The boy nodded but his eyes again became glazed until he looked like a drug-soaked hippie.
‘Then siddown an’ wait till mistah heah tells yo’ what doin’ an’ den, Jo, yo’ go do fast. Sabby?’
The boy again nodded and slowly opened the door, holding it open while they passed into a twenty-foot square room fixed up with an operating table, theatre equipment and first aid kit. Grant eased Krystelle on to the table, and stretched himself, carefully checking that his own wound had dried up. At least there was no fresh bleeding and he still felt fit enough to do the necessary!
Because above all things a blood transfusion was now essential. His own blood group was popularly known as Universal Donor and at times like these some sort of risk had to be run. There was no way out of it. And there was no time to dabble with what the laboratories of the transfusion service called ‘cross matching’. He would, somehow, have to find the wherewithal to pump at least one pint of blood from his own veins into the collapsing veins of Krystelle at a time when every second counted.
Blood! Syringes! He opened cupboard after cupboard. Practically none of the instruments seemed to have been used. And then, at last, he blundered on some empty vacolites, beakers, lengths of rubber tubing, a three-way nozzle and an antiquated syringe. It was twenty years since he had last seen a transfusion syringe with a three-way nozzle, and even then it had been a museum piece! It was about the last thing he expected to find in an operating suite catering for an organisation which prided itself on being really sophisticated.
But if there was that there would also be sodium citrate. Though sterilisation of needles or syringes or tubing would still have to be ignored since time was now running out. Later, if all went well, he could protect Krystelle with a barrage of antibiotics. Meanwhile she would have to accept a load of bacteria which might or might not be lethal. And the same would apply to himself.
Citrate! To keep the blood from clotting!
He checked the girl’s pulse and found it hitting one hundred and thirty. She was drenched with sweat and her blood pressure had dropped to below one hundred systolic. So blood loss had been pretty severe and speed could be the only life saver. That—plus luck.
And then he remembered a glimpse of a door next to the red cross room. There had been a vague smell of antiseptic as he passed. Or if not antiseptic some sort of chemical.
A laboratory! And if so the citrate would be on tap within minutes.
He was now slightly light headed, but made the corridor and found the door unlocked. The place was a store-room of sorts, and there were hundreds of small containers for carrying citrated blood. It began to look as though the centre had carried out routine blood checks on a lot of people, and Grant feverishly opened each container until he had collected a pile of crystals at the bottom of a glass beaker. He then added water from a tap, stirred and raced back to the theatre. Blood had by now seeped to the floor, and he guessed that Krystelle was unconscious until she lifted a finger slightly and spoke with a husky whisper far removed from her normal powerful contralto. ‘You okay, David?’
He kissed her lightly on the forehead and forced a laugh. ‘Sure. And everything’s now under control. Just fixing a tourniquet. Your vein’s a bit collapsed.’
The system for transfusing which he was being forced to use was one of the earliest devised. There was a three-way setup of rubber tubes, one connected through a needle to his own veins, the second ending in the flask of citrate solution, with the third inside Krystelle’s collapsed elbow vein.
And then he began to develop a rhythm. Suck citrate: turn the tap: fill twenty c.c.s of his own blood into the syringe: turn the tap and empty into Krystelle: turn the tap and refill with citrate—or at least enough to keep the precious blood flowing easily with no trace of clot, because an overdose of citrate would do her no real harm. But if he didn’t replace blood loss she would surely die. And after that would come the really Hellish bit: to try and fix her wound, because he had left the knife in position, and anything might happen when he withdrew it from her side.
He performed the rhythmical manœuvre just on fifty times before he became so light-headed that he himself could no longer afford to lose more blood. But he had given her one full litre and already the sweat was drying on her forehead, while he saw a flush of health begin to paint her cheeks and lips with life.
He pulled out the needles, patched each puncture with a tiny elastoplast dressing and turned to his patient. Two questions were in his mind. Was there an anaesthetic in the place? And if not could the girl take a surgical procedure without one?
