WAR: Intrusion (10 page)

She shot him a disdainful glare. “If you have a problem with my looking the other way regarding what I believed was the smuggling of non-lethal luxury items, fine. But don’t you dare taint me with my mother’s crimes. She alone was responsible for her actions. I’m tired of you and everyone else ignoring all the lives I’ve saved because of the damage my mother did. She was convicted. She went to prison. She took her own life. Whether or not you think that’s fair, justice was served. I refuse to spend the rest of my life being judged by her actions.”

For a long, tense moment she and MacKay glared at one another. His expression briefly lost some of its predatory ferocity. Then the grieving wails of nearby women broke the spell.

MacKay strode toward her. Helen backed up, but he darted around the chair and shackled her upper arms with his hands. “You’re responsible for this all the same,” he snarled. He shook her. “If you had turned Kwesi in to the authorities—”

“Commander, let the doctor go.” A white man Helen had never seen before walked into the room and stopped slightly to one side of MacKay. “They need her to care for the wounded,” he added in his English accent.

“White man,” David said, stepping into the doorway. “I am the tribal chief and Kwesi’s brother. Dr. Kirk was personally asked by me to let the smuggling continue. None of us knew that my brother had agreed to allow weapons into his cargo. And he is innocent of blame in today’s attack. He would never have supported any action that would harm his son. Whoever planned today’s attack did so without the help of my brother or Dr. Kirk.”

MacKay’s grip loosened on her arms, but he didn’t let her go.

“What your colleague spoke was the truth,” David continued. “There are many wounded from today’s violence. Dr. Kirk has extensive experience with trauma medicine. Her skills are sorely needed. Please, if you do not wish more people to die, you must allow her to do her job.”

MacKay shot Helen a look filled with such hatred, that her mouth went dry. Finally, with a jerky nod, he thrust her away from him. “Stay with her,” he ordered his comrade. “Make certain she actually helps people.” Then he stalked from the room.

The absence of his fury created a suffocating silence. Helen sagged in relief. Then she straightened her shoulders and met the studiously non-committal eyes of MacKay’s comrade. “Thank you, Mr.—?”

“Jacobs. My name is Tony Jacobs.”

“All right, Mr. Jacobs, thank you for stopping Mr. MacKay from…” She bit her lip, uncertain what type of violence MacKay had intended toward her.

“The Commander has a bit of a temper, doctor, but he’s a good man.”

Helen gave Jacobs a skeptically raised eyebrow. Then she turned and nodded to David, to let him know her thanks included him. “Let me grab my medical kit,” she said, walking with as much dignity as possible to the door. “Then you can point me to those who are most hurt.”

Realizing she still had on her bloody gloves from when she’d worked on Kwesi, she bit her lips to hold back a hysterical laugh. Well, she’d been longing to get back to trauma care work. She just hadn’t quite envisioned it occurring under these circumstances.

REELING
OVER HIS confrontation with Dr. Kirk, Lachlan stormed into the jungle. He had to calm down before he hurt someone. What he really required was a swim in an icy cold loch instead of walking through this jungle where the heat, stench, and humidity frayed his temper even more.

He’d almost done violence to a woman.

He stopped and braced his arm against a tree. It sickened him to realize how close he’d come to hurting Dr. Kirk. Even now, the urge to lash out prowled just beneath his control. But for Christ’s sake, to blow up children took a special kind of monster.

“Here, now, son. Sit still while I clean this cut.”

Lachlan clenched his fists and tried not to move, but he couldn’t control his flinch as his father’s hand moved toward the cut on his forehead. He stared in horror at the split skin across his father’s knuckles, the very knuckles that had wounded Lachlan in the first place.

Lachlan still could see the fury in his father’s eyes as his fist flew toward Lachlan’s face. His doctor father had been another type of monster. One who committed personal acts of violence against his only child, and who also killed the occasional patient for getting on his nerves.

As with his father’s patients, today’s victims had no idea they’d been targeted until the MP3 players blew up.

He pushed away from the tree. This line of thought wasn’t helping him calm down. Knowing he needed to get back to the field to help, but still feeling too on edge, he prowled through the jungle. Told himself that he was checking to see if any more shooters lingered nearby, waiting for the first responders to let down their guard before initiating another attack. But he saw no sign of snipers nor a camp where the shooters might have lain in wait until it was time to get into position.

