Chapter 37 - Polina
Polina
Waiting is the one thing medical training never actually prepares you for.
Katya helped without being asked. Sasha poured cups of terrible coffee from a thermos and started handing them out like candy.
Nobody pretended we were anywhere other than where we were.
I put my phone on the corner of the table with the screen facing up. The radio sits on a separate table to my right, manned by one of Boris’s men, a compact, quiet operative named Stepan who has spent the last twenty minutes adjusting frequencies.
“Sit down,” Katya orders from the folding chair behind me.
“I’m checking the supply inventory.”
“You’ve checked it twice.”
“I’m checking it a third time.”
She doesn’t argue. She gets up and refills her coffee instead, and when she comes back, she positions her chair two feet closer to mine without commenting on it.
Sasha pulls her knees up to her chest on the crate she claimed as a seat and wraps both hands around her cup, and the three of us settle into the particular quiet of women who know exactly what’s happening three kilometers away and have agreed, without saying so, not to fill the space with noise that won’t help anyone.
The radio cuts to life at 9:23.
“Perimeter breached,” Boris reports through the radio. “Alpha team is in position. Some resistance at the north gate, nothing the team can’t handle.”
I breathe in through my nose and out through my mouth.
A second check-in comes at 9:51. “Resistance heavier than expected on the east side. Two Kozlov injuries, neither critical. We’re pushing through.”
Katya’s hand finds the arm of my chair. I pretend not to notice.
“They’re doing fine,” Sasha assures us both.
“I know,” I reply, which is not the same thing as believing it.
The radio goes quiet for seventeen minutes. I know it’s seventeen minutes because I check the clock on my phone at 9:54 and again at 10:11, and the gap between the two numbers is something I feel in the back of my skull.
Sasha gets up and stretches. One of the nurses, a young woman named Vera who introduced herself this morning with the handshake of someone who wanted to make a good impression during a crisis, refills the water basin without being asked.
The other nurse, an older man named Gerasim who has clearly done field work before and has the quiet competence to prove it, does a secondary check on the blood pressure cuffs.
At 11:13, a different voice comes through. Ruslan.
“Lev’s team is inside the main building. Second floor. We’ve got eyes on two confirmed guards down in the east corridor.”
I press two fingers to the inside of my wrist without thinking about it, checking my own pulse the way I’d check a patient’s, because apparently I’ve forgotten how to regulate my own body like a normal person.
“That’s good,” Katya comments. “That means they’re through the hard part.”
I nod along, but really, confirmation just means Lev is inside his father’s walls.
I’ve thought about this moment all morning, trying to decide whether it would feel different when it actually arrived.
It does, and not in the way I expected. There’s no relief in it.
Knowing exactly where he is and having no ability to reach him is worse than not knowing, because now I have something specific to be afraid of.
A wounded Kozlov soldier arrives at 11:29, half-carried by a younger man who looks barely twenty and is doing an admirable job of pretending he isn’t scared.
The injured man took a round to the outer thigh, clean entry and exit, no arterial involvement from what I can see through the field dressing someone applied before they got to me.
“Sit him down,” I tell the young one, and he does.
The work takes over the way it always does.
I strip the field dressing, irrigate the wound, check the tissue for damage I can’t see from the surface, and find none.
My hands move through the motions of suturing with the muscle memory of ten years while my ears stay on the radio.
Boris checks in at 11:34. Operation ongoing. No specifics.
“You doing okay?” I ask my patient, whose name I learn is Byron and who is twenty-six years old and clearly determined not to look weak in front of a woman.
“Fine,” he grinds out through his teeth.
“You can be honest. I won’t tell anyone.”
He winces as I tie off the suture.
There are three more stitches to place before I can close, and I place each one with the same level of attention I’d give any other wound in any other trauma bay on any other day.
It is the only honest thing I can do right now.
Byron is in front of me and needs to be taken care of, and the man I’m terrified for is three kilometers away and beyond anything my hands can fix.
So I close the wound in front of me, and I keep listening.
“How many floors does the building have?” Katya asks from behind me. She’s directing the question at Stepan, not at me, which tells me she’s been thinking about it for a while.
“Four,” Stepan replies. “Main operations are on the second and third.”
“And Lev’s team is on the second.”
“Last confirmed position.”
