‘You got the keys?’ he asked Lizzie. ‘I’ll go and get the wagon.’ Lizzie pulled the keys out of her pocket and threw them to Ronald.
‘There you go, mate,’ she replied.
‘Cheers. Back in a sec.’ He stepped down off the ramp and walked across to where the Land Rover was parked.
Lizzie turned and walked back into the body of the helicopter to start gathering the medical kit together for loading on the vehicle. She thought about last week, when Adams had forgotten to hand over the keys when he went off in the ambulance with a patient to the hospital, and she’d only realised that he’d still got them after the helicopter had made the short hop back to the main pan.
Lizzie and Ronald had waited for nearly an hour until Adams had worked out where they were and come back to get them, full of apologies. Lizzie could have walked over to the engineers’ workshop and phoned the hospital from their tent, but she’d wanted to make a point. Besides, there were worse ways to spend an hour than hanging around with Ronald. Lizzie grunted as she picked up Colonel Nick’s medical bag, and she carried it towards the back of the helicopter to start making another pile of equipment.
Ronald reversed the Land Rover so that it was end to end with the helicopter, and he jumped out to help Lizzie load the kit. She looked across at him, laughing.
‘Look what I found,’ she said, holding up a helmet.
6
Almost sixty kilometres due north of Camp Bastion, Lance Corporal Michael Perry was lying on his back in the blistering heat, watching a bird of some description soaring in lazy circles through the blue sky high above him. He wasn’t too sure why he was lying on his back, but one thing he did notice was that it was quiet. Not just quiet, but silent. He couldn’t hear anything at all.
The sun was blocked out for an instant, and he recognised the silhouetted face of the radio operator and patrol medic, Corporal Danny Mulumbu, above him. Perry could see that Mulumbu was shouting something at him, but although he could see his lips moving, he still couldn’t hear anything.
Mulumbu roughly shook Perry by the shoulders, and then put two fingers to Perry’s neck which he tried to swat away, annoyed. He heard a high-pitched whistling noise somewhere in the distance, and the sound of Mulumbu’s voice started to filter through. Perry tried to sit up, but something wasn’t working properly. He managed to get his elbows underneath him and raised his upper body just enough so that he could look at something other than the sky. He could see Mulumbu kneeling next to him, trying to get something from his trouser pocket. Perry glanced down towards his legs.
‘No, no, no!’ he screamed when he saw what was left of them. His left leg had been torn off at the knee, and his right leg was at such an odd angle that it had to be broken somewhere high up near his hip. Perry couldn’t feel any pain though — the only thing that he could feel was rising panic. He threw his head back, jolting the helmet down over his brow. ‘No!’ he screamed again before taking several deep breaths. Perry looked back down at what was left of his legs and saw that Mulumbu had managed to get a combat tourniquet out of Perry’s trouser pocket. The radio operator was trying to undo the black fabric straps, his hands shaking as he struggled with them. Perry’s hearing was returning bit by bit, and he could hear Mulumbu panting. To Perry’s right, the other members of his patrol were fanning out with their guns pointing outwards in a classic defensive posture.
A sharp white-hot pain shot up Perry’s left leg. Screaming, he looked down to see that Mulumbu had grabbed Perry’s trousers and was trying to lift his thigh up to work the tourniquet onto the shattered stump. Perry grabbed Mulumbu’s arm in a tight grip.
‘Stop, stop for fuck’s sake Danny!’ he shouted. ‘Fucking let go.’
‘Sorry mate,’ Mulumbu replied. ‘I’ve got to put this on. You’re bleeding really bad.’ He tightened his grip on Perry’s trouser leg and lifted the stump into the air.
Perry screamed, letting go of Mulumbu’s arm and hitting the ground with a closed fist. He panted, blowing his breath out through his cheeks like a woman in labour. He’d never known pain like it in his life. Perry watched Mulumbu work the loop of the tourniquet over the shattered remains of his left leg and then shut his eyes tightly as if he was trying to anaesthetise the pain by blocking out the image.
