The camp is beginning to talk.

The nurses watch him and the doctors watch her. It's only a matter of time before they come up with a working hypothesis and test it out.

The nurses act first. They begin to flirt with him more. They are coy and shy at first but gradually become bolder in their propositions. At first, she watches it from across the compound but as they step up their efforts to tempt him, they begin to do it right in front of her.

She was surprised by their tactics at first. They could risk being reprimanded behaving like that in front of their commanding officer but then she realized that her reaction could tip her hand in this too. So she makes excuses to walk away when she sees one of them coming with the telltale sashay in her hips. She goes far enough away that they feel they have privacy but not so far she can't hear or see what is said.

First, comes the gentle touch on the arm coupled with a soft smile. When the nurse has his attention she slides in closer pressing against him and makes her offer. Her eager eyes look up at him twinkling with anticipation…and just as quickly she sees the twinkle disappear as he gently turns the nurse down and the girl retreats.

When this first started to happen she was strangely thrilled that he was rejecting the obviously eager women, but that led to a bit of panic about his reasons for turning them away. Was he doing it because he didn't want to jeopardize their own activities or because he really wasn't interested in them anymore?

For his part he is very surprised by the change in the attitude of the nursing staff. Before he would have to work hard to get a date, but now that he has stopped chasing them, they seem to come to him. He smirks when he thinks of what Trapper would have said about it.

Margaret's reaction is also surprising to him. She is never a woman to retreat but she is quick to leave his side when one of her nurses approaches. Clearly something is going on that he is not aware of and he wonders if he should ask her about it but that would mean they breach the unspoken agreement to not talk about what goes on between them.

The doctors take a decidedly different approach. They are all friends with Margaret so they make more of a point to talk to her and encourage her to open up. Charles even offers to set her up on a date with a surgeon he knows at Tokyo General that would be perfect for her. She smiles politely but finds an excuse to not meet the man. BJ tries to goad her into spilling the beans about her mystery man but she ignores him and focuses more on work. Potter looks on with the same fatherly concern he carries for all of them.

The camp has taken up the new hobby of watching them, but the two sides are doing it for different reasons. She has began to feel that her every move is being scrutinized; his too. How they have not put it together yet she doesn't know but they have managed to run them underground so they can't find time to be together at all without risking being caught. The tension is getting to them both as they keep their emotions bottled up. Inevitably, it explodes all over the compound.

It starts with something small and snowballs from there. It's a domino effect and they seem to feed off of the other's frustrations more than anything. She snaps at the enlisted and he unleashes on Igor. This escalates to her taking it out on the nursing staff while he almost gets court-martialed by a General passing through.

Eventually they turn on each other and it happens at the end of a long OR session.

They have just finished up on a difficult patient, who is also thankfully the last of the patients as soon as the other three surgeons finish up with theirs too. The normal banter in the OR had been replaced by snide remarks which quickly elevated to snappish insults between the two. Perhaps she is a bit too forceful at the end as she shoves an instrument in his hand, earning her another glare from his steel blue eyes.

She can see he is at a breaking point but she is so far down her own path that she can't be bothered to care. He growls at her and she decides that she has had enough and turns on her heel and walks out of the OR.

The others notice her sudden departure and all eyes turn to him. BJ turns to his best friend but the look in the man's eyes is unsettling. Normally, Hawkeye is all fury and passion, but this is something quiet and worse.

"Kelley, close for me" is all he says as he swiftly follows her out the doors.

Potter lets out a curse as he rushes to finish his patient as he is sure that his Chief Surgeon and Head Nurse are about to lay into one another and someone needs to be there to stop them.

The cool night air is sobering when Margaret throws the door open and steps outside. The chill is enough to take some of the edge off of her anger but she keeps walking anyway. She doesn't have a place in mind but she just knows she had to get out of there. The thing is he hasn't even done anything to upset her but just being around him is throwing her off balance and when she gets thrown off balance she gets angry.

Hawkeye is angry at her and the cool air does little to soothe that feeling. He sees her a bit in the distance walking away from him and he moves to catch up with her. His long legs clear the ground faster than her quick pace can.

Of course, she hears him coming and she knew as soon as she made the decision to walk out that he would be hot on her heels. It's not until she feels his large hand latch onto her arm and pull her around to face his furious blue eyes that she thinks this may have been a bad idea.

He knows it's a bad idea too but is past the point of no return. When Potter and the others make it outside they can hear their shouts ring through the compound, echoing off the metal building. In the distance he can see them arguing. The tension and anger in their body language has nearly become a substance all to its own.

He starts to yell at Radar to call the MPs as he is sure this is about to get worse before it gets better when a shot rings out. Instinctively, he ducks back inside the building as the sniper fires another shot.

Outside, their words die out with the sound of the bullet and they both hit the ground. They are too far from the buildings to get to safety so they crawl towards a truck that has been left parked at the edge of the compound. The sniper follows their progress dotting the ground with bullets until they are securely underneath.

He lays over her as much as he can to shield her. The truck does not afford them much coverage and the sniper takes advantage of this. The bullets ring off the metal frame and the ground around them. All they can do is curl into one another and hope for the best.

Inside, Potter is shouting down the phone for back up, while the rest of the unit huddles alternately worried for their own safety as well as that of the two trapped outside.

Fortunately, a nearby unit sweeps in and removes the sniper. Once the all clear is called, Potter rushes out as they are pulling themselves from under the badly damaged truck. They are clearly shaken and quickly split from each other to retreat to their own space.

Later, Potter sits back in his chair and rubs his hand over his face. These two will either destroy the camp or each other and its beginning to become clear to him just what is at the heart of the issue, but ever the gentleman, he won't bring it up, at least until he has too.