The Heart of a Mercenary Read online

  Hunter suddenly materialized in front of her, making her catch her breath. The man moved as quietly as a snake when he wanted to.

  She looked up into his eyes, trying to see what he might have seen. But his face was absolutely expressionless. “There are canoes,” he said. “We can’t wait until dark. We must take one now, try and get a ways down the river, find a place we can hole up until nightfall.”

  She began to rise to her feet. He stopped her, placing his palm on her shoulder. He crouched down to eye level and took her hands in his. “Sarah,” he said quietly. “We have to go through the compound to get to where the canoes are beached.”

  She swallowed, nodded.

  His eyes lanced hers. “I don’t want you to look. I want you to focus on following me. Just move fast and keep looking at me.”

  Her heart began to pound. “Have…have they been killed?” she whispered.

  “Yes.”

  “All of them?”

  “Yes.”

  “Even the priests?”

  He nodded.

  Her stomach turned over and she stared at her toes.

  “Come.” He took her arm, pulling her to her feet. “We have to move quickly.”

  Sarah concentrated on the backs of Hunter’s boots as he led her through the center of the mission compound. But she could smell the sickly sweet scent of spilled blood, the acrid scent of burned thatch. Sweat dampened her skin. In her head, she could see Dr. Regnaud’s glazed eyes behind his goggles, could hear screams of the nuns back at the Ishonga clinic, could hear the moans. The moans seemed real…too real…. She faltered, suddenly unable to move, unable to discern memory from reality. She watched Hunter’s boots moving away from her. Then she heard it again, a moan. Her heart skipped a beat. It was real! She glanced up. “Hunter! Stop!”

  He halted, spun round.

  “Someone…someone’s hurt. I can hear them.”

  He took two strides toward her, grabbed her arm, digging his fingers into her skin. “Come,” he growled.

  “No!” She tried to yank free of his hold. “Listen.”

  She heard the low moan again. The sound was coming from the trees behind the wattle-and-daub hut to her left. Sarah turned to look, and bile heaved to her throat as the carnage around her filtered into her vision. Several bodies were scattered around the clearing. Massacred with machetes. She clamped her hand over her mouth.

  Hunter flung his arm around her, protecting her from the sight with his body. He lowered his face to hers. “Sarah, just keep moving. Don’t look.”

  She jerked free and ducked out of his hold. “Someone’s still alive.”

  “Sarah—”

  She spun and stumbled over the dirt, making her way around the hut with its partially burned thatch roof, trying not to absorb too much. But she was compelled to find the source of the sound.

  She found it in the shade of a kapok tree.

  A young woman lay sprawled on the red ground. Blood covered the side of her head and face, and her belly was round and swollen under her T-shirt. Her eyes were open and she stared right at Sarah and moaned softly.

  “Oh my God!” Sarah rushed forward, dropped to her knees at the woman’s side. “Hunter…come quick, help me. She’s pregnant!”

  His hand gripped her shoulder hard. Her eyes shot up to his. “We’ve got to do something!”

  “Sarah, we have to leave. Now. There’s nothing we can do for her.”

  “How can you say that! How do you know?” Sarah turned to the woman, felt for a pulse at her neck. It was very weak and rapid. Her skin was cold to the touch, and Sarah’s fingers came away covered in blood. She quickly lifted the woman’s T-shirt and palpated her swollen belly. She felt a movement under her hands. Her heart stopped, then started racing. “Oh, God, the baby’s alive.” Sarah felt the woman’s belly again. She could tell by the height of the woman’s expanded uterus that the fetus was probably at thirty-eight weeks’ gestation. “I—I think it’s term,” she whispered.

  She glanced at the woman’s face. Her eyes were rolling back, her lids fluttering. She was losing consciousness. Sarah felt quickly for her pulse again. It was thready, barely there. They were losing her.

