Chapter 15 Day 5, Saturday

The neurosurgeon, Dr. Paul Willis, arrived on the ward at nine o'clock on Saturday morning, as promised.There was no change in his patient, which worried him.After another scan and film, the surgeon took a close look at the results. Certainly no new cerebral hemorrhages leading to ongoing coma.The vessels he ligated were not damaged either.There is no bruise pressing on the brain.The brain has expanded rapidly to its original volume.There was no new hemorrhage forming compression in other parts. However, intracranial pressure remains high, as does blood pressure.He began to fear that the neurosurgeon's nightmare would come true.If the kick had caused catastrophic diffuse axonal damage, it would not be visible at all, not even on a scan.But if the brainstem or cerebral cortex suffer damage that cannot repair itself, the patient becomes a vegetative state until life support is shut down, or simply dies.He decided to do brainstem tests over the weekend.Now his wife is waiting downstairs in the car, eager to get to Oxfordshire for a lunch meeting with the gang they met in Corfu, Greece.He glanced at the lying patient again, and then left.

The guerrillas appeared in great numbers near the shooting blind spots of the old stone fortress.He had seen them before with B Squadron in this tragic and secret war, but they had been out there in the distance over the brown hills, and only here and there, singly or in groups of two.This time it was a large-scale attack across the board, and fanatical guerrillas were swarming in. He and his companions consisted of only ten men; the mixed team of native soldiers from the north, local gendarmes, and some drafted untrained soldiers totaled about fifty men.Among his own personnel were two officers, two sergeants, a corporal and five enlisted men.The number of guerrillas has exceeded 200, and they are charging from all directions.

Crouching on the roof of the training-team barracks, he aimed the reticle of his SLR automatic rifle at three guerrillas, knocking them down before they could figure out where the bullets were coming from.This is not surprising, as the crackling of mortar shells and the sound of small arms fire has never stopped. An hour earlier, when the rebels had stormed the outpost at Jebel Ali, they would have been doomed had it not been for a single shot.The warning of gunshots bought them some valuable time to gain a favorable position ahead of the first wave of attackers swarming towards the barbed wire.But the outnumbered situation is driving them into a corner.

He looked down and saw the body of a native soldier lying face down on a dirt road that became the main street.Corporal Labalaba, a fearless Fijian with half his jaw torn by bullets, was still using an old twenty-five-pound field gun to fight on open ground with tribesmen swarming at close quarters. There was a head-on fire, and Captain Mike tried to cross the four hundred yards to save him. Two hooded men poked their heads out from behind the fort, and he shot them down one by one.Three more figures crossed the low ridge and appeared to his left.They tried to take down Captain Mike who was dodging left and right on the open ground.He fired at them with all the remaining bullets in the magazine, killing one and scaring off the other two.

He rolled over to change the magazine as a rocket from a Carl Gustaf rocket whizzed past his head.Had the rocket been ten inches lower, he would have been blown to pieces.Beneath the roof beams where he lay, he could hear his officers radioing the base, asking them to ignore the low clouds and send Attacker jets in for support.After replacing the new magazine, he found two other guerrillas in the open ground, and he shot them all before they could sneak up on Captain Mike.The captain took this opportunity to hide in the bunker with the health worker Tobin, ready to rescue the two Fijians. Though he didn't know it then, he would later learn that the intrepid Lababa had just been shot a second time, this time through his forehead, and he didn't survive; Yi was bandaged and mortally wounded, while Tay survived with three bullets.He happened to spot the terrorist manning the bazooka that had nearly killed him, the partisan between two sand dunes near where the barbed wire had been torn.He fired a 7.62mm NATO standard round with a nickel-copper alloy bushing into the opponent's throat with precision.The rockets fell silent, but the muffled explosions of mortars and 75mm recoilless guns used by the guerrillas continued.

Finally, the Attacker jet flew over the sea, pierced through the clouds, and came a hundred feet down to appear.The pouring of bombs and strafing machine guns finally destroyed the fighting spirit of the tribal people.The offense faltered and then fell apart.Taking the wounded and most of the corpses with them, they began to retreat.He would learn later that he and his companions had repelled three or four hundred men, and sent about a hundred of them to heaven. When the gunfire fell silent, he lay on the roof and laughed easily, wondering what Aunt May would think of him now. In the intensive ward of the Royal London Hospital, the crippled man's thoughts are still far, far away.