Close Reach

by Jonathan Moore

  The dead surgeon had at least been careful enough that Lena would stay alive through the examination and for however long it took him to ready the Colonel. He’d wanted her heart to beat until the second he was ready to steal it from her. It left Kelly with time and a chance.

  She looked again at the instruments, some of them familiar, others less so.

  She wished she had a nurse. An anesthesiologist who didn’t need to be shot. Without help, she wouldn’t be able to alter the inhalational anesthetics until she was done. The machine wasn’t sterile, and she wouldn’t be able to touch it in midsurgery. If Lena started to crash, she’d have to deal with the machine and the drugs, and then she wouldn’t be able to touch her patient again until she spent another ten minutes resterilizing herself. For the same reason, she wouldn’t be able to adjust the lights or change the magnification loupe on her visor. Maybe none of it mattered, anyway. She’d already committed the greatest breach of operating room sterility she’d ever heard of.

  There was an empty bullet casing on the blue sheet between Lena’s knees. She left it there.

  “Okay, Lena, honey,” she whispered. “Let’s do this.”

  The retractors were held apart with a thumbscrew. She twisted it to the left and then slid the steel hinge closed. She took the retractors off Lena’s chest and set them on the lower tray. Now the split sides of Lena’s sternum were loosely abutting each other. When she fit the sternal reduction forceps and locked them into place, the two sides of the saw-split bone came tightly together.

  She was no expert in this kind of surgery. Her field was more precise and delicate. She operated on nerves. Tiny tumors or bleeding vessels deep in the brain. She went in through holes the diameter of a coffee straw and groped her way forward by remote control, watching her progress on a video monitor.

  By contrast, this was like operating with a large-bore naval gun. The hole in Lena’s chest was big enough to pass her fists through. And in all her years of surgery, she had never used a Phillips head screwdriver on a patient. But she was about to.

  She fit the first titanium plate and twisted the drill guide into place, bracing the rib from underneath with the fingers of her right hand. She used the surgical drill to bore a narrow pilot hole, then set the drill guide aside and twisted in the first screw. The plates had been custom fitted for the Colonel’s sternum and would be too big for Lena, whose bones were as delicate as a sparrow’s. But this would do until she got to a hospital. The other twenty-three screws were a little easier and took a minute apiece to drill and set. Without pausing, she ran a line of absorbing sutures through the lower layer of Lena’s skin, stitching flesh back over bone.

  She leaned past the blue curtain and looked at the anesthesia machine’s monitors. Lena was still fine, running right down the middle. There was no way to guess how long that might last. For Lena, time was as precious as blood, and she was short of both.

  She was closing the outermost layer of Lena’s skin with the surgical stapler when she saw a shadow pass the window. Kelly held her breath and froze. She was still half deaf from shooting the pistol in the tiny cabin. Her ears could have been stuffed with cotton. But she heard the footsteps all the same, the creak of dry boards out on the porch.

  “Cuidado,” a man said, his voice low.

  She put down the stapler and picked up the pistol, pulling her mask down around her throat after she backed away from Lena. She stepped over the dead surgeon and through the hole the anesthesiologist had left in the plastic wall. Outside, there was more whispering. The generators cut out one at a time.

  When the lights went out, there was just the orange glow of the fire in the stove, the purple glow of the sky outside behind the waving tree branches.

  The EKG and some of the other equipment must have had a battery backup. The low beeping continued, and there were green and white lights from some of the control buttons on the other machines.

  She stepped into the shadows behind the woodstove.

  The flames wavered behind the stove’s greasy mica windows. By their light, she saw the front door swing open six inches. The man outside was pushing it open with the flensing knife. Firelight trickled across its blood-wet blade, and when he took one step more, she saw his face. Big Hands. If he’d armed himself with the knife, he didn’t have a gun. They’d thought that they were alone, that the only danger to their Coloel was the procedure itself, not anything from the outside.

  Kelly crouched low and waited.

  A knot popped in the fire, and Big Hands started, then appeared to relax. He stepped farther into the room, looking not at the stove but at the carnage on the other side of the room. Kelly waited until she saw the second man on the porch beyond the doorway. She shot him first, aiming for his chest but hitting him in the groin. He fell back screaming, and Kelly turned the gun on the first man, who was charging at her. She fired until the clip was empty, hitting him in the chest, in the face. The other shots went wide, smashing into the log wall and breaking through a window. Big Hands staggered and fell across the top of the woodstove, sizzling as he slid off it.

  The streak of blood he left on the hot iron immediately started to smoke.

  She stood and went to him, stooping to take the flensing knife from the floor beside him. She went out onto the porch. The man she’d hit in the groin was crawling on his elbows across the grass, heading for the generators. She followed him, and he turned over onto his back, his hands up. It was the man whose ankle she’d cut aboard Freefall. Her throat was still tight and bruised from the pipe he’d used to choke her.

  The flensing knife was heavy, and she was tired from swinging it, tired from everything. She brought the knife up past her shoulder slowly and looked down at the man. His hands were clasped over his chest, his fingers interlocked and prayerful, shaking at her. He might have been begging. She wasn’t sure. She didn’t let him do it for long, and she put her back into the downward stroke.

  * * *

  Later, after she restarted the generators and put the lights back on, she scrubbed in a second time. Lena’s heart rate was steady. The anesthesiologist had done a good job. She wondered what had driven him to this. The surgeon, too. They must have lost their licenses somehow or been convicted of something. She imagined the kinds of jobs they’d taken, the evil they’d done that had led them to the Colonel and to this little cabin at the land’s end.

