“Then let’s get to work.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
British Army Field Hospital at Camp Bastion / Helmand Province, Afghanistan / Five days ago
OF ALL OF the British forces in Iraq the Sixteenth Air Assault Brigade had suffered the worst casualties. Their turnover of troops was steady, with fresh battalions moving into the field to replace those units that had suffered losses or had suffered too many days under the unforgiving Iraqi sun which daily beat down at above 120 degrees. Wounded soldiers-British, American, and a mixed bag of other Allied troops-were brought in with disheartening regularity. The triage process had taken on an assembly-line pace. Get them in, stabilize the most serious wounds, check their IDs, and then airlift the worst cases out to hospital ships in the Gulf. Less seriously wounded were transported by helicopter or armored medical bus to bases scattered around the country, where they would remain on the chance that they might be rotated back to their units. Great Britain had diminished its presence in Iraq since 2007 and it was more politically useful to keep the same experienced troops in the country than to send in fresh ones.
The serious cases would eventually be transported home to the Royal Centre for Defence Medicine at Selly Oak Hospital in Birmingham. Too many of them would ultimately fall under the care of the British Limbless Ex- Servicemen’s Association who would try-and sometimes fail-to secure proper disability benefits for them and see them through rehab as they worked to find a new version of their civilian lives.
Captain Gwyneth Dunne lived with these facts day after day. Running the British Army Field Hospital at Camp Bastion was like working a busy ER in one of the outer rings of Hell, or at least that’s how she described it to her husband, who was stationed with the 1st Royal Anglian regiment in Tikrit. She was a registered nurse whose training was in pediatrics, but the wizards at Division had decided that this qualified her to triage battle-wounded soldiers. It was a total ongoing cockup.
She was at her desk in a Quonset hut that had two overhead fans that did nothing but push around stale hot air, reading through the computer printouts on the three wounded soldiers from the ambush near Najaf. Lieutenant Nigel Griffith, twenty-three; Sergeant Gareth Henderson, thirty; and Corporal Ian Potts, twenty. She didn’t know any of them; probably never would.
The door opened and in walked Dr. Roger Colson, the senior triage surgeon.
“What’s the butcher’s bill, Rog?” Dunne asked, waving him to a chair.
He sank down with a sigh, rubbed his eyes, and gave her a bleary look. “It’s not promising. The officer, Griffith, has a chest wound that’s going to need more surgical attention than we can give here. The good news is that there’s a pretty good Swedish chest cutter on HMS Hecla. I’m having him prepped for airlift.”
“Does he have a chance?”
Dr. Colson lifted one hand and waggled it back and forth. “Shrapnel in the chest wall. We managed to reinflate the left lung, but he has some fragments near the heart. It’ll take a deft hand to sort him out.”
“What about the others?”
Colson shrugged. “They should both go out with Griffith. Corporal Potts is probably going to lose his left leg below the knee. Maybe the hand as well. We don’t have a microsurgeon here and they don’t have one on the hospital ship, either, so even if he keeps the hand he’ll lose most of its function, poor bastard.” He rubbed his eyes again, which were red and puffy from too many hours staring at wounds that he didn’t have the staff or materials to properly treat. “The best of the lot is Sergeant Henderson. Very bad facial laceration. He’ll be disfigured but the eyes were spared, so there’s that.”
“I never met Henderson. He’s a new lad, transferred from the Suffolk regiment.”
“Mm,” Colson said, indifferent to that part of it. “Should have stayed in Suffolk and raised sheep.”
“You want him transported out?” Dunne asked.
“I should think so. Injury like that will take a long time to heal and he looks like he might have been a handsome bloke. Injury of this kind will have traumatic personal effects.”
Dunne looked down at the three printouts of the survivors spread out on her desk. She picked up Henderson’s and examined the face of the thirty-year-old sergeant from the farmlands. “He was a handsome lad.”
She shook her head and turned the page over to show the doctor.
“Ah well,” Colson said sadly, “he doesn’t look like that anymore. Pity, the poor blighter.”
Chapter Thirty-Three
Baltimore, Maryland / Tuesday, June 30; 3:12 P.M.
AS CHURCH AND Courtland led me through a series of hallways I said, “I’m going to take a flyer here and assume that you know that there is no way this prion thing is simply the weapon du jour of a group of religious fundamentalists.”
“No kidding,” Church said.
The warehouse was very large, with suites of offices, workrooms of all kinds, and several big storage rooms. There were scores of jump-suited workmen shifting crates, running wires, and swinging hammers. Guards patrolled the hallway and every one of them looked like he’d had his sense of humor surgically removed. Not a lot of smiling in that place, and I could certainly understand why. I wondered how many of the people in the halls had lost friends at St. Michael’s.
“So the real reason you didn’t hit the crab plant is because of what happened at St. Michael’s,” I said. “You’re thinking that if the DMS’s cream of the crop would fall prey to fatal hesitation then anyone else would, too. Even special ops.”
“You’d make a bloody good terrorist,” Grace said with an approving smile.
“I’m hoping he’ll make a great terrorist,” Church corrected and pushed through the door.
Grace Courtland gave me a wink as she followed. I wondered why her team was not being offered the job. Maybe they were still too shocked and too hot after what happened to their friends at St. Michael’s. More likely they were too valuable to throw away on what clearly could be a suicide mission or a trap. I didn’t for a moment think that Church wouldn’t be aware that I would think that, but it did give me a bit of a measure between what Church needed to get done and what he could spare compassion on. Big gap, probably getting wider every minute.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Baltimore, Maryland / Tuesday, June 30; 3:16 P.M.
WE ENTERED THE main warehouse floor, which was big enough to be an airplane hanger. Back in the shadows I could see a number of vehicles, mostly civilian with a few military Hummers and transport trucks sprinkled throughout. There were two big storage bins lining one wall, one marked EQUIPMENT and the other ARMS. A soldier with an M-16 stood outside the arms locker, eyes slowly scanning the room, his finger laid straight along the outside of the trigger guard. One corner of the room had been turned into a makeshift training area with several hundred square feet of blue gym mats.
The other candidates I’d tussled with-minus the clown I’d punched in the throat-were seated in the front row of an otherwise empty section of folding chairs. I could feel their eyes on me, and two of them gave me cautious nods: Sergeant Rock and the Jolly Green Giant. The latter held an ice pack to his face.
Across from them was a second row of chairs and these were filled with a dozen hard-looking men and women in fatigue pants and black T-shirts. No one wore any patch or insignia indicating branch of service or rank, but at least half of them had military tattoos of one kind or another.
Church stepped onto the mats and gave each group a long, considering stare. Even in that vast room he gave the impression of size and substance. All conversation ceased immediately and every eye was on him. I’ve seldom encountered a more commanding presence and though he was surely aware of the effect he had on everyone there wasn’t the slightest sign that he was jazzed by it. It was a fact of life to him, or, more probably, a tool.
Grace and I stood at the edge of the training floor, she on the side with the dozen-her team, I presumed-and