He used two valuable minutes to wash out needles which might still be needed again if he cut an artery or hit trouble and then began what seemed an endless hunt for a supply of any anaesthetic which would give him freedom to work for at least half an hour.
Only one good thing came out of his search, he was able to locate and put into an electric steriliser a selection of essential instruments, self retaining retractors, curved cutting needles and artery forceps: sutures, scissors and heavy clamps: a selection of knife blades and rubber drainage tubing together with skin clips.
But no anaesthetic!
Grant was superstitious. He felt that he had had the breaks, that he was on a winning wicket and that if he looked carefully enough he would still find the key to successful surgery.
And he did, after losing ten precious minutes digging among dressings and swabs. Two long lumbar puncture needles and a five per cent aqueous solution of heavy procaine hydrochloride. It was old-fashioned. Indeed it had been old-fashioned when he was a medical student. But it was effective, and he guessed that the drug was there for use as a surface local anaesthetic on the rare occasions when some minor operations might have been necessary.
But above all he found several ampoules of duracillin, and loaded a syringe with three million units. At least that antibiotic would take care of sepsis, and there were enough tablets of both terramycin and midicel to give three antibiotic umbrellas which must make sepsis improbable.
Krystelle listened to his instructions carefully and drew a deep breath of sweet relief as Grant thrust the duracillin into her buttock. She had a deep seated fear of blood poisoning, and felt now that she didn’t care what he did: everything would be okay.
She rolled round on to her right side as he tilted her head and shoulders upward, the knife now sticking obscenely in silhouette as Grant felt between her lower vertebrae and insinuated the lumber puncture needle into the fluid around her spinal cord. Five minutes later she had a complete anaesthesia to above wound level, and Grant paused for the first time to have a cigarette before starting on an operation which would tax his skills to the limit. It was several years since he had last carried out any form of surgery and that, too, had been a matter of life and death. But now it was almost his own right hand that he was cutting because the girl had suddenly become closer to him than anything he had ever known. In fact he began to think that he must be in love. And for Grant it was a strange emotional experience to be in love instead of in lust.
He glanced at the clock. Procaine, he had just remembered, was a fairly swift thing. The effect might pass off before he was ready so moving almost like an automaton, but with deceptive speed, he scrubbed up for five minutes, accepted that he must operate without gloves, and then laid out his trays of essential instruments.
The girl had now begun to lose more blood. He calculated that at least a quarter of what he had given her must now be on the floor and the time had come for action. Fast action.
He kissed her gently on each cheek. ‘Wish us well, honey chile. Both of us. But don’t worry. Something tells me we’ll make it.’
The girl smiled. But for once said nothing. No one knew better than she what Grant might be up against. She had seen too many knife wounds in her life to have any doubts about this one. Her own bet was that the blade had thrust upwards to end just on her heart.
Chapter Twelve – ‘Bed is a good place to die in’
Grant had once been a doctor and in a sense still was. But he had been filtered into counter-espionage soon after qualifying, and he would be the first to admit that his practical experience of surgery had been almost nil. He had used a scalpel only three times over the previous twenty years and for this operation he knew that he must play it not only by ear but through memory of the book. Though memory was rusty, while the book was almost certainly long out of date.
But certain surgical principles remained unchanged. And they had been strictly drummed into him by exacting chiefs until he knew that they could never be forgotten.
Avoid shock by handling all tissues gently, by conserving body fluids through good haemostasis, and avoiding sepsis by using the most aseptic technique possible. He despised surgeons who couldn’t care less about suture abscesses or septic wounds. For them anti-biotics solved every problem, and he believed, passionately, that a good surgeon seldom found himself with a post-operative infected wound. In fact he believed that the masters of yesteryear were infinitely superior to many ‘switched on’ registrars or consultants of today who produced dirty wounds with every third or fourth case and killed sepsis only with antibiotics. But for him there was no way out of it because sterilisation must be primitive.
But the other rules had been equally stringent. Move fast, gently and with precision, but get finished within the hour while always maintaining good ventilation of the lungs.