  It didn’t matter.

  She turned back to Lena and finished closing her chest, trying her best to be careful but knowing that if the girl lived through this, the scar would be terrible. When they’d opened her chest, the surgeons had not given any consideration to closing it, so that the wound was jagged and larger than it needed to be. She took up her instruments, and when they were in her hands, she let her mind slide back into its trance.

  From the other half of the operating theater she could hear the Colonel’s raspy breath. She’d deal with him later.

  * * *

  When she was done, she rolled Lena’s gurney closer to the fire. She found a cord of split wood stacked along the side of the cabin and brought in an armload to keep the stove burning. She took the tie-downs from Lena’s gurney and used them to restrain the Colonel. Eventually, his anesthetic would wear off and he’d wake. She’d be there for him, right at his side.

  But not as his doctor.

  They would have a talk, just the two of them. If he didn’t speak English, she’d make sure he understood. He’d let his sons lift him onto the gurney and let the doctor run the anesthetic into him, thinking that when he woke up, he’d have everything he needed to come back. But he was going to wake in the cold on the porch, with the same dying heart he’d had all his life. And with his son’s severed head on his chest, staring at him. He was going to learn exactly what he’d bought for himself, for his family.

  For now, though, he slept, and so did Lena.

  Kelly stoked the fire and found a chair on the porch, bringing it in for a place to sit. There was a stock of canned
food in the cabin, and she ate from it without tasting a thing, just spooning it into her mouth straight from the cans while she stared at the fire. She’d need her strength for days and weeks to come. So she ate.

  It was light outside again.

  Down the slope from the cabin, she could see the end of the fjord’s small branch. La Araña and the float plane were down there. When she was ready, she would gather the dead men and put them inside La Araña’s bridge. She’d bring the Colonel down and leave him inside somewhere, strapped to his gurney, his eyes blinking against the pressure of the gag. She’d pull the leads from the batteries so the bilge pumps couldn’t run, and she’d use a saw to cut through the raw water intake hose to let the cold fjord pour in.

  La Araña and her men would go down slowly. The surgeon’s plane would keep them company on the bottom.

  But that would all come later.

  She slept a while in the hardwood chair, waking every few moments to check Lena’s pulse, to watch the color rise back into her face as the fire warmed her. There were drugs in the cabin that she could use to supplement what was left aboard Freefall. If Lena made it through this day and the one after, if she didn’t swell up with an infection, she would live. They would wait in the cabin until the girl was rested enough to board the Zodiac, and then they would hide at anchor until Lena was strong enough to survive the passage out of Chile. She held the girl’s hand and leaned down to kiss her fingertips. She put her cheek against Lena’s wrist. Her pulse was soft and slow, but it was there.

  Kelly dozed off again, but there was still no rest.

  Epilogue

  Kelly set the autopilot and let it steer Freefall on a northeast course.

  They were two hundred miles from the Falkland Islands and would be there the next day unless the weather changed. She hadn’t made any landfalls in Chile since leaving the maze of Patagonia’s fjords. Whatever story she told, she would tell it to the British. No one would lay hands on Lena but the girl’s own countrymen.

  For now, Lena was sleeping. Kelly would go to her soon, would slide in next to her and hold her as the boat carried them to Port Stanley and whatever warmth and safety it might offer. But for a moment she just sat in the helm seat and watched the sea ahead.

  The sky was gray, and they’d seen no hint of sun in days.

  There hadn’t been any ice for a while, but the water was still cold. Where the waves frothed and broke, they were green and white and looked as frigid as any sea she’d sailed. But sometime, whether in a few weeks or a few months, she and Lena would reach the crest of a wave and would see a shaft of sunlight ahead on the horizon lighting the turquoise water it touched. The wind coming over the rail would be as warm as the sun on her face on a late summer afternoon.

  Like a blessing.

  And maybe she would find something there, in that warmth, the way that once, on a sea just like it, Dean had given her a kiss, and she had savored it on her lips that entire day as this same boat carried her ahead to a future she couldn’t have guessed.

  Maybe she would find something like that.

  Call it forgiveness, call it redemption. Call it anything.

  She could hope.

  She touched her knuckles to the thick teak above the companionway doors the way Dean always had when the clouds behind them looked a shade too dark. And then she went below to hold on to the girl.

  Acknowledgments

  You wouldn’t be holding this book but for the hard work of my agent, Alice Martell, and my editor, Sarah Peed. They believed in the story and then helped make it better. Robert Perry is one of the best yacht designers working today, so I’m truly grateful he took the time to draw Freefall; his imagination spurred mine. When it comes to matters of the heart, you can’t beat Nathaniel Boyer, M.D., who answered every question I asked. All authors need first readers, and in that department, I’m blessed to have Maria Wang and Bruce Nakamura, who always find time to help me. And finally, I want to thank Dallas Mayr—he knows why.

  About the Author

  JONATHAN MOORE lives in Hawaii with his wife, Maria. When he’s not writing or fixing his boat, Jonathan is an attorney at a Honolulu firm. Before completing law school in New Orleans, he was an English teacher, a white-water raft guide on the Rio Grande, a counselor at a Texas wilderness camp for juvenile delinquents, and an investigator for a criminal defense attorney in Washington, D.C. His first novel, Redheads, was published in November 2013.

  Explore worlds beyond imagining

  eOriginal Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror from Random House

  www.readhydra.com

  Join the Hydra Online Street Team

  Earn store credits that you can use toward redeeming free books, swag,

  online giftcards, and more!

  Join now at: http://​readhydra.​fancorps.​com

  readhydra

  readhydra