Close Pursuit

“That’s not encouraging.”

“Since we’re being so democratic about this, ask her,” he suggested. “I’ll try to time the incision for during an artillery barrage. She’ll have to do the rest.”

Katie spoke briefly to the girl. Determination entered the girl’s eyes, and Katie thought that she was more scared than the girl at this point. The girl twisted a length of her burka and told Katie to hold it in her mouth for her when the time came.

“Ready?” Alex murmured from his crouched position between the girl’s legs. The girl’s grotesquely distended belly, now bared to the cold air, was pale in the darkness. How on earth was Alex going to do a C-section in these conditions?

The girl put the gag in her mouth, and Katie grasped the ends of it, her entire body shaking with terror. The girl wasn’t shaking much less.

“Next explosion,” Alex murmured, scalpel poised.

Kaboom!

Alex slashed. The girl screamed. The night lit up and blood spouted black and wet from the girl’s belly. A second slash, and the girl thrashed wildly.

“Hold her down,” Alex ground out. “Placenta’s separating. She’s hemorrhaging.”

Katie leaned on the cloth gag, pinning the girl’s head to the ground. A knee across the girl’s shoulders helped hold her in place, while Alex knelt on the girl’s thighs. He worked fast, and Katie did her level best not to look at the gore unfolding.

Instead, she stared into the girl’s panicked, animalistic eyes. All humanity drained out of the girl as she screamed against the gag again and again. And then, just like that, the girl went limp. Her eyes glazed over.

Is she dead? Katie fumbled under the girl’s jaw for a pulse.

“Thank God,” Alex breathed. He worked even faster, hacking the baby free of its mother’s body.

Katie was shocked at how fast Alex had the baby out. Thirty seconds, maybe, all told. A lifetime for that poor girl, though.

“I can’t find a pulse,” she told him frantically.

“First things first,” he snapped. “Gotta get the kid breathing.”

The baby let out a wail that he quickly muffled with a hand over its mouth. Alex shoved the baby at her fast. “Keep it quiet.”

Like she had the first idea how to silence a newborn infant? The baby was slippery with blood and white, greasy gook. Quickly, she wrapped the child in the spare towel Alex had laid out and slipped the child down inside her coat for warmth, which was a trick while keeping a hand over the crying child’s mouth. She hoped she wasn’t suffocating the poor thing. What a hell of a way to be born.

“Hold the flashlight,” Alex ordered.

She didn’t have three hands, for crying out loud. But he was probably doing the work of three surgeons right now, so she didn’t complain. Kneeling awkwardly, she kept the baby’s mouth covered as it slid farther down in her coat and held the flashlight in her free hand where Alex pointed it.

He worked frantically on the mother, his hands flying.

“How’s she doing?”

“Bleeding all over the place. I’m losing her,” he gritted out.

Another round of gunfire from nearby made Katie jump and the baby cry even louder. She made hushing noises into her coat even though she doubted they would have any effect on the squalling infant.

Alex started to swear in a steady stream under his breath, and in the light of the next mortar, his face looked gray. She risked a glance down. There was blood everywhere. A huge pool of it lay under the girl. The formerly white towel was now black with it. And where Alex’s hands worked inside the girl, his fingers disappeared in a flowing puddle of it. Streams of blood trickled down the girl’s belly unchecked. Katie had never seen so much blood in all her life.

“Listen for a heartbeat,” he ordered.

She laid her head on the girl’s chest. The rib cage did not rise, and she heard only the swish of her own blood in her ear. God, she hated silence. But then a barrage of gunfire made it too loud for her to hear a thing, and that was worse. She hunted again, frantically, for a pulse under the girl’s jaw. Nothing.

Tears welling in her eyes, she shook her head at Alex.

He continued to work in grim silence for several more minutes. But finally he went still. He stared down at the girl’s body bleakly. And then all he said in a terrible, agonized whisper was, “Turn off the flashlight.”

Her second hand freed, she turned to the business of quieting the crying infant. She maneuvered the hot little bundle inside her coat until it lay across her, the baby’s head on her left breast. She remembered hearing somewhere that the sound of heartbeats calmed babies. It took a few moments, but it worked.

Alex shook himself out of wherever he’d gone mentally and crawled to the edge of the crevasse. “We’ve got to get out of here.”

“What about her?” Katie glanced down at the corpse of the girl who’d been so brave and angry and determined to live.

“We have to leave her.”

Every cell in Katie’s being protested the notion of just abandoning the girl here like a discarded hunk of meat. Thankfully, Alex crawled back to the girl’s side. Gently, he closed her eyelids before pulling the end of her burka across her face. He covered the bloody mess that had been the girl’s belly with a towel and arranged the girl’s robes over it all.

He placed his hand over the girl’s heart and murmured barely loud enough for Katie to hear, “Rest in peace, and be with whatever God you worshipped in life.”

The tears overflowed from Katie’s eyes then, and she sucked back a sob. She was shocked when strong arms wrapped around her, dragging her up against a hard body. Between them was the hot bump of an infant torn from its mother’s dying body. Katie didn’t even know what sex it was. A hand pushed her face down onto his shoulder; his own face was buried in her hair. He shuddered against her while she cried into his neck.

But as the ominous thwocking of a helicopter became audible in the distance, he stilled and muttered into her hair, “If you want that baby to live, grieve later. Follow me now. Fast and silent.”

CHAPTER FOUR

THE NEXT HOUR was a nightmare. The mountain was no less steep at the top than at the bottom, and the baby fussed occasionally, sending her into a cold panic as she tried frantically to shush the newborn. It didn’t help matters that the battle raging below grew more intense as the night wore on. And who knew what lay over the mountain peak?

Alex was grim and silent, focused intently on finding a route up the mountain. He was quick to lend her a helping hand, though, or to haul her up over a particularly rough patch. As she’d correctly guessed, he was deceptively strong. And when her strength lagged and her will to go on faltered, he was indomitable.

And there was always that intense hug to think about. It had been more than simple comfort. He had let her inside his guard for just a minute. Made a human connection with her. Maybe even needed her for a second there.

Alex murmured from ahead, “Stay low. We’re cresting the mountain. We don’t want our silhouettes visible below.”

She crawled across the open peak and huddled in the lee of a boulder just over the crest beside Alex.

“How’s the baby?” he asked.

“Alive. It moves around now and then.”

“Let me see it,” Alex muttered.

She unzipped her coat and lifted the infant out. In a flash of mortar fire, she saw it was a baby girl. Said baby girl took immediate and loud umbrage at being exposed to the sharp chill, however, and started to squall.

Alex pulled a clean towel out of his pack and swaddled the infant in it after a fast examination. Thoughtfully, he passed the baby back to her, and Katie slipped the child back in her coat. It took a minute or so, but the baby quieted in the warm and dark next to Katie’s heart.

“We have to get food for her,” Katie whispered.

“She can go a day or two without eating, actually,” Alex replied. “Most babies don’t take in much nourishment in their first twenty-four hours.”