Rescue Nights (23 page)

Margo tossed the protocols packages on the table. ‘Joint operation, people, so cross your t’s and dot your i’s.’

The others might be groaning theatrically but Andrew was man enough to admit that if Kate was going to be going down the wire to be dealing with criminals he would prefer that men with guns were going to be accompanying her.

Andrew and Kate were running the final checks on their med bags and adding in extra Naloxone, in case Customs intel on heroin addiction was correct.

‘We’ll have an extra five minutes,’ Kate assured him. ‘There is no way that Joe is having those boys on his bird without the full safety message. It is a matter of both procedure and pride.’

‘If it is going to get me out of the scary talk about my options of what to do when the chopper falls out of the sky, I’m definitely going to the vending machine for extra Coke and chocolate.’

There was a security in debating the correct drugs with her, a rightness in knowing that she would be spending a whole day by his side.

‘The latest weather modelling has come in for the GPS coordinates of the area and Joe isn’t going to be happy. There is a strong south easterly that is going to make any air rescue problematic,’ said Pete, as he accompanied them the last metres to the helicopter.

‘Queensland Rescue helicopter doesn’t do a simple easing in of first days,’ said Kate, strapping herself to her seat and extending her hand to the policemen.

Andrew tried not to notice her warmth towards the nice looking professionals crowding the jump seat opposite them, as she hardly looked his way at all. As they got closer to where the initial mayday went out, the general unsteadiness of the chopper in the wind became apparent. Andrew couldn’t help an unholy smile when the handsome sergeant started looking a distinctive green-grey.

‘Eyes on the horizon,’ Andrew advised.

Hell, they were part of the water police unit. You would think that any type of motion sickness would be an automatic disqualifier.

Kate had been attempting to question the other officer about the activities of the patient they were here to treat and was getting stonewalled.

‘Apart from the fact that one of our professional tenets is patient confidentiality, we are also part of the emergency services and understand discretion,’ Kate said, in exasperation. ‘Anyway you guys suddenly landing on their deck will probably give away the bloody secret.’

The officer shrugged and had the grace to look embarrassed. ‘They’ve been running the drugs and money between here and PNG. They seem to be pretty reliable couriers but I wouldn’t trust them with the merchandise for too long.’

As they had been talking, Kate had been handing out helmets and checking clasps on harnesses. When she turned to him, Andrew had to restrain himself from reaching out to touch her. She was close enough that he could see the faint shadows under her eyes and even a delicate stress wrinkle that he could swear hadn’t been there yesterday. Last time she had gone into an uncertain situation, she had almost died. He could only imagine there would be a natural trepidation this time.

‘We are going to go down, two at a time,’ she dictated. ‘First will be Officer Lucas and I, and once we have declared the scene appropriate for further personnel, we will signal for you two to come down the wire.

‘I could go first,’ Andrew offered, almost insisted.

Kate’s noise of derision was probably what he deserved. ‘Yeah, I’m going to let that happen.’

Andrew knew he should have been insulted by her lack of tact but somehow the fight in her eyes warmed something in him. This woman had him further invested than was logical. Especially as she now wanted to kick his arse.

‘Three minutes out and wind gusts at thirty knots so you might want to hang on to your hats,’ Joe’s voice came through the intercom.

Andrew’s gaze followed the officer as he did his weapon check and he could feel Kate clocking the same thing.

‘Keep that holstered and the safety on while we are strapped together,’ she warned. ‘Those boys may be drug dealers but they have called for our help and I’d rather not go down as the girl killed on the line by a random bullet because the wind was too strong.’

The motoring yacht came into view and it was a reasonably sorry looking sight. Unlike most of the boats that flaunted themselves in the Cairns marina, this one was dirty, decrepit, with its motor blowing a fair amount of smoke. Andrew could only take it on trust that it had made it to PNG, multiple times, under its own steam. A mangy looking man, who he could well believe belonged to the vessel, was waving. It didn’t look like they were going to be unwelcome guests.

Ben’s voice came over the helicopter’s loudspeaker. ‘Please stay away from rescue personnel as they board on the foredeck of the boat.’

