Storm's Gift Page 2

  She started to cry. She couldn’t help herself.

  “I’m sorry. Did you need a doctor?”

  Datta could only shake her head. That big beautiful pack would be filled with medical supplies. Good, clean medical supplies that she’d been missing so desperately these last days.

  “Are you sure that you’re okay?”

  She could only nod her head. For three days she’d been immersed in a hell she’d never imagined. To have a handsome, military medic, carrying a large pack of essential supplies, and speaking American English was just too much. She simply couldn’t speak, or stop the tears running down her cheeks.

  “I—”

  “Hey, Medic Boy!” His radio squawked loudly enough to make her jump.

  “What’s up, Trisha?”

  “I need your ass and I need it bad. Where are you?”

  He did something to his radio.

  “Got you. Be there in two. Trisha out.”

  5

  Arin wasn’t quite sure how the woman had come along. The moment Trisha had said they were headed to Kutupalong, she’d simply clambered onto the helo seat beside him.

  The back seat of Trisha’s Little Bird fit two, barely. He tried to give the woman some space, but there wasn’t any way to do it. Instead, they were pressed together from shoulder to hip. Trisha’s standard maneuvering didn’t help any; they took turns trying not to land in each other’s laps.

  “Bengali army dudes said we can’t enter the camp. Boss Lady told them to go suck an egg. I get the feeling that they’ve never seen as many guns in one place as Lola hangs on her DAP Hawk. Let’s just say that they’re feeling more cooperative. Dumping you directly at the central hospital, such as it is.”

  “Oh joy.”

  In moments, they’d overflown the scattered scrub of bamboo and rattan tucked among farmers’ fields.

  “Nyah! Nyah! Nyah!” Trisha yelled out as they overflew the front gate guards.

  “You’re so mature, Trisha.”

  “That’s why you love me so much.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  The camp was a miserable patchwork. Not a single green thing growing. The rolling slopes were “planted” with bank upon bank of thatch huts separated by twisting narrow lanes that were probably mud most of the time. Low points were still lakes, thick with sewage.

  “Cholera city,” the woman spoke for the first time since she’d climbed aboard.

  She was right. It was going to be.

  “One crisis at a time,” he informed her, and she nodded sadly.

  Trisha somehow managed to squeeze in between the power lines and the one tin-roofed building in the area to set them down on a short stretch of cross-hatched brick roadway. People huddled all around, doing their best to cover themselves from the down-blast and debris kicked up by the helo. The ones that worried him were the ones who didn’t even try to protect themselves—too far gone to care.

  “This is your stop, lover boy.”

  He helped the woman out, then climbed out himself before turning to thank Trisha.

  “Is that her?” she asked before he could speak.

  “Her who?”

  Trisha looked up at the sky. “Dear Lord, I really do try to help the poor soul, but couldn’t you send me someone even a little less dense?”

  “What are you going on about, Trisha?”

  “Her!” she nodded toward the woman now squatting beside one of the people lying by the curb.

  Nice of her to try to help. Who knew what she’d lost today, but she’d stepped forward.

  Trisha was still on a roll, “She’s at least as Indian as you are, and a major looker. Normally I’d say out of your league, but hey, maybe there’s hope for you. You should marry her.”

  “You’re insane. Get out of here.”

  “Go ahead, tell me she isn’t beautiful?”

  “I didn’t notice. I don’t even know her name.”

  Trisha groaned, begged the Lord’s pardon for fools, then eased up on the collective and was gone.

  The hospital had some power. Perhaps a diesel generator. The woman was kneeling under the one outdoor light close by the steel gate. Other than the mud caked all down her side, Trisha was right.

  Her thick black hair hung well down her shoulders in soft waves. She wore slacks and a blouse, both of which had seen some hard days. Her hot-pink Converse sneakers were more the color of mud, but he liked them. And her face really was lovely.

  “Sorry,” he covered as well as he could for staring. “I didn’t even ask your name.”

