Troop 18

by Jessica L. Webb

  Andy cut her off. “The road is no longer an option. We’re going to have to get Sgt. Trokof down the mountain to the main house.”

  Les’s shoulders dropped with this news, her face stricken.

  “Les, it’s okay. We’ve got some time,” Kate said calmly from Trokof’s bedside. She turned to Andy. “Will there be an ambulance waiting?”

  “Yes, and police and fire are on the way. I’m hoping they’ll get up here in time to meet us part way. But I think we should assume we’re on our own.”

  Kate nodded and Trokof groaned.

  “Is the pain getting worse, Sgt. Trokof?” Kate said.

  “No, the pain is the same, but you can add extreme humiliation to my list of symptoms.” Andy appreciated Trokof making the effort to speak, but the thin, slightly slurred sound of his voice made Andy even more nervous.

  Kate smiled and lay a hand on his shoulder but didn’t comment. Trokof closed his eyes again.

  “How quickly do we need to move?” Andy said.

  “He’s stable for now but his symptoms—heart arrhythmia, difficulty breathing, and dizziness—are becoming more pronounced. More than anything, we need to get him on a monitor to find out what’s going on.” She took a breath. “He’s not emergent, Andy, but we need to get him to a hospital so we can keep him that way.”

  Les stood to the side, chewing on her fingers, a scared and seemingly unconscious motion. Andy was surprised. She had assumed that being a mother of four and a cop, Les would have better reserves than this. Andy checked her judgement. It was irrelevant right now. Les seemed incapable of independent thought or action, so Andy needed to give her something to do.

  “Les, go make sure Meyers and Zeb know of the change in plans. Tell them they’ve got five minutes, then we’ll meet in here and run through a step by step of what we’re going to do to get to the main house. Got it?”

  “Yes. New plan, five minutes, meet back here.”

  Les opened the door, looked at Kate’s medical bag in her hand and seemed momentarily confused. Andy held her hand out and took it from her gently. Once she was gone, Andy looked up at Kate whose face mirrored Andy’s look of disbelief.

  “She’s been a mess since I came to check on Trokof just after we got back,” Kate whispered.

  “You don’t have to whisper on my account,” Trokof mumbled without opening his eyes.

  Kate looked down at him again and walked over to where Andy stood, still dripping wet, by the door. Kate slipped her warm hand into Andy’s cold wet one and gave a reassuring squeeze. Andy returned it.

  “Any idea what happened?” Andy said in a low voice.

  “According to him, symptoms began about three days after arriving at camp. They were very mild at first but have progressed significantly over the last several days, peaking at around noon today when he realized he couldn’t get out of bed without the pain in his chest becoming unbearable.”

  “And he didn’t radio down to Kurtz,” Andy said, the worry making her voice sound annoyed. This could have been avoided if only she’d gone with her instinct.

  “He left the radio in the kitchen cabin after he had something to eat this morning,” Kate said quietly. “There’s nothing we could have done differently, Andy.”

  Andy didn’t say anything. She didn’t necessarily agree with Kate, but she knew it wasn’t the most pressing issue right now. “Stress?” Andy spoke aloud a half-formed thought. “Did stress bring this on?”

  Kate shook her head. “He has no known risk factors for heart disease or vascular conditions. Stress could make symptoms worse, but not cause the severity of what we’re seeing.”

  They were both silent, watching Trokof’s thin chest as it rose and fell. He was clutching his jacket in both hands like his uniform had become a lifeline. Andy’s heart ached for the man.

  “So you’re saying it’s just coincidence he became sick after he arrived at camp? Meaning it could have happened even if he’d never left Regina?”

  “I really don’t know, Andy,” Kate said “It doesn’t make sense that it’s environmental, and the only meds he takes are vitamins of a dose low enough to be innocuous. He says his diet hasn’t changed all that much since he came up here, possibly less red meat than he’s used to but generally he’s been eating and drinking the same…”

  Kate trailed off and Andy, alert to the sudden tightness in Kate’s shoulders, watched her carefully, waiting for her to finish the sentence. Instead, she turned away from Andy and walked quickly back over to the bed. She lay a gentle but insistent hand on Trokof’s arm. He awoke immediately, his eyes growing wide and taking a moment to adjust.

