“You fiddled with this load for two days.” Jennifer crossed her arms. “Time to put it on.”
Filled with her stethoscope, blood pressure cuff, a portable heart monitor she hoped could detect a fetal heartbeat and every other drug or relevant equipment she could snag from the clinic storeroom, her ruck weighed a thousand pounds. The weight of it and her vest probably compressed her spine a half inch.
“Here.” Jennifer held out a Tic Tac mints box. “Stick these somewhere handy.”
“What for?” She leaned forward to create enough slack to snap the pack’s waist belt.
Her friend shoved the gift closer. “Fresh breath.”
She must have looked blank because Jennifer continued. “You are single. You are almost thirty. You’ll be spending a day with several manly men, one of whom watches you at meals like you’re an ice cream cone he wants to lick.”
“He does not.” She didn’t have to ask who Jennifer meant.
“He does so. Take them.”
“Fine.” The tiny mints rattled a warning from inside their plastic box. Chhk-chhk-chhk-don’t-think-it.
“Adios.” Jennifer followed her to the prefab’s door. “And be safe!”
“Bye, Mom.” She escaped through the dawn and headed for the flight line.
The normal eight- or nine-minute walk stretched to twelve, then fifteen, as she struggled. Her feet wanted to shuffle, and her shoulders tipped forward despite constant effort to lift her legs and straighten her back. She’d almost prefer a kidney stone to this gear. Almost.
Trying not to resemble a tent with legs prevented her from absorbing the activity at the flight line until she was seated aboard the Black Hawk helicopter for the crew chief’s safety brief. As she inserted a pair of squishy foam earplugs, Sergeant Wardsen—she couldn’t allow herself to think of him as Wulf no matter how much Jennifer teased—buckled into the next spot. A prudent professional would nod politely, then ignore him.
Wh-wh-wh-whump-whump. The Black Hawk lifted off, shifting her into his upper arm, the one body part he didn’t have sheathed in a protective plate. Her vest and gear refused to obey her spine’s signal to sit tall; each lurch of the helicopter bounced her against his shoulder.
Forget polite. She needed to get off him.
She braced on his solid thigh, another part decidedly without armor, and pushed. The contact lasted a second or less, a blink, but his quad jumped under her hand. It left a brand of hard male muscle that seared her palm even after she’d planted her boots on the vibrating floor and pinned herself to the side of the helicopter.
Then he spread his legs for stability too and crowded a finger width from her space.
Maybe her flush could pass as a heat reaction. If she unclenched her fist, could she let go of how strong he’d felt? She had a better chance of the metal decking opening up and swallowing her right now while she counted rivets on the walls, read the yellow warning stencils, searched for a distraction that didn’t include his thigh.
A soldier clipped to a safety line manned a .60 caliber gun in the open side door. Past him, the land streamed below. She’d flown into Caddie at night. For six months her workday glimpses of summits beyond the camp walls had seemed more like theater scenery than reality, but this morning her flat, orderly world disappeared, replaced by carved and eroded mountains, valleys and gullies. Below the helicopter any green, anything alive or made by humans except this machine and themselves, had vanished. They could be flying through time instead of air, heading for Genghis Khan or an ancient myth instead of a pregnant village girl.
Her watch said they’d been in flight forty-five minutes when the ceaseless unfolding of mountains was interrupted by a narrow green line where water enabled valley farming. Toto, I have a feeling we’re not in Caddie anymore. The Black Hawk’s wheels settled on a plateau of packed dirt and rocks above the irrigation canal. At the dusty edge of the rotor wash, a half dozen boys wearing traditional baggy trousers and dress-length shirts jumped from foot to foot.
She followed the team out of the bird and found herself in the middle of their line formation. At the front, boys clustered around the tank-size sergeant from Hawaii, who doled out oranges and bananas from his cargo pockets. A mud-walled compound hung so precariously from the cliff above that she worried anything dropped from a window would hit her. The walls had turned the exact color of the earth and stones, nearly white with reflected glare if she looked over her sunglasses, pale brown when she looked through the tinted lenses.
The hike up a winding, rocky track dragged on until the ground shimmied with each step. She blinked to keep sweat out of her eyes, because lifting a hand to wipe her forehead required extra effort. Not even breathing through her open mouth banished this dizziness and nausea. Maybe helicopters didn’t agree with her.
Sergeant Wardsen came alongside and matched her pace. “You’ll be on your own with the girl. Okay with that?”
She nodded while trying to conceal her gasps. If she didn’t pull herself together, she’d fail before she had a chance to start examining the patient.
He grabbed her hand and pressed his thumb to the inside of her wrist. For a moment she stopped her plodding to concentrate on breathing.
“Damn.” He thrust a blue-and-white canister with a cup-shaped lid at her. “Take a hit.”
She let her eyebrows ask What is it? because she couldn’t speak.
“Canned Oh-Two. We’re over seven thousand feet and you’re humping at least forty pounds. You need oxygen.” Mercifully, he flipped the lid over and held it to her face. “Steady, Doc. You’re not acclimatized to this elevation.”
Ahhh. Her vision cleared and the flutters in her chest calmed with each suck.
“Better?” His question anchored her in the here and now.
Hypoxia. She’d succumbed to altitude sickness so quickly she hadn’t recognized her own symptoms. She pulled the face mask off. “Thank you. I—”
“Move out.” He waved a hand over his head to indicate the others should continue forward. They rose from defensive positions in the rocks. Only she and Sergeant Wardsen had been standing like sandwich boards, and his body had been positioned between her and the edge.
She couldn’t let that happen again. She’d keep up or puke trying, and she damn well better remember her soldier skills.
After circling a boulder, the path ended at a mudcrete wall bisected by a wood-and-iron gate. How long ago trees that size had grown where now she only saw scrubby orchards, she couldn’t imagine. The gate led to an open-air courtyard. More than a dozen men sat on carpets under a cloth shade. One of them, his weathered skin contrasting with his white beard and eyebrows, had a sunken atrophic scar instead of a left eye. When he smiled and rose to welcome them, she noticed he had proportionally fewer teeth. Sergeant Wardsen and Captain Deavers spent enough time greeting this man that she assumed he was the leader whose wife needed medical care.
“Captain Chiesa, please join us.” Hearing Sergeant Wardsen speak English startled her. She’d been so absorbed in studying the clothing and architecture, she hadn’t consciously processed the fact that he didn’t use an interpreter.
While they sat on elaborate rugs, the next half hour stretched through introductions to the elderly leader—Dostum—and tea-drinking formalities. The other Afghans studied her freely during the old man’s deep conversation with Wulf and Captain Deavers. She didn’t see any women or girls. Finally Dostum seemed to be satisfied, and everyone, including her, stood.