Strong

by Natalie Debrabandere

  “Can you get a line into her?” she asked.

  “Sure.”

  “Okay. Quick as you can.”

  Lenster set to work, and Kate bent over Tyler‘s leg, frowning in concentration. She jumped in fright when Tyler grabbed her arm and pulled her back, hard enough to make her lose her balance.

  “Tyler, it’s me,” Kate said quickly, catching the disorientation in her eyes.

  “Chinook is on the way boss,” Lenster said loudly. “We’re getting an Apache to clean up the unwanted first.”

  Tyler stared at him in disbelief, then at the needle in her arm, and she tried to raise herself up on one elbow.

  “What… what are you doing?” she protested.

  She turned to Kate, and her eyes travelled over her body armour before coming to rest on her face.

  She blinked furiously.

  “Kate. Are you injured?” she gasped.

  “No, I’m fine.”

  “You’re covered in blood!”

  Kate forced a reassuring smile. She grabbed bandages from her bag, working quickly, not pausing to talk for long.

  “It’s not mine, Tyler,” she said. “Try to relax, okay?”

  “Lenster, help me get up,” Tyler snapped angrily. “Did we get hit? I don’t…“

  She stopped abruptly and stared at her leg. Kate felt her tremble. She wanted to cry when she spotted the look on Tyler’s face, recognising frustration, anger, and a huge amount of fear all wrapped into one. She wished she could have hugged her then and reassured them both that she was going to be okay. But there was no time for that, and she was not going to start lying to her now.

  So she kept her focus and started to cut through the remains of her trousers. She was working as quickly as she could, concerned that Tyler was losing a lot of blood. There was so much of it that it was hard even for Kate to see exactly the full extent of the damage.

  “How are you doing?” she asked. “Talk to me.”

  Tyler did not reply. It took her a few seconds to make sense of what she was seeing, because it was so unexpected to see it on herself, and because she still felt dizzy from the shock of the explosion. She had seen soldiers wounded before, gunshot wounds and limbs torn apart by IEDs, grenades and shrapnel. But for a moment she struggled to link the sight of her shattered leg to her own self. Most of the bone below her knee was gone, and it looked like only a single tendon still connected her foot to her leg.

  She gritted her teeth as shock and pain hit her like a freight train.

  “Fuck,” she muttered.

  Another platoon from the camp had arrived by now, and a big group of marines were busy establishing a safe landing zone for the evac helicopter. Anybody wanting to take a shot at them had better be prepared to die in the process. At least it might be relatively safe doing the extraction, Kate reflected.

  She realised that Tyler was going to leave, and she clenched her teeth.

  “Get me on the radio,” Tyler ordered Lenster.

  He quickly gave it to her, and Tyler fought to control her breathing as she got back on the net.

  “Is everybody okay?” she asked, and Kate threw her a sharp glance. She was shaking like a leaf.

  A chaos of voices came back over the net. A lot of swearing and anger came through. And confirmations that an Apache was about to do very bad things to a bunch of confirmed Taliban hiding in a nearby wood. Nobody was going to intercept the rescue helicopter.

  Tyler dropped the radio and sank a little lower.

  “I’m not leaving,” she said through gritted teeth.

  “Listen…”

  “No. I‘m not going.”

  Her voice was hard but the trembling was getting worse.

  “Fuck!” she repeated, and Kate was worried that this was going downhill way too fast.

  She took Tyler’s face in both her hands and touched her lips with

  hers. She did not give a damn who was around anymore, this was far too important.

  “Listen to me," she said quietly. "I need you to calm down, okay? Stay still and let me do my job.”

  Pain blazed through Tyler's eyes and she struggled to speak.

  “I need... Ben. Where's Ben?”

  Kate looked up and her eyes met Lenster’s.

  The marine’s jaw clenched and he looked like he was about to be sick.

  “Kate?” Tyler insisted. “Is he okay?”

  Kate rested her fingers against her cheek and lowered her voice.