He checked the level of Krystelle’s anaesthesia and made a bold incision in the flank which skirted the blade of a deadly looking knife and flicked through powerful muscles to the thin layer of extraperitoneal fat which was his first major landmark.
Bleeding was controlled more easily than he had expected. But then her blood pressure had crashed, and although he didn’t know it he was moving with super speed, with the speed, in fact, of an accomplished craftsman and ligating every bleeding point with enviable precision.
He then inserted some self-retaining retractors and surveyed the depths of his wound. The blade pulsated with every heart beat, and he figured that the tip was either lying actually inside the heart muscle itself or else just touching it.
His equipment was primitive but he prepared himself for almost anything as he incised the diaphragm, exposed pericardium, that stout membrane which covers the heart, and confirmed that it really had been perforated by the knife. His own bet was that the blade had stopped just short of the actual heart cavities, short, in fact, of the right ventricle, and that Krystelle was alive only through a sheer fluke.
He had never before operated on a heart, but he had heard surgeons say that it was more robust than people were inclined to suspect, that it could take a lot of messing about with and still keep ticking.
He hoped only that they were right!
His next steps were elementary and exceedingly primitive. But he hoped they would be effective as he thrust six curved needles through the heart wall and left a series of sutures ready for instant tying.
Then and only then did he pause and place a boiled-up pack over the wound while he checked again on Krystelle’s blood pressure. It had remained steady, her pulse rate was now under one hundred and her colour was good.
He washed up once more, scrubbed his fingers for three minutes and then returned to the wound. The pack out he found a perfect exposure, and only then did he withdraw the knife.
In the same second there was a throbbing flow of blood and he knew that the point had actually entered the heart but somewhere or other he remembered having read that the organ was mobile, that it could be compressed with the fingers.
His own heart was now in his mouth, but he squeezed the gaping wound in the ventricle between finger and thumb of his left hand while he worked a miracle with his right, tautened the sutures and tied firm knots with three fingers.
Bleeding diminished, and when he relaxed pressure he found that the area was ‘dry’. Hemorrhage, at last, was under control.
He was, by now, beginning to feel the effects of his own blood loss. The room was swirling dark in front of him and he had time only to thrust another pack into the wound before lying down to recover his energies. One part of him knew that he was suffering from reaction but the other said that it was the effects of blood loss.
He forced himself to double check on Krystelle’s anaesthesia, confirming that the spinal was still working, and then he left the theatre for a changing room where a cup of tea lashed with five spoonfuls of sugar was waiting. Ten minutes later, and after a cigarette which he drew upon like a child with its mother’s milk, but which somehow relieved his accumulated tension Grant left Jo Go-Go and returned to the theatre where Krystelle was still showing good colour. Her blood pressure had risen to normal limits and was a steady 120/65, while her pulse had settled to a rhythmic 80 and her breathing was normal. Even her voice was strong, though she spoke only once. ‘We’ve made it, David. I feel a new woman. You sure are Mr. Miracle Man.’
But Grant felt like an amateur by comparison with the girl whose wound he now began to suture in layers, having first closed heart muscle with a series of meticulously fine stitches and the pericardium with almost equal care, because it was important that no adhesions later formed between that precious throbbing heart and the membrane which surrounded it.
But at last he was finished. He had also found penicillin powder, and each layer of muscle had been dusted with the antibiotic before being closed. Though later he had to admit that he had probably lavished most care upon the external skin wound because Krystelle was a great beauty and it was up to him not to deface a perfect body with an untidy scar.
He anchored a dressing, pumped in another shot of duracillin into both of them for luck and carried her to a bedroom which Jo Go-Go had discovered and put to rights while he was operating.
He had never looked at the clock but knew only that he had been hungry and that Jo had brought him tea with sandwiches. The boy had been ordered not to awaken either of them but to sit on guard outside the little bedroom with its two single beds until he was called. And for once there was no need for speed. Grant vaguely remembered that Winston must be somewhere around, but he was a resourceful guy. And if he escaped good and well. He could hardly come to harm. Not now at any rate. While if he lived they would find him.
