Her Tempting Protector: Navy SEAL Team (Night Storm Book 2)

by Caitlyn O'Leary

  Good to know.

  Max nodded his head toward the lieutenant of Omega Sky, Kostya Baranov. He’d been leaning back in his chair up front, but at Max’s nod, he unwrapped his towering frame and stood up.

  “My hope is that these problems in Africa come to nothing and we can keep playing in our normal Middle Eastern sandbox. Gray Tyler of Black Dawn has been telling me about all the fun he and his team have been having lately, and I would hate to miss out on anything.” Kostya’s smile encouraged everyone to join in with his laughter. He had a good way of easing tense situations.

  When the laughter stopped, he continued.

  “Then there’s Mason Gault from Midnight Delta, I think I heard he and his team just got back home to Coronado, and I’m going to bet he’s already been out surfing. But after that last damned mission, I think he and his men deserve to go to Fiji.”

  That was met by silence. Kostya winced. He knew he’d stepped in it.

  Max spoke up.

  “Clint Archer made it home. That’s the important thing. He has good people surrounding him, and the best care in the world. I’ve been talking to Mason. He’s been keeping me in the loop. As soon as we know everything, I’ll let all of you know.”

  Kane and Cullen exchanged glances. They didn’t have to wait for Max, because another one of their Night Storm team members kept them informed. Since Zed Zaragoza had recently been badly injured, his wife was in an exclusive sisterhood who banded together and provided support to one another. Therefore, Zed knew exactly what Clint’s prognosis was on a daily basis as his wife, Marcia, stayed in touch with Clint’s fiancée, Lydia.

  “People, I apologize,” Kostya said. “I’ve been spending too much time mired in meetings with the brass, and apparently, have my head up my ass.” Everybody could tell he was less than happy about it. They all knew there was political bullshit going on and it was Baranov’s former team had been caught in the crosshairs. No wonder he’d fucked up about Clint.

  Cullen looked around and saw every one of Kostya’s people sitting up straight. Clearly, they had their lieutenant’s back.

  “Back to Africa,” Max continued. “One last thing I want to leave you with. Both embassies have teams that are extremely seasoned. If they are raising flags, then we need to pay attention. Things are changing out there, so stay close to base, you could be called in on a dime. Got that?”

  Every head in the room nodded.

  How hot was hot? Carys pulled the scarf up over her nose and mouth, trying to keep out the sand and cover her cough. It was just a dry cough that always hit her when she was in one of these uncovered trucks going at high speeds. At least her sunglasses kept the grit out of her eyes. They’d been driving for over an hour to get to the clinic. Carys knew from what Perkins had told her the trek usually took three hours.

  The closer they got to the Rufaa, the more farmland she saw. Sudan was such a dichotomy. Khartoum was a modern city, at least parts of it, all gleaming steel, but then there were the poor parts. As they drove down the highway out of the city, they passed desert, but finally she looked out in the fields and saw many people—including small children—out in the hot sun doing backbreaking work. Especially on the low-lying crops.

  “What’s that?” She pointed as she asked Jamal, the man driving the open-aired truck.

  “What?” he yelled in Arabic.

  “The crops. What are they growing?”

  “Maize, sorghum, and millet are the tall stalks. Over there is cotton and peanuts,” he said, pointing to the left side of the road. When she looked closely, she saw men and women amongst the stalks with scythes cutting at the taller stalks. Where they were going was very poor, so she was grateful to see that there was food to be had.

  “How many people own farms?”

  Jamal grimaced. “Not many, and those that do are very lucky. Much of the land around here was bought by big corporations. Soon you will see modernized harvesting techniques.”

  “I don’t understand,” Carys said. She’d heard about some land grabs, but she’d thought it had been about mineral rights and oil. “Who are the corporations? I thought the farmland passed down from generation to generation.”

