“Relieved of duty?” Potter repeated the words as if they were spoken in a foreign language. “Horse hockey! I’ve been serving this man’s army since Black Jack Pershing was a corporal!”
Hawkeye grabbed Potter’s arm before the Colonel could march outside and pistol-whip the bullhorn-wielding Major. “Hold on, Sherman. If you go out there guns blazing, they’ll shoot you, court-martial your corpse, and write the history books to say we were running a syndicate out of the Swamp.”
“Hawk’s right,” B.J. said, peeking through a crack in the door. “That’s Major Thompson out there. Quartermaster Corps. He’s the guy whose signature is on every supply manifest we get. If he’s the one framing us, he’s brought a firing squad to make sure we don’t argue.”
The reality of their situation settled heavily over the room. The 4077th was an island of sanity in a sea of madness, but now the madness had surrounded the island with rifles. They were cut off. They had no real penicillin. And Private Miller, along with half a dozen other severely wounded boys in post-op, was running out of time.
The door swung open, and Frank Burns marched in, followed closely by Margaret. Frank looked entirely too pleased with the situation, practically vibrating with self-righteous glee.
“Well, well, well,” Frank gloated. “The chickens have come home to roost. I always knew you two degenerates were stealing supplies! Making bathtub gin, selling government property to the locals…”
“Frank, shut up before I surgically remove your vocal cords without anesthesia,” Hawkeye snapped, his patience entirely evaporated.
Margaret, however, looked conflicted. She respected the chain of command more than oxygen, but she was a nurse first. “Colonel, Major Thompson is demanding you step outside. He says he has signed affidavits from locals claiming Captain Pierce traded medical supplies for… for illicit goods.”
“Margaret,” B.J. said softly, looking her dead in the eye. “Look at me. Have you ever known Hawkeye or me to let a patient suffer? Have we ever skimped on the OR table?”
Margaret hesitated. She looked at the blood on their gowns. “No. You’re insubordinate pigs, but… you’re good doctors.”
“The penicillin we got today is sugar water, Margaret,” Hawkeye said, his voice stripped of all sarcasm. “Thompson sold the real stuff and sent us the decoys. Now he’s here to pin the theft on us before we can report it. And while he’s outside playing Eliot Ness, Private Miller is dying of sepsis.”
The color drained from Margaret’s face. Her rigid posture sagged. The absolute, unshakeable trust she placed in the Army’s glittering insignia had just cracked. “Are… are you sure?”
“Taste the vial on the desk,” Potter growled.
Margaret picked it up, sniffed it, and closed her eyes. A tear slipped down her cheek, ruining her perfect military composure. When she opened her eyes, they were blazing with a fury that terrified even Frank. “That… that son of a bitch. He’s murdering our patients.”
“Colonel,” Hawkeye said, turning back to Potter. “We have maybe twelve hours before Miller’s organs shut down completely. We need the real penicillin. If Thompson is here covering his tracks, the real shipment hasn’t left the province yet. The black market dealers wouldn’t move it during daylight with this much MP activity.”
“What are you suggesting, Pierce?” Potter asked, his eyes narrowing.
“I’m suggesting B.J. and I take a little stroll. Out the back flap of the Swamp, through the minefield path, and down to Rosie’s Bar. Rosie hears everything. If a massive shipment of army antibiotics just hit the local underground, she knows who bought it and where it’s stashed.”
“That’s desertion!” Frank squeaked. “That’s fraternizing with the black market! I’ll report you!”
Potter suddenly unholstered his revolver and slammed it onto the wooden desk with a deafening crack. Frank jumped nearly a foot in the air.
“Major Burns,” Potter said, his voice dangerously calm. “You are going to walk out into the compound, approach Major Thompson, and tell him that I am currently indisposed with a severe bout of dysentery, and that I request a formal meeting in my office in exactly two hours. You will bore him with regulations. You will stall him. If you fail, I will personally see to it that you are transferred to a frontline infantry unit in the Aleutian Islands. Do we understand each other?”
Frank swallowed hard, his Adam’s apple bobbing. “Yes… yes, sir. But…”
“No buts, Frank!” Margaret suddenly barked, grabbing Frank by the collar. “You go out there and you act like the pompous windbag you are! You stall him, or I swear to God, Frank, I will break your arm.”