  “What is it?” he mumbled. “Time to go?”

  “No, not yet. I just had a question. What did you eat this morning after we left camp?”

  Trokof tried to wet his lips with a dry tongue, and Kate reached for a plastic glass of water on a table behind his head and handed it to him silently. Andy waited impatiently while he took a sip, wiped his chin, and handed it back.

  “Tea and toast, like I always do. I had some orange juice while I was waiting for the kettle to boil. Not much of anything, really…” His voice petered out, like he’d forgotten the question. His eyes drooped again, blinked, and then he was out. Kate frowned, touched two fingers expertly to his neck and held them there without moving for a minute before walking back to Andy.

  “I need to see the troop. All the cadets. Now.”

  Andy didn’t quite understand what had happened, what facts had just emerged or what leap in logic Kate had just made. But it wasn’t Andy’s mystery to solve.

  “I’ll have them assembled in two minutes.”

  “Thanks,” Kate said curtly, her thoughts obviously somewhere else. She started to move back toward the bed then stopped as Andy opened the door. “Wait, I need your phone.” Andy reached into her inner pocket and handed her the useless cell phone silently. Kate took it without a word and Andy left the cabin, a suspicion forming in her mind.

  Two minutes later, the medical cabin was filled to capacity. Those who had been outside were soaked and filthy, and the smell of wet mud permeated the room. The energy in the room was palpable as adrenaline and purpose flowed from one body to the next. The cadets sought each other out with their eyes, updated their component of the plan, disagreed, improvised, and revised. It was chaos.

  “Troop 18, I need your attention and your silence,” Andy called out. The troop quieted, and Trokof stirred on the bed.

  “What is it…where’s the troop…” Trokof mumbled, struggling to sit up, then going very pale and putting a hand to his chest, eyes wide. Kate pushed him back gently, spoke very quietly and he drifted again, his breathing laboured.

  The cadets looked on in absolute silence. Andy saw fear, disbelief, and an echo of her own earlier awkwardness reflected in their expressions. Some of them had clearly forgotten that in just a few moments they were going to attempt to take a real, sick human being down a treacherous mountain path in the dark and rain. Reality settled heavily on the room. And then Kate started to speak.

  “I know why you were all brought up here to Camp Depot. We all do. Sgt. Wyles, myself, Sgt. Trokof, your instructors—we all know why you are here at camp and not at Depot. We’ve known for weeks that you are hiding something, and that it has to do with drugs.” Kate said it all in a quiet, firm voice. She had everyone’s attention. The cadets were silent and still, all eyes on Kate.

  “And right now I don’t care about any of that. I don’t care what you’re hiding or how you’ve been hiding it. I don’t care how hard you’ve worked to protect each other. Troop 18 has crossed a line, and I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt and say you don’t even know it. So I’m going to ask you one very important question and I hope like hell you give me the answer.”

  Dead silence except for the sound of twenty people breathing in the stuffy cabin air.

  “Is there something in the kitchen cabin Sgt. Trokof could have unknowingly ingested in th
e last two weeks that could possibly explain his current condition?”

  Cursing, exclamations of disbelief, pale faces and wide eyes, Petit putting his head in his hands, Frances taking two shaky steps back until he hit the cabin wall. Prewitt-Hayes gasped, covered her mouth with a shaking hand and stepped forward.

  “Yes…oh, God, how did he…”

  “Stop!”

  Shipman pushed his way from the back of the room. He must have been one of the cadets working outside in the rain. His track suit was a ruined mess, completely covered from head to toe in mud. Not a cadet, Andy reminded herself of her earlier conversation with Lincoln. Not a cadet anymore.

  “Tracey, stop. It’s mine. I’ll tell them,” Shipman said but he wasn’t looking at her, he was looking at Kate, his eyes intense. The rest of the troop were shaking their heads, Hawke Foster looked furious, and the rest of the troop looked like they were in pain. But no one stopped him from speaking. “It’s methadone. He must have been drinking the orange juice. It’s liquid methadone.”

  Andy heard the word, let the fact settle and the pieces fall into place. Then she saw Les leaning against the door, her face pale, her arms wrapped around her body. Andy turned her attention back to Kate, who was showing Shipman Andy’s phone with the image of the chart.

