Where was the leak? Where?
Sabeena wasn’t looking at me, and I knew why.
One of the things that you started to get after a week or two in this place was that you could not save everyone. Not even close. Fifty percent was a good score, and then half those patients died in recovery.
Still, Nuru was my patient.
My responsibility.
As the flies descended on her child’s face, Nuru’s mother howled and crowded back up to the table, crying out, “No, no, you said, Doctor. You said.”
Normally, it would be insane to have parents in the O.R., but here, it was necessary for the closest kin to see what we did, the decisions we made, even to help us make the decisions. So Nuru’s mom had to be here, but I needed every one of the seconds that were racing by.
“Please give me room, Mother,” I said. “I’m sorry, but you’re in my light.”
She did what I asked. She stepped back but stood at my right arm, crying and praying, the sound of her voice cutting into my ability to concentrate like a machete to my forehead. Other people were screaming, too. Colin yelled at his patient, who was shrieking in agony. He blasted the patient’s father and cursed at our poor orderly, who had been working for a day and a half straight. I had to block it all out.
I focused my attention on the little boy and began sponging down his still-oozing left lung.
“Where is your leak, little man? Help me out.”
And that was when I felt something with my fingertips. Something hard. I pinched and extracted a scrap of metal from the child’s lung-and now it made sense. The bullet must have hit the fence and fractured before it ricocheted into Nuru. The core of the bullet had gone through and through, but a bit of the copper jacket had taken a hard left once inside Nuru’s chest.
Sabeena said, “Well done, Brigid. Damned good catch.”
If only. If only we had found it ten minutes before. Nuru’s mother was pleading, “You must save him. You must.”
The heart wasn’t beating, but I wasn’t letting that stop me. I sutured the tear in the lung, opened the pericardium, and began direct cardiac massage. And then, I felt it-the flutter of Nuru’s heart as it started to catch. Oh, God, thank you.
But what can a pump do when there’s no fuel in the tank?
I had an idea, a desperate one.
The IV drip was still in Nuru’s arm. I took the needle and inserted it directly into his ventricle. Blood was now filling his empty heart, priming the pump.
Sabeena was whispering in her native Hindi. I was talking to God in my mind. Nuru’s mother had her hands on her son’s forehead, and she was speaking to him, asking him to come back.
And then, the little boy moved. He tried to speak.
“Mother” screamed. And Colin was back at the table.
“Jesus Christ.”
“Amen,” I said, giving him a sidelong grin.
Nuru’s mother grabbed for me, and then she simply swooned. Sabeena caught her and her baby before they hit the floor. When they were lying safely on a bed, Sabeena gave me the highest of fives.
“Oh, my God, Brigid. That was kind of a miracle, you know?”
“Meatball-surgery-variety miracle,” Colin growled as he finished closing Nuru’s wounds. “But, still. Very good job.”
That was another high five, but even without the actual hand slap, it felt good. I respected the hell out of Colin and was a little bit crazy about him, too. Sometimes I thought he might be a little bit crazy about me.
I said, “Thanks, Doc.”
I ripped off my mask and cap, handmade out of a T-shirt, and tuned back into the radio. All I could hear was a staticky roar many thousands of miles away.
Then, the voice of the announcer: “Well, he did it, Red Sox fans. David Ortiz just launched an Andrew Miller slider into the stunned Yankee bull pen. The Sox have just swept the series, and the Yankees are retreating to the Bronx.”
Jemilla, my little gal pal, grabbed me around the waist, and we did a funny little dance, part native to Sudan, part cha-cha slide-which was sharply interrupted by the loud chatter of automatic gunfire at the gates.
Oh, God. It was starting again.
Chapter 4
ATTACKS OFTEN happened at this time, just before dawn, when people were sleeping, when the marauders still had the cover of night.
Now the call to battle stations came as a wordless siren over the P.A. system. The men and boys with weapons went to the walls, the fences, the front gates. At the same time, a handful of boys, none older than twelve, took up posts outside the hospital compound.
Jemilla pushed a handgun at me, and I took it reluctantly, stuck it into the waistband of my trousers.
This little darling was twelve. She’d been gang-raped, had had an ear sliced off by an attacker, and she’d seen her parents murdered when her village had fallen to the gang of thugs. She walked for a week to get here, by herself, and we “adopted” her at Kind Hands. She would live here for as long as we remained, but the thing was, this was not a permanent hospital. We survived here on charity, and we were vulnerable to terror attacks. We could get orders to pack up and leave at any time.
What would happen to Jemilla then? How would she survive?
“I’m not going to be able to kill anyone,” I said to this brave and irrepressible young girl. She grabbed my hands and said quite seriously, “You can, Dr. Brigid. If you have to, you can. There’s no such a thing as a warning shot.”
Outside the O.R., men were shouting as they raced up the dirt track that ran between our compound and the tukuls, the round, thatched huts where the refugees lived.
Colin clicked off his walkie-talkie, saying to all of us, “We’re needed at the gate.”
Surgeons Pete Bailey, Jimmy “Flyboy” Wuster, and Jup Vander armed themselves and followed Colin out to his vehicle and into the lethal, crackling predawn.
With help from nurses Sabeena and Toni, I shoved the patients in their beds into the center of the floor, stubbing the wheels on the buckling planks, and I tucked little Nuru, now bandaged in clean cloth and duct tape, into a laundry basket. Nurse Berna administered knockout anesthesia to the patient who’d been moaning since she came in, and gave a gun to the patient’s father. Nurse Toni chucked our instruments into boiling water, and I shut down the generator.
And then we sat in the dark with our backs against the beds. And some of us prayed.
I visualized our attackers. They were known as the Gray Army because when those men were cattle herders, they rubbed gray clay into their skin to ward off insects. Now, as a rampaging militia, they dressed in camouflage with bloodred head scarves. Their ghostly skin added another layer of terror to their attacks.
We were in the massacre zone of a long-standing dispute in Sudan and South Sudan that had roots along ethnic, geographic, and religious lines. After the autonomy of South Sudan was official, internal fighting began between the Gamba and the Gray Army rebels. The fighting defined the expression “take no prisoners.”
The Grays, as they were also known, re-formed into a rogue militia avenging those deaths, the work of the Gamba. And within weeks, thousands more were dead, and the living had fled. Now, 1.8 million people were displaced, and, although the Gamba had been decimated, the Gray Army, twenty-five to fifty-thousand strong, and drunk with bloodlust and power, kept crossing and recrossing the country, their only objective to destroy it in wave after murderous wave.
Colonel Dage Zuberi was the head of the Grays.
The atrocities this evil man had left behind him in Darfur have all been documented. The mass killing of the men and rape of the women, the torture and looting, the kidnapping of young girls, and the total obliteration of villages all form part of his legacy. And now he had turned to South Sudan.