"You must have picked it up around Kumwha," he said. "There's nothing you can do for it is there?"
"No more than you are doing now, unless the Reds have something we don't know about." I sipped the water someone brought and lay back.
Blackie had come in when he heard I was conscious. "Lee Sung is back," he said. "Maybe he could get something from Anders, or better still, get Anders to see you."
"I couldn't walk two minutes, let alone twenty miles."
"By Golly, we'll carry you," said Blackie. "Don't you worry Colonel." I fell asleep again with his comforting hand on my shoulder.
The trek across the ridges was rough. I can't remember much of it except the feeling of falling when the improvised stretcher tipped on the steep slopes or someone lost his footing. By now, one of our sergeants, another Korean War veteran named Lim On, was ill with what appeared to be the same disease and the morale of the unit was slipping. We had jumped a week ago and as yet had accomplished nothing. In a deserted, half-collapsed farmhouse about a mile from Song-dong-ni, they laid Lim and me down on piles of straw while most of the men bivouacked in small dugouts camouflaged in the woods beside the house. We waited for Lee Sung to get Anders.
He arrived the following afternoon. A tall man, he looked like a benevolent hawk, pale smooth hair, sharp nose, keen grey eyes. He stooped under the low lintel of the hovel and stood for a while in the semi-darkness of the tiny, paper-walled room until his eyes were adjusted. Then he came and dropped on one knee by my side.
"You are a very sick man, Colonel," he said slowly, in precise English.
"I think I have hemorrhagic fever," I said.
"There is little doubt," he agreed as his hands searched my neck and armpits for swollen glands. "See, the small blood spots on your abdomen, and your eyes. And what else have you noticed?"