by Julie Rowe
* * *
Grace woke to the sound of men.
Some were quietly talking, others were moving around. The sound of plastic wrinkling, a lot of plastic, stirred her interest. There was a reason why that was important.
Max was here.
Grace tried to sit up, but found it more difficult than it should have been. Cramped muscles shook, but she forced her way vertical, then slowly, with all the grace of a drunk elephant, got to her feet.
The room spun, so she braced her hand on the nearest wall and used it to keep herself upright. Though she’d just woken up, she felt exhausted, her brain running on half speed while her whole body ached. Even her breathing was labored.
Why was this so hard?
Her first step was mostly stumble, the second and third not much better. She stopped, gathered her strength and wits and carefully set her feet, one in front of the other.
When she emerged from the sleeping alcove, she glanced left, the tunnel looked dark, then right. Sharp stood about six feet from her position, his back to her, with Max facing him. The two men were talking, and Max looked way too serious.
Nothing new there, he always looked serious, even when most people were laughing. Always a little out of step in social situations was Max.
He saw her over Sharp’s shoulder and moved to go around the bigger soldier, but Sharp was faster, and blocked his path.
“Grace,” Max said, frowning and glancing at Sharp like he wasn’t sure why the other man would get in his way.
Sharp shifted slightly so he could look over his shoulder, yet still keep Max in his peripheral vision. “Doc, you okay?”
Grace tried to smile, but it took up energy she didn’t have and she gave up on it almost immediately. “Not really.” She looked at Max. “I think I need some antibiotics.”
Max’s nostrils flared, as if he could scent any sickness she might emote from where he stood. “Anthrax?”
“No.” She shook her head slowly. “I think this is your everyday average wound infection.”
“Let me see it,” he demanded in his normal bossy tone of voice, and took a step toward her.
Sharp did not get out of his way. “Just so we’re clear, Doctor,” he said low and slow. “Grace’s well-being is my number-one priority.”
“Ah, so that’s what this is about,” Max said nodding. “I assure you, I will never do anything to jeopardize her health.” He paused as if carefully considering his next words. “Or happiness.”
She couldn’t see Sharp’s face, but some of the tension went out of his shoulders. “Awesome.”
She frowned. She was missing something here, she just couldn’t figure out what. She did know she was going to have to have a talk with Sharp about his attitude.
“Grace,” Max said to her. “Where’s that wound?”
“On my leg.”
He shifted his attention to below her waist. “Take off your pants.”
* * *
Sharp wanted to wrap his hands around Max’s neck and choke the living shit out of him. Did the guy have any common sense? You didn’t order a woman in an enclosed space this small to take off her pants and expect to get no attention. Not when there were eighteen other guys in there with her.
It didn’t help that after about two incredulous seconds, Grace started to laugh, and kept on laughing until she fell on her ass.
“What’s so funny?” Max asked, tilting his head to look at her sideways, like she was some kind of problem he wanted to fix.
“Pants,” she said, continuing to laugh.
Max crouched next to her and stuck an electronic thermometer into her ear. It beeped and he didn’t look happy with the result.
“How high is it?” Sharp asked.
“One hundred and four.” Max put the thermometer into a pocket, grabbed Grace under her elbow and tried to haul her to her feet. “I need to look at that wound.”
Sharp strode over and scooped Grace off the ground, her laughter dissolving into giggling and hiccups. He went into the alcove and laid her on the makeshift bed she’d just been sleeping on and began working on her belt and the fastening on her pants. He managed to pull them down and reveal the bandaged wound.
Max cut it off with a pair of scissors he fished out of another pocket.
Red, puffy skin, even worse than before, with each stitch now weeping a yellowish discharge, made Sharp glad the doctor was here for the first time since he arrived.
Grace hadn’t warned him that Max had no bedside manner to speak of.
“Fuck,” the doctor said. “Who put these stitches in?” he demanded of no one in particular. “A baboon? A crackhead? A drunk?” Max stood and walked to the pile of equipment bags not far away in the main cave muttering, “Incompetent morons think they can just throw something together out of dental floss and duct tape and expect it to heal fine.”
He returned with an IV set, a bag of saline and another smaller bag of fluid. “I need something to hang these bags from,” Max told Sharp. “Preferably a couple of feet above her.”
Sharp had seen something that might work lying on the ground in the tunnel. A metal pole, one end twisted and bent. He grabbed it, and by the time he got back to the alcove, Max had the IV needle in the back of Grace’s hand and saline dripping through the line.
Sharp worked the unbent end into the ground and hung the saline from it. He gave it a shake. It seemed sturdy enough.
Max attached the smaller bag to Grace’s IV line and began feeding her the antibiotic.
“Do you have enough for her?” he asked her boss.
“Yes, this isn’t Cipro. What she’s got is a staph infection, not anthrax.” Max stood. “She’s going to need a few hours of sleep before the fever breaks. She looks like shit.”
“It’s been a shitty couple of days.”
Max snorted, but he seemed content enough.
“What do you need?” Sharp asked.