  “Are these numbers the individual dosages that were administered or the total amount that would have been mixed in the orange juice?”

  Shipman obviously didn’t know. He looked helplessly at Kate.

  “Projected individual dosage,” Prewitt-Hayes said miserably. “I tried to calculate a ratio based on volume of liquid and current weight.”

  “Tracey, no,” Shipman said sharply, turning toward his troop leader.

  “What?” Prewitt-Hayes nearly exploded. “Do you think it matters anymore, Greg? We’ve almost killed him—”

  “Enough.” Kate’s tone was final. She raised her voice, and Trokof stirred on the bed but did not wake. “All of you listen to me. You need to pull together. That’s the only way we’re going to get Sgt. Trokof out of camp.” Kate glanced quickly at Andy, telling her to take over. Then she opened a plastic drawer and started rummaging through her medical kit, pulling out an alcohol swab and a small, capped needle.

  “Troop 18,” Andy called out, her voice commanding. She needed to pull their attention away from what Kate was doing. “I need one person to tell me the plan. I want every step from this cabin until we load Sgt. Trokof in the back of the ambulance.”

  Prewitt-Hayes stepped forward and mobilized her troop. “Hellman, bring in the stretcher, and I want the two stretcher bearer teams to step forward.”

  As the cadets manoeuvred themselves in the small space, Andy checked out the makeshift stretcher. They’d converted one of the folding bathroom doors from the sleeping cabins. The door was lightweight but solid, and the cadets had fed leather and nylon-weave belts through the slats at four points to make sure Trokof was secure during his treacherous journey off the mountain.

  “We’ve got two teams of stretcher bearers,” Prewitt-Hayes said, nodding to the cadets who had come forward. “They’ll spell each other off as needed. Advance team raise your hand.” Two hands shot up. “Advance teams will check out the path and report back to the traction team. Traction team?” Another four hands. “They will be responsible for laying out the two-by-fours in the mud when the advance team calls for them. I’ll be a light bearer, along with Awad.”

  There were adjustments, Andy putting herself on the advance team, Zeb asserting himself as one of the stretcher bearers, Meyers saying he’d lead the traction team.

  “We’re running out of time,” Kate said from Trokof’s side. “Let’s get him on the stretcher.”

  Andy and three cadets stepped forward and followed Kate’s careful instructions to transfer Trokof from the bed to the stretcher. Kate belted him in, tucking in a wool blanket around the silent and still sergeant. When she was done, Andy handed Kate her jacket from the back of the door while Les shouldered the medical kit like her life depended on it. The troop seemed to hold their collective breath, all eyes on Kate.

  “Let’s move, Troop 18,” Kate said calmly.

  “You heard the doctor,” Prewitt-Hayes called out. “First stretcher team, you’re up. Everyone else, you have thirty seconds to prepare your equipment.”

  Energy was high and progress was slow as they manoeuvred Sgt. Trokof’s stretcher out of the medical cabin and onto the mountain path. The cadets were keyed up, their attention in too many places. Even Andy felt disoriented with shouts lobbed through the dark and rain. Andy pulled in a breath of air, ready to demand everyone’s focus, but Prewitt-Hayes beat her to it.

  “Pull yourself together, Troop 18! Advance team should be the only one speaking. Second team stretcher bearers fall back unless you’re called. Keep formation, keep your focus. We’ve got this, troop. We will not let Sgt. Trokof down.”

  From her position at the front of the group, Andy felt a shift as the cadets regrouped and refocused, as if they remembered they didn’t need light to communicate. They could seek each other out and anticipate each other’s needs. This had been their strength all along.

  The group began moving again, boots digging into wet gravel, rain pelting against trees and coats and soaking into the grey blanket that covered Trokof. Andy watched for obstructions and obstacles in the wide arc of her flashlight as she judged the strength of traction underneath her boots. As they left the safety of Camp Depot’s only hydro pole and entered the forest, mud and darkness became their enemy. Something about the added layer of dark made Andy nervous. It was potentially the most hazardous part of this trip.

  “Foster,” Andy called out. “Take these flares and light up a path for us.”

  Foster ran ahead and soon the crack of the flares and their bright orange glare lit the underside of the trees.