Kate was the first to swing outside the door and smiled back at Andrew and he was struck anew by her. For a second, despite the danger, despite the wind, despite the awful night that hung between them, it was as if all was wiped clean and it was perfect because she was out here doing what she was built to do.

Andrew’s hands cracked around the chopper’s grab-bar as he watched the tense moments where she guided herself and Officer Lucas onto the rocking deck.

‘The smell is offensive but there are no weapons in sight,’ came the welcome communication from below deck.

Andrew could only agree when he made his way into the cabin. Unwashed was probably a kind descriptor. Having ignored the piles of clothes and the agitated sailing companion (or alleged accomplice), a man also in his forties, Kate was efficiently setting up next to the bunk.

Rapidly assessing his patient’s wounds, track marks gone wrong, Andrew was embarrassed again at his belittling words of the work they did here. There was a sophistication of medical practice needed in dealing with a variety of procedures and patients. High levels of skills were needed. Sepsis had set in for this man and if they hadn’t arranged medical attention here to him today, death would certainly have occurred within twenty-four hours.

‘You’ll have to strap in the IV antibiotics because we’ll want to have been on the move yesterday,’ he ordered. ‘I’ll do a fast dressing but mainly we’ll have to hope he doesn’t flat-line before we hit the hospital.’

Kate’s long absence from frontline medical practice hadn’t dulled her speed. As usual, she was able to shut off from the chaos around her and focus on what needed to be done.

Within seven minutes, the patient was being pumped full of meds, strapped to the stretcher. Andrew and the two policemen were carrying him topside as Kate spoke to the chopper.

‘The law and the skipper are staying on the boat and motoring it back to port. So it is a party of three for the ride home.’

Thirty minutes into the flight, it all started going to hell. They didn’t even need the simultaneous ugly chorus of machines beeping to tell them something was going horribly wrong. Their patient had started a heave of convulsions.

‘Gauge three chest tube,’ Andrew called.

It took all of Andrew and Kate’s strength to hold him flat enough for Andrew to begin the not so delicate process of shoving a tube down the man’s throat so they could guarantee his airway. In the back of a helicopter, to the untrained eye, Andrew often wondered if it would look like assault.

‘ETA for the hospital because we are going to want to defib?’ Andrew asked.

‘Eight minutes,’ Joe replied.

The limited space up here was something that Andrew never got used to. Kate made it look easy, effortlessly putting her hands out and blindly grabbing for the exactly right instrument, which was always exactly where she thought it was. When you called a cardiac code in a hospital, many hands rushed to help. Here all jobs fell to them.

‘Oxygen stats are dropping and pulse is becoming unsteady,’ Kate reported.

‘Push the adrenaline and be prepared to start bagging when I go for CPR,’ Andrew got above the patient and felt for the exact level where the cardiac resuscitation needed to start.

‘One, two, three, four, five, six’

Once in med school, Andrew had been told that the beat of Queen’s song ‘Another One Bites The Dust’, was the perfect rhythm with which to perform CPR, with its 100 beats per minute. Kate never needed a metronome here in the helicopter, or to even follow the beeps of the heart monitor. Her rhythm was pitch perfect and their harmony up here was almost an intricate dance.

Andrew was glad that the Customs boys were still at sea when Margo organized office drinks at the end of the day.

‘We need to celebrate Kate’s triumphant return to the fold,’ she said.

‘Abso-bloody-lutely,’ Andrew agreed, as he pulled his hoodie on. In Cairns’s premier drinking location, casual attire was definitely preferred.

The sea of people inside the pub obviously agreed with his assessment. NRL jerseys and singlets seemed to be the most common attire. Andrew didn’t think that in London, the bouncers at pubs had to intervene with the refrain ‘no shirt, no shoes, no service’ quite so often.

Kate was holding a table near the dance floor. She still had her hair in a tight French braid, but that only made Andrew think of the way he had tugged on her loose curls during glorious sex just two nights before. Now, she had traded her uniform for jeans and a tight black sleeveless top and Andrew was worried he might actually have to hit any man who would hit on her.

