Chapter Thirty-Two
M ax watched Ali lose her battle with consciousness. She wasn’t responding well to the antibiotic cocktail. Her labored breathing and the bloody discharge worried him the most, but she’d also been badly beaten.
“I want her on a plane and back to the base as soon as possible. She may have broken bones or have a small internal bleed,” he said to Dr. Samuels and the two nurses who’d entered the tent.
“Sir,” one of the nurses said, “it’ll take some time to get an isolation medevac prepped and here.”
“As soon as possible,” he said, not caring that he sounded like an inflexible asshole.
“Yes, sir.” The nurse saluted and left the tent.
“Sir,” Dr. Samuels said to him in a careful tone. “I took a closer look at the powder Stone breathed in under the microscope. There are anthrax spores in it, but also flour and cinnamon.”
“Cinnamon?”
“It’s quite irritating if you inhale it.”
There could be only one conclusion. “He used it to facilitate the spores getting deeper into tissue.”
“That’s my fear as well,” Dr. Samuels said softly. She put her hand on Max’s shoulder and squeezed.
“Increase the dosage of the antibiotics and shorten the time between doses.” Unconscious, Ali looked far too small to be the lethal physical threat she was. Her size and bruises made her look vulnerable and beaten.
One of the nurses came back inside. “Sir,” she said to Max, “There’s a boy out here who asked to speak to you.”
Max exited the tent and found Coban waiting by an armed soldier.
Max waved the soldier away and crouched in front of the boy. “What do you need? Food? Water?” he asked in Arabic.
Coban looked over his shoulder at the tent Max had left, a huge frown on his face. “Is she going to die?”
“I’m doing everything I can to prevent that,” Max told him. “Where is your brother?”
“The soldiers gave us food and he fell asleep.” Coban looked up at Max. Calm, much too calm. “Father is dead. One of the bad men shot him. What will happen to us now?”
Max met Coban’s gaze. “A doctor is going to make sure you’re not sick. You will have to leave this place, but we will make sure you are safe. Do you have family in another village or town?”
Out of the corner of his eye he saw Dr. Samuels walking back into the tent with more IV antibiotic bags. When had she left? Max shook his head. He needed to sleep too.
“I don’t know,” Coban said, his chin quivering.
Max wanted to pull the boy into a hug, but the biohazard suit made that impossible. “You and Berez are going to be safe, I promise.” He stood and gestured for the boy to follow him. “Let’s get you back to your brother so you can sleep too.”
The village looked very different than it had only an hour ago. The first air drop had happened only an hour after Max made the desperate call for antibiotics. He’d spent that hour guarding Ali, directing people to rescue Nolan from deep inside the old hospital, and triaging the sick who’d ventured out of their homes after the gunfire stopped.
He estimated that 90 percent of the occupants of the village had become infected with the flu. A dangerously high rate. Any virus that could infect that many people in only a few days was alarmingly infectious. Any virus this contagious, with a death rate of thirty to forty percent, could only be described as an infectious nuclear bomb.
As a result, he’d ordered the entire village and the region around it quarantined.
Four hours after his call for help, medical and security personnel began arriving. The fires were put out and a house-to-house search for survivors was undertaken. Anyone with symptoms was separated from those who appeared healthy and taken to a hastily erected tent where a combat support hospital had been set up.
Healthy survivors were taken to another tent with hot food, clean water, cots, and heaters, so they could eat and sleep.
Blood samples had been taken from everyone, including Max, Ali, and the surviving members of their team. Only Max and Ali had tested negative for the flu.
Dr. Grace Samuels and Dr. Sophia Perry arrived with the medical team. Grace was overseeing the assessment and treatment of the disease, while Sophia took over the investigative side of the mission, confirming Max’s determination of the virus and restarting the production of onsite vaccine. It wouldn’t help Ali, but it had to be done.
As Sophia put it, why fuck with a method that’s working?
His biggest concern now was Ali and her worsening condition. They’d gotten antibiotics running into her within an hour and a half of exposure. She shouldn’t be getting worse.
He and Coban reached the tent where the relatively healthy citizens of the village were being cared for. He got the boy into a cot next to his brother and tucked him in. He should tell Ali that the boys were safe. She’d want to know.
