“Watch out for him!” She staggered on numb legs and strained to reach Wulf, but Chris’s left hand manacled her upper arm.
“Bravo Squad, pull security for the aircraft recovery team.” While Chris ordered half the men to stay on-site, he marched her to the rescue helicopter.
“He needs a litter!” she yelled at the two men carting a sagging Wulf.
Instead of listening, they dumped him on a seat and handed him a peanut butter packet from a meal pouch.
“He can’t have that!” He’d hit surgery as soon as they landed at Caddie, and most likely be pushed forward to the main hospital at Bagram, so he was nothing-by-mouth.
When Chris dropped her arm to give the pilot a thumbs-up, she lunged for her patient.
The helicopter’s surge flung her sideways and the landscape dropped away through the open doors. She tried to find a handhold or a safety line to grab, but a track embedded in the floor caught the toe of her boot. Skidding, she slapped air when the Black Hawk banked. Rocks blurred behind the door gunner. As the helicopter gained height and speed, the opening pulled her like a drain sucking water. She leaned away, but her soles couldn’t grip.
Everything seemed to stop except the ground rushing past at the bottom of the slope that, seconds before, had been level.
She was falling.
Chapter Eight
The helicopter banked the opposite direction at the instant the back of Theresa’s bulletproof vest jerked. Airborne, she felt, for a millisecond, what an astronaut must experience without gravity, before her landing jarred every vertebra between her tailbone and neck. Someone’s hard-shelled knee pad slammed her chest armor and another bracketed her spine.
Her lungs expanded with a breath she hadn’t expected to own. Almost unbelievably, she hadn’t cartwheeled out the door. Who’d yanked her from the brink? She shoved her helmet higher on her forehead and twisted from her huddle to identify her savior.
All colors except blue had vanished from Wulf’s eyes, and his cheeks conformed to his skull. He looked cold and drained as he slurped the traces of peanut butter from the packet. Next to her jaw, his other wrist trembled where he gripped a loop on the shoulder of her gear. He’d saved her again, but his heroism might have cost blood he couldn’t afford to lose.
She stretched for the sliced flaps of his shirt.
“Stop.” His lips were easy to read over the noise of the engines.
“Wound check,” she yelled back.
“Don’t.” He shook his head from side to side as he reached for her wrist. “No.”
“I have to.” She blocked him with one hand and laid her other palm over the bandage. His body was feverishly hot, oddly so when chill and shock were the common responses after a serious injury.
He slumped, eyelids lowered and chin tucked to his chest as if he was ashamed. He shouldn’t have been, because she was the one who’d run too slowly, not him. Her fingernails caught the edge of the gauze. She meant to check for fresh bleeding, but the bandage peeled into her hand like wet paper and revealed his chest, whole and white. It wasn’t bloodless white, but a healthy bread-crust color with traces of veins and dark blond hair.
“Wulf!” She couldn’t pull her eyes from the textbook perfection. Minutes ago she’d pressed her fingers into a three-inch hole right there, where her blood-streaked hand stood out dark and filthy against his unbroken skin. Prepared to celebrate, she stretched toward him from her spot between his knees. “You’re—”
She shut up when she saw the despair etched on his face. The main rotor’s thw-thw-thw pounded a question into her brain: how-how-how? The blood on his sliced-up clothes didn’t lie. He had been shot through a lung, a killer shot, but he’d healed in minutes.
Then the pieces connected. The medevac calls, the missing paperwork, even the blood in Nazdana’s mouth after her seizure—he’d been injured, but, like today, he’d walked away whole. This was the secret the team had tried to conceal in the gym.
The rhythm of the helicopter rocked her against his legs, but she was too numb and shaky to push herself from the metal deck. They stared at each other in a parody of an embrace, his arm cradling her shoulder, one of her hands on his leg, the other spread across his bare chest, while liquid pooled in his eyes.
Finally the Black Hawk surged forward, and the changed motion broke their stalemate. He signaled to someone past her shoulder. Big hands hoisted her into a seat.
“Don’t move.” Sergeant Kahananui’s broad face resembled an unsmiling idol as he buckled her harness. “Don’t talk.”
Demanding answers from the wall of silent men would be pointless. In addition to Wulf, slumped in his seat, the two door gunners and Deavers stared out of the helicopter. The Hispanic medic watched Wulf, and the young Southerner closed his eyes. Beside her, Kahananui read the label on a bottle of water as if it was a skin magazine. No one looked at her or met her eyes. Everything appeared to be normal, yet nothing was. No one so much as twitched until Wulf removed the intravenous needle and folded the empty saline bag into his cargo pocket. Then the medic tossed him a roll of duct tape to secure the sides of his shirt and vest where she’d sliced the Velcro. The efficiency seemed frighteningly routine from a man who should have been dead.
She had so many questions, but the rules her mother had established about her stepfather’s garbage business flooded back as the rescue flight stretched. Even Miss Smarty-Pants doesn’t need to know everything. She understood that the team’s secret wasn’t her affair, but whatever had given Wulf this healing ability could save hundreds or thousands of soldiers. It would advance trauma care and possibly end combat deaths.
The end of death.
Her hands shook. Clutching the fabric of her cargo pants didn’t stop the trembling, so she jammed her fists into her armpits. Was Wulf part of an experiment? Now that she knew, what would happen to her? The air was cooler at this altitude, but the bumps up and down her arms had nothing to do with temperature. How far would Wulf’s team go to keep his secret?
One step at a time. First she had to get away and pull herself together.
Deavers and the other men wouldn’t look at her, but she reminded herself they were American soldiers like her. They’d saved her today. Wulf had saved her twice. The man who’d eaten her mother’s cookies, who’d held her hand in the dark and cared enough to translate for a desperately ill Afghan girl, that man wouldn’t hurt her. She clung to her faith in him, despite a whisper of doubt that asked, Wouldn’t he? Is he who you think he is?
The forward motion ceased as they hovered over the airfield at Caddie. Less than one minute to landing, and suddenly every pair of eyes focused on her. She felt pinned.
Were any of them who she thought they were?
No sticking around to find out. Her thumb slipped under the buckle’s release mechanism, and she pushed the soles of her boots against the metal deck, ready to bolt.
Theresa locked the female shower unit’s door and stowed a clean uniform on the bench with the relief of a homecoming. Between her years in college and med school dormitories, her residency apartment and cheap off-base housing, she’d spent a dozen years behind plastic shower curtains whose speckled bottom seams didn’t bear inspection. Worse, she’d stored shampoo and soap in her indestructible caddy longer than she’d been able to buy a drink.
Hot water sluiced over her body and created a cloud of steam that separated her from the day’s events. She attacked her fingers with a nail brush until her hands pinkened. Not an iota of Wulf’s blood remained in the creases or under her nails, but even with the evidence of his injury washed down the drain faster than the wounds had disappeared from his chest, she knew his healing hadn’t been a dream.