Shattered (4 page)

“Hell, no,” he said.

The medic nodded. “Good.”

As they trudged back up the mountainside, a single refrain kept repeating over and over again in Shane’s head.

“Night Stalkers don’t quit!”

Baghdad, Iraq

One year earlier

Having been up in the north, flying Special Forces members of Task Force 20 around in their search for Saddam, Shane had been away from Baghdad for three weeks. And during much of that time, he’d spent a lot of time thinking about Captain Kirby Campbell.

He’d been lying on his stomach, his butt ignominiously bared, waiting for treatment in the cubicle the triage nurse had stuck him in. The moment Kirby had opened that white privacy curtain, the air in the small space had turned instantly electric, like heat lightning shimmering on the horizon.

Her lips, the petal-pink color of peonies in his mother’s garden, were bare of any artificial color or gloss. The urge to taste them hit like a bolt of lightning from a clear blue sky.

And that was just for starters. Shane wanted to taste the rest of her, too. Every lush, womanly inch.

She hadn’t really given him any sign that she might be interested. In fact, she’d been brisk and efficient. Of course, being an Army officer, she knew better than to flirt on the job.

If she’d stuck around long enough for him to have gotten out of that undignified position on that steel treatment table, he would’ve put a move on her.

But before he could get a chance to even suggest they might go out for a pizza, she’d been called out to treat a soldier wounded by a tank gun barrel that had swung around while he’d been driving by atop his Humvee. The barrel had smashed into his face, and from what Shane could tell, it had shattered every single bone.

So he hadn’t even gotten to say good-bye before heading out again. But even while he flew over the miles of desert, he couldn’t stop thinking about the sexy military doctor, who in no way resembled M*A*S*H’s Hawk-eye Pierce.

Which was why the first thing he did when returning to the fortress that was the Green Zone was to head to the CHS.

He’d just reached the hospital when two Humvees came roaring up right next to the hospital doors. The driver of the front one, obviously the top dog of the pack, shouted instructions to the others before tearing into the hospital.

Thirty seconds later, he’d returned with CSH medics, who, with the other soldiers’ help, loaded four injured men onto gurneys, then raced back into the ER with the team members bringing up the rear. There was a lot of cursing and yelling, and adrenaline pumping so hard Shane could almost smell it over the sweat, dust, and blood.

Their long hair and lack of identifying patches revealed them to be Special Forces. Shane might not know them personally, but being a SOAR pilot himself made them his brothers, so he didn’t hesitate to go in with them.

While the team leader—so furious a vein was pulsing on his forehead, making him look in danger of stroking out—yelled about goddamn delays at the goddamn gate leading into the goddamn Green Zone, the medical team began to triage their new patients.

Shreds of clothing, equipment, watches, dog tags hit the floor, jettisoned in the attempt to save lives.

Unable to leave, Shane backed up against a wall next to an American flag, staying out of the way as he watched the woman he’d come here to see do chest compressions on a soldier who had more gaping wounds than Shane could count, exposing bones and torn muscle tissue embedded with dirt and shrapnel.

Meanwhile, one of the uninjured, who’d picked up a bloodied envelope that had fallen from his buddy’s shirt pocket—probably a letter from home, Shane thought—was shouting for him to “Keep fightin’! You’re gonna to make it!”

He screamed the words, as if shouting them could make them true. His accent was from below the Mason-Dixon line, maybe Mississippi or Alabama. But the frantic tone was a long way from a soft Southern drawl. “You’re gonna be okay, Jimmy boy!”

The second soldier’s leg was barely attached, causing blood to gush onto the floor, turning it red.

When a medic asked the third soldier if he could move his hand, he couldn’t.

No shit, Sherlock, Shane thought. Since it looked as if it’d been broken in about a hundred pieces.

Outside the hospital, a series of thuds from insurgent bombs erupted, sounding like massive, backfiring engines. Apparently accustomed to such sounds, and utterly focused on their patients’ wounds, not one of the doctors or nurses bothered to look up.