  “No. He’s not,“ she murmured.

  “What?“

  “I’m sorry Ty. Ben is gone. Now please lie down.”

  She averted her eyes and turned once more to Tyler’s leg.

  Kate felt on the verge of despair as she applied fresh compresses against the side of it, aware that she was fighting a losing battle. There was too much blood, the injury was too severe to be treated in the middle of a dirty field, and she felt both angry and scared at the same time as she tightened the tourniquet on Tyler’s leg and glanced over her shoulder.

  “ETA on that Chinook?” she yelled back.

  She struggled not to swear, knowing it would not help, knowing she had to keep calm for Tyler's sake.

  “Two minutes, doc.”

  “Kate,” Tyler said weakly. “You sure about Ben?”

  Kate winced involuntarily.

  “I’m sure. I‘m sorry,” she repeated.

  Tyler seemed to give up then. She did lie down finally, and after a couple of seconds she brought her arms up and crossed them in front of her face. She started to sob silently.

  Kate wrapped her fingers around her wrist and pulled her arm back.

  “Don’t do this now,” she ordered. “Please. Don’t give in. I need you to stay awake and keep talking to me.”

  But Tyler was struggling to keep her eyes open by now. She was getting worse with every passing second, and Kate knew that they were running out of time.

  “Open your eyes, damn it!” she shouted.

  “They’ll cut my leg off… in Bastion...”

  This made Kate feel a little as if someone had just punched her in the stomach. The way that Tyler stated the obvious, with so little emotion, as if she were talking about her own self. Kate wanted to tell her no, that she would be okay, but she knew that Tyler would be lucky if she managed to keep her knee.

  “Hey, Ty, tell me about the beach at home,” she said instead.

  She looked up as the Chinook started approaching, low and fast over the frozen fields. Tyler was leaving. They did not have much time now.

  She squeezed her hand, hard.

  “Look at me,” she urged.

  Tyler’s eyes remained closed, and Kate bent even closer to her.

  “You have to hold on,” she implored. “You hear me? Tyler!”

  Tyler finally opened her eyes, and struggled to speak.

  “Be careful,” she murmured.

  “Always.”

  “I‘m sorry, Kate…”

  “Shhh. You’ve got nothing to be sorry about.”

  Kate took a hard breath. She lay her hand over Tyler‘s forehead, letting her fingers drift to her cheek, feeling the skin burning underneath.

  “You‘re going to be okay,” she said, as firmly as her own fear allowed her to.

  Out of the corner of her eye she spotted the evac Chinook about to land. She lay on top of Tyler to protect her from the down blast, and in the next second they got drenched in wet mud lifted from the powerful blades. Tyler held on to her, and Kate bit her lip when she felt how badly she was shaking.

  “It’s okay, it’s okay,” she kept on repeating.

  She brushed her eyes before Tyler could see that she was crying, and she looked down at her.

  “Nearly there, darling,” she said with an encouraging smile. "You're going home, you're going to be okay."

  “No. Stay with me,” Tyler murmured.

  Kate looked up as the army medics arrived on scene. Reluctantly, she moved away from her injured friend.


  “What’s her status?” one of them asked as they moved her onto a stretcher.

  "Cat B," Kate replied, fighting tears.

  They were fastening the straps on the stretcher, covering her with an emergency blanket.

  “BP’s plunging,” his colleague announced. “We need to go now.”

  Kate ran with them back to the helicopter. She stumbled a couple of times, feeling weak and out of breath. She was beginning to lose control and she knew it.

  As the medics ran up the ramp and lowered the stretcher inside the helicopter, Kate glanced at Tyler and caught her eyes on her. She was struggling to remain conscious and her face was ashen, but her eyes were open. Kate bent down to her and put her mouth to her ear. The sound of the Chinook was deafening, and she shouted so that she could be certain that Tyler would hear her.

  “You’re doing great,” she said breathlessly. “Keep fighting. I will come and find you. I promise.”