I put a fresh dressing over Byron’s thigh and tape it down with three strips, then help him straighten his leg. “Keep weight off it for the next forty-eight hours,” I tell him. “If it swells or the dressing soaks through before then, find me.”
He thanks me as the young soldier helps him to one of the chairs along the wall. I strip my gloves and pull on a fresh pair, because that’s the protocol, and I stand at the supply table and wait, trying not to look at the clock on my phone every thirty seconds.
It’s 12:17 when I notice the radio has gone quiet, and this silence feels different from the earlier ones.
Before, the gaps between check-ins carried the background static of a live feed. Distant sounds I couldn’t identify. The occasional burst of something I couldn’t quite decode. Now the frequency is clean, which means Stepan has lost the relay or the relay has moved, and neither option is comforting.
“What happened to the feed?” I ask.
Stepan adjusts the dial. “Interference. It’ll come back.”
“How long?”
“I don’t know.”
I turn back to the supply table and rearrange items that don’t need rearranging. Sasha appears at my elbow with a hand wrapped around my forearm, not pulling, just resting there.
“He knows what he’s doing,” she insists.
“I know that.”
“Then stop trying to organize the gauze into a shape that will somehow change the outcome.”
The radio comes back at 12:33 with a burst of static, and then Boris’s voice cuts through flat and businesslike. “Teams two and four confirm east and south exits are sealed. We’ve got movement on the tunnel.”
Good. That means Boris is cutting off the exits exactly the way they planned, which means the plan is working, which means Lev’s intelligence held up, which means I should feel relieved.
I don’t feel relieved. I feel nothing from the neck down.
The minutes stack up. Boris checks in at 1:11, again at 1:29, and both times the update is the same. Operation ongoing. Interior teams not yet confirmed clear.
Lev’s voice doesn’t come through.
I keep waiting for it. I’m not sure when I started expecting it.
At some point in the last hour, without deciding to, I started building the next sixty seconds around the possibility of hearing it, and when it doesn’t come, the next sixty seconds feel like standing in a room where the floor has gone soft.
Katya comes to stand beside me. She doesn’t say anything. She’s trained for silence the way I’m trained for action, and right now, her silence is the most useful thing she has to offer.
At 1:43, Boris’s voice comes through again, and this time, it sounds different.
“Does anyone have eyes on Lev?” A short pause, followed by static. “Lev’s team has gone dark inside the building. Requesting confirmation of his position.”
No one answers.
My hands stop moving over the suture kit I’ve been pretending to organize.
“Any unit with eyes on Lev Morozov, confirm position,” Boris requests again.
The radio stays quiet.
Katya’s hand closes around my arm, and I feel the pressure of it somewhere distant, like a sound through a wall. My brain starts doing what it does when a patient crashes without warning, running through the variables in sequence, working the problem from every available angle.
Did Lev switch sides the moment he stepped back inside his father’s walls?
He knew that building better than anyone in Boris’s team.
A man who wanted to run a long play would have had a dozen opportunities in the last twelve hours alone to feed bad intelligence without anyone being the wiser.
If that was his plan, then I handed my entire family to a man who built the trap himself, and the woman who saved his life in that ER would be the last piece of useful stupidity he ever needed from anyone.
Or the intelligence was good, and the plan worked, and somewhere inside that building, Lev is on a concrete floor with no radio and no one coming for him.
One scenario makes me a fool. The other makes me someone who may be about to lose everything she didn’t plan to want.
“Polina.” Katya’s voice is quiet and even as she pulls me from my panic. “Look at me. The radio goes dark in a firefight. You know that.”
I do know that. I know it the same way I know how to suture a femoral laceration without looking at my hands, and it doesn’t help at all right now.
“Boris is asking because he wants to confirm, not because he’s certain something’s wrong,” she continues.
“But he wouldn’t ask twice unless he’s not getting an answer.”
She holds eye contact and doesn’t tell me I’m wrong, because I’m not wrong, and she knows it. The radio stays quiet, and I stay where I am while the space between Boris’s last transmission and whatever comes next stretches out in front of me like a corridor with no visible end.
He said he’d come back, but a promise made in a dark room doesn’t negotiate with what happens inside a building three kilometers away.
The radio fires to life, and everyone in the triage station goes rigid.
Boris’s voice fills the room one more time.
“Any unit. Anyone with eyes on Lev Morozov. Confirm now.”
Silence.