Protecting the Flame Read online

  “Within limits, but I’ll have to be careful. First things first, though. You have to relocate the shoulder and then I can reassess. Check pulses, sensation, strength, that kind of thing. Normally, we dope people up pretty good so the muscles relax.”

  “Do you have anything like that?”

  Will shook his head. “Even if we did, I’m not sure it would change anything.”

  “Why not?”

  “I told you,” Mattie said. “There’s not enough room for his arm to hang down.”

  Will nodded. “In other words, no gurney. But I know another way. It’s more involved, but it should work.”

  Should was not the same as would. “What do I have to do?” she asked.

  “Be strong,” he said.

  Chapter 5

  Will moved to her seat. While Mattie unbuttoned his flannel shirt, Emma grabbed a coil of nylon rope from Will’s pack. Looping the rope across Will’s chest, she threaded it beneath his right armpit and behind his back while Mattie got busy removing the fabric cover from Emma’s seat back. Then, Emma knotted the rope into a kind of tourniquet, only instead of a stick, she used one of Will’s collapsible hiking poles from his pack. When Will was good and tight, she tied the legs of a spare pair of his waterproof pants into a snug knot then carefully fed his bad arm through until the loop rested on his right biceps. Then, cocking his arm at the elbow, she placed her booted foot on the knot she’d made in the pants and put her weight into it, bearing down, applying more and more pressure.

  His body resisted. His muscles hardened. His face blackened with blood, and the veins of his neck and arms and chest stood in thick cords. She knew she was hurting him. He was panting, hard and fast, trying to ride the crest of the waves of pain that shook his body. Sorry, sorry, sorry. She bore down.

  Then, all of a sudden, there came a dull thunk that was the sound of a butcher’s cleaver against a carving board, and Will screamed.

  “Oh!” Mattie’s hands flew to cover her mouth. “What happened?”

  “I think it worked.” Sweat matted her hair to her face. Her neck was slick, but Will was bathed in perspiration, his thermal shirt soaked through. He’d flung his good arm over his eyes, but she could see the shine of tears. She touched his damp cheek. “Will? Did we—?”

  “Yes.” The word was a croak. “Give…give me a second,” he said, voice tight. “Mattie, get the…the sling I was wearing, okay?”

  “You bet.” Snatching up the sling, she slid past Emma and knelt in the space between Will’s legs and the back of her mother’s seat. “Here it is, Will.”

  “Thanks, honey.” Will cupped the girl’s head with his good hand. “Emma, if you’ll bend my arm across my chest, then Mattie can slip on the sling.”

  “Sure.” Her insides had turned to jelly. A good thing her stomach was empty, too. She kept hearing that clunk the bone made as it socked back into place, and the memory made her a little queasy. “What can we do about the pain?”

  “It’s already not as bad. But I think I should probably take some more acetaminophen.”

  “I’ll get it.” She put a hand on his good arm. “We have to get you out of those wet clothes. You have extras, right?”

  Face still ashen, he’d fallen back against her seat and closed his eyes. “In my pack. Side pocket. I’ve got another shirt in my luggage. But I’m not sure I can move my right arm enough to get it out. Don’t want it to dislocate again.”

  “Do you have surgical scissors?”

  “In my kit. Why?” Then his mouth twitched into a tired half-grin. “Cut me out?”

  She’d seen medevacs in action. “That’s the plan.” Retrieving the scissors along with a fresh top, she said, “You let me do the work. Don’t help.”

  Beginning at his waist, she cut straight up the middle to his neck and then flayed open the arms. From there, it was a simple matter of peeling the fabric away from his torso. As she did, her pulse gave an absurd little thump. Will was toned and tanned and much more muscled than he appeared. In the chill, his nipples puckered, and when her fingers brushed his sides, his skin jumped.

  “Sorry!” Flustered, she took an involuntary step back. My God, someone would think she’d never seen a man’s chest before. “Did I hurt you?”

  “No. Ticklish.” He closed his eyes as she wiped away sweat from his chest and neck with a camp towel before making him sit forward so she could dry his back. “Stop worrying,” he said, his eyes still shut. “All pain passes, Emma.”

