by Julie Rowe
Nolan turned and within a couple of seconds the soldiers had themselves organized. He went out the door with his weapon raised, one man with him.
Had there really been only four of them? They’d seemed like an army. Then again, they were Special Forces. The Snake Eaters, as some called them, were worth three of any other man when it came to warfare.
The rapid, repeat bark of a rifle told her Nolan and his wingman had engaged the enemy.
Shouts in Arabic told her they’d been spotted, and someone called for more men to chase down and kill the Americans.
It sounded like a crowd of men ran past, none of them quietly. It took a minute for the uproar to pass, then another gunshot went off followed by the wailing of women.
Time to put a stop to that shit.
“I’ll go in down the middle,” she said to the two Berets. “You two come in from the flanks. How many seconds do you need to get into position?”
“Five,” one of them said.
The other nodded.
“Go.”
Both went out the door in opposite directions.
She waited, counting slowly in her head. At five, she walked out the door and calmly strode toward the crying, screaming mass of women and girls. In front of them by about ten feet was the kneeling line of men and boys. About half were lying facedown, blood splattered all over them and the people next to them.
A gunman was poised to shoot the next male in the head, who was no more than a teenager.
She shot the gunman first.
For a moment the remaining gunmen didn’t realize their man was dead and not the teen.
The boy winced as if he expected to feel pain, then raised his head and looked right at her.
Undiluted fear radiated from his wide eyes and tense mouth.
She did the only thing she could do to tell him the situation had changed.
She winked.
Behind him, the gunman crumpled. His weapon bounced across the stone street, then all hell broke loose.
Chapter Twenty-Three
The two soldiers working with her charged toward the gunmen from either side, while she picked off the ones in the middle with careful single shots. This was not a good time to go semi-automatic. Too many civilians in the way.
She picked off two before anyone started returning fire. A couple of gunmen grabbed women and used them as shields, but they underestimated the shooting accuracy of the soldiers they faced. They died with bullet holes in their foreheads.
Something punched her diaphragm, hard enough to knock her back and force all of the air out of her chest. She had to work to stay on her feet and catch her breath, but managed both within a few seconds.
She regained her equilibrium and got her rifle into position just in time to shoot some asshole who’d grabbed the teen she’d saved. He was either going to shoot the boy or try to use him as a shield.
Coward.
Ali shot him in the throat.
Another gunman went down a few feet away and she looked for another target, but couldn’t find one.
Had they killed all the bad guys?
Ali moved in to search the bodies on the ground and the remaining civilians. Her two soldiers did the same.
When she reached the teen she put her hand out and said, “Are you hurt?”
He shook his head then grabbed her hand and allowed her to help him to his feet. It made her sore chest ache. “Is your home close by?”
He nodded, then said, “Everyone is dead.” He glanced at one of the bodies that had been shot in the back of the head. “That is my father.”
“Shit,” she muttered.
One of the crying women came over to him. “Nephew, come with me. Your cousins are dead, but we have each other.”
Relief eased the tension on his face so that he looked his age again and not like an old, old man who’s seen too much. He went to his aunt and hugged her, but after they’d taken a few steps away, he turned around and ran back to hug Alicia too.
“Thank you. You saved me.”
“Be safe,” she whispered back to him.
This time when he walked away with his aunt, he didn’t turn around.
Some of the women were trying to carry their dead away while others just wept over a body.
“You need to go back to your homes and stay out of sight,” Ali told them.
“Our homes aren’t safe,” one woman shouted at her. “These animals broke in and forced us to come here. Forced us to watch as they murdered our husbands and sons. They would have forced us and our daughters into marriage.”
“I will show you how to shoot their guns,” one of the surviving local men said.
“Good,” Ali said to him. To them all she ordered, “Go now, before any of them come back.”
That got everyone moving.
Her two guys joined her in watching for the return of any of the bad guys who chased after Nolan and his buddy while the women, children and remaining men gathered up the weapons and dispersed.
“Hey, Stone,” one of her men asked. “Are you okay?”
“Well, other than tired, yeah, why?”
“‘Cause you have a bullet hole in your clothes right over your heart.”
She glanced down in surprise and discovered that she did, indeed, have a hole through every layer of clothing she wore right down to the body armor. The slug was buried in it. “What the fuck?”
“Did it penetrate?”
She touched the area around the bullet, probing for pain. “I don’t think so. It hurts, but not enough.”
“Living up to your name again?” the other soldier asked rhetorically. “The colonel is going to have a few words to say about that.”
“Shit, do we have to tell him? He’ll have kittens.”
Both soldiers grinned and tried not to laugh.
“Come on, assholes,” she said rolling her eyes. “The civilians are gone. Let’s find Nolan.”
They headed off in the direction Nolan and his wingman had run in. It wasn’t a hard trail to follow. There were bodies of bad guys every so often.