When he reached the section of jungle that ran alongside the front of the school, he stopped to watch the firefighters putting out the fire. This bomb had been more powerful than the one that took out the stage, with enough energy to form a small crater. A burned-out shell of a taxi had been flung onto its side and up against the cement wall that marked the boundary to the school.

Lachlan wondered if this was the first such terrorist act the local first responders had dealt with. This region of the country had not yet been invaded by the rebels and had a mostly peaceful history compared to its neighbors.

But someone had just declared war. Perhaps this Natchaba bloke. Perhaps someone he answered to.

The question was, did Lachlan honestly believe that Dr. Kirk was involved?

Sighing, he turned away. The locals appeared to have the situation under control. There wasn’t anything more Lachlan could do to help, not without official sanction. How had the rebels obtained such explosives? He hadn’t heard of anything so powerful being packed into such a small device, but maybe JC Delacroix, his team’s explosives expert, knew of such a thing.

On that thought, he pulled out his sat phone and called HQ.

“I was wondering when you’d check in,” Kris said when he answered the call. “The President of Volta just called Azumah, asking if those were our men who had taken down three of the snipers who shot the regional governor at the capital of the Eastern Region. Since that’s in your general vicinity, I told Azumah the answer was probably yes.”

“Aye,” Lachlan said. He explained about the attack and his interrogation of both Kwesi and Dr. Kirk. “I saw the boxes of MP3 players at the airfield. Bloody hell, I
touched
one of them.” He wanted to go back and kick his own arse for failing to look harder at the shipment. “If their CSI team is any good and they recover the right part, they might actually find my fingerprints on one of the casings.”

“It’s not your fault, Scots. You don’t have x-ray vision. You had no way of knowing that such a weapon was even possible.”

“But we knew that Morenga had arranged to purchase cutting edge weaponry from Dietrich.” A few months ago, international arms dealer Heinrich Dietrich had sold Jonathan Morenga, the weapons broker for the rebels, a highly experimental weapon of mass destruction stolen from a South African lab. Max Lansing, one of Kris’s former teammates at Unit 3, had stopped Dietrich and recovered the weapon before it reached the rebels. Dietrich had been arrested and later died in custody. Upon Dietrich’s death, Morenga had stepped in and taken over Dietrich’s supply lines, so Lachlan had believed that any weapons being smuggled through Dr. Kirk’s airfield would have been a result of Morenga’s operation. But unless Natchaba turned out to be an alias for Morenga, unlikely since Morenga was under constant surveillance, then there was an unknown player at work here.

“Even suspecting Morenga might be involved didn’t give any of us ESP, Lach,” Kris chided. “Stop beating yourself up. Trust me. It won’t help.”

Lachlan just shrugged unhappily. “Has the U.S. Department of Defense figured out yet what that device was capable of?” Dev Neilson, Lachlan’s second-in-command, had been part of the South African special forces team sent to recover the missing device. The discovery that someone within his own government had worked with Dietrich to get the weapon into the hands of the rebels had led Dev to quit and join up with WAR. After Dietrich’s arrest, the weapon had disappeared into the research division of the U.S. DOD, to loud complaining by the South African government.

“Not as far as I’ve heard.” Kris still had contacts within the U.S. military, including Max’s brother, Wil Lansing, who was stationed in the Greater Niger Republic. “I’ll check with Wil to see if he knows of any missing weapons that could be your MP3 players. In the meantime, since your cover has been blown, Azumah and the President have worked out an agreement for you and Tony to provide assistance as needed.”

“I’m not certain there’s much left to do.” As he’d been talking, Lachlan had moved back the way he’d come. Now he stood behind the administration building. Through the louvered windows of the headmistress’s office he watched Dr. Kirk working on a young woman who was missing the lower part of her right arm. An unfamiliar woman in a white coat assisted her. The door to the lobby was open and Lachlan spotted Tony standing guard.

Dr. Kirk held a scalpel poised over her patient while her assistant sponged up blood. Reinforcements with proper supplies must have arrived. “Tony and I took out three of the four snipers. Last I saw, the locals had the fourth one cornered. Any word on if they kept him alive?”