  “Many small farmers couldn’t show proof of ownership. Under the old dictator, Bashir, our government did a massive land grab, then sold hundreds of thousands of acres to the highest bidder. Pretty soon you’ll see large modern farms that were sold to the Saudis. But not just them—many nations across the Middle East have bought up thousands and thousands of acres of our land to feed themselves. That is one of the things we are praying our new prime minister will fix.”

  The fertile farms whizzed by as the truck picked up speed. Carys was able to breathe now that they left behind the sand and dust. Instead, she was surrounded by the fresh air of the Blue Nile and the burgeoning greenery.

  She sat back in the truck and wished her body temperature down as they went on for more kilometers and considered everything Jamal told her. She hadn’t appreciated just how fertile parts of Sudan were when confronted by some of the malnourished patients she cared for on a daily basis. The hospital she’d been working at was for the indigent, whereas very close by were two large hospitals for the wealthy members of Khartoum society. To think that they sent so much of their food across the Red Sea to neighboring countries, while they starved, was outrageous. The inequities all around made her furious.

  The truck slowed down and she looked around. They’d driven past the city of Rufaa to the small clinic. The area around the sandstone brick building was nothing but dirt and dust.

  “We’re here,” Jamal pointed out unnecessarily. Carys got out of the truck and was surprised to find it took a moment to get her legs moving. Then she realized that she had been tensed up on the drive with Jamal’s erratic driving style, so her muscles had locked just a tiny bit. She reached in to pull out her RISK kit, but Jamal wasn’t having it.

  “Let me, Doctor.”

  She gave a self-deprecating smile. She knew better than to try to carry things on her own with Jamal around, but she hated having her Rapid Intervention Surgical Kit in anybody’s hands but her own.

  “Thank you, Jamal.” She started toward the front door.

  “Wait,” Jamal called as he pulled his gun from his trousers. Even after seven years of working in hotspots around the world, Carys was still taken aback at everyone’s ease with guns. Not that she didn’t have one herself, she thought wryly.

  Jamal wasn’t one of the men on her security detail, but Isaac had recommended him as a good man to be her driver.

  “Dr. Adams, please go behind the truck while I go into the clinic.”

  She hated this, but agreed with his assessment, so she did as he requested.

  It seemed like forever before he came back out with a hunched over, wizened man.

  “Dr. Adams, come and meet Dr. Nazer.”

  Carys came out smiling with her hand extended, but inside she was concerned. This man looked to be on his last legs. She thought Perkins had told her a younger doctor oversaw this clinic.

  “Thank you for coming,” Dr. Nazer said in English with a British accent. “I could greatly use your help.”

  “Whatever you need, I’m here for you,” Carys said.

  Dr. Nazer started to cough, and it wasn’t a dry cough, it was a deep bronchial cough. It didn’t sound good.

  “Should you be up?” Carys asked.

  “No,” he smiled. “But right now, I’m all we have until Kenneth gets back. He left yesterday to help at a farm where two men were working to get a corn hopper unstuck. When he called last night, he told me he was able to save part of one man’s arm.”

  “Shouldn’t they have come here?”

  “No, he needed to do the work on-site, and he’s arranging for them to be treated well enough so they can get to Khartoum without going into shock.” He looked up at her from the corner of his eye and winked. “Maybe if the men are lucky, they’ll get another pretty American doctor like you to
work on them, huh?”

  That took Carys aback, normally in a Muslim country like this, she would not expect a man to openly flirt with a Western woman like her. He must have seen her look of surprise.

  “I studied at Oxford in England,” he explained.

  “Ahhh,” Carys smiled. “I wondered.”

  “Please call me Rashad and come inside. Not that it will be much cooler, but at least you will be in the shade.”

  “When will Kenneth be returning?”

  “He should be back tonight. Tomorrow morning at the latest.”

  Jamal followed them into the dim light of the clinic. They went down a short hallway before it widened into an open room that seemed to double as a reception area and clinic for simple procedures by the look of things.

