Between the helicopters shuttling urgent surgical cases in and all the cutting, there wasn’t time for sleep, let alone relationships. She was a good doctor, one of the best I’d ever worked with, and that was the end of it. I couldn’t let myself be distracted by the thought of those green eyes looking at me from over the mask.
I remember the day it started. A kid came in, a nineteen-year-old Marine with an unexploded rocket-propelled grenade in his abdomen. The EOD techs called us out to a second operating room, surrounded by blast barriers. We wore flak jackets and helmets over our scrubs.
One of the corpsmen started to say that if anything happened to him, someone should tell his wife and kid that—and Emily cut him off, sent him out of the room. No nonessential personnel. “I don’t need a fucking jinx and a bomb in here.”
The anesthesiologist runs the OR. Emily knew exactly what to do. She shut off everything electric. Took the patient’s pulse using the second hand of her watch, dosed the anesthesia by counting drip by drip.
I cut out the RPG and put the kid back together as best I could with the tissue that remained. He’d be using a colostomy bag for the rest of his life, but that was better than the alternative.
Afterward, Emily and I ducked outside and watched the EODs blow the grenade a mile off.
She offered me a cigarette. Most of the doctors smoked. I would take one now and then, but I passed that night.
“How’d you know what to do in there?” I asked.
“An article I read.”
“That’s it?”
She nodded, dropped her head in her hands, and sighed. “Jesus Christ.”
She had been pure confidence the entire operation, had steeled our whole team, and now she could finally let the fear out.
“Sometimes I picture myself in a nice gastroenterology practice in Buckhead,” she said. “Six hundred K a year. In at eight, out at four, just sitting in an ergonomic chair at the head of the table and watching the GI guys look up people’s asses all day.”
“Sorry, Miller,” I said, and I thought of everything I knew about her. “I think you’d get bored with asses.”
“A girl can dream.”
It’s hard explaining what it’s like downrange. The rest of the world is an abstraction. Death is everywhere, so life draws you in. We weren’t looking for it, but it found us.
Personnel weren’t supposed to sleep together, but that only added to the tension as we passed each other in the halls every day, sat side by side in the DFAC—the dining facility. Even before we got together, others could see it coming off us like a cloud of guilt as we talked like old accomplices or sneaked off after a sixteen-hour shift to drink some of the moonshine her father made in his own still and shipped to her in perfume bottles.
She liked Afghanistan, liked that people still rode horses there. It reminded her of where she had grown up.
We were good. We kept it secret, never flouted the rules. The only chance to be open about it was on R&R. It probably shows how fucked up things were that we went to Kashmir for R&R. We rented a houseboat on a lake in the mountains in Srinagar, looking out over the Mughal gardens and floating lotus.
We were together for fourteen months and due to return to the States soon. There would be time for everything.
Two nights after we got back to the base, we were walking back from the operating theater to our B huts when she turned to me with a look on her face like she was about to do a cliff dive.
“I’m late.”
I was too surprised to say anything. When she was thirty-one, doctors had told her she most likely wouldn’t be able to have kids.
“How late?” I asked.
“I’m eight weeks pregnant.”
“But…”
“Never count out a Miller. My mom was forty and on the pill when she got pregnant with me.”
We were standing at the edge of a dusty airstrip. The Spin Ghar Mountains and the Khyber Pass were silhouetted against the stars.
“Marry me,” I said.
“What are you doing, Byrne? No, no, no.”
“Say yes,” I said. I dropped to one knee.
“What? Come on. Get up.”
There had been so much death, so much blood, and now life.
“I’ll get up if you say yes.”
“You’re serious.”
“Don’t I look serious?”
“You look ridiculous.”
“Say yes.”
“Yes…we can talk about it.”
I stood up, lifted her in the air, and kissed her.
“All I heard was yes.”
She died within the month—a rocket attack. Shit luck, was all. We took fire all the time, would hole up in the bunker for hours. She had sneaked into my quarters. The blast woke me up. Everything was chaos and noise. She was beside me, and her body was torn apart.
We had just been lying there, but her body protected me. The rockets kept coming. She was awake for a minute before shock set in.
“It’s deep, Tom,” she said. “See what you can do.”
They called us into the bunkers, but I ignored it.
They blew up the main OR. I carried her to the secondary operating theater. There was penetrating trauma to her chest and abdomen.
She tried to say something else, but I couldn’t make it out. I’ve spent two years wondering what she said. She went unresponsive, not breathing, pulseless, but with some electrical activity in the heart.
I had two corpsmen with me. The procedure is called an emergency thoracotomy, or sometimes a clamshell. I cut her chest from sternum to flank and spread her ribs.
The only good thing was that the injury was to the right side of her heart. That gave her a chance. The shrapnel had torn the right ventricle. Blood poured out with every pump. The heart muscle around the wound was shredded, but I gathered enough tissue to sew it up. Fifty-six stitches and a double square knot. She was hemorrhaging in the lower abdomen, but the lungs were fine, and I had sealed up her heart.
The heart stopped. I took it in my hands and began to help it beat. The sutures held. No blood came from the ventricle. The gunfire crackled outside. I kept going, a hundred beats per minute, far slower than my own heart rate. And it started to move in my hands.
