Deception Game (29 page)

Spotting the movement and realizing that she’d somehow managed to free herself, Drake drew his weapon. If she intended to attack one of his teammates with the kitchen knife, he wouldn’t hesitate to drop her.

‘Drop the knife,’ he warned. ‘It’s not worth dying for.’

Straightaway the knife clattered to the floor, though he got the impression it was because it had served its purpose rather than because his threat carried much weight. And far from expressing anger or dismay at having her desperate plan thwarted, the woman merely aimed a disdainful glance his way.

‘If you want to shoot me, then do it. I am not afraid of you,’ she challenged him, speaking nearly flawless English that carried only a faint accent. ‘But you will be killing the only person who can save this man’s life.’

Drake frowned, surprised both by the fact she spoke English, and by the grim warning she’d just issued. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I am a surgeon,
Ryan
.’ She practically spat his name. ‘This man has a laceration of the profunda femoris artery, and since I don’t see an exit wound, it seems likely the bullet is still inside. He needs surgery to remove it, an immediate arterial clamp and repair of the artery if he is to live. If any of you think you can do this, then please go ahead. Otherwise get out of my way and let me save him.’

Her dark eyes swept across each of her captors, burning with anger and barely suppressed hatred.

‘He won’t last much longer, Ryan,’ McKnight warned, tightening the tourniquet once more in a desperate effort to conserve whatever blood remained to him.

Drake still had his weapon levelled at Sowan’s wife. ‘How do I know you won’t kill him?’

If she felt they were fighting to save his life simply to torture him to death later, she might well kill him to spare him the suffering.

‘He is my husband. I am going to help save his life.’ She took a step forward, her eyes locked with his. ‘As I said, if you want to stop me, then do it now. Otherwise stand aside.’

She took another step forward, and another, until the silencer was pressing into her chest. Still she wouldn’t back down.

For Drake the choice, stark and unforgiving though it might have been, was clear. Kill her and watch Sowan bleed to death, or let her live and risk killing him anyway.

Hell of a decision.

‘If you kill him, you die next,’ he promised.

She didn’t flinch for a moment. ‘If killing is all you understand, then so be it.’

Saying nothing further, Drake lowered the weapon and reluctantly moved aside, allowing her access to the patient.

She wasted no time taking charge of the situation, quickly checking his pulse and papillary response. ‘I need boiled water, a sharp knife, a pair of pliers and any medical equipment you can find. Bring the owner of this house in here, if you haven’t killed him already,’ she added with a scornful look.

‘Keira, bring the old man through,’ Drake called out.

In short order, the farmer was escorted through to the kitchen at gunpoint. He surveyed the scene before him; the injured man, the bloodstained table and the woman in a nightgown working frantically to help him.

Straightaway she started talking in Arabic, speaking her questions in a low, quiet, efficient tone so as to convey her needs as quickly as possible. The farmer glanced at Drake and the others suspiciously, perhaps unwilling to help them even if an innocent man’s life was at stake, though a more forceful prompting at last elicited a response.

‘He says there is a first-aid kit in the barn outside, just to the right of the main door,’ she translated. ‘Bring it here now.’

‘Cole,’ Drake ordered.

Mason nodded. ‘On it.’

McKnight had already set a pot of water on the gas cooker, and was working the controls to start it boiling.

Sowan’s wife wasn’t finished yet however. ‘I need pliers, tweezers, anything that can grasp a small object. Find something.’

It was Drake’s turn to start looking. The small kitchen was cluttered with objects and items of all shapes and sizes, from the usual crockery, cutlery and frying pans, to food and spices, to tools like screwdrivers and wire cutters, and even dismantled electrical goods. There was no real order or system to it; it had just been dumped wherever was convenient at the time. It reminded him of his kitchen back home.

That being the case, what he needed was The Drawer. Every kitchen in the world had one. It was the place where everything useful seemed to end up sooner or later, from spare batteries to light bulbs, instruction manuals, keys and pretty much everything else that didn’t have a logical storage place.

Rifling through the old-fashioned kitchen units, it took him three attempts to find what he was looking for. In this case, The Drawer was home to a small box of shells for the shotgun, electrical wiring, nuts and bolts and screws of various sizes, and mercifully a pair of needle-nose pliers.

