Shattered (2 page)

Pakistan

April 1

Kirby Campbell was clearly in hell.

She wasn’t precisely certain which circle she’d landed in, but if this wasn’t what Dante had been describing, she’d definitely misunderstood the narrative poem she’d labored over during her freshman English Lit course.

It wasn’t that she wasn’t used to chaos, having spent the past years working first as an Army trauma physician, and more recently, working for Worldwide Medical Relief.

As relief groups rushed to this dangerous region on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border from all corners of the globe to provide aid after the latest earthquake, WMF was already on the scene, fortuitously having set up a maternal health care clinic just last week. While they were currently working in a tent, an inflatable hospital had been promised and was supposedly on the way. Kirby could only hope that was true.

A last-minute replacement for a male doctor who’d bailed to take a teaching position at Johns Hopkins, Kirby was disappointed but not surprised to discover that no one was at Kabul’s airport to greet her. Of course, it was only six o’clock in the morning and a bloodred sun had barely begun to rise over the mountains. But still . . .

Accustomed to making her own way, within five minutes, she located an Afghan driver who not only knew the location of the refugee camp she wanted to visit, but was also willing to drive her there.

And best yet, he actually spoke English. While she’d learned some Arabic during her posting in Iraq, other than “hello,” “good-bye,” “please,” and “thank you,” her Farsi was nonexistent.

Also unsurprisingly, the promises that had been made to WMF about military protection into the mountains had been swept away without explanation or apology from the government.

She’d been traveling from Darfur for a grueling thirty-six hours, but by the time she’d traveled two kilometers from the airport, even discounting climate change from the desert to the snow falling from a leaden sky, Kirby realized that this trip could be more challenging than most.

The bullet pockmarks in the white sides of the armored UN vehicles they passed suggested more problems than Mother Nature had provided.

Grim, silent columns of refugees struggled to make their way down from the mountains, all their worldly possessions heaped high on the backs of shaggy donkeys; panhandling victims of land mines sat on empty brown pants legs in the dust alongside the road; heavily draped women, babies clutched against dirty burkas, begged for coins with outstretched palms.

The level of misery increased the farther they got out of the city. They passed what looked to be a vast parking lot filled with vehicles that had been cluster bombed into fused, fire-blackened metal.

“You maybe go back?” her driver, Hasan, asked hopefully.

Kirby shook her head, which she’d covered with a traditional black hijab scarf. The scene, as dark as it was, only deepened her resolve. “We’ll keep going.”

Hasan sighed dramatically. Muttered something beneath his breath, which she suspected was along the lines of “Crazy Americans.”

At the moment, she couldn’t argue the point.

The sixty-mile trip, which back home on a decent freeway would’ve taken less than an hour, was excruciatingly slow. The higher they climbed, the steeper that only the most optimistic person could consider a road became.

The snow turned grittier. The mountains they were entering were draped in a pall of campfire smoke. The biting-cold, coal-colored air pressed down on Kirby’s chest and made breathing an effort. Small flags—the scarlet hue of the poppies that grew at lower elevations—dotted the landscape, warning of buried land mines.

In the distance, from the direction they were headed, Kirby heard a series of thuds, then a tearing sound overhead.

“Al-Qaeda,” Hasan said. “They are firing salvos at the Americans.”

“But those trucks are bringing aid,” Kirby pointed out, instinctively ducking as another batch of shells went flying, luckily too far away to prove a threat to her team. At least not yet.

“They are not welcome,” he said. He shot her a glance. “There will be those who don’t welcome you, either.”

“There will also be those who do,” she said mildly, as low-flying jets began strafing the mountain peaks where the salvos had originated. The shredded trees added a pungent scent of pine to the smoky air. “And those are the ones I’ve come for.”

She wondered if, just perhaps, Shane Garrett was somewhere up in those skies. He’d always enjoyed being in the thick of things, and it hadn’t taken her long to realize that SOAR pilots were not only every bit as smart and skilled as the fighter-jet jocks, but also, perhaps due to their Special Forces training, even tougher.

If a Night Stalker pilot asked for a vitamin M (Spec-Ops speak for Motrin), it was likely he was trying to conceal a fracture that might just cause him to miss some action.