Tomorrow. Or another day!
Krystelle slept holding Grant’s hand, and then, when she was soundly unconscious he slipped into his own bed. His watch said eleven-twenty. But he had no means of knowing if it was ack emma or pip emma, and he could hardly have cared less. Krystelle had saved the day. While he had saved Krystelle. But he was still in her debt. His wound had ceased to throb and a dry dressing seemed to have taken care of everything.
When he awoke his watch said four-fifty. But his beard told him that he must have slept for at least seventeen hours and the ache in his side reminded him of when he had once been kicked by a horse. Krystelle was already awake, her colour good and with both temperature and pulse normal. She smiled at him with blatant admiration, and her voice was warm with a sound which Grant had heard only a few times in his life. It was the warmth of love, and it carried him back to his early months with Maya who was the only other woman who had ever really loved him. ‘David, man. I’m ready for anything. You’ve fixed me good. And I want to kiss you.’
The kiss was the beginning of a fantastic love-in. They seemed to have found a new respect for one another. The slightest touch of a finger was enough to thrill. The twinkle of a smile or an eye was enough to trap a surging fountain of gratitude that they were together.
Krystelle had again hypnotised Jo Go-Go and the boy had become their slave. He even carried a gun and had orders to use it if any stranger approached. He had even been ordered to cook, to bring drinks and brew tea.
Grant had found a library of paperbacks in a room which he imagined had been used by Ferguson, and for once he experienced that wonderful sense of intimacy which can come simply from sitting in a room with the woman who matters.
Krystelle was equally relaxed. She had been allowed up on the second day. They had even gone for brief walks and explored the few hundred yards of corridors around their rooms. But by tacit consent neither had angled towards the lake which could sometimes be seen in the distance. It was a place of beastly memory and somehow they realised that they were creating an earthly paradise which sought nothing more than to be together, to see one another, to listen to each other’s voice, and to give small services like lighting a cigarette, passing a drink or offering some eats. It was no time for memory of death.
But both knew that time was running out, and both knew that they were, by the sixth day, almost back to normal. After that work must lie ahead. Papers had to be discovered. Communication had to be made with the mainland. An escape route had to be pinpointed, and above all friends had to be contacted. Until then Grant had never thought of Winston. The fact that he might be without food or water hadn’t even crossed his mind. There had been a curious delayed shock which blacked out almost everything and he snapped out of it only on the morning of the seventh day when, having removed Krystelle’s skin stitches, memory of Winston suddenly hit him like a blow and he snapped to full attention. ‘I’m off, honey chile. Jo’ll stay with you. Got to find Winston. The fellow might be dying of thirst. Can’t think what the Hell’s come over us.’
Krystelle sighed deeply. This was the end of the finest week she had ever known. From now on it would be back to fighting, to killing, to planning and running: to hiding and bluffing and disguising until all this had become simply a fantastic dream. But she took it well. And if she wanted it to go on for ever she still managed to stifle her disappointment. ‘You do that, David. And good hunting. Just one thing. Lock the door when you go out. My nerves still aren’t back to normal and I’ll be happier for knowing the key’s turned.’
She watched Grant leave the room, heard the key move and then stretched herself luxuriously. No one would ever know that she, and she alone had hypnotised Grant into accepting one full week of total rest: that she and she alone had prevented his thoughts from turning towards Winston or anyone else. And that she had done it for his own good. She had remembered him once explaining how he had been made the subject of deep hypnosis on two separate occasions. And that had been enough for her because it had proved that he was a hypnotic subject. And she had put him under without a hitch. Less than a minute had been necessary to ‘condition’ him and she had done it only because he had been near the end of his resources. He had never been given time to recover from the affair in Paris. And the frightful events of a week ago had rocked him—quite apart from the effect of his knife wound, of which she had been well aware from the beginning.
Black Champagne Page 18