Freefall (28 page)

He turned down the chamomile that she offered for its soothing properties, claiming he'd rather eat the bark off the tulip tree outside the window. But although Sabrina suspected that he would prefer something stronger, he accepted the more robust Irish breakfast tea.

She'd believed him when he'd told her that he didn't have a problem with alcohol, but nevertheless she admired his self-control in not giving in to the temptation to have a drink because he needed one.

Because he seemed to be feeling closed in, despite the spaciousness of the house, she immediately agreed when he suggested going outside.

Which was how they came to be sitting on the same swing where she'd told him her bombing story only a few nights ago. Strangely, once she'd shared the terror, it had seemed to diminish.

She suspected that the memories of the event, and the effect it had on her, would never entirely go away. But at least she was beginning to move on, and her thoughts—and dreams—were filled more with hope and positive visions than with bad.

He told her about his concerns regarding the logistics of the mission from the beginning. About the crash, which sounded horrific, and all the good and brave men who'd been ambushed, gunned down as they'd run off the helicopter.

He went on to tell her about his close friend, Shane Garrett, who, despite being wounded, had still managed to land the helicopter in a way that gave them at least a chance for survival.

Sabrina suspected that Zach was giving her the abbreviated, highly censored, PG-13 version of the subsequent battle, which was just as well, since although she wanted to be strong for him, she wasn't certain how much detail she could handle.

"There was this Marine," he said. "He was maybe eighteen, nineteen, tops. I thought of him as Opie, because he reminded me of that kid on the
Andy Griffith Show
."

"Ron Howard."

"Yeah. He was short and skinny with a face covered with freckles. He was also one helluva shot."

"You said 'was.'"

"Yeah." He dragged a hand down his face. "It was almost over. We'd taken the tangos out, and I was starting to breathe again when the kid began screaming. He must've stood up to fire sometime during the battle, because he'd gotten hit below his chest plate. In the pelvis.

"Which is one of the worst places you can get shot, because the aorta splits low in the abdomen, forming left and right arteries, which branch into the exterior and deep femoral vessels, which are the primary arteries for blood to the lower half of the body."

"I didn't know that."

He shrugged. "Neither did I. Not the precise medical details, anyway. We all have first-aid training and can field-dress our own wounds if necessary, but I learned a helluva lot more than I wanted to that day.

"Lucas Chaffee, he was our team medic, got some IVs going and was literally squeezing the bag with both hands to push the replacement fluid into him.

"He must've gone through six bags, but the blood kept spurting. By now the kid had figured out he had an arterial bleed, but instead of screaming bloody hell like most guys would be doing, he stayed amazingly calm."

"Maybe he was in shock," she suggested, remembering how, when she'd been pulled from the rubble and had seen all the chaos around her, it had seemed strangely as if she'd been watching a movie. As if none of it was real.

"That's what I thought, too. Meanwhile, Lucas is going nuts, because it's like trying to turn off a fire hose and he knows that the only way he's going to save this kid is to clamp off the artery. Which means going into the wound."

"With his hands?" A chill ran up her spine.

"Yeah. It had to have hurt like hell, because Lucas couldn't give him any morphine, because of the altitude and the fact that he'd lost so much blood his pressure was too low. Morphine could've killed him.

"Anyway, Shane and Quinn and I held the kid down and took turns pressing on his abdomen, to keep pressure over the artery while Lucas started spelunking through all this skin and fat—not that there was much of that, because the kid, along with being skinny, was in great shape—and muscle, but it must've retracted into his abdomen, because he couldn't find it."

"Oh, God."

Sabrina pressed one hand over her mouth, the other against her own stomach, which clenched at the thought of what they were all going through. She'd seen war movies; had even managed to sit through
Saving Private Ryan
, but this was so very different.

"I called in for an evac helo, but command was firm about not flying in the daylight."

"But you said it was barely dawn."

"Yeah. But the military lives by the rules of combat engagement, and on this mission, the rules stated that no planes flew within thirty minutes of sunrise. So, putting another bird down before nightfall was out of the question, because as far as they were concerned, the LZ was still hot, so they couldn't risk having another helicopter shot down."

"That's horrible!"

"That's combat," he said mildly. "And they were probably right, because we were getting some intel from the fixed wings heading back to base from high-altitude bombing runs that they were seeing a lot of guys who didn't look like friendlies headed down the mountain our way.

"The commander did tell me to keep him apprised of the situation, though. And that they'd be there as soon as they could."

Sabrina's curse was rich and ripe and caused Zach's lips to curve up, just a bit, at the corners.

"The only thing left to do was to cut into the abdomen and hunt down the artery and clamp it. But the kid was going into shock and every time Lucas dug around for it, he lost more blood, so there wasn't any way he could survive being opened up without a transfusion."

"On the battlefield? Can that be done?"

"Sure. If you do a direct, person-to-person transfusion. It's risky, because it's only done as a last resort, which means the recipient is already in a world of hurt, but if you've got a match, sometimes you've got to go for it."

"And he found a match?"

"Yeah."

From the way he jerked a shoulder, Sabrina guessed exactly who that match had been. "It was you, wasn't it?"

He shrugged again. "I'm type O. Which makes me a universal donor."

Stunned beyond words, she could only shake her head at the risk Zach had taken.

"He would've done the same thing for me," Zach said, giving her a much clearer idea of that fighting-for-the-men-in-the-foxholes-on-either-side-of-you concept. "Any guy in that bunker would've.