  He said that so gently, with such kindness, and yet the words were arrows to her heart. It was as if he somehow saw into her, read all her grief and regret. Before she could respond, though, Mattie handed her Will’s clean thermal. “Here. Trade you for the towel.”

  “Thanks. Okay,” she said to Will and rolled his fresh top to the neck. “Ready?”

  “As I’ll ever be.” He remained motionless as she worked the top over his head and down to his shoulders. “I can do the left arm,” he said, though his jaws clenched and he sucked air through his teeth as he cautiously threaded the arm through its sleeve. “Now for the hard part.”

  “You let me do the work,” she said. “Go limp. Dead weight.”

  “I’ve got to help a little,” he protested. “There’s no way you’ll be able to both keep the arm bent and pull on the top. Maybe I should make do with half a shirt.”

  “That is not an option.” She already didn’t like that he wouldn’t be able to get his arm through a parka sleeve for a day. But his quip about half a shirt gave her an idea. “Mattie, I saw a roll of duct tape in Will’s pack. Go get it, okay?”

  As Mattie scuttled off, Will gave her a narrow look. “What are you going to do?”

  “Give you half a shirt,” she said as Mattie trotted back. “Okay, here’s what we’re going to do.”

  In the end, she cut Will’s thermal top on his right side straight up from the waist to the seam at his sleeve and then down the inner seam to the wrist. Then, draping the shirt over his bad arm, she had Mattie cut lengths of duct tape which she smoothed into place from his waist to his armpit and then down to his wrist.

  “Okay, I’m impressed,” Will said as she worked. “It’s like a vest with side ties.”

  “Or chain mail,” Mattie said.

  “Whatever works.” Securing the open flap of shirt at his wrist with a last piece of tape, Emma took a step back. “How’s that?”

  Mattie favored Will with a critical eye. “He looks like the time my dad dressed up like the Mummy for Halloween. Except he started really coming all undone when we were only halfway. Mom used tape to hold his costume together on account of he only had on his underwear underneath.” The girl stopped to consider a moment. “And only the top half. He said he didn’t mind the breeze.”

  Will and Emma looked at one another then broke up. “Ow, ow, ow!” Will said, grimacing but still sputtering. “Stop making me laugh!”

  Better than you looking like Death warmed over. Laughing made her ribs hurt, too, but it was worth it because Will would be okay. She had to believe in that. As long as Will was okay, they were, too.

  Chapter 6

  A short time later…

  “Here.” She handed her travel mug to Mattie, who crouched between her mother, still in Will’s sleeping bag, and their pitiful barricade. “Drink this.”

  “I’m okay,” Mattie protested.

  “Oh, right, says the human windbreak. Drink it. We’ll figure out a way to keep the wind from getting in.” As the girl took the mug, she said, “How’s your mom?”

  “The same.” Mattie brushed a finger along Rachel’s left cheek. The woman didn’t flinch. “I wish I knew if it was good or bad.”

  “Is Will worried?”

  Shaking her head, Mattie hugged her knees. “But he’s a grown-up. I don’t think he’d tell me if he was.”

  “Hey.” Will looked up from the rear, where he knelt before the open cargo locker behind Emma’s seat. “I heard that.”

  “Well,
would you?” Mattie demanded.

  “Have I been straight so far?”

  Mattie gave him a look. “Answering a question with another question isn’t answering the question.”

  “Give it up, Will. You’re doomed. And you,” she said to Mattie, “drink some more of that before it gets any colder.”

  “It’s actually still pretty hot.” Taking a dutiful sip, Mattie pulled a face. “But it tastes like grass,” she said, handing the mug to Emma.

  “That’s because it is. On the other hand, it’s better than nothing.” Depressing the mug’s auto-seal button, she tipped a swallow into her mouth. The tea was no better than it had been back in Minot, but at least it wasn’t icy cold either and she sighed as a warm finger traced its way down the middle of her chest. And it is still hot.

  “What are you smiling at?” asked Mattie.

  “The last line from an old kid’s book my mom used to read to me.” She made a mental note to write to the travel mug’s manufacturer if they ever got out of this. Maybe Gwyneth Paltrow, too, if she was feeling charitable. She looked toward the rear of the plane. “What’d you find?”

