STARGATE SG-1: Do No Harm (2 page)

If he tried to snatch, Frank would stuff the damned mail down his own boxers. The guy could be a bastard like that. So he shoved his hands into pockets and waited while another letter was dropped onto Wang’s cot, then three onto Dysart’s.

A gleam of devilry was in Frank’s eye as he held out his hand. “Only one for you, Jack. Man, you’re tragic.”

If it was the right one, who cared?

Sarah’s handwriting was smooth and flowing, almost copperplate. Seeing it felt like her fingertips trailing down his spine. He let out a sharp breath.

Down, boy. Down.

He dropped back to his camp-bed and carefully eased open the envelope. It was very important he didn’t tear it. A photo slid into his hand. Charlie, brown eyes so huge in his puckish little face, cake-smeared mouth stretched wide in squealing delight as he stared at the teeny tiny Chicago Cubs uniform they’d bought him, with a mini-mitt and a signed baseball his six-year-old hands weren’t big enough to throw properly.

He’s six? Hell, last time I looked he was in diapers. Wasn’t he?

“What’s that?” said Frank. He hadn’t opened his letter, hadn’t even sat down. His wife was battling breast cancer and she wasn’t out of the woods yet. If something bad had happened there’d be a phone call, he wouldn’t find out in a letter from home, but…

Carol dying? It’s the only thing in the world that can scare him, I think.

He passed over the photo. “Charlie’s birthday party. Sarah and I organized the present before we shipped out.”

Jesus. Jesus. Was that only five weeks ago? Five weeks in this sandbox and it feels like a lifetime.

Childless Frank grinned at the photo. “Man, he’s a cute kid. Lucky for him he takes after Sarah.”

“Yeah, yeah.” It was a familiar refrain. “Screw you.” He read Sarah’s letter.

Love you… miss you… the party was fine… cake in the carpet, and up the walls… Carol’s had some bad days, but please don’t tell Frank… come home soon, we’re wai
ting…

Hollow with homesickness, he looked at Frank. His friend had opened his own letter at last and was reading it, slowly. The look on his face… damn… why did life have to suck? Why couldn’t someone like Saddam get cancer?

“Everything okay?” he asked, re-folding Sarah’s letter and sliding it next to his skin. It couldn’t stay there if they got deployed, but in the meantime…

“Carol says so,” Frank replied, his eyebrows pinched. “But I’ve been married to the damned woman for sixteen years. She oughta remember I can tell when she’s lying.”

Childhood sweethearts, known each other since Sunday school, Tennessee. How corny was that?

But then Frank’s a corny guy. A romantic with a heart bigger than Texas. Hell, he watches chick flicks. He cries in ‘St Elmo’s Fire
’. I’ve seen him.

“Hey,” he said, and waited for Frank to pay attention. “Carol’s one tough broad. Has to be, staying married to you. She’ll make it.”

“Yeah.” Frank shook his head, cleared his throat. “Here,” he said, handing the photo back. “Sorry you couldn’t be there for his birthday, Jack. Hell, I’m sorry
I
couldn’t be there. Sarah bakes a wicked fine chocolate cake.”

“Yeah. She sure does.” Everything Sarah did was wicked fine.
Greedily he stared at the photo, drank in the sight of his miracle child. They’d had such trouble conceiving… for a while there it had looked like Charlie was never going to happen.

God. It scares me sometimes how much I love him.

The photo slid beneath his shirt next to Sarah’s letter. His fingers caressed them: his family. They were his life, the reason he was breathing. The reason he was here.

“Jack…”

Something in Frank’s tone triggered alarm bells. They’d known each other a long time now, were tuned to each other’s every nuance and breath, the way a good team leader and his second in command needed to be. “What?”

Still holding his letter, Frank sat on the nearest camp-bed. Wang’s. His face was somber, his eyes serious and cool.

Oh crap. Here we go.

“It’s just a whisper,” Frank said, reading his mind. “Someone said someone else said they heard Horne say… you know?”

His heart was kicking his ribs. “But you believe it?”

Frank didn’t reply for a moment. Outside their flimsy shelter the sandstorm howled and raged. “There’s intel coming
through,” he said, his voice lowered, as though the enemy could
overhear them. “Looks like the Iraqis are using civilian air raid shelters as military bunkers.”

