins. For general surgery, they must have some good people, but the guy I know best for this is Jack." John Michael Cammer was Chairman of Hopkins' Department of Surgery, holder of the prestigious Halstead Chair, and one hell of a good man with a knife. Cathy knew him well. Jack had met him once or twice at fund-raisers and been impressed by his demeanor, but wasn't a physician and couldn't evaluate the man's professional abilities. "It's fairly straightforward to treat a gunshot wound, mostly. Unless the liver or spleen is hit. The real problem is bleeding. Jack, it's like when Sally got hurt in the car with me. If you get him there fast, and if the surgeon knows his stuff, you have a good chance of surviving—unless the spleen's ruptured or the liver is badly lacerated. I saw the TV coverage. His heart wasn't hit—wrong angle. I'd say better than even money he'll recover. He's not a young man, and that won't help, but a really good surgical team can do miracles if they get to him fast enough." She didn't talk about the nasty variables of trauma surgery. Bullets could ricochet off ribs and go in the most unpredictable directions. They could fragment and do damage in widely separated places. Fundamentally, you couldn't diagnose, much less treat, a bullet wound from five seconds of TV tape. So the odds on the Pope's survival were better than even money, but a lot of 5—1 horses had beaten the chalk horse and won the Kentucky Derby.
"Thanks, babe. I'll probably be able to tell you more when I get home. Hug the kids for me, okay?"
"You sound tired," she said.
"I am tired, babe. It's been a busy couple of days." And it wasn't going to get any quieter. "Bye for now."
"I love you, Jack," she reminded him.
"I love you, too, babe. Thanks for saying that."
Ryan waited more than an hour for the Zaitzev family. So the offer of a helicopter would have just enabled him to wait here longer—fairly typical of the U.S. military. Ryan sat on a comfortable couch and drifted off to sleep for perhaps half an hour.
The Rabbits arrived by car. A USAF sergeant shook Jack awake and pointed him to the waiting KC-135. It was essentially a windowless Boeing 707, also equipped to refuel other aircraft. The lack of windows didn't help his attitude very much, but orders were orders, and he climbed up the steps and found a plush leather seat just forward of the wing box. The aircraft had hardly lifted off the ground when Oleg fell into the seat beside his own.
"What happened?" Zaitzev demanded.
"We caught Strokov. I got him myself, and he had a gun in his hand," Ryan reported. "But there was another shooter."
"Strokov? You arrested him?"
"Not exactly an arrest, but he decided to come