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“I wonder why here?” the MOD asked. “There are very good hospitals in the Canal Zone, and that’s a lot closer to Argentina than Washington.”

The NOD shrugged.

“And that admiral showed up an hour after he did,” she said. “And shortly after that, the major’s family started coming. He has a large family. I think they’re Puerto Ricans. They were all speaking Spanish.”

“Interesting,” the MOD said.

Major Maxwell Ashton III, Cavalry, detail Military Intelligence, a tall, swarthy-skinned, six-foot-three twenty-six-year-old, tried to rise from the water closet in his toilet by using a chromed support mounted to the wall. The support was on the left wall. Major Ashton’s left arm was in a cast and the cast was in a sling. Using his right arm, he managed to rise about eighteen inches from the toilet seat before his hand slipped and he dropped back down.

He cursed. Loudly, colorfully, obscenely, and profanely, in Spanish, and for perhaps thirty seconds.

He then attempted to rise using the crutch he had rested against the toilet wall. On the third try, he made it. With great difficulty, he managed to get his pajama trousers up from the floor and over his right leg, which was encased in plaster of paris, and to his waist.

“Oh, you clever fucking devil, you!” he proclaimed, in English.

He unlocked the door, held it open with his forehead, and then managed to get the crutch into his armpit, which permitted him to escape the small room.

He was halfway to the bed when Lieutenant Allred attempted to come to his aid.

Ashton impatiently waved him off, made it to the bed, and, with difficulty, got in.

“You should have asked a nurse to help you,” Allred said.

“I’m sure it’s different in the Navy, but in the Cavalry, we consider it unbecoming an officer and a gentleman to ask women with whom we are not intimately acquainted to assist us in moving our bowels,” Ashton said.

Admiral Souers laughed.

“I’m delighted to find you in a good mood, Max,” he said. “How’s it going?”

“Sir, do you really want to know?”

“I really do.”

“I am torn between that proverbial rock and that hard place. On one hand, I really want to get the hell out of here. I am told that when I can successfully stagger to the end of the hall and back on my crutches, I will be considered ‘ambulatory.’ I can do that. But if I do it officially, that will mean I will pass into the hands of my Aunt Florence, who is camped out in the Hay-Adams extolling my many virtues to the parents of every unmarried Cuban female in her child-bearing years—of the proper bloodline, of course—between New York and Miami.”

“That doesn’t sound so awful to me,” Allred said.

“What you don’t understand, Jim—although I’ve told you this before—is that unmarried Cuban females of the proper bloodline do not fool around before marriage. And I am still in my fooling-around years.”

“Or might be, anyway, when you get out of that cast,” Admiral Souers said.

“Thank you, sir, for pointing that out to me,” Ashton said.

Souers chuckled, and then asked, “What do you want first, the good news or the bad?”

“Let’s start with the bad, sir. Then I will have something to look forward to.”

“Okay. There’s a long list of the former. Where do I start? Okay. General Patton died yesterday in Germany.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. He always said he wanted to go out with the last bullet fired in the last battle.”

“And a car wreck isn’t the last battle, is it?” Souers replied.

“Unless it was an opening shot in the first of a series of new battles,” Ashton said.

“We looked into that,” Souers said. “General Greene—the European C

ommand CIC chief? . . .”