Bastards
. Like every dictator in human history, Saddam treated his own people like crap. Less than crap. Threw them under the bus the first chance he got.

“So, what? They want us to go in? Confirm the intel? Or take out the bunkers?”

“Don’t know,” said Frank. “But my gut tells me we’re going to find out pretty damned soon.”

So. Despite Schwarztkopf’s well-known aversion to Special Forces going behind enemy lines — stupid jerk — they might actually get to do something useful after all. Well, hallelujah and pass the ammo, boys.

Frank’s booted toe kicked him gently on the shin. “There’s something else.”

He felt his belly roll queasily. “What?”

“The Brits have lost one of their SAS teams.”

“Lost?” He stared. “What do you mean, lost? When?”

Frank shrugged. “Recently. Three teams went out to take care of any mobile scud platforms they could find and only two teams came back. One of them’s dropped off the radar. No contact. Zip. Nada. Zilch.” He flicked his fingers. “They’re gone.”

“Gone as in laying low, or gone as in… dead?”

Another shrug. “Nobody knows. They could be fine, and their comm equipment’s snafu. They could be mummifying as we speak. Or — ”

“Or the Iraqis nabbed them.”

Silently they stared at each other. It was every soldier’s worst nightmare: the thought of getting taken by Saddam’s Republican Guard. Forget the Geneva Convention, those guys played rough. Worse than rough. They’d rape anything that moved. They tortured kids in front of their parents, parents in front of their kids. They were… barbaric.

Sarah… Charlie…

Frank kicked him again, less gently this time. “Hey. Get your head straight, Jack. We’re here to do a job, and if we’re sent in I can’t have you carrying them on your back. I need to know you’re a hundred percent with me. Is that clear?”

Frank didn’t often reprimand him. Didn’t often need to. It stung, but it wasn’t undeserved. “Yeah. Clear. Sorry.”

“Hey.” Frank’s scowl relaxed. “It’s cool.”

The thought of letting his friend down was enough to make him sweat. He knew his job. He was friggin’ good at his job. He was so good at his job sometimes that scared him, too.

But things can go wrong. And I don’t want to get him killed.

“Jack — that intel. Let’s keep it between us, for now,” said Frank. “There’s nothing official yet.”

But there would be. Frank’s nose for a mission was the best in the game. “Which SAS team is it? Do we know them?”

“Bravo Two Zero. We bought Chris Ryan a beer, remember?”

Hell, yeah. And Ryan had slaughtered him at darts. Why that should make it worse he didn’t know, but it did.

“You worry about it much?” said Frank. “You know. Getting taken?”

It was the unwritten rule: you didn’t talk about that kind of thing. Talking about it brought it too close for comfort. But that was Frank; shouting what the angels feared to whisper.

He shrugged, frowning. Stared at the scuffed and oil-stained floor. “Sure. Some.”

“Yeah. Me too.”

“A lot?” he said, after a moment, and looked up.

“Enough.” Then Frank shook his head. “But here’s the thing, Jack, and you can take this to the bank. So long as I’m leader of this team, none of you get left behind. If I have to shoot you myself I won’t let the bastards get their hands on you.”

He felt a little of the weight slide from his shoulders. “That’s a promise?”

“It’s a promise.” Then Frank grinned. “But hey. It’s not one I’ll have to keep. We’re too good for those bastards to catch us.”

He wondered if Chris Ryan and the rest of Bravo Two Zero had made the same bold, foolhardy declaration… but he kept that thought to himself. “Yeah,” he said. “You got that right.”

And then the hangar’s side door blew open again and it was Wang and Dysart, bemoaning their crappy luck at the poker table. He and Frank exchanged swift, complicated smiles… then joined forces to mock their team-mates, mercilessly.

Two days later they shipped out for Baghdad.

Janet Fraiser was in the concrete cubicle she laughingly called her office, reviewing the bloodwork results on SG-6, when Sergeant Harriman’s voice blasted through the base’s intercom.

“
Medical emergency! Medical team to the gate room! Doctor Fraiser, please report
!”

