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the surgeon in charge sighed.
    "We've wasted our time. He's got no more than a ten percent chance of pulling through." But the doctor did not know Robert Bellamy. And he did not know Susan Ward. It seemed to Robert that whenever he opened his eyes, Susan was there, holding his hand, stroking his forehead, ministering to him, willing him to live. He was delirious most of the time. Susan sat quietly next to him in the dark ward in the middle of the lonely nights and listened to his ravings.
    ..... The DOD is wrong, you can't head in perpendicular to the target or you'll hit the river. -.. Tell them to angle the dives a few degrees off target heading. ... Tell them - -." he mumbled. Susan said soothingly, "I will."
    Robert's body was soaked in perspiration. She sponged him off.
    ----. You have to remove all five of the safety pins or the seat won't eject. ... Check them. -.."
    "All right. Go back to sleep now."
    -----The shackles on the multiple ejector racks malfunctioned.
    ... God only knows where the bombs landed. - Half the time Susan could not understand what her patient was talking about. Susan Ward was head of the emergency operatingroom nurses. She had come from a small town in Idaho and had grown up with the boy next door, Frank Prescott, the son of the mayor. Everyone in town assumed they would be married one day.
    Susan had a younger brother, Michael, whom she adored. On his eighteenth birthday, he joined the Army and was sent to Vietnam, and Susan wrote to him there every day. Three months after he had enlisted, Susan's family received a telegram, and she knew what it contained before they opened it.
    When Frank Prescott heard the news, he rushed over.
    "I'm really sorry, Susan. I liked Michael a lot." And then he made the mistake of saying, "Let's get married right away." And Susan had looked at him and made a decision.
    "No. I have to do something important with my life."
    "For God's sake! What's more important than marrying me?" The answer was Vietnam. Susan Ward went to nursing school. She had been in Vietnam for eleven months, working tirelessly, when Commander Robert Bellamy was wheeled in and sentenced to die. Triage was a common practice in emergency evacuation hospitals. The doctors would examine two or three patients and make summary judgments as to which one they would try to save. For reasons that were never truly clear to her, Susan had taken one look at the torn body of Robert Bellamy and had known that she could not let him die. Was it her brother she was trying to save? Or was it something else? She was exhausted and overworked, but instead of taking her time off, she spent every spare moment tending to him.
    Susan had looked up her patient's record. An ace Navy pilot and Page 24
    Sidney Sheldon - Doomsday Conspiracy
    instructor, he had earned the Naval Cross. His birthplace was Harvey, Illinois, a small industrial city south of Chicago. He had enlisted in the Navy after graduating from college and had trained at Pensacola. He was unmarried.
    Each day, as Robert Bellamy was recuperating, walking the thin line between death and life, Susan whispered to him, "Come on, sailor. I'm waiting for you."
    One night, six days after he had been brought into the hospital, Robert was rambling on in his delirium, when suddenly he sat straight up in bed, looked at Susan, and said clearly, "It's not a dream. You're real." Susan felt her heart give a little jump.
    "Yes," she said softly. "I'm real."
    "I thought I was dreaming. I thought I had gone to heaven and God assigned you to me."
    She looked into Robert's eyes and said seriously, "I would have killed you if you had died."
    His eyes swept the crowded ward.
    "Where-where am I?"
    "The 12th Evacuation Hospital at Cu Chi."
    "How long have I been here?"
    "Six days."
    "Eddie-he-"
    "I'm sorry."
    "I have to tell the admiral."
    She took Robert's hand and said gently, "He knows. He's been here to visit you." Robert's eyes filled with tears.
    "I hate this goddamn war. I