“I need to do my work uninterrupted. Can you ensure that?”
“I’ll coordinate with A-Team Commander Faulkner.”
“You’d be doing me a favor if you kept him on the other side of the room...cave from me.”
“Is there a problem?” The last thing this mission needed was people arguing with each other.
“Several. We’ve disagreed on nearly every decision since we left Bahrain. I can’t work with people who won’t listen to reason.”
“Whose reason?”
“Mine,” Max said like the answer should be obvious.
“Have you worked with Faulkner before?”
“No.”
“Faulkner is damn good at his job. Probably as good as you are at yours. You need to give a little, Max,” Sharp said to him. “Sometimes it’s about staying alive long enough to find the cure.”
Max didn’t hide his expression of distaste for that idea. “You Special Forces soldiers always think you have the answer.”
“That’s because we do.”
Max grumbled something under his breath, then turned and began unpacking his equipment.
Faulkner waved at Sharp from across the room.
“Good to see you, Falcon,” Sharp said with a salute. “I wish I had better news to report.”
“Cutter’s dead?”
“Yeah. Marshall is more than one brick short of an outhouse. We were fired upon from the base.”
“Well, you did steal a helicopter.”
“We were following Max’s orders,” Sharp explained. “And Marshall was, in no way, making rational decisions. He’d thrown Grace into some kind of gulag without allowing her to get all the medical care she needed, which is probably the reason she’s got an infection now.”
“Grace, is it?” Faulkner studied Sharp with eyes that missed nothing.<
br />
“She’s earned her place on our team,” Sharp told him. “Ask the rest of them. She’s even got Smoke speaking in complete sentences.”
Faulkner grunted and a smile came and went on his face. Getting him to smile was a tough job. “Why don’t you start from the beginning and tell me the whole story?”
“Yeah, that would be the moment we stepped onto FOB Bostick about two weeks ago. No, it’s pushing two and a half weeks now.” He shook his head. “Marshall took one look at Grace, confirmed her name, then devolved into a dictator on the spot.”
Chapter Twenty
Faulkner crossed his arms over his chest and shook his head. “He called Max and yelled like a madman at him.”
“I can’t see Max taking that without comment.”
“Nope. It was a fun phone fight to watch. Neither one of them listened to a word the other said.”
“Even the word anthrax?”
“They threatened each other with it.” Faulkner shrugged, disgust wrinkling his nose. “Like a couple of screaming little kids.”
“Things have been FUBAR since we got to Bostick, but it wasn’t until we got sent out to investigate the deaths of a village full of people over the span of less than twenty-four hours that things went completely to hell.” Sharp looked Faulkner in the eyes. “Someone shot our aircraft down and I don’t think it was an accident.”
“How so?”
“At the time the crash didn’t seem connected to the anthrax, but now...there are too many coincidences. Too much of the wrong information getting out and not enough of the right info.” Sharp glanced at the alcove where Grace was sleeping. “The only reason I’m still alive is because she stepped it up and shot three extremists before they could kill me.”
“I heard you got shot.”
Sharp found himself reluctant to take his gaze off Grace. “Yeah, that and shrapnel from the crash, but I’m okay.”
“If Marshall did intentionally kill Cutter,” Faulkner said slowly, “the shitstorm has only started.”
“Isn’t General Stone coming to relieve Marshall of his command?” Sharp asked.
“Not exactly.” Faulkner smiled ruefully. “He’ll arrive at Bostick tomorrow morning, and plans to straighten all this out, but he isn’t taking sides until he hears from everyone. Marshall will still be in command of the base.”
“Well, that’s just fucking perfect. Grace is scared to death of him.”
“Why?”
“She wouldn’t tell me.”
Faulkner watched Max move around, preparing his equipment and directing a couple of soldiers as they created a clean room with the plastic sheeting.
“So, we have two volatile situations,” Faulkner said slowly. “One is the threat of someone using this anthrax as a weapon, and the other is a bunch of officers who hate each other’s guts and are possibly willing to kill because of it.”
“I think we need more hazard pay,” Sharp said.
Faulkner grinned at him. “Now, there’s a request I’d love to see you make in person.”
“You just want to see someone kick my ass,” Sharp said with a smirk. He moved off to check the alcove and was happy to see Grace still sleeping. Her IV antibiotic bag was nearly empty, so he mentioned it to Max.
Max glanced at him in a way that made it clear he’d forgotten all about Sharp already. “Don’t touch anything,” he said as he disappeared into the alcove. He came back a few seconds later and continued to set up his work area and equipment. “Her fever is down a little, but she needs more sleep.”
“How long until you’ve done what you need to do?” Sharp asked him.
Max snorted. “I have no idea, but I’ve been given a thirty-six-hour deadline to deliver a report with recommendations to General Stone.”
Sharp grunted. “I didn’t think you had that much time.”
Max turned to stare at him. “I hope you’re wrong.”
“So do I.”
Max continued to stare.
“What?” Sharp asked.
“You’re the sniper, right?”
“Yeah.”
