Healing Dr. Alexander

PROLOGUE

“DR. ALEXANDER, now!”

The panic in the head nurse’s voice barely penetrated Jack Alexander’s concentration as he searched for the bleeder that, if not stopped, would claim his patient’s life. The top of the damn artery had started to roll back up the leg and he was having a difficult time finding it amidst all the blood.

“Dr. Alexander!” Becca’s shrill voice called his name a second time.

“Whatever it is, it’s going to have to wait!” he said, not taking his eyes from the teenage boy on the gurney in front of him. “I’ve only got a couple of minutes here or I’m going to lose him.”

The clinic didn’t have enough blood stored to make up for what was currently being pumped out of the poor kid. And while there was a line of people hundreds deep outside the clinic, most of the Somali patients were too close to starvation to afford the blood loss that came with donating. No, if this boy had any chance of survival at all, Jack had to find the top half of the shorn artery. Now.

“They want to talk to whoever’s in charge. I told them you were in surgery. They didn’t care.”

“Who?” he asked, distractedly. Then turning to Ruth, the nurse who was assisting him, he barked, “Stretch his leg out as far as you can. I’ve got to dig for it.” It was times like these that he missed his fully equipped operating room back in the States. Performing surgery in an ill-equipped tent in Somalia might have been his calling, but in moments like this it was also a horror.

“The Shahab,” Becca told him, her voice low and urgent and frightened. That got his attention.

“They’re here?” he demanded, even as he dug deeper into his patient’s leg. He was deadly aware of the moments that kept ticking by. In another ninety seconds this whole situation was going to be moot because the teenager on the table in front of him would be dead. Damn it. He glanced down at the kid’s face. He couldn’t have been more than fourteen or fifteen. Far too young to die.

“They’re outside. They want supplies.”

“We just gave them stuff last week,” he said, following the path the artery had taken, his gloved fingers slipping. Thank God they’d had enough anesthesia to knock the kid out—this time. But if they gave the Somali warlords any more supplies, they wouldn’t have enough for the next emergency. The next shipment from For the Children wasn’t expected for at least three more weeks. “Tell them we don’t have anything left to share.”

“I did. They aren’t listening.”

The panic in her voice finally got through to him, but there was nothing he could do about it. Not then, as his fingers finally brushed against the ragged edge of the severed artery. “Stay here,” he told her as he twisted his arm and shoved his hand a little deeper. “I’ll take care of them when I’m done with this surgery.”

“I don’t think they’re going to wait.”

“They’re going to have to,” he snapped, “because I’m not letting this kid go.” He finally got hold of the artery and pinched it tightly between his thumb and forefinger. “Get the clamp ready, Ruth.”

She already had the surgical clamp in her hand, and extended toward him. He tugged on the artery, not bothering to be gentle. The boy was going to feel like hell when the anesthesia wore off, but at least now he actually had a chance of waking up. Here, now, that was all the hope Jack could offer him.

The knowledge grated his insides raw, but he couldn’t afford to dwell on it. Not right now.

He finally got the artery back down where he could see it, and within seconds had it clamped off, the steady pulsing of blood finally stopped. “Okay, I need the sutures,” he told Ruth. The kid was out of immediate danger, but now came the delicate process of mending the artery. “Fin Dr. Alexander?” he heard the gruff words behind him.

“Am shi!” he shouted at the rebels to get out. This might not be a sterile OR to start with, but that didn’t mean he wanted them tracking in God only knew what kind of germs while his patient’s leg was wide open.

Even as he yelled, he hadn’t turned around. There wasn’t time to be distracted. His nimble hands began weaving the ragged edges of the artery back together. “Get the last pint of O negative,” he told Ruth. “We’ve got to get it in him, quick.”

“Not so fast,” said Mussa, the leader of the rebels. “Nobody gets anything until we have what we came for.”

There was the unmistakable sound of a gun being cocked, and Jack finally glanced up from what he was doing in time to see his nurse’s face, livid with fear. “Ruth,” he told her with firm authority, refusing to let her drown in her own panic. “Go get the blood.” If he could get her away from the rebels, it was one less person for them to hurt.

A gunshot rang out, slamming into the dirt floor near the foot of the hospital gurney even as he tensed for impact. “Damn it!” he shouted. “We’ve got oxygen going in here. You’re going to blow us all up if you’re not careful.”

A bunch of muttered words in Arabic followed his exclamation, and then one of the soldiers—who wasn’t any older than the boy he was currently working on—strode over to the table, shut off the gas that was flowing.

“What the hell are you doing?” Jack exploded, only half lunging over the table at him. The only thing that kept him from fully going after the guy was that he couldn’t afford to stop working. Not now. “Turn that back on!”

There was no response. Jack’s attention and his fingers flew over the torn artery, determined to finish as quickly as possible. His patient wouldn’t die without the oxygen, but it wasn’t optimum, either. Not like anything here was, but still… “Look, let me finish what I’m doing and then we can talk about this,” he said in the most conciliatory tone he could manage. Which wasn’t really, but it was better than swearing at them—or hitting them—both of which he wanted to do. Both of which might mean the difference between life and death for his patient.