  “Buried treasure,” Will said. “Burke wasn’t kidding about having survival gear.”

  “Please tell me there’s a satellite phone in there.” While she’d been outside earlier, she’d tried her cell more out of habit than actual hope and had gotten what she expected: the equivalent of an electronic raspberry and a message in tiny capitals, NO SERVICE.

  “Afraid not.” Will had strapped on a headlamp from his pack and was laying objects onto the deck: flashlights, batteries, a hand axe, a black-bladed fixed blade in a leg sheath. Hefting a rifle in his good left hand, he said, “But it’s still not half bad. Almost makes you believe in Santa Claus.”

  At this point, she’d be willing to attend a Burl Ives solo concert in exchange for a seat on a rescue chopper. “Wow. Here,” she said, holding out the travel mug. “Trade you.” As he drank, she hefted the rifle, a bolt-action Savage. Slow-rolling the bolt made her smile. Burke had maintained the weapon well. Even in the freezing cold, the action was buttery-smooth, and she caught the slightest whiff of gun oil from the barrel. “I call dibs on the Savage,” she said, setting the weapon aside. “And I want that blade.”

  “They’re yours. I’ve already got a knife in my luggage, and there’s no way I’ll be mucking around with a rifle anytime soon.”

  “That’s a pretty big knife.” Mattie, who’d followed, watched as Emma strapped the sheath to her right thigh. “And that gun looks dangerous.”

  “Only if you’re on the receiving end,” Emma said.

  “My mother says guns are bad.”

  “I think that depends on who you are and what you use them for.”

  “Guns are only for killing.”

  She was not getting into this. “Yes, they are. But if it’s a choice between going hungry and eating deer stew, I’ll take stew.” The knife was a KA-BAR BK2 and, she could already tell, sharp enough to slice paper. She usually carried a knife, a nice Ken Onion Leek Ben had bought that she could clip to a pocket when she was off-duty. The knife was a comfort thing more than anything else; it wasn’t as if she was skilled in fixed-blade fighting, and there wasn’t much call for, say, shaving tinder, splinting out kindling, skinning game, or carving out a handy-dandy hand drill to make a fire in her apartment. But Ben had always carried a knife. She had a sneaking suspicion it was a nod to NCIS—Gibbs’s Rule Number Nine—a show he’d loved and never missed, although he always made fun of it, too. Being a special investigations officer, he knew what agents could and couldn’t do. (A Mossad agent like Ziva David, he said, was a non-starter, but hey, it was fiction.) One thing Ben always said: you never knew when you’d need a knife. For this trip, she hadn’t thought to pack her Leek. Why should she? She was supposed to be only interviewing veterans and their nice dogs, not trying to figure out how to stay alive long enough for someone to rescue her ass. Besides, the airlines would only have given her hell, and she’d been traveling light, with only her pack.

  “Do you know how to hunt?” Mattie asked.

  “I’m from Wisconsin. Even my grandmother hunted.” Straightening, she dropped her right hand, felt her fingers brush the sheath’s release strap. No good wearing a knife you couldn’t get to in a hurry. She wondered if there was any game at this elevation. In winter, the answer was probably no. Deer, rabbits, raccoons, opossums…except for mountain goats, anything they could reasonably hunt would be at a lower elevation where food would be easier to come by. Well, they wouldn’t be here long enough to have to worry about that anyway. “What else do we have, Will?”

  There turned out to be quite a bit. Besides the rifle, two boxes of ammunition, and the BK2, there was a coil of wire, three flashlights, extra batteries, a hand axe, a folding saw, a collapsible fishing rod, a folding shovel, a coil of rope, a small military-grade stove, nesting cookpots, fire sticks, three lighters, three packets of waterproof matches, a packet of jerky, and eight civilian MRE-equivalents (full meals, Emma noted, and not simply entrees, which was good; with the cold, they’d need calories to keep warm). There were also extra packets of tea, instant coffee, sugar, and creamer, as well as an inflatable raft, two sleeping bags (one a double-ton, which made Emma wonder if Burke took trips with lady friends), an extra men’s parka and gloves, snow pants, a pair of men’s snow boots, and another of snowshoes.