Max nodded. “She trusts you, which is why I’m going to give you a direct order.”
Sharp couldn’t keep his eyebrows down.
Max didn’t seem to notice. “Whatever happens with this situation, don’t leave her alone with Colonel Marshall.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good. Now, I’m going to begin some delicate work. Please tell the others to make every effort to be quiet.”
“Colonel,” Sharp said. “We’re hiding from an awful lot of people who would love to kill us. Quiet is our first order of business.”
* * *
Grace woke feeling hungry and in desperate need of the cave’s inadequate bathroom facilities.
She put out a hand so she could leverage her body into a sitting position and noticed the IV in the vein on the back of her hand. She followed the tubing up to a couple of bags hanging off a pole above her head. After maneuvering herself onto her knees, she was able to read the labels on the bags.
Saline and clindamycin.
Memories from the past few hours rose hesitantly. Max arriving. Her infected wound. Max putting in an IV. Several times Sharp’s hands and voice reassuring her she was going to be okay.
No one was around, so she pulled her pants down, peeked under the bandage and looked at her sore leg. It was red and inflamed, but not quite as bad as she remembered. She felt less foggy too. Maybe her fever had gone down enough for her to think clearly.
Redressing, she got up, grabbed her IV bags and left the alcove.
Darkness had fallen and the cave was lit in strategic places only. Those light sources were carefully shielded so no light could make it through the patchwork of debris and garbage camouflaging the hillside exit of the cave.
Max was inside a do-it-yourself clean room fashioned out of clear plastic. He was wearing a full bio-suit and was seated at a microscope viewing something through the lens.
The Special Forces soldiers were scattered around the rest of the cave, playing cards, sleeping or watching Max. Until she came into view.
Sharp got to his feet and walked over to her, putting one finger over his lips to tell her to be quiet. As soon as he was close enough, he leaned down to whisper in her ear, “A group of twenty men are camped about fifty feet away, along the edge of the garbage dump. They’re not carrying a lot of firepower and look like locals, so I don’t think they’re here for us.” He paused then asked, “How are you feeling?”
“Like crap,” she whispered back. “But better than a little while ago. My head is clear.”
Even in the near darkness, she could make out a relieved smile on his face. “Good. Why don’t you sleep some more?”
“Can’t,” she said, wincing. “I need to use the ladies’ room again.”
“Okay. You remember where it is?”
She nodded. “I don’t remember if there’s somewhere to hang these, though.” She lifted the IV bags.
“Let’s take a look,” Sharp said and led the way to the hole in the ground.
She smiled at Smoke, Hernandez and the other soldiers she knew as she walked by. They smiled or gave her thumbs up in return. The ones she didn’t know nodded respectfully to her, which surprised her enough that her nods back were probably more than a little wobbly.
As soon as she and Sharp were away from the lit area of the cave, darkness made walking difficult and she found herself standing alone, trying to see where Sharp went. He surfaced out of the dark, took her hand and tugged her along behind him.
Then she realized he must be wearing his night vision goggles. “Hey,” she whispered. “Got a pair of those goggles for me?”
He didn’t answer audibly, just squeezed her
hand, but she figured that was a yes. They slowed, then he put the goggles in her hand.
She got them on and slid past him and around a short corner of the rock wall to the hole in the floor of the cave. Ugh.
There was however, a ridge of rock she was able to hook her IV bags to. Yay.
Sharp didn’t say a thing when she gave him back the goggles and he led her back to the main room of the cave. She expected him to drop her hand as soon as it was safe, but he didn’t. He kept hold of hers until she stopped in front of the plastic clean room. She tugged and Sharp set her free with a shake of his head.
What was his problem?
“How are you feeling?” Max stood on the other side of the plastic.
“Better.” She smiled. “Have you made progress?”
“Some. I think I know how this anthrax strain kills so fast.”
That was incredible news, so why did he look and sound so glum?
“And?” she prompted.
“And I don’t know if any known antibiotic will have any effect. I’m setting up a sensitivity test right now.”
“What mechanism makes this bug so deadly?”
“There seems to be an affinity for red blood cells, lysing them like a hemolytic streptococcus would. It might be leading to a rapid onset of sepsis that kills the patient.”
“So rapid the antibiotic can’t keep up?”
“That’s what I’m afraid of. If those first soldiers died of the anthrax infection despite the fact that they’d been given Cipro prior to deployment, we have a big problem here.”
“Have you tried mixing Cipro with other antibiotics? If it’s behaving like a strep, try penicillin boosted by a beta-lactamase inhibitor along with it.”
“An interesting approach. One worth investigating.”
“Working with anthrax requires level-three containment facilities,” Grace observed. “Who could have made it?”
Max looked grim. “There are no official labs of that level in Afghanistan. The closest ones are in India. Anyone crazy enough to release this bacteria into a village to see what it would do, isn’t interested in proper procedure or safety.”
“What can I do to help?” she asked. She wanted to get in there and assist. She was feeling better despite the exhaustion pulling at her and making her knees wobble.