  “No, you didn’t. But then I didn’t ask for yours either. I’m Datta.”

  “Arin.”

  “Okay, now that we got that over with, can we go see if they need help?”

  The lines of people waiting to pass through the gate made the answer to that all too clear.

  “Could you go inside and ask where they most need me? I’ll start right here. I’ve given them hope by just showing up, I don’t want to take that away.”

  Datta rested a hand on his shoulder as he squatted in her place beside the injured woman. Perhaps she needed to steady herself. Maybe it was to squeeze his shoulder in thanks. He hoped it was the latter.

  6

  Datta had watched a lot of hospital shows, but she’d never expected to end up in a scene from M*A*S*H. The hospital had an operating theater, but certainly not a western one. And it needed far more than the one it had.

  Inside, there were three tables set up in a space that wouldn’t fit one in America. All three were in use. And with her arrival, there were now two surgeons. Within seconds of arriving, she was table hopping crisis to crisis. There was no question of changing gowns or gloves. Datta scrubbed the gloves with a hard lye soap as she left one patient for a nurse to finish closing as well as she could, while she herself moved on to the next crisis.

  Scalpels and instruments weren’t autoclaved. Between patients they were briefly plunged into a pot of water boiling on a stand-alone propane burner.

  Finally coming fully conscious in the middle of repairing a man’s biceps muscle where a snapped humerus bone had sliced partly through it, she remembered Arin.

  She sent one of the nurses to find him.

  It had been hours, and she was running desperately low on several items. If he didn’t have them, maybe he’d be able to get them from wherever that helicopter had come from.

  Datta turned her attention back to her patient. Somewhere between that thought and the next, the torn biceps patient was sewn up and gone. Now she was helping a woman terrified of losing her baby.

  It took less than a minute to determine that her next procedure was going to be an emergency C-section.

  Thankfully, there had been little call for a spinal block, so she still had the meds. Better not to knock the woman out, as general anesthesia was going to be in short supply soon.

  To keep the woman calm, Datta asked her about her husband.

  Not a good choice.

  They’d gotten separated by the storm. He was somewhere out there.

  Then the woman asked about her own husband. She didn’t understand Datta’s attempts to explain that she’d been too busy becoming a doctor. Somehow, she was less of a doctor for not having a man. A song Datta’s own mother still sang on occasion.

  Instead, she focused on delivering the child rather than wonder at the prospects of ever finding time to have one of her own.

  7

  Arin followed the nurse toward the operating theater just as dawn was breaking. He’d lost count of how many people he’d helped over twenty people ago. Or perhaps over fifty ago.

  He hadn’t slept well last night and had been on the go for over twenty-four hours since. But their needs weren’t easing.

  Trisha checked in occasionally as she overflew him, even resupplying him once. They were using her Little Bird to do some of the heavy lifting of collapsed structures. There were few structures here big enough to need a stronger helo. A pair of bad landslides to
the south had probably killed several hundred, but that count might never be accurately known.

  Most of the rest of the camp was coming under control.

  “I’m not a surgeon,” he told the nurse. But she didn’t appear to speak English and kept indicating that he should follow her. He tried not to look at the amount of blood caked on her gown.

  He arrived in the OR, pulled on a mask, and waited by the door. One doctor was wrist deep inside someone’s chest. Arin decided that was probably not a good sign.

  Another had a woman on the table and her belly was a great mound of pregnancy.

  Even as he watched, the surgeon reached two hands in through a slice across her lower abdomen. Then ever so slowly, she extracted a child covered in a bloody birth caul. It was wiped clean, tipped head down to clear its lungs, and gave out shrill caterwaul of complaint.

  He knew it was totally cliché, but he loved the new-life moment amidst so much pain and destruction. The mother wept against the dark fuzz on the little girl’s head even as the doctor sewed her back together.