  Tyler shook her head but her eyes were closing again in spite of herself. The helicopter shuddered, ready to lift. One of the medics applied an oxygen mask to her face and turned to Kate.

  “We gotta go, are you going or staying?” he yelled.

  “Going.”

  Kate allowed herself to look back at Tyler just once. She touched her cheek, squeezed her hand one last time, and then she jumped out of the helicopter and ran back to the troops.

  Chapter Eleven

  When Tyler came to she had absolutely no idea where she was, although she knew instinctively that this was not a place she wanted to be. The air around her was strange, congested with the smells of blood, antiseptic, and something else that she could not place. The infirmary at Cobel? It was hot, dark and stuffy. It felt like the middle of the night, and she tried in vain to identify where she was and remember how she had got there. It was hard to think. Her brain felt sluggish and heavy, and every bit of her body hurt, even more than the night after her last Ironman.

  It was quite impossible to stay awake much longer, and she drifted off again.

  Just over a day later, she started to awaken at the feel of a cool hand on her forehead. After a while she recognised the sound of a woman’s voice, very faint.

  That got her attention.

  “Kate…” she murmured.

  Her throat was dry. The headache was worse than before, and she struggled to open her eyes.

  “Kate,” she said again, louder this time.

  “Captain Jackson?”

  Tyler opened her eyes and blinked. Damn it was bright in this room. She blew air out loudly and tried to adjust her vision.

  “Captain?”

  The woman standing next to the bed came into focus. She had short spiky red hair and bright green eyes. She wore a uniform and sergeant stripes under her white coat. Not Kate.

  Tyler narrowed her eyes at her.

  “Hey there," the woman said loudly. "Do you know where you are, captain? Do you remember what happened?”

  Tyler shook her head a little and the simple fact of doing so made her feel like someone had planted an axe right in between her eyes. She closed them again and exhaled slowly. Now that she knew the woman was not Kate, she was not interested in talking to her, and all she wanted to do was sink back into sleep. The light hurt her eyes and she longed for darkness, but the sergeant would have none of it.

  “Can you tell me your name, captain?”

  “Jackson,” Tyler muttered.

  "First name?"

  "Tyler."

  “That’s good. I'm Sergeant O'Connor. Can you open your eyes for me? Do you know where you are?”

  “Hospital. I don’t know where I am.”

  The second Tyler said that it hit her. Everything came flooding back all at once, and she sat bolt upright, ripping the IV line out of her arm, hard enough to start it bleeding.

  “Whoa, take it easy,” the doctor exclaimed.

  She gripped Tyler’s wrist and immediately applied a compress against her arm.

  “Calm down. You’re safe here.”

  Tyler’s heart was racing.

  She glanced at the syringe in the woman’s hand.

  “I don’t need that,” she said.

  “It’s just morphine. Believe me, it will help.”

  “No. I don’t want drugs,” Tyler argued loudly, and her head was clearing at the speed of light, memories getting sharper as adrenaline rushed through her.

  “Okay, just let me know when you change your mind.”

  “I won‘t. Where am I?”

  The doctor sank her hands in the pockets of her white coat and gazed at her patiently.

  “How are you feeling?” she asked.

  “I just remembered… what happened yesterday. Where am I, is this Bastion?”

  “Actually, that was just over three days ago now. You’ve been out a while.”

  Three days? Tyler let that sink in, her mind working overdrive to piece the bits back together.

  “What’s your normal resting heart rate?”

  “Forty-eight.”

  O'Connor nodded in appreciation, and she wrapped her fingers around Tyler‘s wrist. She glanced at her watch, then shot a concerned look at her patient.

  “You’re at ninety three right now.”

  “That’s because I don’t know what the hell is going on!” Tyler shouted.

  “Okay. Calm down...“

  “No! Don‘t touch me!”

  Tyler rolled over and took a wild swing in the general direction of the doctor’s head.

  Then she vaguely heard the woman call for help, and almost immediately someone else was in there with them. She felt someone hold her down, and something very cold pressed against her face, and then silent darkness flooded her mind once more and dragged her down into unconsciousness.

