Read Online Countdown: M Day by Tom Kratman - Free Book Online

breath in a rush.
    “You say the first sample is always free, is it?”
    “For field grades and senior noncoms only. And to get anywhere near her you have to produce a clean blood test from within the last week .”
    “So how do you …?”
    “Just ask her to put you on the schedule. For today, however, we have a schedule to keep.”

    “By the way,” von Ahlenfeld asked, “why do you call the pilot, ‘Doc’?”
    Stauer laughed. “Because Doc McCaverty’s a neurosurgeon that we can only keep on strength—for what we can afford to pay—if we let him fly, generally, and fly combat, in particular.”
    “A neurosurgeon ? You, Wes, have a very odd crew here.”
    “You don’t know the half of it.”

    Karl Marx Impact Area, Guyana

    “And that’s the other reason,” Lana said, in Reilly’s tent a few dozen meters from the battalion command post. “I’m …I’m …”
    “‘Um, um,’” Reilly gently mocked. He was over fifty, compared to his wife’s mere thirty-one, and tended to tease her for her youth, among other things.
    “Gonna have a baby,” Lana finished. “In about six months.”
    Reilly had been sipping at a folding tin cup of coffee when Lana had come into his tent. Sua sponte, his hand opened up, letting the cup fall to the tent’s dirt floor.
    “No shit?” he asked, unintelligently.
    “No,” she answered sardonically, “shit comes out of one side. Babies come out the other side.”
    He was on his feet in the next instant, physically picking her up and setting her protesting form—“I am pregnant; I am not fragile!”—down on his field chair. Then, legs gone weak, he sat straight down onto the dirt. “No shit,” Reilly muttered.
    “I take it, then,” Lana said, “that you do not object to the idea?”
    Speechless for the nonce, he just shook his silly-smiling head in negation.
    I’ve made you happy , she thought, also smiling. That, alone, is worth what I’m going to go through.
    Still smiling, she said, “Good. But we still have the problem of the company. Doc Joseph isn’t an obstetrician—we don’t have an American or Euro-trained obstetrician—but he made a call to a friend of his in the states who is, and the two of them decided I’ll be fine up to about the end of the fifth month. At that point, it would be better—safer, anyway—for me and the baby, both, if I stay out of the excessive heat and generally take it easy. That’s not consistent with being a company commander.”
    “We’ll worry about the company later,” Reilly answered, finally finding some meaningful words. “We have time. What’s more important is that the regiment’s hospital doesn’t have an obstetrician on staff.”
    “That’s not true,” Lana said. “There is one, though all of his patients tend to be local, like himself.”
    “Where did he go to medical school?” Reilly asked. “If it wasn’t top notch from America, Israel, or Europe . . ”
    Lana held up a shushing hand. “He delivered both of Phillie Stauer’s without a hitch.”
    Reilly took her small hand and wrapped it in his own. “I’m not in love with or married to Phillie Stauer,” he said. “I am with you. So I don’t care what was good enough for her and hers. I care about what’s good enough for you and ours, and a local isnlikely to cut it.”
    “Doc Joseph checked on that, too, and there is a first rate OB-GYN in Georgetown, a graduate of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, in Delhi. That, Joseph says, is the best in India, as good as any in the world and better than most.”
    “All right,” Reilly conceded, though not necessarily with any good grace. “You can go to see this Doctor …what did you say his name was?”
    Lana sighed. “You really are getting old, short term memory loss and everything. I didn’t say. But it’s Singh and Joseph already made me an appointment for next week. The hospital’s paying Singh enough for him to come here rather than me going there,