  Sarah felt utterly helpless and bewildered. She’d know how to help in a hospital situation. But out here? She reached up, grabbed the fabric of Hunter’s army pants. “The baby—we’ve got to do something!”

  He crouched down, looked into her eyes. “Sarah,” he said softly, urgently. “You can help. You can help by staying alive yourself, by getting this pathogen out so that it can be identified. You can help by saving the lives of millions upon millions of innocent people. People just as innocent as this woman and her unborn child here.”

  She stared at him, speechless. How could he ignore this pregnant woman?

  “Think of it as triage, Sarah. You have to help those with the most chance of survival first. Sometimes the decisions are tough.”

  “No.” She shook her head, jerked away. “I can’t. I can’t leave this woman and her baby to die alone with the vultures circling up there. I just can’t. I have to at least make them comfortable.” She glared at him. “And don’t try to make me leave. You made me shoot a man. Don’t make me do this, too.”

  His eyes narrowed. He clenched his teeth and a muscle in his neck began to jump fast. He glanced at his watch and cursed viciously under his breath. Then he shrugged out of his pack, dropped to his knees beside her, felt for the woman’s pulse, began to palpate her stomach.

  Sarah’s mouth dropped open. He moved like a professional.

  He turned the woman’s head to the side, exposing a thick, gelatinous puddle of blood and a clean machete gash that sliced right through her skull into gray brain tissue. Sarah’s stomach bottomed out. Hunter was right. There was no hope for her. How she’d held on this far was incredible. She had to be doing it for her child.

  Hunter glanced at Sarah. “She’s going into cardiac arrest. We’ve got five minutes.”

  “What?”

  “To save the fetus. Pass me my pack. Quick.” He unbuttoned his shirt as he spoke, shrugged out of it.

  Sarah stared at him.

  Hunter reached over her, grabbed the pack himself, extracted the first aid pouch, rolled it open, began to snap on a pair of latex gloves. He hesitated for a millisecond, then closed his fingers around the scalpel. “Get the flashlight out, Sarah. Position it at the side of my head, shine it on her stomach as I work.”

  Her brain felt sluggish. She realized they were in the shade. He’d need light. How did he know what he was doing? She fumbled in the pack, her mind racing. She flicked the light on.

  “Use one hand for the torch, Sarah. Take those gauze pads in the kit with your other hand, use them as laparotomy sponges, pack off the fluids as I work. I don’t have clamps, I’ll need to move fast. Use my shirt for the baby. You’re going to have to be ready to do neonatal resuscitation if necessary, while I look for equipment in the huts. Mission should have antibiotics, blankets, formula, especially if they were caring for a young woman like this. They’d have been ready….” He lifted the scalpel as he spoke, performing a neat midline abdominal incision that would allow fast access to the uterus.

  Sarah’s chest clenched. Her mind reeled. By God, this man knew exactly what he was doing. He was a professional. There was no doubt in her mind.

  Hunter McBride was a surgeon.

  Chapter 15

  15:26 Alpha. Sangé River.

  Thursday, September 25

  She was small and coffee-brown with black hair, and she was the most exquisite and perfect little thing Sarah had ever laid eyes on. She hadn’t been breathing when Hunter took her out, but Sarah had managed to resuscitate her while he went through the partially burned-out huts and found blankets, bottled water, antibiotics, disposable diapers and prepared formula.

  They’d cleaned her tiny body, and Hunter had clamped and sterilized her umbilical cord and administered preventative antibiotics. The baby girl was a
n excellent weight—Sarah judged her to actually be on the higher end of the normal spectrum. Her mother had obviously received excellent care and nutrition at the mission, and all of this gave the child one hell of a fighting chance.

  Sarah knew from experience that a healthy newborn of good weight could survive up to a week without any care as long as there was no umbilical stump infection, which could lead to systemic infection or tetanus within a couple of days. Plus they were more than lucky to have found formula. The gods had been looking out for this little girl, she thought as she stroked the infant’s silky head.