  Seeing the tiny stack of bandages the doctor was reaching for, he pulled a large bandage out of his pack. It had built-in antiseptic and enough coagulant to halt surface bleeding.

  “Thank you,” the doctor looked near collapse and sounded grateful enough to cry.

  He almost dropped the bandage to the bloody floor when he recognized her voice.

  “Datta?”

  “Yes,” she peeled the bandage and smoothed it into place.

  He couldn’t put the next two thoughts together, even if there was no doubting they belonged there.

  His woman sleeping on the roadside was…the doctor he was looking to help. No wonder she’d wanted to reach the camp.

  The Rohingya refugee woman and her newborn were rolled out from between them.

  A man with a simple broken arm was rolled into her place.

  Arin pulled on a pair of gloves and tugged out a SAM Splint.

  “Oh my God, I can’t tell you how beautiful that is at this moment,” Datta made a quick adjustment to the man’s arm, earning her a brief yelp from the patient, then held it stiff while Arin wrapped the flexible splint around the arm and secured it with gauze. The nurses knew their role and whisked him away within seconds of the last knot.

  There was a low curse.

  Arin look up in time to see the nurses rolling out a body whose face was covered with a bloody shirt. It was the other doctor who had sworn.

  “You know there was no chance for him, Dr. Banerjee. No hospital could have helped him better.”

  “I know, but I had to try, Dr. Jhanvi.”

  When no other patient was rolled in, there was an odd silence in the room.

  Again, Arin was left feeling slow on the uptake.

  “Dr. Datta. Jhanvi.”

  She nodded wearily.

  “Dhanvantari Jhanvi.”

  “What? I don’t speak Hindi.”

  “It’s not a word; it’s a name. Dhanvantari is the Hindu god of healing. I left the camp looking for Dhanvantari Jhanvi to see if I could help him. Her. You.”

  “You’re not making any sense, Arin.”

  No, he didn’t suppose that he was.

  But Trisha O’Malley was going to laugh her ass off.

  8

  The evening gathering on the USS Peleliu’s aft deck was an amazing luxury. For three weeks, Datta had chased crises up and down the Bengali coast.

  Arin had rarely left her side.

  Instead of resenting it, she’d come to rely on his steadfast nature.

  His triage was flawless, always feeding her the cases in the most life-critical order. Many of the lesser injuries which would have been brought to her in any US hospital, he patched or fixed himself.

  With the resources of the Night Stalkers and the Peleliu behind him, he’d given her an unprecedented scope to help these people.

  “Have fun?” Trisha asked her. She’d become Datta’s and Arin’s lifeline for transport and supply.

  “You’re twisted.”

  “Duh!” Trisha just grinned back.

  But it wasn’t an invalid question. For three weeks she’d done what she’d been dreaming of doing for her whole life. A trauma surgeon’s job was to save lives that shouldn’t be savable. Not due to disease or old age, but from accidents.

  And she supposed, though she’d never given it much thought, from battle. It was impossible to not think about it aboard this ship. It was a ship of war. Datta had never heard of the Night Stalkers, but even the quickest online search had revealed what she’d already learned for herself—they were exceptional. That their ship, according to everything she could find, had been retired from service several years ago, only made them all the more interesting.

  Released from their final call less than two hours ago, the crew were now lounging about the deck, knowing they’d done well.

  The chef had set up big grills and was cooking up long skewers of beef and vegetables. A couple of fierce badminton games were being fought nearby, occasionally interrupted by a Frisbee winging through the game. They hadn’t lost one over the side of the hundred-foot wide deck yet.

  Had she had “fun”?

  In a strange way, for a surgeon, she had. More…fulfillment. She’d done more operations in three weeks than many surgeons did in a year, a very busy year. There was no education like the one learned cutting into a human body and putting it back together.

  “Where are you headed next?” Arin asked so softly, she almost missed it despite his chair being close to hers. Would have, if she hadn’t become so attuned to his voice.