‘It’s on, Perry. Okay mate? It’s on now.’ Perry looked back up and saw that Mulumbu had put his left leg back on the sand. ‘You’re doing alright fella, doing good. Yeah?’ Mulumbu started to twist the rod on the tourniquet that would tighten it up and squeeze Perry’s femoral artery until it was closed, stopping the bleeding. With each twist of the rod, a new sharp pain shot up Perry’s thigh.
‘Morphine mate. Where’s the fucking morphine? Come on Danny, morphine mate. Please. For fuck’s sake, please.’ Perry felt Mulumbu’s hand go back into his trousers, looking for the small green box with the morphine auto-injector that they all carried. He shut his eyes again, trying to ignore the pain, and heard Mulumbu open the plastic box and snap the top of the syringe.
‘Right shoulder, Perry. Okay?’ Mulumbu said, tapping Perry’s right upper arm.
‘Yes mate, come on,’ Perry replied. Mulumbu pressed the syringe hard against Perry’s deltoid muscle and pressed the button. Perry heard the click of the injection, but any pain from it was lost. He saw Mulumbu pull the needle out and bend it against the ground, snapping the needle off completely before putting the used syringe back into the box.
A small bead of sweat ran slowly down the side of Perry’s forehead before another wave of agony struck when Mulumbu moved his left leg to straighten it up. Perry screamed, even though he tried hard not to. ‘Jesus Christ,’ he said through clenched teeth. He tried to remember what advice his girlfriend had been given when their first and so far only child had been born. Shutting his eyes tightly, he huffed and puffed, trying to breathe the pain away. The only problem was that he wasn’t having a baby in a warm, comfortable, and clean hospital in the United Kingdom. He was bleeding to death in the middle of Afghanistan.
A sharp slap to the injection site on his shoulder made Perry open his eyes.
‘Mate, I need to put a bandage on that.’ Mulumbu pointed at what was left of Perry’s left leg, a large combat bandage in his hands. ‘It’s gonna hurt, sorry. Got to be done though.’ Bracing himself for the pain, Perry nodded at Mulumbu. He understood what Mulumbu had to do. He didn’t like it, but he understood. Perry shut his eyes again, screwing them up to try to distract himself. He thought about his family, about how bloody angry his girlfriend would be when she found out that he’d lost a leg like he left it on the bus or something. He tried to picture his son’s face. Charlie was eighteen months old, and when Perry had left for the desert he’d just started to say a few words. In her last letter, Perry’s girlfriend had described how Charlie had finally taken his first steps less than a week after he’d left.
Perry had cried when he read that he’d missed it by only a few days, and he cried again now as he lay on the sand with his legs in bits and realised that he couldn’t even remember what his son’s face looked like. White hot pain brought him back into reality, and he realised that Mulumbu was wrapping the bloodied stump of his left leg in a bandage.
Perry opened his eyes as he sensed rather than saw a shadow across the sun. He couldn’t see who it was who’d blocked out the sun, but he soon recognised the harsh Northern Irish accent of his platoon commander.
‘Fuck me, Perry. What’ve you done to yourself, mate?’
Perry closed his eyes again. All he wanted to do was to shut the whole thing out. Maybe it was the morphine finally starting to kick in, but he felt really, really tired.
Corporal Danny Mulumbu looked down at his friend lying in the sand in front of him. Looking around, Mulumbu could see the crater in the ground where the mine or improvised explosive device had gone off, taking Perry’s left leg with it and bending his other leg in completely the wrong direction. The crater was on the edge of a wadi, or dried river bed, so the chan
ces were that it was one of the thousands — if not millions — of mines left behind during one of the many wars in the area over the last few years. His patrol was completely off the beaten track, trying to find a vantage point to set up a forward observation post which would look over a road where the Taliban were rumoured to have set up unofficial checkpoints over the last few weeks.
Mulumbu figured that as this wasn’t an area where insurgents or the military operated in frequently if at all, the location of the explosion in a wadi probably meant that the mine had been swept there during the winter by a flash flood. The insurgents wouldn’t have taken the time and effort to set up an improvised explosive device here on the off chance that a patrol might stumble across it.