  Hunter had explained to her as he’d loaded the canoe that the missionaries would’ve been prepared for the young mother to leave the baby with them and return to her village once she’d given birth. If she was here to have her child, it was likely because she’d become pregnant through an act of violence and rape. It was all too common in this region, and in some tribes, a baby conceived in that manner was considered dirty and unwanted. It would have been discarded as soon as it was born. This young woman would have come to the Italian mission in a brave and desperate act to save her child. And she would likely have left it with the priests to be put up for adoption.

  Sarah lifted her camisole and cuddled the newborn against her naked skin, a soft flannel blanket wrapped over the little back. This skin-to-skin contact was called kangaroo care, and it increased an infant’s chances of survival tenfold. It also helped the child bond with the mother. She’d seen it done at the children’s hospital when police had brought in a newborn found abandoned in a bus shelter. Sarah had taken a special interest in the care of that baby, helped nurse it back to health, and had been utterly heartbroken to see it leave.

  “See?” she whispered as she stroked her hand over the soft spot on the newborn’s skull. “Everything happens for a reason, little sweetheart. You’ve got a better chance with me and Hunter here than most kiddies born out in the jungle, you know.”

  The baby stirred slightly and made little suckling noises. Emotion welled sharply in Sarah’s chest, and a soft, maternal warmth shot through her blood. What she was experiencing was indescribable, overwhelming. It made her feel as though she could take on the world, do anything to protect this innocent little life.

  She looked up at Hunter. He sat in the stern of the canoe, facing her, still naked from the waist up, his chest muscles rippling under tanned skin as he maneuvered their craft into a dark and narrow tributary of the Sangé River. His face was still completely devoid of emotion. Not once during the entire operation had he showed any sign that he was feeling a thing. But she knew he had to have been. She’d glimpsed enough to know that whatever armor this man had managed to erect around himself, whatever iron-willed control he exerted over his emotions, there was someone under it all who cared deeply enough to have done the things she’d seen him do over the last few days. She wanted to talk to him, to ask him. But she sensed now was not the time.

  Drums continued to thrum in the distance, echoing in faint waves of sound as his paddle dipped and splashed softly in the deep, black water. Trees began to crowd in, branches hanging low over the narrow waterway, muffling sound. Water hyacinths and orchids grew in thick reed beds along the shore. A fish plopped, startling Sarah, and she could see a monkey the size of a man standing in the fork of a tree, watching them. Nerves began to eat at her. She pressed the baby closer to her chest.

  The canoe rocked gently as Hunter paddled. He scanned the encroaching bush constantly, his gun resting within instant reach of his fingers.

  17:19 Alpha. Sangé River.

  Thursday, September 25

  They sat under trees on a slab of warm rock that jutted out into the small tributary. The cloud-filled sky turned a dirty orange as the sun began to sink toward the horizon. Hunter absently fingered his rifle, making sure it was at his side, ready. Cloud cover was good. It would mean complete blackness tonight and additional protection as they tried to cross the border into Cameroon. Rain, however, would not be good for the baby.

  He turned to look at them. Sarah was trying to nurse the little infant with a bottle of prepared formula. She tapped the nipple against the baby’s cheek, and her mouth instantly began to root around for it. She found the nipple and began to suckle, beetle-black eyes fixed intently on Sarah’s face. His heart clenched tight, so tight it almost choked him. Hunter blinked back the weird hot surge of emotion and looked out over the river.

  It was deserted here on the banks of the tributary, but they’d heard gunfire earlier, to the north, and it concerned him. There was way too much activity in the region. Something wasn’t right.

  “Hunter?”

  He flicked his eyes to her.

  “You’re a surgeon.”