  Arin had done so much more than help her with patients.

  He’d also taken care of her, making sure she ate and slept, without being overprotective. So many men assumed that she didn’t know her own limits, that somehow, they knew better because of having a Y chromosome. All that Arin assumed was that when she finally did hit her limits, a little caregiving might be in order.

  “I don’t know really.”

  “Why not?” Lola Maloney, the team’s commander handed her a plate piled high from a skewer.

  “Well, I just finished my residency in trauma surgery. I have offers from several places.”

  Lola had been turning back for the grill. Instead, she pulled up an empty chair, spun it around backwards, and straddled it before asking, “Where are the offers from?”

  “Harborview in Seattle, Northwestern in Chicago, and Mass General in Boston.”

  Trisha choked in the middle of a swallow of Coke and ended up spewing some out her nose.

  “Ignore her,” Lola leaned in intently. “Doc Evans is transferring out soon.”

  Datta had met him. He was a damn fine cutter.

  “We’re looking for a replacement.”

  Datta could only stare at Lola wide-eyed. “But you’d need a Navy surgeon.”

  Lola’s shrug was rather expressive on that point. How many rules were bent to have a secretly un-retired ship, filled with Night Stalkers, Delta Force, and Army Rangers, cruising the seven seas?

  Then Lola smiled brilliantly and pushed to her feet. She was up to something, and Datta wasn’t sure what. But she strode toward the command superstructure without turning back.

  Trisha had finally recovered.

  “What was that about?” Datta asked.

  “Lola? Oh, she already had you all checked out. Security clearance, all that, before she let you aboard. You’re disgustingly respectable, just sayin’. She’s probably informing command that they’ll be writing up a formal offer for you within the hour.”

  “No, I meant you trying to snort an entire can of Coke.”

  Actually, Lola’s action was exactly what she’d been questioning, but she wasn’t about to tell Trisha that. To stay on the Peleliu? Events like the aftermath of Super Cyclone Devesh were rare, thank Allah, but she’d guess that this ship’s team was probably in harm’s way enough to need a top surgeon on short notice.

  Trisha
laughed at her response, not the least bit fooled, but took the topic change anyway.

  “I was just thinking that they don’t have RPGs shooting through their operating rooms at places like Mass General.” She was winking at Arin, who blushed for some reason.

  “What?” she turned on Arin.

  He just shook his head and blushed brighter.

  “What is it with you two?” She’d thought they might be a couple at first, until she’d met Trisha’s husband, the head of the ship’s Delta Force team.

  “Oh, just something we were having a fine time talking about not long ago,” Trisha’s grin wasn’t easing up. “Let’s just say, I was trying to help Mr. Medic Boy—”

  “Don’t!” Arin shouted out.

  “—get his life on track.”

  “Please don’t,” Arin mumbled.

  “Missed your chance, buddy. If you’re going to marry the crap out of an Indian woman, I’d say that the prime candidate is sitting right beside you.”

  Datta opened her mouth to protest, but nothing came out. Because the statement worked both ways. She couldn’t imagine finding a finer man than the one beside her, no matter how novel the idea might be.

  It was much later that night when the two of them were the only ones left on the main deck. The stars shown clear as if there’d never been a storm. The ship and its people were quiescent, taking a night’s rest on the quiet sea before setting off in a new direction in the morning.

  “Arin?” She knew what she was asking but didn’t know how to ask it. “Arin Amin. Your last name means trustworthy in Arabic. What about your first name?”

  “Mountain of Strength, if you can believe it. I know your last name is for the river Ganges.”

  “Gift. Datta means gift in Bengali.”

  “Gift of the Ganges,” he said it softly as if she truly was one.

  Then in the dark of the empty flight deck, with only the stars above them, he reached out to brush her cheek with his thumb. She had slept against him in exhaustion any number of times over the last three weeks, both stained with other people’s blood and the mud that Devesh had seemingly left on every surface.