She was too much the seasoned professional to leap up from her desk, sweating and swearing, but she wanted to. Oh, how she wanted to. It was the fourth emergency call to the gate room in twelve days.

Just when I thought the worst was over. Hell, I’m so damned sick of this…

With over-practised ease she grabbed her stethescope from its hooks by the door, pulled on gloves from the dispenser beside it, collected her response team from the infirmary with a quick “Soup’s on. Move it.” and made her brisk way to the latest catastrophe. At least she knew for certain it wasn’t SG-1 this time. SG-1 were safely in the briefing room giving General Hammond the run-down on P4J-992, where miraculously not one of them had so much as stubbed a toe.

Thank God.

She ran through the potentials in her head as she threaded through doors and corridors at something close to a jog. SG-10 were on a diplomatic run, SG-5 were bored spitless on P9C-446, guarding an archeological dig. So that only left —

SG-8. The scene in the gate room was grim. Major Jake Andrews, recently promoted to team-leader, sprawled unconscious on the gate ramp, his right forearm attached to his elbow by two sinews and a prayer. From the damage to his clothing it looked like there was some kind of penetrating belly wound too. Things that should be inside — like blood and intestines — were outside. The slicing wounds were sharp, clean, from some kind of machete maybe. Captain Ariel Lee slumped beside him, her slim brown hands clutching at the broken arrow-shaft protruding from her left thigh. Her team mates, Lieutenants Esposito and Brackley, bled from a profusion of nasty lacerations to their faces, arms, chests and legs. More blade work, like Andrews, but at least it didn’t look life-threatening. The lieutenants supported each other unsteadily as they gasped for air.

“Why wasn’t this wound secured before you came back, Captain?” Janet asked Lee as she dropped to her knees on the ramp beside Jake and opened the first response box. Damn, damn, where was the —
yes
. Her fingers pulled out the tourniquet, and she hauled it tightly into place just above Jake’s elbow. The pulsed flow from the severed arteries was sluggish, easy to compress, the tourniquet a bandaid gesture after the fact. Her hands felt gently, deftly for evidence of a chest injury to go with the belly wound, for a neck or head injury from his unprotected fall through the gate onto the ramp. It would be so easy to miss something, and they were in too much trouble already.

The major’s fatigues were drenched to a soggy scarlet. Class IV shock — greater than 40 percent volume loss, he was almost exsanguinated. “Get him on oxygen and put a couple of i/vs in him if you can,” she said to Liz Gardiner, her chief nurse. “We’ve got to bring his pressure up. If you can’t get an i/v in we’ll cut down and get central access in the OR.” Turning to Tim Webber she added, “I want that gurney now. Then notify the OR we’re coming in hot and they need to start scrubbing for a dirty abdomen. Then call the blood bank and radiology and warm up the rapid infuser.” She arranged the bloody, cooling, inanimate remains of Jake’s forearm beside him. Blood dripped through the ramp grating to the concrete floor below. “The arm can wait.”

Ariel’s teeth were chattering, her eyes blank with shock and pain. She looked like she was trying to remember how to speak. “Sorry, Janet. Sorry,” she muttered. “No time for a tourniquet. If we’d stopped running we’d be dead.” All the color had drained from her face. Rob Cheung was working on her; she didn’t seem to notice him. “I’m sorry. Doctor Fraiser, please…”

Please, please, don’t let him die
. It’s what they always asked. What she could never promise. There was blood on her hands now, way past the edges of her gloves. “He’s a fighter, Captain,” she said, and knew it wouldn’t be enough. She was going to lose Major Jake Andrews. She’d seen too much impending death in the last three years to believe he’d survive his dreadful injuries. His trauma score was too damned high.

Rage was squeezing her, brutal as a wifebeater’s fist. She looked at Liz, who was taping down the second saline bag’s canula. “Okay. Let’s go.”

As she and the rest of her team got Andrews and Ariel onto their gurneys she caught a sideways glimpse of General Hammond and Jack O’Neill, hovering on the edges of the bloodbath. Needing to be there, but knowing when to stay back. Sam, Daniel and Teal’c had remained in the control room. Like Sergeant Harriman they watched through the window, as though plated glass could shield them from grief.