Chapter 10

That's the trouble with doing it by the book. As I issued the challenge they all turned my way, one of them with his finger on the trigger spewing bullets all around the scenery. I squeezed off one round just as I felt a punch on the jaw and the lights went out.

When I woke up, I was, as you can guess, in a lovely clean bed with fuck all on but a sheet and a load of bandages. I could see nothing and I felt like I had just got out of the ring after the fight with the Para. My jaw and teeth hurt like merry hell. I can stand anything only pain, especially toothache, and I had the biggest toothache you could imagine.

"Hny uhn errr? Wha hnuh fn hnd?"

"Nurse! He's awake! Now just lie quietly darling everything is going to be fine. Oh God I love you so much, Drew. Thank God you've come round. The doctors were certain the bullet didn't hit anything vital but it knocked you out from the force of it."

The nurse arrived and the doctor followed shortly afterwards. Once they established that I was conscious they gave me pain relief. Believe me; I was doing my damnedest to convince them I had no head injury. That's one thing I knew from my team medics course ... no morphine for head injuries, and I really wanted morphine! The doctor explained that I had been hit by a bullet that had ricocheted off the engine of my van. It had entered just below my jaw and travelled up and out through my cheek taking part of my lower jaw and most of my teeth on the left-hand side of my face with it. My cheekbone had been fractured too. My eyes were bandaged because of that. Now I was awake they could check it out but they were confident my sight was unaffected.

All in all I was pretty lucky. The bullet was low velocity, from a home made S.M.G. which meant it wasn't as powerful as a commercial one. It was a ricochet, which reduced the impact some more but because it was out of shape and tumbling it made the wound bigger. Hey, I'll take a large, messy, non-fatal wound over a small, neat, fatal one any day. I had only lost a small part of my tongue so I should be able to eat, speak, and taste fairly normally. My jaw would be reconstructed using bone from my thigh and I would get a new set of decay proof molars screwed into it. I would get plastic surgery for my cheek and they figured I wouldn't be too badly scarred.

It may seem odd but at that moment my biggest concern was the hospital I was in. It was the same one I had worked in and it had a lot of staff who had republican leanings. I was worried that the IRA would be able to get in and top me while I was sleeping or drugged. Added to that were my concerns about my marriage and just to put the icing on the cake was how the railway company would look at it. Would they hold my job open and would I still have a place on the degree course?

I was whisked off for a barrage of tests. Testing my eyesight was fun. I could only grunt so the doctor had to offer me a series of alternate answers until he got the right one. He eventually established that I was suffering blurriness in my left but my right was O.K. He told me it was probably just swelling pressing on the nerve and it should clear up in time. Everything else seemed as good as could be expected. The terrorists hid weapons and ammunition in the sewers and the wounds could become very badly infected. So they would keep me on broad spectrum anti-biotics for a while.