“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.