  The number of people inside surprised her, considering how empty it had been outside the clinic, but now that she thought about it, who would have wanted to be outside in the afternoon sun if they could at least be in the shade? What’s more, she watched a young girl give all the people sitting against the walls and on chairs cupfuls of water from a jug. There was even some bread to be had. Fine service indeed.

  As usual, there were mostly women and children, but occasionally a man sat inside, looking ready to topple over. Three women dressed in white administered to them. They had small cots set up where people either sat or were lying down and being questioned, poked, or prodded. It was a medical assembly line, with only an occasional whimper or cough coming from an ill child. What Carys would have given to hear the cacophony of complaints and noise from a US emergency room because then she would know she was dealing with a healthier group of people.

  Looking around, she saw a door and another hallway.

  “What is behind that door?” she asked Rashad.

  “One is an office that Kenneth and I share, but we also have the nurses use it if they need to speak to a patient confidentially.”

  “And the hallway?”

  “Follow me.”

  She was only halfway down the hall when the smell hit her. It was the miasma of odors emitted from healing, infected and dying flesh. Some smelled sweet, some sour, some putrid, it was a stench she was familiar with since practicing medicine in Africa. They were obviously going to the surgery ward.

  There were windows along the ceiling letting in plenty of light to help the surgeons see, while operating. Bare lightbulbs that weren’t currently on, hung above the area set up as the operating room. Every attempt had been made to make the space as sterile, functional, and professional as possible. As a matter of fact, compared to most set-ups she’d seen over the years, this was one of the best.

  “Better than you thought, huh?” Rashad’s cracked lips smiled broadly.

  She grinned back at him. “Very impressive,” she agreed as she moved toward one of the four occupied beds. Only one patient was conscious, and she looked at Carys curiously, despite her obvious pain.

  “May I?” Carys asked the old doctor.

  “Go right ahead. One of her broken ribs punctured her lung after she fell off her boyfriend’s motor scooter.”

  Carys raised her eyebrows. A motor scooter in this part of the country was rare.

  “He has many girlfriends,” Dr. Nazer sighed. “His father is a manager at the large Saudi farm. The boy has more money than sense. I’ve delivered five of his children, from four different girls,” Rashad continued in English so the girl in the bed couldn’t understand.

  “How is this one doing?”

  “She developed an infection. As a matter of fact, everyone here has developed an infection. It is the reason I have asked for you to come here. It is my understanding that you have seen something like this in your time in Nigeria. Kenneth is a smart doctor, but he is a general practitioner, neither of us are good with infectious diseases.”

  Carys pulled the chart that was lying underneath the bed.

  “She’s not coughing,” she said referring to the cough that the old doctor had.

  “No, that’s not the type of infection. It’s bloodborne,” he said just as he went into a spasm of coughing. The woman in the bed looked at him with concern. Finally, he stopped coughing and looked up at Carys, his expression filled with shame and amusement. “Our girl here is smarter than I was,” he said in Arabic. “You never smoked, did you?” he asked the girl.

  She smiled shyly and shook her head.

  Rashad turned to Carys, “Two packs a day all the time I was at Oxford. It continued for years. Now I have COPD. I’m lucky it hasn’t turned into lung cancer, but this is pretty debilitating.”

  Carys frowned. “You know you shouldn’t be here,” she admonished.

  “It’s where I want to be. I’m close to my sister and her children. I was foolish in my youth. Do you smoke?” he asked her. “Of course, you don’t,” he answered before she could. “Smart girl.”

  Carys shrugged. She wasn’t here to pass judgment on anyone. Carys looked at the girl in the bed and saw that she was watching the two of them with wide-eyed fascination.

  “Go to sleep,” Rashad said kindly. “One of the nurses will be back to check on you later.”

  She nodded. The doctor turned back to Carys and continued in English.

  “So now that we’ve ruled out my cough as part of the infection, let’s get down to our problem with the patients. As I was saying, it’s bloodborne. Kenneth has done a lot of testing.”