Then they found the body of Nolan’s wingman, and all the energy she had seemed to flow right out of her.
“Fuck, it’s Parker,” one of her men said.
“We can’t leave him here,” Ali said. “Could one of you take him to the old hospital?”
“Yeah,” said the guy who identified him. “I’ll do it.”
He picked up his buddy in a fireman carry and strode off.
Ali looked at her remaining man. “I’m sorry. You’re Thompson, right?”
He nodded. “Not your fault. We’re dealing with some dangerous men. They don’t care who they kill as long as their leader is happy.”
She started walking again, looking for another crumb on the trail and found another bad guy’s body this time. “How do you know that?”
“Before the Howitzer got rolled out, we talked to a bunch of village elders. They had heard enough to know that this whole clusterfuck is a trap.”
“A trap for who?”
“Us. You. The colonel.”
“Well, that’s shitty.”
Ali and Thompson kept going in the same direction as the trail seemed to be taking them. Another body, this time a bad guy. Gunfire from up ahead told her that they were on the right track.
As they neared the fighting, they slowed down and approached the area, near the outskirts of the village, very cautiously.
Rounding the corner of a house, Ali saw a group of gunmen firing at one house in particular. Whoever they were shooting at was inside and firing through a window. Two gunmen slipped away from the main group and came toward Ali and Thompson. They both ducked back before they were seen.
The gunmen came
around the corner and face to face with Ali and Thompson. Both men opened their mouths to yell at the same time as raising their weapons, but the two Americans were prepared for them and didn’t hesitate.
Ali knifed one man in the neck, while Thompson did the same to the other one. Both went down fast and quiet.
With hand signals, Ali and Thompson discussed a couple of options for an attack and decided on flanking positions. Thompson went around to the far side of the militants’ positions while Ali counted to thirty slowly.
At thirty, she inched along the stone wall of the house until she could just see around it. She picked out the man she thought was the leader, and shot him. She methodically shot the next man closest to him, and the next man.
Men started to go down on the other side, which meant Thompson was in position and was doing his fair share of damage.
Whoever was inside the house made good use of the confusion and took out a few bad guys, as well. Until there were none left.
“Nolan?” Ali called out.
She was about to call his name again when he responded, “Yeah, I’m in here.”
She crossed the street without relaxing her vigilance in case they missed a bad guy, and cautiously entered the house. “Where are you?”
“Back here.”
Ali found him slumped below a window, blood smeared across his chest and the wall. She rushed to him and he gave her a watery smile.
“Did you kill those fuckers?” he asked, breathing harder than he should have been.
“Every last one.” She examined him, searching for the wound that resulted in all the blood.
“Excellent.”
Thompson ghosted into the house and crouched next to her. “Hey, boss. You sleeping on the job?”
“You gonna report me?” Nolan asked, gasping for breath before and after the words.
“No time to sleep, boss,” Thompson told him. “We’re stuck in the middle of an asshole convention.”
“I’m going to need some help. The son of a bitch who shot me did too good of a job. I’m not going to get anywhere under my own steam.”
“No worries, boss,” Thompson said. “I’ll run you home.”
“Where are you hit?”
“Left side. I think it was a ricochet ’cause it looks like it came up and under my armor.”
Ali and Thompson laid him out flat on the floor and she lifted his clothing to get a look at the wound. It was just inside his body armor and was bleeding sluggishly, but steadily. “You need a pressure bandage or you’re going to bleed out.”
“I think I’m more than halfway there,” Nolan said, his voice fuzzy and slurred.
Ali got her pack off and pulled out her first aid kit. She grabbed a pressure bandage and a large wound bandage and proceeded to wrap his lower abdomen as tight as she dared.
He passed out just as she finished.
Fuck, they had to get him to Max yesterday if he was going to survive.
“If we get him over your shoulder without making the bleeding worse, can you carry him all the way to the hospital?”
“I could carry him all the way home,” Thompson said with a feral grin. “With you guarding our backs, it’ll be a cake walk.”
“Let’s do it.”
She helped Thompson get Nolan into a fireman’s carry that wouldn’t dislodge the bandage, then hoisted her pack back on, added Nolan’s weapon, and got her own weapon ready in case they met any unfriendlies on their way back to the old hospital.
They didn’t see many people out and about as they hurried on careful feet through the village. There was still the odd gunshot ringing out from farther away, but not the sustained number that indicated active fighting between two large groups.
A few of the locals, ones that weren’t too sick, were out getting water or other supplies. She saw one kid of about ten with a dead rabbit in his hands.
She nodded at him. “Good job.”
When they got to the hospital, Jessup ran out to meet them.
“Tell Max that Nolan’s lost a lot of blood.”
Jessup ran ahead.
Max met them outside the OR. “Bring him in here.”
Max had taken the operating table and moved it away from the wall. It wasn’t in the middle of the room, but he could walk all around it.