“Negative. He blew himself up and took several cops with him.”

Lachlan grimaced. “I’m sorry for that. The locals took heavy casualties. This was not something they appeared well-prepared to handle.”

“Not surprising,” Kris replied. “Too many of the local governments are either in denial about the rebel threat, don’t have the funds or the skilled trainers necessary to prepare their forces, or are steeped in so much corruption the rebels could probably take over with one large financial contribution.”

“Which reminds me, did the research team turn up any information on those names I forwarded? With Natchaba being implicated as a possible mastermind of today’s attack, I want to know if he has any ties to the rebels.”

“I’ll check with Research and get back to you, but they’re still overloaded.”

One of the unfortunate side effects of WAR being an underground movement was the lack of adequate resources. Their limited budget tended to be used first for weapons, ammunition, and medical care, with research falling last.

“So, what are you going to do about Dr. Kirk?” Kris asked. “Did you believe her when she says she was ignorant of any planned attack?”

Inside the office, the patient Dr. Kirk had been working on was placed on a stretcher and carried into the library, which had been turned into a recovery room. Her assistant followed the stretcher out. Alone in the room, Dr. Kirk bowed her head and her shoulders sagged, but not before Lachlan saw the misery and frustration on her face. A tendril of sympathy tapped against the ice in his chest.

A moment later, the attendants returned and placed another patient on the headmistress’s desk that served as the operating table. Dr. Kirk disposed of her soiled gloves, pulled on another pair, then immediately began working.

Lachlan rubbed the back of his neck and sighed. “I don’t know what to believe,” he admitted. “I’m watching her right now and what I’m seeing is a hard-working, skilled doctor doing the best she can to save lives in sub-optimal conditions. But—”

“Between her admission that she looked the other way on the other smuggling, her mother, and your fear of doctors, you’re having trouble fully accepting her innocence. If it helps, Rene thinks very highly of her.”

Lachlan’s mouth quirked. “Och now, if the legendary Dr. LaSalle gives his approval,” he said drily, “then Dr. Kirk must be a saint.” Rene had saved Lachlan’s life once and never let him forget it. A mission had gone bad and Lachlan had been separated from his team and bleeding out. Then suddenly Rene had appeared out of the dark. He’d ignored Lachlan’s protests that he didn’t need medical aid and his less than polite suggestion that Rene get himself out of the danger zone before he got his fool self killed. Instead, Rene had jumped right in to help Lachlan, treating him with a brotherly combination of bullying and teasing, before dragging him to safety. Rene’s ability to save the lives even of the reluctant ones had added to his status as a medical legend.

In all seriousness, WAR was lucky to have Rene on their side both as a doctor and as one of the leaders of their intelligence network. Rene, along with Lance, the team’s medic, were two of the only doctors Lachlan could tolerate having treat him. Even the other doctors at WAR HQ hadn’t fully earned his trust yet. And he still occasionally flinched when being treated by Lance or Rene, despite trusting them.

“I didn’t say she was a saint,” Kris corrected with a laugh. “I just want you to consider that she’s telling you the truth. You of all people should be wary of judging someone based on the sins of a parent.”

Lachlan winced. Kris was the only one at WAR who knew about his father. During Lachlan’s job interview, Kris had explained to Lachlan that he’d dug into the supposedly sealed juvenile files. “I don’t bring on any new personnel without vetting them thoroughly,” Kris had said.

Lachlan still remembered the feeling of icy dread that had spread through him at Kris’s words. The official, public story had been that Lachlan’s father had been killed by a vandal who’d broken in to the medical clinic looking for drugs. Those who dug further would find reports about the enquiry into whether Lachlan’s father had murdered dozens of his patients and been stopped from committing one more by Lachlan. But no one was supposed to be able to access Lachlan’s medical records or the court records assigning custody of Lachlan to Father MacGuinessy, an Irish priest and distant cousin to Lachlan’s mother who’d at the time been assigned to a church in Scotland.

“I don’t care that your father abused you, Lachlan,” Kris had continued. “Or that you killed the bastard. And I won’t share your past with the team unless your fear of doctors becomes a threat to your missions. But no one works with my team unless I understand where they came from and who they are now.”