The silence that descended upon the Operating Room was absolute, cutting through the ambient noise of buzzing flies and distant artillery. It was a terrifying kind of quiet, the kind that precedes an explosion. Hawkeye Pierce stood motionless, the heat radiating off his body, his eyes fixed on Major Frank Burns.
The young soldier on Hawkeye’s table, a Private First Class named Miller, violently convulsed. His skin was a shocking, mottled red, dry as parchment. The body’s natural cooling system had entirely shut down. Heat stroke was an insidious killer, turning the human body into a sealed pressure cooker. If his core temperature reached 107 degrees, his organs would begin to liquefy.
“Frank,” Hawkeye repeated, the dangerous calmness evaporating into a barely contained fury. “I am going to ask you one more time before I use this bone saw to manually extract the truth from your skull. Where. Is. The. Ice?”
Frank’s ferret-like face twitched. He pulled himself up to his full, un-impressive height, trying to invoke the authority of his rank. “I am a Major in the United States Army, Captain, and I do not have to explain my strategic requisitioning to an insubordinate—”
“Burn’s, spit it out!” Colonel Sherman Potter bellowed from the adjacent table, his usually grandfatherly demeanor replaced by the sharp bark of a seasoned cavalry officer. “We have a boy dying of hyperthermia on this table!”
Frank gulped, his Adam’s apple bobbing nervously. “I… I required it for a vital military experiment. To maintain officer morale and efficiency during extreme weather conditions.”
“He filled his bathtub with it, sir,” Radar piped up, shrinking back as Frank shot him a murderous glare. “He and Major Houlihan were complaining about the heat in Margaret’s tent, so he dumped all three bags of the hospital’s ice into the canvas tub to make an ‘air conditioning radiator’ with a desk fan.”
Margaret, to her credit, suddenly looked horrified. She had been wiping Miller’s forehead with a damp cloth, but her hand froze. “Frank! You told me that ice was surplus from the officers’ mess!”
“It was a tactical decision!” Frank whined. “Officers need a cool environment to make command decisions!”
Hawkeye didn’t yell. He didn’t make a wisecrack. He simply looked at the dying boy, then at Frank, with a profound, crushing exhaustion. “Frank, when this is over, I am going to mail you to North Korea in a very small box. But right now, I have a kid whose brain is about to turn into scrambled eggs.”
Hawkeye turned to the nurses. “Kellye! Get every towel we have. Soak them in the coldest water you can find. It won’t be enough, but it’s all we’ve got. We need to create an evaporative cooling effect.”
The OR exploded back into frantic motion. Nurses sprinted to the scrub sinks, returning with dripping towels that were immediately draped over Miller’s chest, groin, and neck—the areas with major blood vessels. Hawkeye and Colonel Potter worked furiously to complete the intestinal resection, their movements blurred with speed. Every second counted.
“Pulse is erratic and threading,” Margaret reported, her voice entirely professional now, stripped of any affection for Frank. “Respiration is shallow. Temp is 106.2.”
“We’re losing him,” Hawkeye muttered, his hands deep in the kid’s abdomen. “The water isn’t cold enough. The ambient temperature in here is completely negating the cooling. We need a rapid temperature drop. We need ice.”
“I’ll go check the mess tent,” Radar said, his voice trembling. “Maybe there’s some frozen meat, some frozen peas…”
“Not enough surface area,” Potter grunted, tying off a bleeder. “We need to pack him in it. At least fifty pounds of it. Unless you can perform a miracle, Son, we’re going to lose this soldier to the weather instead of the war.”
The monitor blipped erratically. Miller’s chest heaved in a ragged gasp.
Suddenly, Radar’s head snapped up. His eyes widened behind his thick lenses. It was his namesake ability—the uncanny precognition that something was approaching long before anyone else could hear it.
“Wait,” Radar whispered. “I hear it.”
“Hear what, Radar? The angels?” Hawkeye asked grimly, closing the abdominal cavity.
“No, sir. A Deuce-and-a-half truck. Heavy load. And… a jeep. A military police jeep. It’s coming down the main supply route, about two miles out.” Radar’s face broke into a massive, hopeful grin. “Sir! It’s the Quartermaster’s supply convoy for I Corps headquarters! I saw the manifest this morning on the teletype. General ‘Iron Guts’ Kelly is throwing a morale booster for the brass tonight. That truck is a refrigerated unit, sir. It’s carrying four hundred pounds of dry ice and twenty tubs of vanilla ice cream!”
Hawkeye looked up, his bloodshot eyes locking onto Radar’s. The ghost of his trademark smirk returned, completely devoid of humor but full of reckless determination.
“Ice cream,” Hawkeye breathed. “Vanilla.”
“We can’t requisition that!” Frank squawked, horrified. “That’s for a General! It’s official military property! It’s treason!”
“No, Frank,” Hawkeye said, peeling off his bloody surgical gloves. “It’s a prescription.” He turned to Potter. “Colonel, I request permission to leave the surgical field. The patient is closed. Now I need to go practice some preventative medicine.”
Potter didn’t look up from his own patient. “I didn’t hear a word you said, Pierce. The noise in here is deafening. In fact, I’m practically blind and deaf until this shift is over. Whatever you do, don’t tell me about it, and don’t get caught.”
“Radar,” Hawkeye barked, tossing his surgical gown aside to reveal his sweat-soaked olive drab t-shirt. “Get the jeep. We’re going to go rob a General.”
[ Next Chapter ⏩ ]