I thought I saw her fingers extend to reach for me, but I knew that she was too far gone for the movement to be intentional. Her heart continued to beat. I closed up the thoracic cavity and set to work on her abdominal wound. The pulse was strong, and then nothing.
She was gone.
The autopsy found that the ventricle had ruptured near the repair. They had had to pull me away from her body.
I worked through the night on the rest of the casualties. Operated for fifty hours before they forced me to bed. I didn’t want to stop, couldn’t stand to be alone with my thoughts. I had been caught by a secondary blast, a chunk of stone blown out from a Hesco barrier. I didn’t tell anyone about the broken ribs, about the pain. I couldn’t stop moving.
I don’t know if it was the ribs or what happened to Emily, but I couldn’t sleep. I would work until I couldn’t stand any longer, and when I had to catch a few hours’ rest, I would dose myself against the pain. It was a way to shut my mind down, to keep the thoughts at bay as I lay there trying to pretend it hadn’t happened, that I hadn’t failed her, killed her.
I had been going too hard, for too long.
I was in the pharmacy tent. I slid the needle into my arm, and within a few seconds, my legs crumpled. I’d grabbed the wrong vial. I knew it must have been a paralytic because I hit the floor like a sack of dirt. The muscles in my arms drew tight in spasm, then let go: fasciculation. That meant it was succinylcholine. We called it sux around the OR.
It paralyzes the patient. My diaphragm slowed, a last shallow breath from my still lips. My lungs emptied but didn’t refill.
You would never use it without a ventilator. The patient would asphyxiate. And you never use sux alone, without general anesthesia, or the patient would
be fully conscious but unable to move or breathe on his own, a living death. You could end up operating on someone who feels every stroke of the blade but can give no sign or reaction as you cut.
I could see the syringe at the edge of my field of view but couldn’t control the muscles to turn my eyes toward it. The plunger was a third of the way down. Thirty-three milligrams of the typical one-hundred-milligram dose. I weighed a hundred and eighty-five pounds. The paralysis would last two to ten minutes. Brain cells typically start to die after one minute; real damage kicks in at three, and by ten, no one recovers.
A horse race.
I was buried alive inside my body. The air started to run out. I willed myself to breathe but couldn’t. Sixty seconds without oxygen. My mind played with the numbers. I tried to distract myself, hide in the calculations, but in the end it was a coin toss whether that first gasp would come before my life ended.
My vision began to waver, an early sign of hypoxia.
I didn’t care.
I couldn’t stop thinking that maybe I made the wrong call on the thoracotomy. Maybe I missed something. Maybe I’d killed her when I cut her open and grabbed her heart. The ventricle had given out. The surgeon’s stitch is like the runner’s stride; it’s personal, distinctive, the foundation of everything else. And mine had failed. I didn’t care what they’d said about underlying tissue damage. It was my fault, my table, my stitches. I’d killed her.
I waited for death.
Ninety seconds…one hundred.
I blacked out, but my body kept fighting, and somewhere in the dark came that last saving gasp.
The paralytic wore off. I was breathing again. I would live, like it or not.
But I was done.
I left the navy. They cleared me of any blame, commended me, but I knew the truth. I skipped the ceremonies. The medals came in the mail. I signed up with a locum tenens shop, worked trauma at a string of hospitals. I tried to make up for the lives I had taken with the lives I saved but I always came up short.
It gave me an excuse to keep moving. When you stay in one place, you find people, you get close. They trust you. And everyone who had ever trusted me was dead.
Over time, I started to believe what the others told me. That this was crazy. That I had to stop. That I couldn’t be alone forever. But it had been greed on my part.
I’d wanted what I didn’t deserve. And then I brought Kelly in and made her trust me.
And now I’d killed her too.
“They were right over here,” Hayes said. His voice was close. I could smell him. His fingers touched my neck, probed for the pulse of my carotid artery, held there. I lay still, focusing on the breath coming and going from my belly, trying not to betray that I was awake.
He put his hand on my cheek. It felt like 220-grit sandpaper. His thumb touched my eye, pulled the lid up. I looked at him, fought the impulse to squeeze those shears tight. I couldn’t afford to show any sign of consciousness. He shone a light in my eye, watched the pupil contract, let the lid shut.
I heard the brush of his boots as he stepped away, then I leaped for him.
He had his hand on his pistol by the time I hit his back. I pressed the shears under his jawline, felt the skin stretch and tent, looked around the room, and found myself at the intersection of three gun barrels—Hayes’s team, arrayed to one side. I kept my head behind Hayes’s as much as possible. These guys had drilled hostage rescues in the dark, on bucking ships and planes, practiced shooting until their hands bled. Killing me would be as tough as opening a jar.
“Don’t fire,” Hayes said. “Byrne, you have to listen.”
“Where’s Kelly?”
“This isn’t what you think.”
“Where the hell is she? Is she okay?”
I saw it in their eyes before I felt it. Someone was behind me. A hand clamped on my shoulder.
I turned, kept the shears on Hayes’s neck, and hit the person behind me with my forearm.
“Tom!”