  When she opened her eyes again she found O’Connor standing by the side of her bed, looking wary. Tyler spotted the cut on her lower lip, and she sighed.

  “Ha. Did I do this?” she asked.

  “Don’t worry about it.

  “Well. I’m very sorry.”

  O’Connor flashed her a genuine smile.

  “Really, captain. It’s nothing, don’t worry.”

  “Is this Bastion?” Tyler asked tiredly.

  “Yes.”

  “Then I don’t want drugs.”

  “Okay, that‘s fine.”

  “Where’s my weapon?”

  “You’re on your way out of here, captain,” O’Connor explained. “No weapons allowed on the plane.”

  Tyler stared at her, working to wrap her head around this novel bit of news. Then she looked down and narrowed her eyes at the unfamiliar shape of her legs under the thin hospital cover.

  The doctor followed her gaze.

  “Do you remember what happened?” she said quietly.

  Tyler barely heard her. All of a sudden she was back in the field after the explosion. She stared into space and felt herself grow rigid as she remembered what her leg had looked like. She remembered the medic on the helicopter telling her to stay with him, that she had to stay awake. Voices swirling around her as she kept drifting in and out of consciousness, and then everything accelerating as a man in scrubs bent over her leg and shook his head. She remembered the mask against her face and the sweet smell of anaesthetic, and surrendering to it because she could no longer fight it, knowing what they were going to do.

  Tyler gave a tense shake of the head. It was a shock to see that a big part of her left leg was no longer there.

  "Captain Jackson."

  Tyler looked up at the doctor at the same time that she realised she was crying. She brushed the tears away, angry with herself for losing control so easily.

  "It‘s okay," the doctor said gently. "Do you want to tell me about it?"

  Tyler swallowed, still staring at her leg.

  “Suicide bomber,” she said slowly.

  “Where were you at the time?”

  “Out on patrol...”

  She started to shake.

&
nbsp; "Sorry," she murmured.

  "It's okay. Just let it go."

  "Why am I shaking like this?"

  "Shock. That's pretty normal, don't worry."

  Tyler fought to control the shaking and failed.

  “My leg... looked pretty bad after the explosion,” she said, looking up at the doctor. “I didn’t think you’d be able to save it, but I was hoping you could at least save my knee...”

  She bit her lower lip and went quiet. She had been hoping against all hope that there was something they would be able to do to save her leg. And the thought that they would take it off above the knee had never even entered her mind.

  O’Connor gave her a gentle smile and nodded.

  “I know," she said. "The surgeons did everything they could, but the damage was too extensive, and there was a risk of infection. They had to cut just above the knee. This being said, you should have no complications with it, so long as you don’t rush your rehab.”

  Tyler pretty much ignored that last comment.

  “When can I get a prosthetic?” she asked. “I need to be walking.”

  “We’re flying you out to the UK, and you are going straight to Staunton Forest. You can start your rehab over there pretty much straight away.”

  This was enough to distract Tyler from her leg for a second.

  “England?” she repeated.

  “Yes. Is that a problem? You‘ll need to speak to your command if you‘d like to go back to the US first…”

  “No, England’s perfect,” Tyler interrupted. “I just…”

  She breathed deeply and felt herself relax a little. Any connection to Kate was a boost of morale at the minute.

  “England‘s great, thanks,” she said.

  “We aim to please. I'll go and check on timings for you, be still and wait for me, okay?”

  Alone once more, Tyler took a deep breath and slowly removed the cover off her legs. Her left thigh was heavily bandaged, and she was grateful for that. She realised as she stared down that she had not been quite ready to look at the injury yet, and the white bandage covered it completely and made it easier to come to terms with. It looked neat and clean. Her hands shook a little still, but she took several deep breaths and remained firmly in control. It would be okay. She would get a prosthetic and she would still be able to run. She would still be able to walk. It was all that mattered.