Whether it was a mine or an IED was completely irrelevant, he thought, as it had completely done the job on Perry. What it did mean was that the chances of them being close to an unofficial minefield were fairly high, although they were all on firm ground. Even Perry had been blown back out of the wadi onto the firmer ground by the blast. Mulumbu looked up towards the slightly higher ground where the rest of his patrol were setting up an emergency helicopter landing site for the medical team that should be on their way from Camp Bastion.
‘How you doing there, big man?’ he said to Perry, using his unofficial nickname for the smallest bloke in the patrol. Perry didn’t reply, so Danny knelt by his side. It could be that the morphine finally kicked in, he thought, and he didn’t want to wake Perry up if that was the case. He’d be in enough pain during the transfer to come as it was. Perry didn’t look too bad, given the circumstances. His breathing was regular, not too quick, and he was a healthy enough colour. Mulumbu had a quick look to make sure that the tourniquet was still doing its job of keeping Perry’s blood where it should be — inside him — and couldn’t see any leaks. He remembered back from his Common Core first aid training that you could bleed to death without anyone seeing a single drop of blood if you had internal injuries, but that was more from stuff like being run over by a bus or something like that. Mulumbu sat down next to his friend, and with a quick glance to make sure none of the other members of the patrol were watching, touched the side of Perry’s face. ‘Not long now mate.’ he said. ‘Hang in there. Not long now.’
7
Lizzie dried her hands on the rough paper towels from the dispenser in the female toilets. Dropping the paper into the bin, she sighed. That was a straightforward enough job. One casualty, and fairly simple. It had got a bit sticky at one point, but they’d done what they’d set out do, which was to deliver the casualty to the hospital in a better state than he’d been in when they’d picked him up. From that point of view, job done.
But, and this was a big but, there was the small issue of the new doctor, Colonel Nick. Her first impression of him wasn’t good, that was fair to say, but she had to admit to herself that there was something about him that she quite liked. She figured that Ronald had probably picked up on this, but then again he would, but she thought to herself that she didn’t need this. Lizzie looked at herself in the mirror on the wall. She wasn’t in bad shape, she thought, although the crow’s feet that had started to appear around her eyes over the last few months were irritating. Even more irritating was that Adams had called them ‘laughter lines’ when she’d first mentioned them to him, and seeing how annoyed she was by this phrase, had kept using it since. She used a finger to pull at the skin next to her eyes to smooth them out but the minute she let go, there they were again. The worse thing was that the more tanned she got, the more obvious they got, or at least that’s how it seemed. Lizzie was running her fingers through her hair, trying to tame it, when the door to the toilets opened behind her and one of her room-mates, Corporal Emma Wardle, walked in.
‘Hi, mate,’ Lizzie said to Emma’s reflection in the mirror. ‘How did it go?’
‘Not too bad in the end, Lizzie,’ Emma replied. ‘Major Clarke put me in as scribe.’
‘Oh, okay,’ Lizzie said. ‘So, it all went well, then? You were shitting yourself the other night.’
‘No, it was fine. Went really smoothly, I thought. Not that different to back at home, but then again we never got many gunshot wounds in Barnet General.’
‘Mate, I’ve been a Paramedic for nearly five years now and that’s the first proper one I’ve seen,’ Lizzie said. ‘He should be okay, shouldn’t he?’
‘He’s in theatre already. The ITU’s getting all excited waiting for him to come out, but the transfer team are hovering like vultures.’
One of Lizzie’s closest friends was an intensive care nurse on the RAF critical care transfer team, or CCTT, so she knew a little bit about how they worked. The quicker they could get a patient in the air and on the way back to a decent hospital the better. She knew as well that there was a real element of pride attached to being able to move patients who were badly injured so quickly.
‘He might not even make it as far as the ITU if the CCTT have their way,’ Lizzie said. ‘He’ll just be loaded straight into the back of a Hercules before he’s even come round from his anaesthetic.’
‘They’re certainly keen, that’s for sure,’ Emma laughed as she went into one of the cubicles, closing the door behind her.
‘So, Major Clarke was really supportive, was he?’ Lizzie asked through the door.