The fourth soldier had taken a bullet in the head, but after being quickly stabilized, he and the guys with the bloody leg and broken hand were rushed out of the ER, destined for Balad, the Trauma III Air Force theater hospital sixty miles north of Baghdad.

Shane had been in Iraq long enough to know no one stayed in this place long. Medical care downrange worked like a conveyor belt. Any wounded soldier injured in Baghdad would probably land here first, with the more serious being coptered out to Balad.

After Balad, they’d be flown on a C-17 to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center at Ramstein Air Force Base in Germany.

Then, finally, back home to the United States.

Those less severely injured were usually sent to a U.S. base in Kuwait for a few weeks’ convalescence. After which they’d return to duty.

One of the soldiers who’d stormed in with his unit had been triaged and was sitting in a chair, waiting patiently for someone to stitch up a slash down the side of his face. His eyes were open but glazed, and in that thousand-yard stare, Shane could see whatever horror they’d experienced out there beyond the relative safety of the Green Zone.

The electronic beat of the heart monitor attached to the soldier Kirby was working on suddenly turned into a long single note as he flatlined.

She shook her head. Briefly closed her eyes, then called the time of death.

Turning to the soldier’s buddy, who had tears pouring down his cheeks, she touched his arm and said, “I’m sorry.”

“Thank you for doin’ your best to save him, ma’am,” he choked out.

From the floor she plucked the dog tags that had been ripped off him and checked the engraving. “Corporal Tyree was Protestant?”

The soldier nodded. “Yes, ma’am. A Methodist. He’d always go to services whenever we happened to be in some camp when they were bein’ held.”

“Well, then, I think we should say a prayer together, soldier,” she said, stripping off her latex gloves.

And as Shane watched, she gently took the grieving young man’s hand in hers, and although he couldn’t quite hear all of what she was saying, he did pick up on her asking that both the corporal’s life and tragic, too-early death would help hasten a much-needed peace and bring the war to an end.

The leader, who’d been the first off the Hummer, came over for the prayer, as did the rest of the unit. And for those brief couple of moments, silence descended over the ER.

And then, just like that, the moment of peace was over, and everyone got back to business as usual.

Except for Kirby, who turned toward Shane. She seemed unsurprised to see him, making him wonder if she’d been aware of his presence all along. Even though he’d always considered himself an expert at compartmentalizing, that impressed the hell out of Shane.

“Well, isn’t this is a surprise,” she said, coming over to stand a professional three feet from him. “What can I do for you, Captain?” She skimmed a look over him. “You don’t look like a man who needs any more shrapnel pulled out of him.”

“I’ve managed to stay out of trouble,” he responded.

She was wearing a boxy blue scrub shirt over BDU cammie trousers she’d tucked into a pair of bloodied combat boots. She wasn’t wearing a bit of makeup, and the dark shadows beneath her eyes told of a lack of sleep. But she was still the sexiest woman he’d ever seen.

“I’m glad to hear that.” She folded her arms, still waiting for the reason for his appearance in her ER.

With his hands sweating and his ears actually burning like a sixteen-year-old nerd’s while he was trying to get up the nerve to ask the head cheerleader for a date to the prom, Shane said, “That was real impressive.” He waved a hand around the room. “The way you all kept so cool.”

Her eyes, the deep purplish blue of meadow wild-flowers he’d grown up with back home, saddened.

“It’s our patients’ emergencies, not ours,” she said mildly. “Our job is to try to establish calm from chaos. Much as I imagine you Special Forces types do when you’re out on the front lines.”

He’d been so focused on the sexual punch the first time they’d been together, he hadn’t stopped to consider that, other than them both being in the military, they might actually have something in common.

“I’m here for the next forty-eight hours,” he said. Because he was unreasonably tempted to skim a finger beneath those fatigued eyes, which he feared would just lead to a lot of inappropriate touching, he stuck his hands in the pockets of his BDU to keep them out of trouble. “I was hoping to spend some of them with you.”