Kelly stumbled back.
Chapter 34
CARO AND RIGGS waited in the wardroom, a cramped dining area with vinyl-upholstered chairs; luxurious by shipboard standards. Riggs ran his thumb over the handle of an empty coffee cup and glanced at the clock.
“Where are they?”
Caro had traced Nazar’s call releasing the evidence. It had gone to an estate lawyer named Shah in Laguna Niguel. Caro sent his men to Shah’s office to intercept him before he could deliver the evidence.
That had been forty minutes ago.
Caro checked his phone. “I don’t know. I can send—”
The mobile buzzed in his hand. He answered it, and the other man’s voice came through the line. “You’re sure?” he asked.
The other party spoke.
“Do not move. I’ll deal with you later.”
He ended the call.
“What happened?” Riggs asked.
“They found Shah. He must have seen them. He fled. A hundred and twenty miles an hour on the Five in his Jaguar. He couldn’t handle it, lost control, and went headfirst into a divider. He’s dead.”
“The evidence?”
“He exited his office with a strongbox. They were able to take it before the police and EMTs arrived, pulled it from the car. But it was empty.”
“What?”
“They think he was going to retrieve the evidence.”
“From where?”
“We don’t know.”
Riggs threw the mug against the bulkhead. The ceramic shattered.
“Now what the fuck do we do?”
“Nazar is still alive?” Caro asked.
“Yes. No one touched her.”
“Good. Because she’s the only one who can lead us to it.”
“She’ll never give it up.”
“There are ways. What about this mess up in LA at the Egyptian embassy?”
“I don’t know. There’s no word.”
“And Hayes?”
“We have narrowed it down to his rally site, Italy. We’ll have a team there in five minutes.”
“It’s not his style to wait. We have to assume he’s coming for us.” Caro took a photo from his pocket and slid it across the table. It was a woman holding a child.
“Who is that?”
“Hayes’s wife and daughter,” Caro said. “Cox found their address. It’s near Raleigh.” Lauren Hayes had gone back to her maiden name, Parker, and moved three times since the scandal. She had cut off all contact with the command and the other unit wives in an attempt to distance herself from her husband’s crimes.
“We should have gotten to them first. We need the leverage.”
“There are still ways to use her to control Hayes, even after the authorities get involved,” Caro said. “Tell them that she is dangerous and involved in the plot, harboring, collaborating. We can still get to her. Hayes will have to choose between coming after us and saving his wife.”
“I’ll get started.”
“Leave Nazar to me,” Caro said.
He climbed down the ladders to the third deck. Hall stood outside the compartment. Caro approached, dialed in the combination to the door, and opened it.
Riggs remained in the passageway as Hall followed Caro inside. Caro flicked open the knife and moved toward the old woman chained to the bulkhead. She looked up, stared straight into his blue eyes.
“You couldn’t kill me before, and you can’t kill me now, Aziz.”
Of course it was his mother. Always the whore for whatever army passed through.
He wasn’t going to kill her. That was true. Not yet.
“Leave us,” he said to Hall.
The door slammed shut behind him. He balanced the knife in his hand and took a step closer.
Chapter 35
“KELLY!” I SAID and reached for her as she stumbled back. She caught my hand and kept herself from falling. “Are you okay?”
She straightened up, touched her face. “Drop the shears, Tom,” sh
e said. “These guys saved us, both of us. They weren’t the ones shooting at us. It was Riggs and his men.”
She had a gun holstered on her hip. If she was being coerced, there’s no way she’d be armed. I saw it in her manner as well: she was telling the truth.
My hand fell to my side. Hayes hovered to my left, close enough to take me down.
The shears dropped from my fingers to the floor, and I wrapped my arms around Kelly, feeling her warmth and the heart beating in her chest.
“Thank God you’re okay,” I said.
“You too.”
A faint red mark showed on her cheek where my arm had hit.
“Sorry about that,” I said.
“Don’t worry. I thought you knew how to throw a punch.”
That got me smiling, Hayes too.
A neat row of stitches ran just above her hairline. “That’s nice work,” I said.
“Hayes did it,” she replied. “He and Cook had to fight their way to us.”
That made sense. I hadn’t been able to understand how I’d managed to buy time with my 9 mm against two guys with MP7s.
A crumpled menu lay on the counter—Volare Pizza Restaurant. “Let me guess. We’re in Italy.”
“Yes. Should be safe for now.”
I looked into the living room and saw a man lying on the floor, bandages covering his shoulder and neck. Standing over him was a man I barely recognized. The last time I had seen him was back at the safe house near the Mexican border. It was Hayes’s medic.
His left hand was bandaged, the broken fingers still splinted. The neck wound was covered but clearly wasn’t causing any problems since he was in good enough shape to be checking on the casualty.
“Green, was it?”
“Yeah.”
“How are you doing?”
“All right. Takes some getting used to.” He lifted his hand. “Thanks for fixing me up.”
“Don’t mention it. What happened to him?”
I knelt over the casualty. It was Cook, the youngest of the crew. His right cheek and most of the ear was gone.
“Multiple gunshot wounds, shrapnel. Blunt-force trauma to his chest.”
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