Cadet 3 by Commander James Bondage Page A

too late, but…” her voice
dropped “… if we try to move him the way he is now…” She left the
sentence unfinished, but her face and the hopeless way she shook
her head spoke volumes.
    Murphy was closer to awareness than Kate
suspected, as they discovered when they heard his voice coming from
the tent, although it was too weak for any of his words to be
comprehensible.
    “Dick!” Kate exclaimed. She scrambled back
into the tent and knelt beside him. He whispered something that
only Kate could hear. She looked out from the tent and caught
Jodie’s eye. “He wants to tell you something, General,” she
said.
    Jodie scuttled into the tent and knelt next
to the stricken captain. His face was unnaturally pale in the glow
of the flashlight. His eyes were closed and his breathing was
uneven and shallow. “It’s Jodie. I’m right here, Dick,” she
said.
    “General Lawrence,” he said in a barely
audible voice, “you have to get out of here, now. The gunfire and
all the noise…” he trailed off.
    Jodie waited to see if he was going to
continue on his own, then gently prompted him. “Yes, Dick, you were
saying?”
    “There’s a chance we were heard… you can’t
wait until morning to leave… too risky,” he said, pausing every few
syllables to gather the strength to continue.
    “Kate says it’s not safe to move you now,”
Jodie answered, “so we’ll have to stay a little longer and wait
until you’re strong enough to travel.”
    He did not speak again for so long that Jodie
thought he had lost consciousness again. She started to tell Kate
that she was going back out to consult with the rest of the group,
when injured man stirred. His voice was even weaker than before. He
lacked the strength to control his tongue and lips well enough to
form clear words, so that his speech was both labored and slurred.
It did not require medical training to see that Cafferson’s
intelligence man was almost at the end of his strength. His entire
body strained with the effort to produce a few words. “Gen’ral, I’m
not… gonna get… stron’er. I’m… done. Jus’ leave…” He faded out,
then drew in a shuddering breath, and continued. “Leave me here…
coun’ry… nee’ you…” He fell silent, and his tense body relaxed as
he passed into unconsciousness again.
    Jodie picked up Kate with her eyes and
signaled with her chin to step out of the tent. They stood together
by the entrance, and far enough away from the others that they
could talk quietly without being overheard. Jodie said softly, “I
can’t leave him behind if there’s the even smallest chance he might
make it. You’re the only one of us who has any medical
training…”(she had found this out during the long trip from
Washington) “… so it has to be your call.”
    Kate’s eyes went to the tent where Murphy was
lying, then returned to Jodie. “Christ, General, how am I qualified
to decide a thing like this? I took a three-week course in
battlefield first aid. I know how to sew up an open wound, splint a
broken bone, administer a shot of morphine, start an I.V., things
like that. You’re asking me to make a decision that’s way above my
paygrade.” Her voice, which was already low, dropped even further.
Jodie had to move her ear close to Kate’s moth to make out her next
few words. “Even if I knew enough to give you a reliable answer,
I’d be the last person you should ask. Dick and I… we were… we’ve
been…” She hesitated and fell silent.
    Jodie was mystified for a moment, but she
quickly worked it out. “Oh. Oh, Jesu s, Kate. How serious was
it?” she whispered, her eyes studying her friend’s face.
    Kate’s face was set in an unreadable mask, as
if she was working hard to suppress any hint of the emotions that
tore at her inside. “We were going to be married in the fall, sir,”
she answered, addressing Jodie as her superior officer rather than
her friend, to keep the pain at bay by hiding behind