Before he left the tent, he let himself watch the staff and villagers interact, ensuring all that needed to be done was being done.
Max nodded to the staff and returned to Ali’s tent. She wasn’t alone.
Sitting next to her was someone in a biohazard suit. Max recognized the man by his posture.
General Stone.
Max stood in the doorway of the tent, his stomach dropping into the very bottom of his steel-toed combat boots.
“Come in, Max.” The general’s voice sounded tired.
“Sir.” Max hesitated, then moved to stand on the other side of the cot. “I... There’s no excuse for...”
“Max,” General Stone said, “I know. It’s not your fault.”
“Sir, with respect, bullshit.”
General Stone smiled. “I see she’s been a positive influence on your attitude.”
“As the ranking officer, the responsibility for this clusterfuck is mine.”
“Max, you came into this situation with a team of four. We sent in another dozen to help. Do you know how many militants were here?”
“Uh, no, sir.”
“There were two different groups with over eighty fighters. You had bad intel, facing an insane adversary deploying an out of control biological weapon. There is only so much you can control, and my daughter has never played anything safe in her entire life.”
“I appreciate that sir, but I should have anticipated that Akbar would booby-trap his own body.”
“She’ll argue she should have thought of it.” General Stone cleared his throat. “What’s the prognosis?”
“I wish I could say it’s good, but to be honest, I don’t know. She’s not responding to the antibiotics as well as I’d like.”
“She’s a fighter.”
“Yes, sir, she is.”
“So are you.” The general stood. “You’re dead on your feet, Max. I order you to get some sleep.”
He didn’t want to leave Ali, wanted to monitor her progress. But his brain just couldn’t come up with a believable excuse for the general.
“Before you can protest, you can sleep here.”
On cue, a biohazard-suited nurse brought in a cot and set it on the ground on the other side of the small tent.
This he could do. “Thank you, sir.”
Max was so tired, there was no point in putting off. He lay down facing Ali and closed his eyes.
* * *
M ax woke to a flurry of activity.
There were several people inside the tent surrounding Ali’s cot shouting at each other.
He blinked the last of sleep away and the realization that they were performing CPR on her smashed into him.
His first reaction was to get to his feet and charge in to take over, but there were too many bodies between him and Ali. No, they didn’t need him barging in when they were already doing as good a job as he could. What he could do was get out of their way.
He could see Ali’s face in gaps between the first responders. Her pale skin, dark, dark circles under her eyes, and the ventilator tube down her throat told him she’d gotten a lot worse very quickly.
They’d barely had any time together, but he already knew she was the best partner he could have ever asked for, professionally as well as personally. He couldn’t lose her now. He couldn’t .
Grace shouted, “Clear!” Everyone stepped back and Grace hit Ali with a jolt of electricity.
For a moment there wasn’t a sound, not a cry or cough, total silence. Then a beep echoed through the tent. And another. And another.
“She’s back!” Grace cried. “Let’s get her ready for transport.”
“Grace,” Max called out.
“Max, good. You’re awake. General Stone wants you on the same transport as Sergeant Stone. The base has an isolation room ready for her and you’ll be decontaminated when you arrive.”
He hesitated, torn by dual responsibilities. This had been his mission, his situation to resolve. He didn’t want to leave the job half-finished, but he didn’t want to let Ali out of his sight either. “What happened while I slept?”
“We had to put her on a respirator with one hundred percent oxygen. Her oxygen saturation got as low as sixty-two percent, but it’s back up to seventy-one now.”
Max glanced at the monitor and confirmed that number. “Has she coded before now?”
“No, that was the first one.”
“Can you manage here without me?”
Grace’s eyes smiled. “Yes. Besides, the general issued an order, not a suggestion. You’re supposed to stay with Ali. You’re the best person we have to determine what she needs.” She pushed him to follow Ali’s gurney. “Go. I’ll keep you updated on things here.”
Duty and desire warred within him so hard his fingertips tingled with the need to do something, anything . “Thank you, Grace.”
“Whatever you need, Max.”