‘Got them,’ he said, turning towards Sowan’s wife.

She inspected them for a moment before apparently deciding they were suitable. ‘Throw them in the boiling water. They must be sterile.’

With the pot on the cooker now steaming and just starting to bubble, Drake dumped the pliers in. As far as field operations went, this was undoubtedly one of the most improvised jobs he’d witnessed.

At that moment, Mason came running back into the kitchen, breathless and clutching a small green first-aid box.

‘Here,’ he said, practically tearing it open, and dumping the contents on the table.

Amongst the sterilized dressings, rubber gloves and alcoholic wipes, Sowan’s wife spied a little suture kit and held it up. ‘This will have to do,’ she decided, quickly pulling on the gloves. ‘Give me the pliers, and get ready to hold him down.’

A severed artery was rather like a burst hosepipe; as long as there was water flowing through it, it would continue to leak until some way was found to clamp it shut.

There was no great technicality to what she had to do next. Her first objective was to find the bullet and extract it. Once it was out, she needed to find the damaged artery and use the pliers to clamp it shut. It wasn’t a permanent solution by any means, but it would stop the blood loss and allow them to stabilize his condition. If it worked.

Sowan had been hovering on the verge of unconsciousness since they’d laid him on the table, but the moment his wife pulled apart the wound and pushed the pliers inside, he kicked and thrashed, crying out in agony and threatening to fall right off the table.

‘Hold him!’ she commanded, having to raise her voice to be heard.

Mason and Drake gripped him by the shoulders while McKnight took his legs, exerting no small amount of force to keep him pinned down. For a dying man suffering from severe blood loss, he was still capable of putting up quite a fight, pain and adrenaline lending frantic strength to his efforts.

The combined force of three operatives was enough to keep him still, allowing the surgeon to go about her work. Nonetheless, her task was far from easy. Working in dim light, with the most basic medical equipment imaginable and with her unsedated patient screaming and thrashing against her, she bent close, jaw clenched tight as she focussed utterly on her task.

‘He’ll go into shock if we keep this up,’ Drake warned, wondering how much Sowan’s already weakened heart could withstand.

‘I feel the bullet,’ she said, manipulating the pliers with infinite care. ‘I almost have it.’

‘Then pull it out, for Christ’s sake,’ Mason implored her. Listening to a man screaming in agony was enough to try even the staunchest nerves.

‘It is close to the artery.’ She didn’t look up, but if she did then Drake was certain her eyes would be filled with unrestrained fury. ‘If I do this wrong, it will sever completely and he will die within seconds. So be silent.’

Unable to do anything but hold the patient down and trust to her skill, Drake watched as she moved the pliers a fraction of an inch deeper, ignoring the chaos and noise around her. There was something oddly calming about this woman, as if her inner focus and quiet confidence somehow radiated from her and affected those nearby.

He watched as her fingers drew together, tightening their grip on the pliers’ handle. And then in a smooth, graceful motion, she withdrew them. The motion was accompanied by an agonized scream from Sowan, though it soon faded out as his consciousness waned – pain and blood-loss at last causing him to faint.

A quick check of his pulse confirmed he was still alive. Sure enough, a bloody 9mm slug, its head flattened by its violent passage through metal and human flesh, was clenched between the jaws of the pliers.

For a moment, Sowan’s wife’s eyes met with Drake’s. ‘I daresay you know more about these than I do,’ she acknowledged. ‘Is this all of it, or could there be more still in the wound?’

Drake held out his hand and she dropped the slug into it. He turned it over, studying the shape, size, weight and general contours of the round. It wasn’t unknown for bullets to fragment on impact, particularly when striking hard surfaces like a car chassis, but luckily this one seemed to have remained intact.

‘This is all of it,’ he confirmed.

She nodded, satisfied. ‘Then I can start to undo some of this damage.’

Working with both speed and great care, she was able to use the pliers once more to press down on the damaged artery, exerting just enough force to stop the flow of blood without damaging the arterial walls. Her task was made a great deal easier with Sowan unconscious and no longer fighting and crying out, allowing her to pull the wound apart far enough to inspect the damage. Drake had found a working flashlight amongst the kitchen paraphernalia, and was holding it overhead to assist her.