Frank whimpered and scurried out of the office.
Potter turned to Hawkeye and B.J. “You two have exactly two hours. You find that medicine. You do whatever you have to do to get it back. Steal it, buy it, beg for it. Just get it back here. I don’t care about the laws of man or military right now. I care about the boy in post-op.”
Hawkeye nodded, a grim determination settling over his features. “We’ll get it, Colonel.”
Fifteen minutes later, stripped of their uniforms and wearing dark civilian coats they had bartered from locals weeks ago, Hawkeye and B.J. slipped under the perimeter fence. The rain had started to fall heavily, turning the Korean dirt into a thick, clinging mud.
They moved silently through the brush, following the hidden trail toward the nearby village. The devastation of the war was all around them—bombed-out huts, skeletal trees, the distant, rhythmic thumping of artillery. The trust they had in the system was gone, replaced by a cold, sharp survival instinct.
They reached the back alley behind Rosie’s Bar. The smell of cheap beer, roasting garlic, and unwashed bodies hit them like a wall. Hawkeye knocked on the heavy wooden door—two short, one long, two short.
The sliding peephole opened. A pair of sharp, dark eyes looked out. It was Rosie.
“We’re closed to the Army tonight,” Rosie whispered, her voice tight. “Bad men around.”
“We’re not the Army tonight, Rosie,” Hawkeye replied softly. “We’re doctors. And we’re looking for a specific vintage of medicine. The kind that cures gangrene.”
Rosie hesitated, then unbolted the door. “You boys are walking into a meat grinder. The men who bought your medicine… they aren’t local smugglers. They’re Yakuza operating out of Seoul. And they’re heavily armed.”
“Where are they, Rosie?” B.J. asked, his fists clenching in his coat pockets.
“The old abandoned paper mill. Two miles east,” she said quietly. “But Hawkeye… they have guards. They have machine guns. What are two doctors going to do?”
Hawkeye pulled a metallic object from his pocket. It was a heavy, olive-drab Mk 2 fragmentation grenade. B.J. stared at it in horror.
“Hawkeye, where the hell did you get that?” B.J. hissed.
“Traded a bottle of scotch to a tank commander last month,” Hawkeye said grimly. He looked at Rosie. “Thanks for the tip, Rosie. Keep the change.”
As they headed back out into the freezing rain toward the paper mill, B.J. grabbed Hawkeye’s shoulder. “Hawk, tell me you don’t actually plan on blowing up a warehouse full of Yakuza thugs.”
Hawkeye looked down at the grenade in his hand, his thumb resting near the pin. The rain slicked his hair to his forehead. The witty, sarcastic surgeon was nowhere to be found.
“Beej,” Hawkeye said quietly over the sound of the rain. “I’ve spent a year sewing kids back together only to have the generals tear them apart again. They took away our thread today. If I have to blow up half of Korea to get it back, I will.”
They crept through the tall grass until the dark silhouette of the ruined paper mill loomed against the night sky. True to Rosie’s word, two men with Thompson submachine guns stood at the entrance, smoking under a tin roof.
Hawkeye and B.J. crouched behind a rusted truck chassis.
“Okay,” Hawkeye whispered. “Here’s the plan. I’m going to walk out there. You flank around the back. When I cause a distraction, you find the crates and get a Jeep. Any Jeep.”
“Hawk, that’s suicide!”
Before B.J. could stop him, Hawkeye stood up, pulled the pin from the grenade with a terrifying metallic shink, and walked out into the open, holding the live explosive high in the air.
“Hey, gentlemen!” Hawkeye yelled, his voice echoing in the rain. “I’m looking to make a withdrawal from the blood bank!”
The guards raised their weapons, shouting in Korean and Japanese.
But suddenly, the unmistakable, nasal shriek of Major Frank Burns echoed from the darkness behind them.
“Halt! In the name of the United States Army! I order you to drop your weapons!”
Hawkeye froze. B.J. facepalmed in the mud. Frank had followed them. And he had just brought a squirt gun to a machine-gun fight.
The guards turned their Thompsons toward the sound of Frank’s voice and racked the bolts.
[ Next Chapter ⏩ ]
