‘They’ll get back to me about a helicopter,’ he told Carrie. ‘We need to get Akna down to the school.’
‘We can’t move her, Rake.’ said Carrie. ‘She could die.’
‘We have to risk it, Dr Walker.’ Joan wrung out a towel and soaked it in fresh warm water. ‘If she worsens here we can’t even get her to the helipad.’
‘There are signs of internal hemorrhage.’
‘Henry and the men will take her. He’s done this before.’
Akna’s eyes rolled; she was close to going into shock. ‘Akna, are you there?’ Carrie whispered, saying anything to keep the girl conscious. ‘Stay with us, Akna. Tell me the name of your favorite song?’
Akna didn’t respond.
Carrie checked the small front-room and kitchen. Dirty plates lay around and there was a smell of drains and rotting food. She rolled in her lips, glanced at Rake, and moved her gaze quickly away. He had seen that look before, in a mess of a house in Kabul. But then they had shared their astonishment at the muddle and filth. This was different because it was part of the man she was about to marry.
Rake’s phone lit. Sorry. Fog.
‘Mike can’t make it from Nome back until the fog lifts.’ He kept his tone measured, but a thousand bits of anger tumbled through his mind. Why was there no helicopter? Why had this happened to Akna? Why was this Carrie’s first encounter with his island? However much you love a person some things are best left unseen.
‘Snow will be in by then,’ said Henry with a look of genuine alarm.
‘How long?’ Carrie, like Rake, was keeping her frustration in check.
‘Impossible to say.’
‘We have to get her to hospital, Rake. We need to make it happen.’
Sometimes weather and technical problems cut Little Diomede off for weeks on end. The islanders were meant to get flights every Monday and Wednesday. It rarely happened like that. Rake called back the desk sergeant at Elmendorf-Richardson and heard how they were already doing a medical emergency evacuation up at the Goose Creek Correctional Center, the big prison, and there were a couple of others that placed Akna’s pregnancy way down the list of priorities.
Carrie read Rake’s stressed expression. ‘Let me talk to them.’
They stepped out of Akna’s earshot. Rake put the call on open speaker. ‘This is Dr Carrie Walker, sergeant—’
‘Captain Ozenna has briefed me, ma’am.’
‘I’m the doctor. You need to understand — if you do not airlift this teenager to hospital now, she will die.’
This was exactly the Dr Carrie Walker whom Rake had first laid eyes on outside Kabul airport when clearing the area after a suicide bombing. She had insisted on staying with a young soldier lying half out of a mangled and charred vehicle. Flames licked around the bodywork. It was only a matter of minutes before they would reach the fuel tank. An old minivan close by might be a second bomb. Anyone among the gathering crowd could have had a gun or grenade. Rake was no doctor, but knew that someone who had had both legs torn off in an explosion in Afghanistan had the slimmest chance of survival. If any. Period.
‘Ma’am, you need to leave.’
‘Take his arm,’ she instructed.
‘Ma’am. Leave. NOW!’
‘I’m a doctor and this is my patient. Help me!’
Sirens filled the air. Gunshots erupted as police moved people away. This attack wasn’t over. Everyone apart from Carrie, it seemed, expected something else to go down. Straight away he saw stubborn determination, the most difficult for a soldier to handle. But with her blonde hair tied back, and wearing a white medical smock, she made herself a ripe target for killing or kidnap. There was no time for debate. He slung his M-16 carbine behind his back, lifted her onto his shoulders, and ran towards the airport gate. She yelled, but she didn’t fight back.
The fuel tank blew, sending flames and metal shards into the air. Seconds later, the minivan went up in a much bigger explosion that sent a fireball down the road, engulfing people and market stalls. He ran into the airport compound until the heat faded and he felt winter cold on his face again. He lowered her to the ground. He expected her to be grateful or angry, but she was neither. She told him later that she thought she was being kidnapped and that he was an Afghan because of his Asiatic features.
‘Are you OK, ma’am?’
She checked herself, quickly, professionally, patting herself down, running her hands up and down her arms and legs, testing vision, touching her nose, her ears, all in less than ten seconds. ‘I’m fine. Your men?’
At least one was dead, John Tikaani, a twenty-year-old private from Nome, the one Carrie had been trying to save. ‘We have casualties.’
As he turned to go, she saw that Rake’s sleeve was torn and soaked with blood where something had ripped through.
‘Wait.’ She started cleaning it up. ‘You need to get this treated.’
‘Next time, when a soldier says go, you need to go,’ he said gently.
‘I won’t. Not while a patient is alive.’
She had said she fell for him because he made her feel safe without suffocating her. Carrie was neither an easy nor a settled person, and out there amid the heat and bombs, you didn’t go for a man because of the cut of his suit or because he made you laugh. She admitted she never really understood Rake, but he satisfied her longing for the unusual because he came from a remote Alaskan island that sounded contradictory, stark and romantic like a poem, and because Rake himself was smart and rough.
After their first night together, she told him he was not like any previous lover, mostly doctors who knew the human body too well to enjoy it. Rake had not been over-eager to please nor selfishly fast. He was unrefined. He hadn’t read manuals and worked from instinct. He was generous, but knew what he wanted. Carrie said she had never had sex like it before. It might have been the best ever; impossible to say because it was so different.
One evening, when things had quietened, they had dinner and he found she spoke fairly good Russian, much better than the Russian he had learned with the Eskimo Scouts. He asked where she was from.
‘Brooklyn, to be quick,’ she answered, but with her eyes wide open, alive with mischief.
‘And if you want to be slower?’ he said. ‘If the person asking is curious?’
‘Like you?’
‘Could be.’
‘And if I liked them?’ She kept her expression straight, her eyes still dancing.
‘Yes.’
‘I’m half Estonian, half Russian. My parents married as young medics at the huge Soviet submarine base in Estonia. They were Soviet citizens. That collapsed, and those historical hatreds erupted. The Estonians hated the Russians as occupiers worse than the Nazis. The marriage became strained and they saved it by moving to work in a private hospital in Calcutta, India, where I was born and raised until I was eight. I saw my first corpse when I was five. And my first firefight when I was seven. We were out in the countryside when an insurgent gang attacked. I learned to do bandages and morphine injections. My mother said she had never seen a steadier hand with a syringe. It should have repelled me. But it didn’t, and that was when I knew I wanted to be a trauma doctor and that’s why I stick with my patient until they are dead or safe.’
‘So that’s why you did what you did back at the airport.’
She stopped playing him with her eyes. ‘That’s what I am, Rake. I work for an international hospital group which has sent me to Malaysia, Bangladesh, Kenya, Iraq, and Afghanistan. It’s based in Brooklyn, where I have an apartment next door to my younger sister. She’s a doctor too, except she doesn’t remember much about India, so she’s not like me and by this stage I would expect most people to say this is all too much information.’