Max followed the transport team carrying Ali’s gurney down one of the narrow roads leading from the center of the village toward the valley. Once past the last houses, he could see a waiting medevac helicopter poised to take off, its rotors creating enough wind to make the inside of his biohazard suit sound like he was taking off in a balloon.
He waited while the team strapped Ali’s gurney securely onto the bulkhead, then stepped forward. One of the combat medics grabbed him by the arm and helped him into the bird.
It took more muscle power than it should have. Then again, he was sleep deprived, hadn’t eaten enough food to feed a mouse, and had taken a beating. The fact was, he should’ve been on a gurney of his own.
He hadn’t even reported his own injuries yet. Oh, the head wound had gotten looked at, cleaned, and rebandaged, but the bullet wound in his side hadn’t. He was going to hear about that one from someone.
Max sat at Ali’s feet with a clear view of her heart and ventilator monitors. She was stable for now, and her oxygen saturation was up to eighty-eight.
He’d take any good sign there was.
He put his head back, intending to rest for just a few minutes, but when he opened his eyes, they were coming in for a landing at the base in Bahrain.
He glanced at Ali’s monitors, but nothing had changed.
He got out first, then waited to one side while the team off-loaded Ali and ran her into the base. They didn’t go very far. She was taken into one tent, while he was guided into another next to it.
Three people in biohazard suits were waiting for him, as was a portable decontamination shower. They literally hosed him, his biohazard suit, and clothing down as he removed it. After he got his pants off, he had to peel the dirty scarf away from his side carefully to avoid causing unnecessary bleeding. One of the decontamination team looked at the wound, then made a radio call.
By the time he was declared clean there were a couple of nurses waiting to take a look.
“How old is this?” one of them asked.
“I don’t know.” He shrugged. “Maybe seven hours.”
The nurses took him by the arms and led him toward a wheelchair.
“What is Sergeant Stone’s current condition?” he asked.
“We’re still evaluating her, but she’s stable.”
He looked at the tent she’d gone into and balked at sitting in the chair. He wanted to stay with her. “Have you moved her to the hospital already?”
“Yes, sir. The on-duty physicians want to consult as soon as you’re ready.”
“They’ll consult now. My being ready has no bearing on Stone’s treatment.” He gave the two nurses his best hard-line look.
“Yes, sir.”
He began giving the nurse a history of Ali’s injuries and how the anthrax was introduced into her system.
They entered the hospital a minute later and Max insisted on seeing Ali before he allowed the medical staff to put him in a treatment room so his wound could be cleaned and sewn up. They also insisted on antibiotics, which he agreed to, and at least eight hours of rest, which he completely ignored.
His head wound was actually worse than he’d thought. The bullet that grazed him hadn’t just cut a furrow through his skin, but scraped off a layer of bone as well. They did an X-ray and decided there wasn’t much more they could do about it than bandage it up.
They’d given Ali an MRI and thankfully she’d sustained no internal bleeding. It did reveal two broken ribs, and the extent of the damage to her lungs.
Whatever Akbar had put in the powder she breathed in caused a great deal of irritation and swelling, which meant less oxygen was reaching her bloodstream.
Max explained it to General Stone. “It’s out of our hands now and in hers. If she can survive long enough for the antibiotics to kill off the anthrax, she’s got a good chance. But her lungs aren’t in good shape. The spores she inhaled along with the other ingredients of Akbar’s poison have irritated the tissue enough to cause significant swelling. Fluid in the lungs. We have to give the lungs time to recover and allow the swelling to go down.”
“But if her lungs are full of fluid, is she drowning?”
“As long as some oxygen is making it into her bloodstream, she’ll survive. We can do some things to help. Put her on one hundred percent oxygen, medically paralyze her so her muscles don’t use up any oxygen, and even give her a unit or two of packed cells to increase the number of red blood cells available—”
“You’re babbling, Max,” the general interrupted. “You know your job. You don’t need to explain it all to me, just do it.”
“I will, sir.” Max paused, then squared his shoulders and said, “I’d like to formally apologize for the mission going so wrong. I’ll have a report for you in a few hours and will present myself for any disciplinary action you’d like to take.”
“No.”
“Sir?”
“And don’t mention it again, Max,” General Stone said, pointing a finger at him. “Get your head back in the game. Got it?”