She tilted her head. Narrowed her eyes. “How many hours, exactly, were you hoping for?”

“As many as I could get.”

“Well.” She glanced around the ER, where medics, nurses, and other doctors were treating the less severely wounded patients. “As it happens, I have some time saved up myself.”

She reached into a pocket of her trousers, pulled out a set of keys, and took one off the ring. “My trailer’s not all that large, but it’s home.” She gave him instructions on how to find it. “My shift ends at sixteen thirty hours. I’ll meet up with you then.

“Meanwhile, no offense, Captain, but you look as if you could use a shower and some sleep. Oh, and there’s a bottle of Glenfiddich in the cupboard above the bed.”

Despite the seriousness of what he’d just witnessed, Shane grinned.

“Not only are you spectacular-looking, a great physician, and, from the way you prayed with that poor corporal who’s probably going to have survivor guilt for a very long time, a very warm and caring person, you also managed to get hold of single-malt Scotch in this country. My admiration, Captain, knows no bounds. I don’t suppose you’d marry me?”

“I’ll take it under consideration,” she said mildly. “After I check you out in bed. Wouldn’t want to find myself stuck for life with a dud.”

She pointed toward the door. “If I’m going to arrange for some R and R, I need to get back to work. So go.”

He saluted briskly. “Yes, ma’am.”

She sure as hell hadn’t been kidding about her hootch being small. Shane figured it was about a hundred and fifty, maybe sixty, square feet, tops. But it had a bed, a shower, and in just a few hours, the sexy captain would be home.

Life, he thought, as he located the bottle of Scotch, didn’t get much better than that.

Unable to slow down enough to catch her breath, Kirby had sent Lita to check on the injured teenager twice, and each time the nurse reported back that he was regaining consciousness and seemed to be doing as well as could be expected under the circumstances.

With the clock ticking down, she was about to go examine him herself, when the tent flap opened and a bearded man with long hair walked in.

“We need a doctor,” he announced.

He might be wearing native clothing, but his accent was definitely Southern. One of the Carolinas, perhaps. From the square jaw you could park a Hummer on beneath that dark beard, rigidly defined muscles beneath the snug tunic, and steely, gunmetal gray eyes, he had SPECIAL FORCES WARRIOR written all over him.

“I’m a doctor.” She dug into her supply kit and handed a lollipop to the child she’d just treated for minor burns on the leg from when a cooking pot had tipped over. “And you’re in the wrong country.”

“We’ve got wounded.”

“And the military’s got hospitals.” It wasn’t that she didn’t care. But treating an American military man in this camp would only undermine her mission.

“Nowhere closer than Gardez. Which we can’t get to until the command sends a helo to exfil—that’s—”

“I know what it is.” She held out her hand. “Former Captain Kirby Campbell, at your service. My last Army posting was in Baghdad.”

He blew out a short, quick breath she suspected was relief that he didn’t have to go through the entire song and dance, and shook her extended hand. “Good to meet you, Doc.”

He did not, she noticed, give his name, rank, or affiliation. “You do realize you’ve crossed the border?”

“Didn’t have any choice. Our pilot was critically wounded when our helo got shot down. We’ve already lost too many men today, including a Marine who checked out on our way up here, and this one will goddamn die if he doesn’t get more treatment than our medic—who’s damn good, by the way, but there are limits—can give him. And, like I was going to say, CENTCOM’s refusing to exfil us until dark.”

“Because they don’t want to risk another copter.”

“Roger that.” He gave her an admiring look. “Damned if you aren’t the real deal.”

“Don’t tell me anything,” she said. There was no other decision to make. A patient needed her help. End of story. “Not rank or serial number. For any of you.”

If they didn’t exist, she wouldn’t have to be specific in her report.

