The Heroic Surgeon

He huffed a laugh. Huge mistake. It really hurt. “I’m…not seven-feet tall,” he grunted. “That would make me…the Incredible…Hulk!”

“Don’t you dare joke! Ooh, I’d hit you if you weren’t already battered! You promised to get down, not to play any kamikaze tricks!”

“I said I’d do what needed to be done. In the heat of the moment, it seemed the only thing to do.” More details bombarded him. People cowering on the floor, some still singing, until the few bullets had become a hail and their singing had fragmented, turning to cries of terror. There had been nothing to do but try to protect them. The scene around them now again tugged at his gaze. Something bitter spilled inside his chest. “And I’m not even sure I managed to do anything but kill everyone more quickly.”

The touch of her freezing-in-cold-sweat hand jolted through him, warmed him to the core. He turned his face in her palm, his eyes going to her face.

Was that a smile? Yes. It was. Drenched in angry tears of relief and magnificent. “Believe it or not, you insane man, you didn’t. Most of those people are just scared out of their wits, collapsed with dehydration and starvation. Only ten hostages died, and only twenty-three were seriously injured.”

His breath hitched and the lances in his side and chest twisted. “Only?”

“Yes, only! Four hundred and forty-three are fine, will be back on their feet and leading normal lives in a couple of days, and it’s thanks to you. I’d say that’s a much better outcome than two. You were absolutely right. It turned out there were twenty-one more bombs planted and only one was detonated. They caught one of the men with a remote-control detonator before he had a chance to act. Seems the others ran away. The security forces still can’t believe the way you’ve turned this around. They didn’t even dream that when you walked in here, unintelligible and totally out of place, you’d turn out to be the wild card who’d turn that nowin situation around.”

He had to wait until his heart unblocked his throat. “The wild card was you. I couldn’t have done anything at all without you. I would have been dead and I would have gotten everyone killed. You saved my life. You saved those people.”

She shook her head. “Oh, just take your dues. If you hadn’t risked your life in the first place, thrown yourself into death’s jaws, over and over, if you hadn’t decided to either save us or die with us, I would have sat there and died with the others when Molokai decided to off us all for best effect.”

“I’ll take my dues if you take yours.”

“Oh, all right. Let’s agree to split the credit—and the blame.”

So she was blaming herself for those who had died or been injured? For those they had killed?

A wave of tenderness swept him. His left arm was splinted to his side by her body. He tried to move his right one, to touch her, to soothe her, to feel that incredible, living mane for himself.

Wrong move. He doubted any move would be OK right now. His lung was scraping against his ribcage, muscles shredded, nerves exposed. “Tell me something,” he gasped, making the pain even worse. “I am going to live?”

There was no mistaking the green flare in her eyes. He didn’t need to see it to feel her concern, her anger at him for endangering himself, at the far worse fate he could have brought on himself. “You’d better!”

“I fail to see what I can…” He paused, waited out a spasm of searing pain. “Do about it if I don’t. If I’m not mistaken, the woman militant shot me in the back and—”

She cut through his feeble words, reassuring, furious. “And the bullet went clear through you! It didn’t hit the scapula, passed between your ribs, went through your right lung and out of your chest wall between the second and third ribs just beside the sternum. It hasn’t touched any major vessels or structures and your lung has already re-inflated. You did lose blood before I collected some through the chest tube, but at least no more is coming!”

So that was what was lodged between his ribs! A chest tube—to evacuate the blood that must have accumulated around his lung. From the second, higher chest tube he could now feel, he analyzed the foci of agony. He’d bet he had a pneumothorax, too, with air leaking from his punctured lung and becoming trapped in the pleural space. No doubt the pressure of the accumulating blood and air had caused his lung to collapse. But the reason a tension hemo-pneumothorax was often rapidly fatal went beyond the blood loss or the collapsed lung. The rising pressure inside the chest caused displacement of the mediastinal structures and pressed on the other lung and the heart, interfering with, then stopping their functions.

The only way to stop the deterioration was to relieve the building pressure, inserting one chest tube in the chest to drain off the blood, and another high enough to let the accumulating air escape. And that was what she’d done—hadn’t she? “Did you pe

rform the tube thoracotomies?”

Her snort was indignant. “As if I’d let anyone else resuscitate you!”

This couldn’t be good, the way his heart was ricocheting inside his chest. It couldn’t be wise either, the way his deep-freeze was starting to thaw. The way he was starting to crave her caring. “And by the feel of it, you didn’t use local anesthesia before you shoved the tubes in my chest!”

Her touch melted, along with her luscious smile, down his cheek, stroked him down to his soul. “We were fresh out of lidocaine. But I wasn’t too concerned about the pain I would cause you. It was one more thing to stimulate you out of unconsciousness.”

“Cruel woman.” A couple of his fingers wrapped around a lock of hair, tugged. She came, willingly, gave him what would really revive him. Her taste, her breath. Her warmth and eagerness. She did all the work, moving her lips over his face, smoothing away the ordeal from his brow, taking the anger and horror and pain from his lips. He moaned it into her and she absorbed it all, imbued him with her vitality.

He felt his consciousness ebbing again. Felt like falling asleep. Hmm. What better thing than to fall asleep in her arms, with her lips on his face…?

Something wrenched him back, to suffer the pain and hear the weeping and scent the stench. Her loss. She was pulling away, leaving him alone and cold and bereft. His eyes snapped open to escape the nightmare, blurred over her image. Then his ears again rang with her frantic order. “Dante, stay with me!”

He winced, tried to pull her back, to dissolve in her warmth and nearness again. “Have mercy, Gulnar. I just want to sleep…”

She nudged him, gentle, then not-so-gentle, insistent, inescapable. “You’re not going to sleep. You’re going to sit up and drink. You’ve lost half of your blood between donation and injury. You’ll enter irreversible shock if you don’t replace the blood volume you’ve lost.”

“Hook me to a fluid bag, piccola. I’ll just take a little nap—”

“Don’t piccola me! No napping, and we don’t have fluid bags to spare. Every one must be kept for the unconscious injured.”