The soldier pulled out a pistol, cocked it, and pointed it straight at Jack. “We want to talk now.”

“I’m almost finished, damn it. If I stop now, he’ll lose his leg.”

The man behind him—obviously the leader—laughed. “What does it matter to me if he loses his leg? I need supplies and don’t have time to waste.”

Jack swore again. “Fine, Ruth and Becca will take you back. You can—” He broke off as another shot rang out, this time mere inches from his feet.

“We want you.” He paused for emphasis before continuing. “Our general believes you were not as generous last time as you could have been.”

Anger ripped through Jack. He’d turned over half of his supplies to the bastards the last time they’d been here, so many that he’d all but crippled the clinic. It was a bitter pill to swallow at the best of times—and this was far from the best of times. Still, the alternative was having them ransack the place, destroying whatever they didn’t want. Or worse, having them make life so awful here that For the Children would have to pull out altogether. As it was, they were one of a very few relief clinics that had been allowed into the country to begin with.

While it was true the clinic could help more people if they got to keep all the supplies they received each month, at the same time, how many people would die if they weren’t here to help at all? It was a trade-off that hurt him deeply, but one he’d learned to live with through the years. In this, Somalia was no different from Eritrea or Chechnya or Haiti.

Tamping down on the resentment and fury that were ravaging him from the inside, he muttered, “Fine, whatever. I’m almost done.” He kept working even as he fumed. Another couple of minutes and it would be complete. The other doctor on staff could close the wound up.

“Now!” the leader said. And this time he was the one walking around the table, pointing a gun at Jack.

“Okay, okay.” He was almost finished, almost—

This time when the soldier fired three times, Jack didn’t even flinch, expecting the bullets to slam into the ground once again. His adrenaline was so high that it took him a full thirty seconds to comprehend that these shots hadn’t been fired at the dirt. Even then he didn’t understand, even then he didn’t feel anything until his patient’s artery began, once again, to spurt blood.

He went to stop it, tried to clamp the newly severed ends, but his fingers wouldn’t respond. They wouldn’t do what he needed them to do. And that’s when he finally understood. They hadn’t just shot his patient. They’d shot him, as well.

CHAPTER ONE

HE NEEDED TO get out of the car. Jack knew it, just as he knew his best and oldest friend, Dr. Amanda Jacobs, was waiting for him inside the run-down clinic. He’d been due to meet her here two hours ago, but somehow he’d found a million reasons to be late. Lingering over a lunch he didn’t want and couldn’t bring himself to eat, filling the rental car up with gas, exploring websites about sightseeing in Atlanta, though he had no desire to actually visit the place. Anything and everything to keep him from this parking lot, this moment, this decision he wasn’t ready to make.

Not that it was a done deal, he reassured himself as he finally reached for the door handle. He hadn’t agreed to anything. He was here to see his friend, to take a look around. Checking out the clinic didn’t mean he was promising anything. To Amanda or himself. It proved he was interested in what his friend had been getting up to.

Still, the walk to the front door of the clinic was a long one. And not just because of the bowling ball in his stomach. Both his leg and his hand ached from where he’d been shot two months before; Atlanta’s humidity exacerbating the still recovering tendons.

Which brought up the question he’d been asking himself ever since his plane had landed the night before. What was he doing here? His doctor was in Boston. His physical therapist was in Boston. His family was in Boston. And yet here he was, in Atlanta, checking out a clinic he had absolutely no interest in working in.

This whole trip was stupid. A joke. He didn’t belong here any more than he belonged in the fancy family practice his father had gotten him an interview at in Boston last week. He hadn’t been interested in that job, either, but his father had refused to take no for an answer. Dealing with sniffles and high blood pressure was a long way from being Chief of Thoracic Surgery at John Hopkins, but it was better than “scrabbling away in that pathetic little hovel in Africa,” as the elder Jack Alexander liked to say.

The casual cruelty, and inherent snobbery, of his father’s words was what made Jack dial up Amanda in the first place, then take her up on her frequently issued invitation to come see the newest project she was involved in.

Atlanta felt too foreign, too strange, and that was even before he took into account his ridiculous feelings for Amanda. Feelings that wouldn’t go away, no matter how hopeless they were.

And they were hopeless, he reminded himself viciously. They’d been friends for well over a decade—ever since they’d met as first years at Harvard Medical School—and though he’d been in love with her since they’d duked it out for the top spot in the program, she’d never seen him as anything more than a pal. And now she was married—married—to another of Jack’s closest buddies and any tiny hope he’d held on to that they might one day be together had been officially destroyed.

He closed his eyes, took a deep breath. Started to head to the car. No, he didn’t belong here. But that was the problem, wasn’t it? He didn’t belong anywhere. Not anymore. Not like he used to. These days he was a shell of his former self, one who could barely hold a stethoscope steady let alone a scalpel.

Jack cut off the familiar thought as he forced himself to turn back around and step into the clinic. He let the cracked glass door with its iron burglar bars swing shut behind him. The pity party was getting old. Especially since he was the only one at the table.Sick of himself, and the grinding pain he couldn’t escape no matter how many exercises he did, he tried to distract himself by looking around. Analyzing the surroundings.