  “Traction team, we need you.”

  Andy quelled her impatience as a halt was called, and the traction team brought forward more wood and kicked it down into the mud until it stuck. Two stretcher bearers called in their sub, then they were moving again.

  They had just about passed the last of the flares at the edge of the forest when a shout behind her made Andy tense.

  “Shit! I’m losing my grip.”

  Andy heard the sound of stumbling, a cry of pain, and she dug her boots into the ground, and braced herself for the impact as the stretcher team hit her from behind. Meyers struck her painfully in the back as he tried to stop the downward momentum of the stretcher. Andy turned her shoulder against him, braced one boot down the hill and pushed back. Her boots scraped and slid half a foot, her flashlight hitting the ground and rolling crazily before the momentum stopped abruptly.

  “Put him down, put him down,” Meyers said, out of breath. He kept hold of the head of the stretcher so Trokof still lay flat. Trokof moaned. Andy could see his eyes, wide open and terrified. No wonder. It must be hell to be strapped down, unable to put out a protective hand to stop a fall.

  Stretcher bearers spelled off at Prewitt-Hayes’s instruction. Andy bent to pick up her flashlight and when she stood she saw Zeb leaning on Foster, holding his left foot off the ground.

  “Kate,” Andy called out, getting her attention and pointing at Zeb.

  Kate picked her way around the stretcher. “Is it your ankle?”

  “Slipped on a rock and twisted it.”

  “Can you bear weight?”

  Zeb put his foot down, then stumbled and swore. Foster steadied him without a word.

  “Nothing we can do here,” she said bluntly. “Leave your boot on to minimize the swelling. Hawke, can you get him down off the mountain?”

  Foster nodded, his face set in grim determination.

  “Foster, Zeb, walk right behind the stretcher,” Andy instructed. “Let’s get moving,” she said to the rest of the troop.

  Though the rock was slippery, it proved easier for the team to navigate than the mud. The advance team occasionally ca
lled out the location of boulders or tree roots, but they were soon off the rock and back on gravel and loose stone again. When Hellman called out in an excited voice, Andy looked up from her constant sweep of the ground to see the main house lit up with the blues, reds, and yellows of an emergency response team. Four firefighters opened the gate to the meadow, their flashlights lighting up the field and flashing off the reflective strips in their uniforms.

  A sigh of relief and a ripple of excitement went through the troop. They were close but not there yet.

  “Keep it together, Troop 18,” Andy warned. “We get Sgt. Trokof into the ambulance, just like we planned.”

  Andy walked ahead to meet the firefighters as they advanced.

  “Sgt. Wyles?” Andy couldn’t see which body spoke.

  “Yes.”

  “Captain Wilfred and crew. We just arrived on scene.” Andy isolated the voice to the man slightly in front of the rest. “It looks like you might not need our services after all.”

  “I think we’re going to make it,” Andy said. “Is the ambulance here yet?”

  “Yep, they’re just playing emergency vehicle Tetris in the driveway at the moment. The ambulance is going to back up to the gate there. How is the patient?”

  “Stable for now, according to the doctor,” Andy said, intentionally mentioning Kate. Firefighters and paramedics hated cops offering their own medical opinion on anything.

  The troop carried Sgt. Trokof through the meadow and the four firefighters guided them on the last leg of their journey. The ambulance backed up to the gate in a swirl of lights and a hail of drawn-out beeps. Efficient and slightly bored-looking paramedics opened the back doors, unlatched the stretcher, and let the frame and wheels fall open and lock. Kate left her position beside Trokof and gave them an update in a low, clipped tone.

  Watching them transfer Trokof into the back of the ambulance, Andy realized it had stopped raining. Trokof’s face was a sick, dull grey, and he looked like a stranger as the paramedics manhandled him into the rig. Without a backward glance, Kate climbed inside, and the ambulance doors slammed shut with a complete lack of ceremony. A few of the cadets took a step back, like they’d just been slapped. The ambulance driver shouted something over at the fire captain, who replied with a rude gesture, laughing. Then the rig eased its way back down the driveway. Andy could just see Kate through the small, high windows in the back, swaying with the movement of the van. At the last moment Kate looked up just before she and Trokof were carried away.