Andrew Kaplan - Scorpion Deception

“Kill me, your brother dies,” she said, looking straight into his eyes, trying to keep a quaver out of her voice. “Kill me now or help me get the children away from al Qaeda, away from Mogadishu,” her heart beating a mile a minute. She wondered if she was about to die.

“Where do you want to go?” he asked, glancing down at his brother.

“Kenya.”

“You crazy, doctor woman? A thousand kilometers. Better I shoot you,” aiming at her head. She closed her eyes and heard a wheezing strangling sound coming from the patient, who moved his arms, the blood spurting out in an arc.

“I mean it. I’ll let him die,” she said.

“What kind of doctor are you?” he demanded angrily, his finger tightening on the trigger.

“The only one you’ve got,” she said, surprised she could get the words out.

He let the submachine gun hang down and scratched his beard.

“You crazy, doctor woman. But for a female, you’re braver than most men. You save him, I’ll get rid of al Qaeda and take you to Mombasa.”

“The children too. All of them,” she demanded.

“The children too,” he made a face. “Even the girls.”

She was already moving, giving orders to Nadifa, Ghedi, and Van Zyl, whom she told to get his bottle of vodka, since they had no boiling water or steam ready to sterilize instruments. The two most critical things to stabilize the patient were to deal with the pneumothorax so he could breathe and to stop the bleeding. She heard shooting outside the tent and looked at the man with the cataract, who was already herding his men outside, but from the sides, crawling under the tent flaps. Suddenly there were the sounds of explosions and a storm of firing. Inside the tent people screamed and nearly everyone hit the floor. Sandrine continued to work on the patient.

This is insane, she thought, working furiously and trying to ignore the bullets ripping holes in the sides of the tent. She wasn’t a surgeon or an E.R. doctor. She had almost nothing to work with and the patient was showing early signs of hypoxia, the skin starting to tinge blue. In France she’d already have him on pure oxygen, be typing him for transfusion and preparing an occlusive dressing and intercostal chest drain.

She checked his vitals. Heartbeat erratic. Blood pressure too low. He’s in trouble, she thought. And he needed fluids. Ghedi came with a couple of plastic sandwich bags and an IV. Nadifa brought adhesive tape, syringes, antibiotics, a surgical dressing, and a couple of hemostats. Van Zyl brought the vodka, which she had him pour into a bowl to use to sterilize the plastic bag and the hemostats. Dieu , she thought, feeling inside the chest wound for bleeding blood vessels. The wound wasn’t bleeding too excessively, though the blood made it hard to see. She couldn’t feel blood spurting; there was a chance no major blood vessel had been hit. The main thing was to seal the wound. The patient could survive on one lung, and with any luck, if no vessels were hit, the bleeding would coagulate on its own and the collapsed lung might partially reinflate.

She flushed the wound with saline, then put the plastic Baggie over it and taped it tightly on all sides to seal the wound, hopefully relieving the collapsed lung and minimizing infection. To make sure it was sealed, she secured the heavy dressing on top of it. Almost immediately the patient began to breathe more normally. She found the torn artery in the arm, put a hemostat on it, and started a saline IV in the other arm.

While she worked, the man with the cataract came back with a number of his men.

“He’s breathing better,” he said. “Will he live?”

“There’s a good chance, but there’s still a lot to do.”

“You’re not from Mogadishu, are you, mate?” Van Zyl said to him.

The man looked at Van Zyl and then at Sandrine.

“Who is this?” he asked her.

“God knows,” she said. “A South African. With the UN. Name’s Van Zyl.”

“I khara in the milk of the mothers of the UN,” the man said. And to her: “I am Abdirahman Ali Abdullahi. From Puntland.”

“What do you do?” she asked, working.

“I am commander,” he said, grinning broadly.

“Of what?”

“The Puntland Coast Guard,” Ali said.

Van Zyl leaned close and whispered in her ear.

“Coast Guard, my bum. He’s a bloody pirate.”

“What about al Qaeda?” she asked the pirate, Ali. At some point she would have to deal with infection. She needed a tissue culture and there was no lab. She had no way of knowing what kind of infection she might be dealing with and therefore no way to know which antibiotic to use. She only had two anyway: gentamicin and penicillin. The former would deal with most gram negative bacteria. Penicillin would handle staph and anaerobic bacteria, the more likely infections in this environment. She decided on penicillin, thinking it was as good as it was going to get.

“We chased them away.” He grinned, showing yellowed, broken teeth and gums green from qat . “My men went to the House of Flowers, but it’s better if we leave. They will be back.”

“When?” she asked.

He looked at his watch, a Rolex, and she had a sudden absolute conviction it had been stolen.

“Now,” he said.

An hour later they were driving in a convoy of Land Rovers to the Old Port, some of them mounted with big.50 caliber machine guns on the roofs, manned by men sitting there, scanning the streets. Ali had kept his word. The Land Rovers were crammed with the children from the House of Flowers, Ali and his men, and as many of the wounded from the hospital tent as they could manage, bandaged arms and legs sticking out of the open windows.

“It’s like the bloody Exodus from bloody Egypt,” Van Zyl said.

They boarded a rusty small coastal merchant ship with motorized skiffs tied to its sides and stern. As they went up the gangplank, she noticed men carrying RPGs and machine guns and a small cannon mounted near the bow of the ship.

“Pirate mothership,” Van Zyl muttered.

They might have been barefoot pirates, but they were efficient, she thought. Within minutes they cast off. She stood on the bridge with Ali and two of his men, Ghedi, Amina, and Van Zyl, watching the city recede as they headed out into the blue waters of the Indian Ocean.

“I’ll go below. I need to take care of your brother,” she told Ali. “Thank you.”

He shoved a few qat leaves into his mouth and started chewing.

“Listen, doctor woman,” moving the wad to his cheek, “maybe when we get to Mombasa, I sell the children. Sell you too. Mombasa is a good market for human traffic. Good prices.”

“You won’t,” she said, heading toward the ladder, trying to balance against the sway of the ship.

“How do you know?” he said.

“Because Allah is watching,” she said, pointing a finger at the sky. “You keep your word.”

“She’s a lioness, this one,” Ali said to Van Zyl. “Maybe I take her for my fifth wife.”

“You can’t,” she said, pausing on the ladder.

“Why not?”

“I’m already taken,” she said, the thought of the American, Nick, suddenly flashing in her mind. She wondered where in the name of God he was and suddenly realized that what she had just said was true.

Piranshahr,

Iran

“Ithink you broke my jaw,” Ghanbari said, holding the reddened side of his face. They were sitting on the carpet facing each other, Scorpion holding the pistol on his thigh.

“No, but I might if I don’t get the answers I want,” Scorpion said.

“I don’t understand,” Ghanbari said, looking bewildered. “You told me yourself you killed Sadeghi. What’s this about?”