Fatal Courage: Shadow Force International, Book 3 (Shadow Force International Romantic Suspense Series) (37 page)

Of all the…

Jax raised his head and looked up at the ceiling. While the side of the plane had ripped open, the top was still intact. He yelled at the heavens anyway. “Is that it or you gonna throw something else at me, because honest to”—he almost said God, then decided not to push his luck—“fucking Betsy, I’m going to come up there and kick someone’s ass if you don’t cut me some slack here! I’m trying to save this woman’s life. Help me out, for cryin’ out loud!”

So much for not pushing his luck. If only there were someone whose ass he could kick. Colton took a step back and Jax didn’t blame him. The chances of him getting struck by lightning were pretty fucking high at the moment.

For several seconds, the only sound was the rain hitting the metal overhead. Jax shook his head, ignored Colton’s shuffling feet, and without thinking, began barking orders.

First up, they had to stop the bleeding and fast. The jet fuel could catch fire, even in the rain, with the slightest provocation, but there was way too much blood pouring out of Ruby for Jax’s comfort.

He padded her wounds with squares of gauze and wrapped them with long strips of the same stuff. As soon as he finished, he and Colton carefully lifted her from the seat and shifted her to the stretcher.

A moan escaped her lips and Jax patted her arm. He and Colt worked quickly to strap her in. “I’ve got you, Ruby. Hang on.”

Straps secured, Jax noted sirens in the distance. “On three,” he said. “One…two…”

They lifted her, then fought through the debris on the floor, stepping over Izala and Al-Safari, with careful steps to the inflatable ramp.

“I’ll go down first,” Jax told Colton. “Then you send her and the equipment down.”

Colt nodded as they lowered the stretcher to the lip of the ramp.

Jax jumped and slid, rain lashing at him. All around him, lightning cracked and popped. Poised on the ground, he waved at his wingman. Ruby, strapped tightly to the stretcher, glided down the ramp.

She barely weighed anything, Jax realized as he shifted her out of the way. Colton tossed down Jax’s bag, the first aid kit, the defibrillator. Jax caught each of them, then yelled, “Come on.” A pool of ugly blue-black fuel was gathering a few feet away.

All it would take was for one of those lightning strikes to hit the plane and
boom
. They’d all go up. Crispy critters.

The way his luck was running today, the probability was too high for his liking.

Colt’s boots hit the ground and he started to gather Jax’s black bag and the first aid kit.

“Leave it,” Jax yelled over a crash of thunder. “We need to get away from here.”

But Colton, the stupid kid, piled the black bag and defibrillator between Ruby’s legs. He grabbed his end of the stretcher. “Ready!”

The Jeep was fifty feet away. Through the wind and the rain, they kept their heads down and ran as quickly as possible without putting too much stress on their patient. They were closing in on the muddy Jeep when lightning flashed so brightly, they both flinched and nearly lost their hold on the stretcher.

A sharp crack of thunder followed, making Jax duck instinctively. Silly, but muscle memory of bombs and other violent bangs from his days in the military still made him hunker down.

He and Colt and their precious cargo had only taken another step when the plane erupted behind them in a vicious explosion. Colt went to his knees; Jax’s knees nearly gave out too.

Yep, just as he’d suspected. God or Mother Nature or some weird, fucked up karma, was after him.

The first aid supplies rolled off, but Ruby stayed on. Colt jumped up, hollered, then laughed up at the heavens as the jet burned. Jax knew it was a reaction to the adrenaline, the stress. He’d seen it plenty of times in the field when fellow soldiers had barely escaped death.

“Is everything all right?” Beatrice asked in Jax’s ear. “Was that an explosion I just heard?”

Jax suddenly felt like James Bond, M asking ridiculous questions in his comm. “Everything is peachy. Also, tell Hunter I need to cleanse my aura or my karma or whatever the fuck he calls it, because I have somehow pissed off God in one big motherfucker of a way.”

Colt tossed the black bag, AED, and first aid kit onto the stretcher.

“I’m sure Trace will help you with that,” Beatrice said. “Although I doubt it’s your past that’s the problem. How’s our client?”

“Unconscious.”

“Then you should get back to work.”

Easy for Beatrice to say. Jax pinned his end of the stretcher against the Jeep and flung open the back door. “Help me slide her in.”

“Don’t you want to put the backseat down?” Colt asked.

“No time.” The stupid thing was stuck anyway.

It took a bit of work, but they wedged Ruby into the backseat.

The sirens drew closer. “Let’s boogie,” Jax said.

“Where am I going?” Colt asked as he started the car.

Jax handed the earbud to him. “Rory will give you directions.”

With the jet burning behind them, and fire trucks and police cruisers heading in their direction, Colt elected to take the route they’d entered, going back through the hole in the fence at the far end of the runway.

That route involved less confrontation, but was bumpier. Jax straddled Ruby, checked her pulse.
Too slow. Too erratic
.

Her chest rose and fell in jerky gasps. Had they caused further damage to her ribs? Had she inhaled rain as they’d carried her across the tarmac?

Something niggled at Jax’s brain. Her skin had a gray cast to it, her lips, blue-tinged. As he checked her pulse again, he found it was now racing as if she’d run a mile.

If he didn’t know better, he’d think she had internal organ damage. Something was shutting down.

From the crash? The shock? The blood loss?

Palpating her stomach, he found it rigid and hard.

Scanning her body again, willing the problem to surface under his hands or his eyes, his gaze zeroed in on a small bulge in her front pants pocket.

The syringe. She’d shown him the tiny thing in her bathroom before she’d stuck into her pocket.

Wiggling his fingers into the pocket, he carefully drew it out.