“That’s cool, Captain,” he said. “But even though we’re black, now that we’ve shown up here, it’s going to be real hard to keep our presence a secret, especially with Al Jazeera television so eager to broadcast any negative stuff they can get about U.S. forces. Which means we’re going to have to put it in our report to our own command, anyway.”

They both knew the shit was going to hit the fan when that happened. Yet she wasn’t surprised at their behavior. She’d been in the military long enough to know they lived by the “Leave no man behind” axiom.

There wasn’t one of them, from any of the services, who wouldn’t risk death—or, in this case, court-martial—for one of their own.

“Bring him in.”

A quartet of exhausted-looking men, a couple whose faces beneath the turbans they’d managed to pick up from somewhere didn’t look old enough to shave, let alone be fighting a battle in these deadly mountains, carried in the SKED.

Her patient was beneath a pile of blankets that smelled like wood smoke. Although the filthy wool was white from the snow that had fallen on it, she could practically see fleas doing a happy dance at having latched on to a new human host.

“It’s his leg,” one of the two men who’d followed the patient in said. “He got hit with a tracer round. I’ve stuffed the wound with Curlex, given him Heparin and oxygen, but . . .”

The man, obviously a medic, looked both frustrated and a little bewildered. As if he couldn’t comprehend the idea of anyone dying on his watch.

And didn’t she know that feeling all too well?

She knelt down and pulled off the blankets—her eye drawn directly to the bloody and mangled leg wound as she pulled on a pair of gloves.

“The leg’s probably going to have to come off.” She’d seen too many of the same type of wounds from IED blasts. “Above the wound.”

“That’s what we brought him here for,” the first man, who was obviously their leader, said.

“Look around,” she said, waving a gloved hand at the interior of the tent. “This isn’t exactly Johns Hopkins. Hell, it isn’t even County General,” she named the fictional television hospital.

As serendipitous as it might sound, she’d decided to become a doctor because of ER, which had debuted while she was in high school.

The army had helped pay her way through medical school, and Kirby’s only regret was that she’d never gotten to work with George Clooney.

“Military injuries are more complex than those in civilian life,” she said.

“That’s why we risked coming here,” the medic entered the argument. “I’ve done all I can. And without getting exfil before dark, you’re our only chance.”

“And how, exactly, do you plan to get evacuated out of here?”

“Don’t worry. We’ve got that covered.”

“There’s something you need to know,” she said. “Something that will probably cause a problem.”

“That’s pretty much been the kind of day we’ve had so far. Feel like sharing?”

ER work had taught Kirby to impart a great deal of information quickly, in as few words as possible.

“Where are they?” he asked after she’d told him about the terrorists.

“At the far edge of the camp.” She described their location.

“And there’s a dozen?”

“Thirteen, counting the boy. Who won’t be in any shape to help.”

“Hell,” the big guy, whose name she’d probably never know, said. “I thought you were talking about a real problem. Not a mosquito-sized one. We’ll handle them. After you take care of our guy.”

It wasn’t as if she hadn’t done preliminary amputations before, back in Iraq. Munitions focused destructive forces on extremities, creating a particularly complex wound with fragments of the weapon and other debris being driven into it.

As in this man’s case, it had also blasted away clothing and soft tissue, leaving exposed bone, a flap of skin, and all the unsterile debris—and she didn’t even want to think about those fleas—forced between the membranes that connected the skin to the muscle.

“We’d be risking systemic infection, which would lead to a multisystem organ failure. Which, even if he didn’t die, would only result in the need to reamputate at a higher and less functional level.”

“In case you haven’t noticed, Doc, he’s not exactly functional right now,” another man, who’d come in with the medic and was larger than any Afghan she’d ever seen—which resulted in his obviously borrowed pants stopping several inches short of his boots, revealing Thinsulate long underwear—pointed out.

She folded her arms and looked a long, long way up at him. “You don’t look as if this is your first rodeo, so you should know that battlefield wounds are initially left open because of a high risk of infection.”