Shane had been the toughest of the bunch, and although they’d lost track of each other, that hadn’t stopped her from thinking of him. And from comparing every other man she met to him.

Although she’d worried about crossing into Pakistan, where the camp was located, during what appeared to be a raging battle, they passed through the unguarded border without incident.

Finally, three hours after leaving Kabul, she arrived at the refugee camp set up amidst the ruins of a quake-damaged village. The sight that greeted her was not encouraging.

First of all, “camp” was definitely a misnomer. Unlike the rustic yet tidily pleasant Girl Scout camp in the mountains outside San Diego Kirby remembered so fondly from childhood, scores of people, packed together like sardines, hunkered beneath bits of dirty plastic sheets that fluttered forlornly in the wind.

A mangy donkey chewed at a straw mat making up the side of one shelter. The single source of water appeared to be a half-frozen stream, whose icy blue color belied the bacteria she knew would be swimming in it.

A few had tried to improve their lot, carrying stones to build rough shelters, and she could see the evidence of drainage furrows meant to carry off sewage.

From the stench, they weren’t working.

Still, proving the resiliency of the human spirit, others were getting on with their lives, selling vegetables, breaking boulders with sledgehammers, even getting haircuts while perched on a battered barber’s chair along the side of the road.

Several men appeared to be repairing damaged weapons and oiling others, while children foraged for loose bullets, gathering them into plastic bags. One boy, no older than six or seven, struggled beneath the burden of ammunition belts that tumbled out of his small arms and dragged on the frozen ground behind him.

Even as desolate as the scene was, when she spotted the familiar six-pod white inflatable field hospital, Kirby felt a surge of adrenaline that wiped away the exhaustion and aches of the long, hard trip.

Two women who must have heard the truck arrive came out of the tent. One woman’s cloud of white hair and round-cheeked face gave the impression that she should be home in Iowa, baking cookies for her grand-children, rather than working in a war zone. The other’s tanned blond surfer-girl looks belied the fact that she’d been working in ERs for the past eight years

“Hi.” Kirby held out a hand. “I’m Kirby Campbell.”

The blonde’s brown eyes narrowed as they swept over Kirby’s face, then looked past her. “Where’s Dr. Otterbein?”

Yet another wrinkle in a challenging day. Obviously they hadn’t been informed of the change in plans.

“I imagine he’s over the Atlantic on his way to Baltimore about now,” Kirby said mildly. “Headquarters sent me instead.”

“You’re a physician?”

Kirby lowered her hand, which had remained ignored, and offered a reassuring smile. “Yes. I am.”

“Dammit.” A frown darkened the woman’s brow. “Look, this isn’t anything against you,” she said. “But we were promised a male doctor.”

“Well, I can’t do anything about my gender. But if you’re worried about my qualifications, you needn’t be. I spent six years in the Army, two in the 28th Combat Support Hospital in Bagdad. I’ve worked in the bloody mess of the Sudan, where I was held captive for five hours while militiamen fought over a bar of soap and two PowerBars I had in my pack. And I’m very, very good at my job. Maybe the best, in a crisis situation, you’ve ever worked with.”

“And modest, too, I see.” The woman’s lips quirked, just a little. Then she held out her hand. “I’m Lita King, BSN, CCNS, CFRN. Along with claiming that alphabet soup of credentials, I’ve done the gambit of relief acronyms, including a stint with Doctors Without Borders. And I’m sorry for the rudeness, but this has been a rotten forty-eight hours, and having Otterbein bail on us was the proverbial last straw.”

“We all have our moments.” Kirby shook the doctor’s hand.

“I’m Anne Douglass,” the white-haired woman introduced herself. “CRNA. This is my second posting as nurse anesthetist. Before this I spent six months in Mogadishu.”

“That must’ve been a tough initiation,” Kirby said.

Although Somalia had pretty much faded from the public spotlight, medical relief teams remained in the country, fighting disease and starvation suffered by a population forced to live in a continual state of political crisis.

“It sure as hell was a long way from working in the surgical unit at Seattle’s Children’s Hospital for thirty-five years,” Anne agreed.