He didn’t agree, but he wasn’t the general in the room. “Yes, sir.”
“Keep me informed, but don’t wait for my permission if she needs some kind of medical procedure. You’re the expert. I trust your judgment.”
His judgment had gotten them into the situation they were in now. His judgment had failed. Max opened his mouth, but General Stone turned on his heel and left before he could make a sound.
That was just as well. What could he say that he hadn’t already? General Stone had made it clear he didn’t want to hear any more explanations, excuses, or apologies.
Max was able to set up a sort of mobile office right outside Ali’s intensive care room. Mostly a laptop computer, a cell phone, and a small rolling desk. His proximity allowed him to maintain a constant watch on her condition while still writing his mission report, communicating with Dr. Samuels and Dr. Perry at the village, and reviewing the information on the mini-flu outbreak at the base in Bahrain.
The flu that had spread through the supply department like wildfire was very nearly the same virus that caused all the death and destruction at the village. Max wondered if Akbar had tried to release it first via person to person contact between the receiving staff and local suppliers of fresh fruit and vegetables. Its lack of virulence must have spurred Akbar into tinkering with it further, creating a more deadly version which he’d released on the refugees at the village.
Dr. Perry had done some backtracking on Akbar’s movements, thanks to a couple of the militants they captured. The chemist had released his flu among his supporters, and their families had become infected. For a chance at receiving the vaccine, they were willing to confess all.
Akbar hadn’t just cooked up a few deadly pathogens, he’d taught other people how to do it too. Most had caught the flu and died, but not all. Some survived and left the training camp Akbar ran in northern Syria for who knew where.
Not only was Max going to need his team of medical specialists and their Special Forces partners working harder than ever, he could see a need for more soldiers who could be trained to find the people actively creating biological weapons.
There was just no other way to find all the militants Akbar had trained.
He was going to have to request more people, more supplies, more everything.
He just didn’t know if he could do any of it.
He listened to Ali’s ventilator thunk and hiss in its steady pattern. If she died...would he want to?
She’d given no sign of improvement. No change at all.
The current nurse on duty came out of the room and stopped in front of him. “Sir, would you mind going in and talking to her? I’d like to see if she’s aware.”
Max nodded and went inside. He stood next to her bed and for the first time in his career as a doctor, his ability to separate himself emotionally from a patient failed. “Ali?” he asked, his voice cracking. “The nurses want to know if you’re awake. Personally, I’d pretend to be sleeping if I were you.”
Next to his head the beep of her heart monitor sped up as her heartrate rose by ten, then fifteen beats per minute.
“Excellent,” the nurse said. “She’s reacting well to the sound of your voice. Thank you, sir.”
Max nodded, but didn’t follow the woman out of the room, didn’t say anything at all. He couldn’t. His throat was choked with a lake of tears.
All because the bravest person he’d ever met in his life recognized his voice. Despite the half a dozen machines she was hooked up to, with all their beeping and white noise. Despite the drugs keeping her from losing her mind while medically paralyzed. Despite the crushing weight she had to feel sitting on her chest, preventing her from getting the air she needed, she knew him. Reacted to him. Showed him how much he mattered to her with just her heartbeat.
He stood there for a solid minute, not even breathing.
Stood there and prayed for that miracle again, because he knew only one thing.
He couldn’t live without her.
He swayed and realized his knees were shaking so bad he wasn’t going to be able to stand up much longer.
Fuck it. He was going sit down right here next to her bed and pray.
He sank down to his knees and leaned his forehead against the rail of the bed. “I love you,” he told her. Her heartbeat sped up once more and tears rolled down his face. “I love you,” he said again. “You’ve shown me every moment since the day I met you what courage was. I thought it meant keeping your word and causing no harm to anyone, but you’ve shown me real courage has to be ready to fight for what’s right. I’ve been so afraid of fighting, afraid I wouldn’t be able to think through the rage. You showed me how to stay me and still fight. I want to wake up next to you every morning for the next forty or fifty years. I want to be your partner, your friend, and your lover.”
He wiped the wetness away, but there was no stopping the waterfall of grief. “Fight for me, Ali. Fight for us. Don’t go.”
He hadn’t cried since his father had destroyed their family.
Now he did.