  “Interesting.” Will inspected a long orange tube topped with a white cap. “Well, I guess if your radio’s busted and you want to get someone’s attention, this would be a way. Or maybe mark out a landing zone at night? He’s got several.”

  “I can see that.” Turning over a second, Emma read the label. “But why a marine flare? Why not a regular roadside doohickey?”

  “Is that a technical term?” asked Mattie.

  “Yeah, right up there with thingamajig. I suppose there’s a distance component. That is, a marine flare is brighter and produces a much larger flame.” Then Will’s face cleared. “Now I remember. It was during a lecture on bear attacks. An instructor said these are pretty handy against grizzlies. It’s the noise and the fire that scares them away, and they’re better than roadside flares because you don’t have to worry about fiddling with a striker. With this baby, you pop the cap and pull the string and you’re got fire. Might come in handy if there are bears up here.” At the expression on Mattie’s face, Will laughed. “Don’t worry. This late in the season, grizzlies already have been denned up for a month.” He paused then added, “Unless it’s been a bad fall.”

  Mattie gave him a withering look. “Come on.”

  “Scout’s honor. Bears don’t necessarily sleep all winter if they haven’t eaten enough in the fall, or something can cause them to wake up.”

  “Yeah.” Emma nodded solemnly. “Like a plane going boom.”

  “Especially a plane going boom,” Will seconded.

  “Oh, ha-ha. I’m glad you’re having so much fun torturing a kid.” Mattie plucked the flare from Emma’s hands. “Seriously, should we carry one around or something? Just in case?”

  “If it makes you feel better, I don’t see why not,” said Will. “There are enough for each of us. Might be prudent.”

  “Wait,” said Emma. “You were serious about grizzlies waking up?”

  “As a heart attack. But the chances are small. It’s more likely we’d need one to signal a rescue team. In a pinch, you could also start a fire.”

  “Cool.” Setting her flare to one side, Mattie read the label on a long blue box that also sported a graphic of a boy in a white sailor suit. “What’s pilot bread?”

  She knew this one from Thule. “It’s another name for hardtack. They’re really hard, thick crackers without salt. People in Alaska and way up in Canada and Greenland eat it instead of bread because bread’s too expensive to make and pilot bread doesn’t spoil. Most people have it for breakfast along with, you know, jerky or fish.” It also tasted vaguely the way she imagine
d the paste they’d used in kindergarten might, and the stale ones could break your teeth, but details, details. Pilot bread was fine in a pinch, and if ever she was in one, this was it. Thinking about crunching into a cracker made her mouth water. Wait, she had her sandwiches, her trail mix—she nearly groaned aloud—and her Almond Joy.

  “Jerky? For breakfast?” Mattie wrinkled her nose. “What about eggs?”

  She forced herself to stop thinking about chocolate-covered coconut and almonds. She wasn’t going to touch that bar until they were rescued. “Chickens don’t do so hot in the cold. Plus, you have to fly eggs in, and that gets expensive. It depends on what you’re used to. I know people who like canned Dinty Moore stew for breakfast.”

  “Could you guys please stop talking about food?” Will said. “If you’ll recall, none of us has had anything to eat since this morning.”

  “Speaking of which,” Emma said, “we should dig through our packs, pool our resources.” And get some calories in and have something hot to drink and shore up their barricade and maybe start gathering wood for a fire…The list was endless.

  “Hey, look.” Setting aside the box of pilot bread, Mattie reached in again, and this time pulled out three rolls of duct tape. “That’s a lot of tape. Can we use it?”

  “Apparently.” Emma inspected the packaging. “Says it’s specially formulated for use in snow and ice.” A few pointers burbled up from memory. “I think you can make rope from it and use it for bandages and stuff.”

  “Are you kidding? Duct tape’s a godsend. Say,” Will said, trying but failing to lift out what looked like rolls of plastic, “grab that for me, will you? I only have the one hand.”

  The plastic was clear, thick, and very heavy, and wrestling one of the four rolls from the locker set her ribs to complaining again. “What is this?” She let it fall with a hefty thunk to the deck.

  “Visqueen. It’s polyethylene,” Will said. “This is a total jackpot. Normally, you use this stuff in construction work. You know, drop cloths, vapor barriers…”