There was a murmur of voices. The crowd that had gathered to watch Kirby’s arrival parted to allow a dozen men to approach.

Beneath coats made of some sort of animal skins, they were wearing perahan-o-toman, the long tunics and baggy pants favored by the males of the region. From their automatic weapons, pistols, huge curved knives, and grenades hanging from their heavy belts, and grenade launchers slung over shoulders, Kirby guessed they weren’t from the camp Welcome Wagon.

Their beards were filthy, their dark eyes—as hard as the rocks that made up these mountains—burned with something resembling scorn.

Which was why the AK-47, with its attached blade that looked sharp enough to shave with, pointing at the three women did nothing to bolster confidence.

Even with Shane babying the bird, the Chinook still hit the mountain with a jolt. Rocked hard to the left. Then settled.

Into a big, empty field of snow.

Okay, so the landing might not have been the softest he’d ever pulled off. But then again, he’d managed to keep the bird upright.

Shane cut the engines, jacked a round into the chamber of his M4, set the selector to semiautomatic, then reached up and yanked on the yellow-and-black emergency exit handle at the top of the door. But when he tried to kick the door open, nothing happened.

Thinking his flight suit must have caught on something, as another round of fire hit the instrument panel, which began to smoke, and the heavy rotor blades overhead slowly coasted to a stop, Shane tried again.

Again, nothing.

Puzzled, he looked down at his leg, which was spurting blood like Old Faithful.

The material had been blasted away, revealing flesh that—and this was really weird—looked to be glowing green through his NVG.

“Shit.” The familiar, amazingly calm expletive had him looking back over his shoulder at Zach Tremayne, who was crawling like a diamondback rattler toward him. “You’ve been shot.”

“It appears so.” Time had seemed to take on a slow-motion replay feel as Shane stared down at his eerily smoking flesh.

“You’ve caught a tracer round.” Before Shane could brace himself for the attack, Tremayne ripped off a glove and dove into the wound with his bare hand.

O-kay.

That he felt.

He hissed through clenched teeth as he fought against the vomit trying to rise in his throat as the SEAL pocketed the tracer and tied the lanyard from his 9 mm around Shane’s leg as a makeshift tourniquet. No way was he going to give his best friend the opportunity to claim that flyboys weren’t as tough as frogmen.

Tremayne handed Shane back his M4. They both ducked as another round of machine-gun fire tore through the cockpit.

Pulling himself forward by his arms and one leg, dragging the other behind him, Shane managed to crawl back through the companionway and into the back of the bird.

Which was even more of a mess than the cockpit.

It was also on fire. Again.

Not a good thing, given that they’d topped off the fuel tank before leaving Gardez.

As wires jumped and sparked around them, and bullets pinged around as if they were inside a giant pinball machine, this second fire, even more dangerous than the first, began greedily eating its way up the side of the bird.

Having always been a quick study, Shane decided that even the Duke would figure it was time to blow this pop stand.

The man pointing the weapon at the three women began rattling off a stream of words in a sharp, bulletlike rat-a-tat to Hasan.

“What did he say?” Kirby asked.

“He wants to speak to the doctor,” the driver said.

“Tell him that’s me.”

The way Hasan rolled his dark eyes needed no translation. But he proceeded to pass on the message, which earned a darker scowl and an even more rapid-fire response.

“He prefers a male physician.”

“Too bad.” From the flush in the driver’s cheeks, Kirby suspected that wasn’t all he’d said. She folded her arms. “Tell him what he sees is what he gets.”

Hasan hesitated.

“Tell him,” she repeated.

With obvious reluctance, which Kirby suspected might be due to fear for his life, Hasan started to translate when the armed man, who seemed to be in charge, cut him off with a sharp command.

He made a slicing motion with his hand toward his men, two of whom moved forward, carrying the stretcher on which lay an adolescent boy who looked no older than thirteen.

He was conscious, but just barely, his face twisted with pain. His eyes, fiery with fever, were deeply sunken in their sockets and moved restlessly, unseeingly. His right hand was swathed in a blood-soaked bandage.