‘I see it,’ she said quietly. The artery itself was visible as a pale pink tube about the thickness of a drinking straw. A hole perhaps a centimetre in length had been torn in it by the passage of the bullet. ‘Fortunately it hasn’t been completely severed. Hand me the suture kit.’

Reaching over, Drake placed it carefully in her hands, making sure she didn’t drop it. Checking the little needle was properly threaded, the surgeon leaned forward and began the first delicate stitch along the edge of the tear.

‘Where did you learn English?’ he couldn’t help asking. Sowan’s command of English made sense. After all, the man worked in the intelligence sector, and much of his dealings were apparently with English-speaking operatives. His wife however was another matter.

‘I studied ophthalmology at Johns Hopkins for two years.’

That explained it. This woman had studied in Baltimore, barely forty miles from his own home in DC. He might have passed her on the street and never known it.

‘Have you done many operations like this?’

‘You mean removing a bullet from my own husband?’ she asked without looking up from her task. ‘I can’t say I have.’

‘That wasn’t what I meant.’

‘I know what you meant,’ she said. ‘I’m an eye surgeon, not a battlefield doctor. I specialise in cataract removals and corneal transplants. Elective surgeries in well-equipped operating theatres. You might say I’m quite outside my area of expertise at the moment.’

Drake stared at her in amazement as she threaded another loop with infinite care. He couldn’t believe how calm, how focussed and composed she was, considering she was fighting to save the life of a man she loved, using tools and resources that where wholly inadequate for the task.

‘But compared to the human eye, this is really quite simple,’ she went on. ‘Like fixing burst pipes.’

‘If you say so,’ he said, not sure he shared that assessment. Like everyone in the team, he’d been trained in battlefield medicine, but what she was doing now far surpassed his basic skills. ‘You know, we were never properly introduced.’

‘What? You mean you came all this way for us, and you never troubled yourself to learn my name?’ she scoffed with grim humour. ‘I am disappointed,
Ryan
.’

‘We didn’t come for you.’

‘No, you didn’t. You came for my husband. Which begs the question of what will happen to him once I’ve finished. Clearly you need him alive, which means you want him for something. Assuming he survives long enough to serve your purpose, what then? Do he and I just...“disappear”? That’s the word people like you use, isn’t it? So much easier, so much more clean and clinical than
murder
. Maybe it even helps you sleep better at night.’

‘Yeah, and how do you suppose your husband sleeps at night?’ Frost asked derisively. Sitting on the kitchen counter in the corner of the room, she had been watching the operation in sullen, brooding silence until now.

The cut above her eye had been cleaned and bound with some adhesive sutures from the first-aid kit, not that it had done much to improve her mood. ‘Hate to break this to you, but he ain’t no fucking boy scout either.’

‘Go outside, get some air,’ Drake advised her, not wishing to antagonize the one person who had the power of life and death over their target.

‘There’s air in here.’

Drake fixed her with a hard glare. ‘Don’t make me ask again. Go outside and walk the perimeter. Stay on comms.’

Snorting in disgust, Frost eased herself down off the countertop, surveyed the injured man for a long moment, then finally left the room, muttering to herself.

‘What did she mean about Tarek?’ the surgeon asked.

Drake hesitated. Was it possible she didn’t know what her husband did for a living? he wondered. Did she really have no idea that the man she was fighting to save had likely overseen the torture and execution of countless men and women whose only crime had been their opposition to the government of this country? That he might well have ordered the death of Drake’s own mother?

‘She’s angry. Angry people lash out.’ It wasn’t entirely untrue either. ‘But my team aren’t in the business of murder.’

That much was true at least. He couldn’t say the same of himself however.

‘You will forgive me if I don’t take you at your word, Ryan.’

She had completed the third tiny loop of suture, and now prepared to pull the stitches together to close the wound. Using a pair of tweezers from the suture kit, she gripped the end of the thread and pulled the loop slowly together, the pressure causing the hole to close up. With that task accomplished, all that remained was to tie the ends off and find out if her repair had been a success.