  It wasn’t a question, and her voice was completely neutral. He studied her carefully. There was no judgment in her eyes, either. Sarah and he had both come to a point that went beyond judgment, and there was no use pretending now. He didn’t even want to anymore. She’d forced him to pick up that scalpel and do what he’d been trained to do. He couldn’t even begin to articulate what saving that little infant had done to his soul. He’d been outed. After all these years, the old Hunter McBride was back. Sarah had forced him be to the man he used to be, and there was no putting that past back into the bottle now. He just didn’t know what the hell he was going to do about it.

  “I was a surgeon,” he said quietly. “In another lifetime. In Belfast.”

  “What happened?”

  He moistened his lips, reached over and stroked the baby’s hair. “We should name her.”

  “What happened, Hunter? What made you walk away?”

  He sucked air in through his nose, scanned the trees across the water. It would be dark within the hour. They would have to move soon. He still had a job to finish.

  “Hunter?”

  He exhaled heavily. “It was more than fifteen years ago. I’d completed my surgical internship at the Catholic hospital in Belfast and taken a position on staff.” Just thinking about it was rough. Making the words come out of his mouth was worse. He flashed his eyes to hers. “Sarah, it was a long time ago, and we really should—”

  “I need to know, Hunter.” Her gaze tunneled into his. “And I think you need to talk.”

  He gave a soft huff, nodded slowly. She was right. He couldn’t bury this all again, not now. “I was connected. I was engaged to the hospital board director’s daughter. Her name was Kathleen.” He glanced at Sarah. “You remind me of her…a little.” He paused, fingered his assault rifle. “No, that’s not true. You did jolt my memory when I first saw you. You made me think about her, about the past. But…you’re different.” He smiled at her. “Very different. In the best possible ways.”

  The baby made a little noise. She’d had enough milk. Sarah set the bottle down and moved the infant up to her shoulder to burp her, all the time looking into Hunter’s eyes, watching him, waiting for him to continue.

  He said nothing for a while. The orange in the sky began to go purple. “Colin O’Brian,” he said suddenly. “That was Kathleen’s father’s name. Big, big Catholic figure in the Belfast community, tons of cash, and major political clout. He first took me under his wing when my dad and two brothers blew themselves up in a bombing on his account. I was twelve at the time.”

  “What?”

  “That’s just how it was, Sarah. The region was deeply divided along political and religious lines, and each faction looked after their kind. Everyone accepted it. When my brothers and dad died they were considered heroes, martyrs for their cause, and my mother was well looked after by the community until she passed away—and she died a proud widow. But as a kid, I had this whole internal rebellious attitude to the conflict, to the death. It just seemed pointless to me, and when I saw my family blown up I got mad as all hell. But there was no place in my community for a fatherless kid to stand up to centuries worth of hatred. Instead, I developed this desperate need to mend the people that were broken by the violenc
e. I wanted to become a doctor.” He looked into her eyes. “Not just an ordinary doctor, Sarah, but a surgeon, someone who could sew people back together again. It was my survival mechanism, my way of fighting back.”

  He chewed on his cheek, trying to navigate the old memories, consolidate them into words. “Because of what my father and brothers had done for him and his cause, Colin supported me after they died. And he supported my ambition. He funded me through medical school and it saved me from being recruited by his underground factions. And I did the man proud, Sarah—” he snorted “—so proud that the old guy was delighted to give me Kathleen’s hand in marriage when I asked him.”

  A strange light flitted through Sarah’s eyes. “Did you love her?”

  He nodded. “Yeah, I did.”

  “What happened to Kathleen?”

  He blew air out softly, tasting the bitterness in his mouth. “She cheated on me. She got pregnant.”

  Shock flared through Sarah’s eyes and emotion skittered over her features. She reached for his hand, covered it with her own. Her touch made his chest hurt. It made his eyes hot.

  “Who was the father?” she whispered.

  “Son of the opposition. Kathleen cheated not only on me, but on her whole family. She slept with the eldest son of the leader of the Protestant faction, and she tried to hide her affair and her pregnancy from the whole community for fear of the potential political fallout.” He turned to look out over the black river. “People have gone to war over lesser things, you know?”