‘No dead bodies in the chopper.’ Andrew was jolted as Ben hit his shoulder in congratulations. ‘That is always good.’

‘A near run thing, but his heart restarted on the defib and he now can live for a long satisfying sentence in jail.’

There weren’t going to be any happy family visits for that particular patient.

Ben stumbled beside him. They were only bringing back their third beer to the table. That was the thing about devoted family men — when they went out, their tolerance for alcohol had invariably slipped through years of only occasional use.

Andrew wasn’t feeling any such effects. The alcohol had only caused him to feel an increasing numbness as if he was nothing more than a shell.

Kate was also doing her best to ignore him, not watching as he sat beside her, talking across the table to Margo and Joe.

‘The Customs boys sent me a text. Apparently the remaining sailor attempted an escape and Heath ended up in the drink,’ Kate recounted.

‘You mean we missed a chance to get a picture of a water policeman actually in the water?’

Andrew knew that with their sensitivity to Kate’s safety, nothing would have been worse, but in the safety of the pub, he was able to join in the laughter.

A game of pool had started and he and Kate were left alone. Alone in the pulsating cocoon of a very crowded beer garden.

‘I don’t want to see you outside work anymore,’ Kate said suddenly, still looking away from him towards the dance floor where drunken couples swayed.

‘You really want to do this here?’ he asked, disbelieving.

‘The next man who asks me, I’m going to show them my breasts,’ she said in the same tone. She waited a long pause where nobody turned around.

‘I think the evening has long gone past the stage where anyone but us cares about our dramas,’ Kate continued, sardonically.

‘We live next to each other, we were dating, how are we not going to see each other?’ Andrew asked, running the back of his hand over hers under the camouflage of the table.

Apparently, even that touch was too much intimacy, as her hand jerked away from his. However, now her gaze focused upon him, her second drink had revealed a sadness that he could only view with regret.

‘You are leaving me and this life for London and every day we stay in relationship limbo I’m going to end up more hurt,’ Kate told him. ‘This year has been awful enough without me ending up broken hearted. I’m just not going to be that girl.’

Kate didn’t even fully get her words out before she started gathering up her things. ‘I’m getting a taxi home. You should too, but I’m so not going to invite you to share mine.’

Andrew wanted to stop her but there was nothing to do here in a crowded pub. He just had to watch her weave her way through the crowd and thoroughly dislike himself because he was grateful that although he had hurt her, at least she hadn’t caused a public scene.

Three hours later, Andrew stumbled his way out of a taxi door. He had left the driver with a fifty-dollar tip, on top of the fare, because three drinks had turned into ten and he had barely been able to slur his own address. However, it wasn’t like he had Kate to go home to and he had needed something more to get through a night where it seemed she had slipped further out of his life.

As if to make the reality of her decision even more real, Andrew had to stop himself from going to open her front door. Instead, he had to go to his own. His own door, his own lonely bed, his own choices that left him with no Kate. As Andrew dropped his key for the third time, he slammed his fist into the door. The pain didn’t even begin to register, but he had torn apart his knuckles, his bloody precious surgeon’s hands.

Kate nursed a glass of champagne on the night of Andrew’s going away party. Of course, tonight she had actually pretended a major migraine and so was regretfully toasting his departure from the comfort of her own living room. Six weeks since they last had any intimate contact and she already missed him dreadfully, even though they worked together most days.

It was somewhere in that haze of emotional pain that she had actually realized she did love him. She knew questions would be asked about why she wasn’t attending his party tonight. However, the chance of breaking down while wishing him a cheery goodbye was too big a risk to her sense of self.

‘Hey, darling.’ Lucy’s call from her front door was not one that could be ignored no matter how much she might crave her solitude.

‘Is everyone abandoning the party tonight?’ Kate asked. ‘Aren’t you supervising the hosting?’

‘Best friend’s rights, and it’s a pit stop,’ said Lucy, as she breezed in. ‘I gather by the sweats you are definitely not planning a late appearance.’

‘Ex-shag’s rights.’ Kate took another bolt of champagne. ‘Though we are still sticking with the story of a sudden illness.’