The cap had come off the needle. A little more than half of the liquid was gone. Throwing the syringe down, he unzipped her pants and inspected the smooth skin over her hipbone, her upper thigh. Places he’d only recently kissed and sucked on.

The pinprick was minute; he almost missed it in his hurry.

But it was there. The telltale sign.

In her attempts to get loose or possibly when they’d moved her, the syringe had penetrated her skin, sending whatever was in it into her system.

And he had no idea what the drug was, or how much—or how little—could kill her.

“Drive faster!” he yelled.

The kid was already going well over the speed limit, flying around cars that had slowed because of the severity of the storm. It was nearly a replay of their earlier drive as Colton did his best Indy 500 imitation.

Yet, they were still miles from the hospital.

Ruby didn’t have miles.

There were few times in Jax’s life when he’d felt utterly defeated. He hated the feeling, did anything he could to avoid it, and he’d learned to suffocate it, kill it, when it did raise its ugly head.

At this moment, he couldn’t find the resolution to do any of those things.

“She’s been poisoned,” he said to no one in particular. He knew it in his bones, regardless of the fact he didn’t know what was in the syringe. “She’s dying and I don’t know how to help her.”

“What?” Colt yelled. With the windshield gone, he was taking a pounding from the storm. “I can’t hear you.”

Jax reached out and took Ruby’s hand. Her fingers were cold, lifeless. He’d seen plenty of death in his years, but nothing left him feeling like this.

Empty. Gutted.

He sank his back against the door, chin down as he watched her chest rise and fall in small, uneven bursts. The rhythm, already slow and unstable, seemed to slow even more.

“Beatrice wants to know what’s going on,” Colton yelled. He tossed the earbud over his shoulder. It landed on Ruby’s stomach.

Jax stared at it, unmoving for a moment. Then he picked it up and spoke over the wind into it. “Ruby had a syringe in her pocket, Beatrice. I don’t know what was in it, but half the drug is now in her system and her body is shutting down.”

“So do something.” Beatrice’s voice sounded distant since he didn’t have the ear bud in. “You can’t just let her die.”

Let her die?
Let
her die? White-hot rage ripped through him like the strong surge of wind blowing around him. “What the fuck do you want me to do? I don’t have an antidote. I don’t even have a goddamn IV because I used it on fucking Elliot!”

Ruby’s body seized. Everything went rigid. If the straps hadn’t been holding her down, she would have come right off the stretcher.

The earbud fell from his fingers and he grabbed her arms and held her. “I’ve got you,” he said.

And then her heart stopped.

He knew it the minute her body went lax. “Ruby,” he said, feeling for the pulse in her neck. “Ruby!”

Bending over, he listened at her heart, heard nothing—either because it had truly stopped or because the cacophony of noise around his head—as well as inside it—was too great. Fumbling in his black bag, he grabbed his stethoscope.

He listened. Hard. Held his breath.

Nothing.

He glanced at the AED. In cases of sudden cardiac arrest, the portable devices checked the patient’s heart rhythm and could send an electric shock to the heart to try to restore it to normal.

From his cardiac training in school, there were two things Jax remembered clearly.

Ninety-five percent of sudden cardiac arrest patients died.

CPR might be as effective as shocking the heart, but would only keep the blood flowing until they reached the hospital and figured out what caused the heart to stop in the first place.

Unfortunately, the defibrillator needed a dry environment.

Something else he didn’t have.

Plus, Ruby had rib damage. The shock from the AED could cause further injury.

His brain cramped, going back and forth. He began chest compressions, humming under his breath.

Stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive.

Two minutes. He needed to do two minutes of CPR before hooking up the AED and checking for a rhythm.

He’d gone about one when he couldn’t take it anymore. Ruby looked horrible. She looked…dead.

He couldn’t hear her heartbeat. When he checked her pulse, he thought he felt a kick, but with the weather and the rough ride—and the fact he was losing his shit—he wasn’t one hundred percent sure.

He sat back, wiped his face.

Quitter
.

The old, nagging voice grabbed him by the balls.

Fuck off,
he told it.

Ripping open her shirt, he fumbled to remove her bra. No metal could be around the AED when he set it off, not even the thin support of an underwire.

He threw open the AED box, keeping it away from the windows and blocking the rain coming in from the broken windshield with his body.

Her chest was damp with rain and blood and he used gauze to wipe it dry. Next, he tore open the packaging on the sticky pads with the electrodes. He positioned one on the right center of her chest above the nipple, the other under her left breast toward the ribcage.

“Fight for me, Ruby,” he said, making sure he wasn’t touching her anywhere before he hit the machine’s ‘analyze’ button.

The machine was fast, the AED confirming the worst. Her heart needed to be shocked into normal rhythm.

Now.

Jax hit the ‘shock’ button.

Chapter Twenty-five

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T
WO
D
OCTORS,
S
EVERAL
nurses, and a man in a suit met them at the ER doors.

Jax was back to doing CPR. Ruby’s heart was beating again, but it was struggling. It would speed up, slow to a trickle, speed up again.

His wrists, arms, and shoulders burned with the effort to keep her alive. All the while, as sweat dripped from his forehead and his brain refused to let his worn-out body stop, he sung the lyrics to
Stayin’ Alive
.

“We’ll take it from here, son,” one of the doctor’s said as he leaned into the backseat and stuck a stethoscope on Ruby’s chest. “You did good.”

The ER team whisked her onto a gurney in seconds as her vitals were checked and orders were called out. Jax practically fell out of the Jeep and onto the sidewalk as he tried to follow the team through the whooshing doors and into the bowels of the trauma center.

His goddamn legs wouldn’t carry him. He ended up with his ass on the ground, the man in the suit watching with his hands behind his back.