"Lucas decided to risk giving him some of the morphine, and he managed to find the artery and clamp it off. But even with the transfusion, the kid had lost so much blood, his survival chances still didn't look all that hot.

"Quinn went around and took ponchos off some of the troops we'd lost because they didn't need them anymore and this Marine did.

"By then the wind was blowing pretty hard, and since we didn't want to risk taking him back into the helo, we decided to move him into the bunker."

Sabrina was starting to get the picture that
we
meant Zach.

"We took Shane, too, because although he'd fought like hell during the gun battle, he wasn't looking too good, either. Lucas had shoved some Curlex, that's a kind of bandage, into his leg to stop the bleeding, but it was obvious that if we didn't get him on a surgical table pretty soon, he wasn't going to make it out of those mountains alive."

He blew out a harsh breath. Tossed back the now cool tea he hadn't yet touched and put the empty cup down on the table next to the swing.

"There's some wine left from dinner," she said, changing her mind about offering him alcohol. Hell, she could use a drink right about now.

"Maybe later. I'm almost done."

He rubbed the back of his neck.

"So, we got them into the bunker and covered them up with insulation from the helo, and the ponchos, and some pine boughs the surviving Marines gathered from all the trees that had been shot up.

"The kid knew he was going to die. Oh, we told him he'd be okay, but everyone in that damn bunker knew it was a lie, so we all sat there and listened while he told us about his mother, who'd died of ovarian cancer when he was nine, so he'd had to go live with his grandmother in Kentucky, because his daddy was a Marine, and he couldn't very well be on active duty if he had to stay home and be a single father to Opie.

"You could tell he was proud of his dad, who was a gunnery sergeant deployed in Iraq. That's why he became a Marine. To follow in his father's boot steps."

"Something I suspect you could identify with," Sabrina said softly.

"Yeah. Totally…"

"Anyway, I don't know how long he talked, but he told us all about this girl he had back home in Salt Lick, Kentucky, which is where his family was from and where his granny still lived. She—the girl, not his grandmother—was going to beauty school to be a hairdresser, because she figured she'd be able to get work fixing hair wherever he got posted after they got married.

"They were going to have two kids. And a pair of bluetick hounds, because his granddaddy had raised them, and he figured his boys could go hunting with them, same as he had growing up."

"And if he'd had daughters?"

"Shane asked him about that." He managed another of those faint half smiles at the memory. "He's from out west," he revealed. "Where folks are more likely to speak their mind. At least he sure as hell always has.

"Anyway, the kid seemed surprised by that idea. Then he said that if he had girls, he'd have to lock them in a closet as soon as they went into puberty and keep them away from boys until they were thirty.

"Or maybe, he said, he'd switch over to the Catholics, so he could lock them away in some convent. We all had ourselves a good laugh about that."

He sighed. "It was kind of cool for a few minutes; sort of like sitting around the barracks, or even back in school, shooting the bull. Made the war outside seem like something that was happening to someone else, if that makes any sense."

"I think it was nice you had that time," Sabrina said. "That you gave him that time. Since I'm getting the distinct impression he didn't make it home alive?"

"No. We'd finished laughing about the convent thing, and the idea of a born-again Pentecostal converting to Catholicism, like that was going to happen in this lifetime, just to keep his babies away from horny Marines and SEALs like us, when out of the goddamn blue he asked us to pray with him."

Zach leaned his head against the back of the swing and closed his eyes. "Of course there wasn't a guy in that bunker who was going to refuse what we all knew was a last request.

"So Shane, who was an altar boy when he was a kid and knows that sort of Bible stuff, recited the Twenty-third Psalm, the one about not fearing walking through the shadow of death?"

"I know it." Sabrina's eyes filled.

"Well, he seemed to like that. Then we all said the Lord's Prayer together. And because I guess he could tell a lot of us were about to lose it at that point, he assured us that we didn't have to worry about him, because he'd been brought up to love God.

"Which was when Shane told him that God loved him, too…

"And that was that. He sort of smiled, and was gone."

He shook his head and, as if he couldn't hold the stress in anymore, got up, walked over to the end of the veranda and put his hands on the railing and stared out over the swamp.

As she wiped the moisture off her cheeks, Sabrina wondered what he was seeing.

The ram had stopped; a light breeze ruffled the palmetto fronds.

"It was weird. Outside there were Rangers and Marines lying all over the ground. Dead as Marley's damn ghost. You'd think that would've been worse, because of the sheer numbers—"

"But this was personal," she said quietly. "Because you connected emotionally. Which had to be more difficult. More painful."

"Yeah." He plowed his hands through his hair. "There was this show that spun off from
The Andy Griffith Show
, that used to play on Nick at Nite, where Gomer Pyle goes off and becomes a Marine.

"Well, in one episode Opie got mad at Andy after he'd gotten a licking for doing something, I can't remember what, but he ran away to Camp Pendleton to join the Marines, too.

"Of course Andy, who was fit to be tied, came out to California and fetched him back home to Mayberry. I remember thinking that it was too bad this Opie's dad hadn't taken him back to Kentucky when he announced he wanted to run off and become a jarhead."

"He wasn't a child. Well, perhaps he was still a teenager," she allowed at his sharp look. "But he was proud of his father, who was undoubtedly proud of him. And I'll bet he was proud of being a Marine."

"Well, of course he was." Zach glanced back over his shoulder at her, sounding surprised she'd even have to ask.

"Well, then."

"His name turned out to be Richie. Richie Cunningham, which I thought was goddamn ironic, being how that's the name of the kid Howard went on to play on
Happy Days
after all those years being Opie."