‘Yeah, he was. I was quite surprised seeing as he’s normally so grumpy with everyone.’
‘Yeah, well. You know why, don’t you?’ Lizzie said, smiling.
‘Enough Lizzie,’ Emma laughed.
‘What Major Clarke really wants…’ Lizzie continued.
‘I said, enough!’
Lizzie walked out of the toilets into the main hospital corridor and turned down towards the TRT tent. Nodding at a radiographer who was pushing a large x-ray machine down the corridor towards the operating theatre, she ran her fingers through her hair again. Having her head squashed inside a Kevlar helmet for so long didn’t do it any favours.
Adams wouldn’t notice what state her hair was in, or even what colour it was. Ronald wouldn’t care because, well, because he was Ronald. But the new doctor might. She caught herself thinking this, and swore quietly under her breath.
Reaching the end of the long corridor, Lizzie turned and entered the TRT tent, pushing the heavy canvas flaps of the tent door aside as she did so. Walking straight to the table with the kettle on, she picked up the tea that Colonel Nick had made her and sat down next to Adams on one of the green canvas chairs next to the main desk. She took a large sip of her drink.
‘My God,’ she exclaimed, looking into the cup with disgust. ‘Is that tea?’
‘Yep,’ Adams replied. ‘The Colonel made it especially for you.’
‘Well, that’s the subject of the next training session sorted out then,’ Lizzie said. ‘How to make a decent bloody cup of tea.’ Adams looked at her, grinning. ‘He’s behind me, isn’t he?’ Lizzie asked, already knowing the answer from the look on Adams's face.
‘Yes, I am,’ Colonel Nick said, walking through from the small stores section. ‘And what’s wrong with your tea anyway? It’s got milk and two sugars as briefed.’
Lizzie felt herself going red and hated herself for it. The Colonel might be a bit of a cock, but he wasn’t a bad looking one.
‘It’s not that there’s anything wrong with it, as such,’ she said. ‘It’s just not quite how I drink it, that’s all.’
‘I think the damage is probably done, Lizzie,’ Adams laughed. ‘But you’ll have to lead the next training session now.’
‘Where’s Ronald?’ she asked, glaring at him and trying to change the subject. The look from Adams told her that he’d picked up on the change.
‘He’s in main stores, finishing off restocking the bags.’
‘What, all of them?’ Lizzie replied, annoyed. She felt very protective towards Ronald, suspecting that he’d just been told to do it by Colonel Nick and hadn’t had the bottle to tell him to do his own bag. ‘We normally do our own
bags unless someone specifically offers to do them for you,’ she said, with a pointed look towards Colonel Nick. The Colonel raised his hands in a mock gesture of surrender. ‘Sir,’ Lizzie added as she caught the sharp look on Adams's face.
‘He offered to do mine with his, Sergeant Jarman,’ Colonel Nick said. ‘Said it would be quicker as he knew where everything was. Besides, I was making the tea.’
‘Right,’ Lizzie replied, momentarily caught out. ‘But at some point, you’ll need to get yourself familiar with where all the kit is.’
‘Fair point, Sergeant Jarman,’ Colonel Nick replied with a half-smile that irritated Lizzie no end. ‘I’ll be sure to do that.’
They looked at each other for a couple of seconds before she said, ‘I’ll go and help him. It’ll be even quicker then.’
Lizzie walked back to the rear of the tent and emptied her cup into the sink, making sure that the Colonel saw what she thought of his tea in case he hadn’t got the message earlier, before walking through the back of the tent and out into the main base. As she walked across the dusty gravel to the main store building a couple of hundred yards away, she wished that she hadn’t been so quick to get irritated with the Colonel. Ronald was a big lad, she thought, and was quite capable of looking after himself without her acting as his bloody mother. Just as she got to the door of the stores, Ronald came out with a medical bag in each hand.
‘Give me one of those, mate,’ she said. ‘I’ll give you a hand.’
As soon as Lizzie had left the TRT tent, Adams heard Colonel Nick clearing his throat.
‘Sergeant Jarman’s a bit of a live wire, isn’t she?’ the doctor asked.
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