  “What has he tested for?”

  “HIV, Hep B, Hep C, syphilis and malaria,” the doctor held up a finger on his right hand for each item he named off.

  “Those would have been my choices. Can I ask you a couple of questions?”

  He nodded.

  “What are your handwashing protocols?”

  He called in the head nurse who talked her through how they went about washing their hands, then Carys asked about the linens and wiping down the beds themselves. Everything she heard impressed her. They’d even gone to the point of boiling all the linens and wiping down every hard surface with alcohol. These women were bound and determined not to have their patients die.

  “It’s been very frustrating,” Rashad said. “We can’t figure it out. Kenneth has been racking his brain. We’ve been lucky so far that nobody has died yet, but it’s only because we’ve been able to get stronger dosages of antibiotics from Khartoum.” His voice was laced with a deep level of concern.

  “That was another reason why Kenneth decided to go to the men at the farm instead of having them come here. We double- and triple- checked our every sterilization method we can think of. We’ve even taken to boiling our own clothing, and before you ask, all of our surgical instruments go through the autoclave twice now.”

  Carys perked up.

  “You have an autoclave? You don’t boil your instruments, like everything else?”

  “One of the village elders moved to Germany, but he didn’t forget about us. He donated money for this clinic, and he bought the autoclave as well as two looms for the women of our village and a large oven for the community house. He has also purchased three generators for the village and regularly supplies us with propane.”

  “He sounds like a good man,” Carys said as she smiled at the concerned nurse and doctor.

  “He is.”

  “Can I see your autoclave?”

  She saw the two of them, as well as Jamal, give her an odd look. They must have thought it was funny that the American doctor was more interested in seeing a piece of machinery than more of the patients, but she had a sneaking suspicion what was wrong.

  “It’s here,” Rashad pointed proudly. She could see that it had been given a place of honor on a high dresser near the back wall. It was clear that Kenneth and Rashad worked hard to keep their clinic clean and healthy, but that might be working against them.

  “When was the last time this was qualified?”

  Rashad sighed. “Unfortunately, it has never been qualified or validated in the last three years. I’m not sure that you would
even find most of the equipment at the hospital you’ve been working at in Khartoum qualified, but it has all been properly maintained.”

  He bent down and pulled a book out of the dresser drawer. “The last time this was serviced was two months ago. We do not run many cycles. This will be good for at least another year.”

  Carys smiled as she took the book with the handwritten notes in it. She knew about this method. She also understood how happy some of the rural clinics were with the modern technology, sure that it was a guarantee of safety for their patients. Unfortunately, she had seen many times where it wasn’t. Times where the old ways were better.

  “I’m not an expert with these machines, Dr. Nazer, so I can’t determine if they are properly sterilizing your surgical instruments or not. But in the meantime, my suggestion would be to boil your instruments for twenty minutes after you run them through the autoclave.”

  She nodded to the machine’s closed door. “Are there instruments in there right now?”

  He nodded.

  “Has the cycle ended?” she asked.

  “Yes.” He opened the door and pulled out some forceps with a clean cloth that was sitting on top of the dresser, and then placed it onto a sterile surgical tray.

  “I want to have this analyzed for contaminants. I think this is your culprit.”

  “I have something we can put this in.” He found a tub of Tupperware. He asked the nurse to wipe it down with alcohol. When she was done, he placed some of the surgical instruments that would fit into the container and closed the lid.

  Carys turned to Jamal. “Can you take this to Perkins in Khartoum? I’ll call him on my satellite phone and tell him what tests to run.”

  He nodded. “Are you sure you’re all right to stay without me?” he asked.

  “Absolutely. Tell Perkins that I’m going to stay for a couple of days and help out. Everything is going well at the hospital and it looks like the doctors here could use another pair of hands for a few days.” She glanced over at the doctor who had continued to cough on and off throughout the tour. He was going to need to be put to bed before long.