Ali and Thompson got Nolan on the table then helped Max get the clothes off Nolan’s upper body without cutting them to shreds.
“He lost a lot of blood,” Ali said. “Most of the rest of the team is dead. Only Thompson here and the soldier who brought the other soldier’s body here survived.”
* * *
Ali sounded more tired than Max had ever heard a conscious human being sound. It made him want to pack her in cotton and keep her away from any and all danger.
He snorted to himself. Right, like she’d go along with that. No, she’d probably put him on the floor again and step on him for good measure.
“Do you know what happened?” he asked her.
“Nolan said he lost four in those big explosions we heard. He’d negotiated with the village elders for cooperation, then another group came in and blew it all to shit.”
Max managed to get Nolan’s body armor off his torso without cutting any of the straps holding it in place, then took a cautious look at the wound. As soon as he peeked under the pressure bandage, blood welled up and out.
He put the bandage back, then palpated his abdomen. It was tight and he didn’t like what he was feeling around Nolan’s kidney.
“I think the bullet or shrapnel nicked his kidney. He’s bleeding internally.”
“He bled a lot before we got him back here, Colonel,” Thompson said.
Max took a blood pressure reading and it was so low he didn’t know how the soldier was still alive. “Eighty over fifty. Get Hunt in here,” he ordered. Then he pulled out his trauma first aid kit. Goddamn it, he didn’t have the tools, drugs or support to do surgery, let alone a repair on a lacerated kidney.
It was either that or Nolan was going to bleed to death.
Fuck.
Hunt came in, but when he saw Nolan he stopped dead. “Jesus.”
“How many units of blood have you got?” Max asked, pulling every piece of gauze and bandage, no matter how small, and arranging them on the counter near him.
“Six.” He stared at Max running around like a madman then looked at Nolan. “Sir, you can’t perform surgery here.”
“If I don’t, he’ll die.”
“Doing it without drugs will probably kill him anyway.” Hunt’s voice broke at the end.
Max stopped moving to pin the medic in place with a look. “Which would you want? Let you die or try to save you?”
Hunt’s face was agonized.
“Nolan has a wife and two kids,” Ali said, her voice as hard as her name. “We’re doing this. Either you’re helping or you’re out.”
“I’m in.”
“I need all six units.”
“Yes, sir.” Hunt dashed out of the room and came back a couple minutes later with all six.
Max had used the time to set up an IV in Nolan’s left hand. As soon as Hunt handed him a unit, he connected it to the IV line and began the drip.
“Don’t you have to test his blood to those units?” Ali asked.
“Yes, but I don’t have time and Nolan’s blood group is A positive which means he can accept blood from approximately ninety percent of the population.” Max moved around the table and managed to get another IV line into Nolan’s right hand. He hung another unit of blood and started the drip.
He looked over his available supplies. He had the basics and that was about it. Scalpel, scissors, a couple of small retractors that were normally used for small wound repair, a suture needle and sut
ure thread.
He took another blood pressure reading. Eighty-two over fifty-five. He looked at Ali and Hunt. “I’m going to need both of you to help me.”
“Yes, sir,” they said in unison.
“Good. Ali, I want you to hand me instruments and bandages. Hunt, I want you to monitor Nolan’s vitals and continue to hang blood. The rest of you...” He looked at Thompson and the other soldier from Nolan’s team who were still in the room. Damn it, he couldn’t remember the man’s name. “Hold down the fort.”
Everyone nodded.
Max let out a breath. “Then let’s get to it.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Max kept Nolan covered above and below the wound, then cut the bandage off and revealed the damage. He used the only anesthetic he had—a local—injecting it around the wound. Blood welled up, but he ignored it. He made a careful incision and retracted the skin so he could see what was happening inside.
Too much blood. Far too much.
“Ali, I need a bunch of gauze pads.”
She handed him a pile and he used them to soak up the extra blood. He had to really look but finally found where the piece of shrapnel nicked the top of his left kidney. Blood was pouring out of the small wound at a frightening rate. If he didn’t close it soon, Nolan wasn’t going to make it.
He grabbed the suture needle he’d prepared and began closing the tear. “Ali, can you use the gauze pads to get some of this blood out of the way?”
“Okay,” she said, moving closer with a handful. “Squawk if I do it wrong.”
He tied off the first stitch and waited while she cleared the area of blood. “Perfect.”
He stitched quickly, despite Hunt having to hang two more bags of blood before he finished. The tear was closed properly, but that was the only good news.
Nolan’s lips and fingertips were blue and all his visible skin was pale with a bluish tint to it, indicating an extensive lack of circulation.
He’d never seen a man with this kind of blood loss recover. With a lack of available units of blood, or circulation expanders like albumin, any recovery at all was highly unlikely.
As he stitched the incision in Nolan’s abdomen, Nolan began to shift restlessly and moan.