Rather than the dark tan that came from living so high beneath the harsh Afghan sun, his complexion was the color of ashes drifting down from the sky. The color of impending death.

“Bring him into the tent,” Kirby instructed.

As Anne quickly began gathering up supplies, Kirby knelt on one side of the stretcher, Lita on the other.

Kirby pressed her fingers against the boy’s throat. “His pulse is thready.”

So thready, she could barely detect it. His hand, despite the fever raging through him, was ice cold. The lax skin on the back of his hand revealed severe dehydration.

She snapped on a pair of gloves, and as she unwound the bandage, her confidence plummeted at the sight of the oozing, dirt-encrusted, mangled mess.

After a bit of back-and-forth between Hasan and the leader, they discovered that the boy—who’d undoubtedly never been allowed to be a child—was a jihadist who’d been holding a grenade when it exploded.

An examination revealed that the explosion had torn apart his hand, which was swollen with pus and turning a deadly black hue.

“How long ago did the injury occur?” Kirby asked as the boy moaned at her touch.

“Two weeks,” Hasan translated yet again.

Even worse. Proving himself one tough kid, he’d survived shock and blood loss, but she couldn’t guarantee he wouldn’t die of infection. Even if he survived the surgery, the dressings should be changed each day under sterile conditions.

Like that was going to happen.

“Let’s get some fluid and potassium in him,” Kirby instructed Anne, who’d already set up the IV. The good news was that they were already working well together; without waiting to be instructed, Anne added antibiotics and morphine to the drip bag.

“In a way, he’s lucky he hasn’t had enough fluid,” she murmured as she and Lita began scraping the grit out of the mutilated hand with a nail brush, while Anne kept track of his respiration.

Contrary to civilian medical care, Kirby’s CSH background had taught her that dehydration could be useful in battlefield conditions.

“It’s kept his blood pressure low,” Lita agreed.

“Dangerously low, but higher would have increased his bleeding.” Kirby moved on to snipping away torn flesh and bits of bone shards.

“I’ll admit I was annoyed when I found how short-staffed we were going to be,” Lita said.

“And having the guy who was also supposed to be here back out last week and leave you without a male physician in a place not known for women’s equality didn’t exactly make your day,” Kirby said understandingly.

“That’s an understatement.” A jagged piece of bone clunked like a stone into a metal pan. “But I think we’ve got the perfect team.”

Although it would have been inappropriate to smile under these grim conditions, Kirby had been thinking the very same thing. The leader began speaking again to Hasan in Farsi.

“He wants to know what you’re doing,” their driver/ translator said.

“I’m going to have to amputate at least three of his fingers.” Kirby held up a hand, anticipating the argument. “If I don’t, he’ll die.”

“Life or death is Allah’s choice,” the leader said through Hasan. He frowned darkly. “Do you know who this is?”

“No.”

And she didn’t care. If relief medical teams started getting to know the people they were sent to care for around the world, they’d find themselves embroiled in politics. Which was something they couldn’t allow themselves to do.

“This is the son of Imam Jalaluddin.”

While the name didn’t cause the expected fanfare of trumpets his tone suggested, it did ring an instant bell. Even down in the Sudan, Kirby had heard of the terrorist leader the United States had been hunting for the past two years.

Kirby didn’t care if the kid was Allah himself, but knowing that saying it aloud would be considered blasphemy and get her—hell, all three of them—killed, she tried again.

“If he doesn’t have surgery, short of a miracle, he’s going to die.”

“It’s important that he live.”

He really was getting on her last nerve. “Then I suggest you be quiet and let me concentrate.”

There were more looks exchanged. A rapid-fire discussion Kirby couldn’t begin to follow. She could tell they were conflicted. But no one made a move to stop her and Lita from continuing to clean the wound.

“There is one more thing,” the leader said as they continued their ragged work.

“What’s that?” Kirby asked, allowing herself a bit of optimism at the way the IV Anne had started had begun to bring a bit of much-needed color into their patient’s boyishly smooth cheeks.

“If the son of Imam Jalaluddin dies at your hands, he will not die alone.” As Hasan translated, the leader swept a hard look over all three women, his meaning clear.

Kirby believed him.