“Leave it open much longer and he’s not going to have any blood left,” the man, who, from his long hair and beard, she took to be another Special Ops guy, argued.

“I can clean out the wound. Debride it. And get some whole blood into his system, which should help stabilize him. But I spent enough time dealing with the same type of injury in Iraq to know that a staged amputation is honestly the best way to go. You need to get him to Gardez.”

“Terrific.” He folded arms the size of oak tree limbs and gave her a hard stare she suspected proved intimidating when interrogating captured terrorists. “Why don’t you just get out your magic carpet and we’ll fly him the fuck out of here right now.”

Knowing that they must have had a horrific day, and understanding the band-of-brothers bond that existed among military men, Kirby didn’t call him on his sarcasm.

“I thought you had a plan to get him out of here.”

“We do. But if something isn’t done, like, now, he’s not going to make it long enough for us to pull it off.”

Not wanting to waste any more valuable time arguing, intending to take vital signs, she moved her gaze from his shattered and bloodied leg to the wounded man’s face.

And couldn’t prevent the gasp from escaping her lips.

“What’s wrong?” the medic and the team’s leader asked at the same time.

Still stunned, she ignored them.

“Shane?” she asked.

Since he’d been wrapped up in the blanket, they hadn’t tried to change his clothes. Like all Spec Ops guys, he’d torn all the insignia off his uniform and was wearing only his last name and blood type. But even as bad as he looked—which was dreadful—she instantly recognized the SOAR pilot.

“You know him?” the large man who’d argued with her asked.

“I met him while I was posted at the twenty-eighth Cash in Iraq,” she said, pronouncing the acronym. She pressed her fingers against his throat, counting out the thready, too-weak pulse.

“Hot damn. You’re—”

The leader slammed his mouth shut.

But not soon enough.

Kirby was not going to allow herself to be embarrassed. She knew that men in war zones were the same as men everywhere. But more so. Conversations invariably ended up being about women and sex. Which meant that there was a good chance these men knew all about her crazed time with Shane Garrett. Maybe they even knew about her tattoo.

So? At the moment, embarrassment was way down at the bottom of her priorities list.

“How long has he been unconscious?” she asked.

“He’s been drifting in and out for about an hour,” the medic responded. “Which is why I didn’t want to give him any morphine.”

“And he wouldn’t have asked.”

“Would’ve bit his tongue off first,” the big guy agreed.

“He needs to be stabilized before surgery.”

“If you’ve got some trick up your sleeve on how to do that, I’d like to hear it,” the guy obviously in control of this mission said. His quiet tone was more forceful than the loudest shout. “Otherwise, it looks as if you’ve drawn the short straw today, Doc.”

Having been in Baghdad during the worst days, Kirby had never imagined wishing she were back in Iraq. Since joining WMR, she’d grown accustomed to working under the most primitive conditions. But at this moment, she’d give anything for even a bit of the high-tech equipment she’d had back at the CSH.

She touched his face, preparing to pull back his lids to check his pupils, when his Hershey-brown eyes suddenly opened and looked directly into hers.

“Kirby?” She watched as the man she’d never been able to get out of her mind tried to focus. “Wow. That’s funny. I was just dreaming about you. Maybe I still am?”

He tried to lift a hand but lacked the strength. She told herself that it was only exhaustion from jet lag, along with a trying day, that caused her eyes to well up.

“Or is this one of those near-death things, and all my friends are here to tell me good-bye?”

“Don’t talk like that,” she said quickly. “You are not going to die.” Granted, the prognosis was not good—okay, it was flat-out lousy—but there was no way Kirby was going to allow herself to think otherwise. “We won’t let you.”

He looked up at the others. “Didn’t I tell you she was the best?”

“Yeah.” The big guy smiled. Oh, it was forced, and Kirby knew it was only done to reassure. But it was real and had her liking him.

“You’re in luck,” she said, turning her attention back to her patient. “Of all the relief hospitals in all the world, you just happened to end up in mine.”