Читать книгу State Of Honour - Gary Haynes - Страница 18

An hour and a half later, after undergoing an initial debriefing at the temporary command centre, Tom showed his blue and gold DS badge to a cordon of harried-looking policemen dressed in light-khaki pants and maroon shirts, guarding the now-shattered glass doors that led to the hospital lobby. The flanks were occupied by a platoon of US Marines, some of whom were handing out water bottles and the contents of med kits to survivors.

A CIA paramilitary operative stood immediately inside. He held an M6A2 carbine, said he’d just arrived from the embassy with ten colleagues. Edging past him, Tom was hit by the shocking sight of the aftermath of the attack.

The injured lay on gurneys or on blankets on the floor. Every centimetre of the ground-floor corridors seemed to be a mass of writhing bodies, their moans and shrieks reverberating in his ears. At least twenty doctors, nurses and paramedics were doing what they could, although it was obvious that they were overwhelmed by both the number of casualties and the severity of their wounds.

Tom knew for sure that three of his protective detail had been killed in the attack; another two badly injured, he’d been told. Mark Jennings, the youngest agent, a veterinarian’s son from Arkansas, had been shot in the head. He’d been examined by a specialist who’d been flown in by an MH-53 search and rescue helicopter from Islamabad’s Maroof International Hospital.

Tom eased by a woman doctor, her latex gloves soaked in blood. Two orderlies were holding down a young boy as the doctor attempted to give him a shot of morphine. A woman with angular features, whom Tom took for his mother, was hysterical, shaking her hands at the ceiling and wailing. He pushed open a fire door, and took the stairs two at a time to the third floor.

A muscular man in his mid-twenties stood guard outside one of the private rooms. He wore a flak jacket over a short-sleeved shirt, and held a HK sub-machine gun before his chest. He turned as Tom entered the corridor, nodded briefly. Tom figured he was CIA, too.

The door’s glass pane was criss-crossed with wire, although Tom glimpsed a bed beside the far wall, a hastily boarded-up window above it. He strolled in, a closed-mouthed smile slicing across his face. It was all he could muster. The room was a dull white and smelt faintly of mould. But at least the AC was functioning, although it sounded like an antique generator.

As he walked over to the bed Tom saw half a dozen tubes coming out of Jennings, including an IV drip. He guessed the poor guy was lucky to be alive. When he reached him, he was lying flat with an expressionless face, a bloated dull-red-and-yellowish bruise on his left cheek like a piece of ripped plum. The top of his head had been bandaged, his hair shaved.

“Lyric?” he asked, as soon as he registered Tom’s face.

“She’s still missing.”

“Goddamnit!”

“Don’t worry. We’ll find her before the day is out,” Tom said, lying. There was no point in making Jennings feel worse than he already did.

“You think?”

“Sure.”

“Thank God.”

“You’ll be here for a few days,” Tom said. “Then we’ll get you home.”

“You gotta gum? I gave up the smokes five years since. I still get the urge, especially after getting shot in the head. And this pillow’s as lumpy as hell and smells like it’s had guinea pigs nesting in it.”

“I’ll be sure to get you a new one. What’s the diagnosis?” Tom asked, handing Jennings a stick of gum.

“The doc told me that the chances of surviving a head shot are about five per cent. And of those who live, only one in ten escapes suffering permanent disability. A bullet likes to rattle around in the skull, turning the brain into scrambled eggs, according to him. It’s a miracle, Tom, beating those odds. But they can’t operate. It’s too dangerous. Guess I’ll have to carry it around as a souvenir.”

“That’s good to hear. I think,” Tom said, glad that Jennings was taking it so well.

“It hurt like hell, Tom. Like a goddamned mustang mistook my head for a rattlesnake.” Jennings winced, as if reacting to the initial impact. “How does it look?”

“Like that mustang had a grudge,” Tom said, trying to keep the mood light.

“I collapsed. The sky turned red. Thought I was dying. I thought I was dying, Tom. And I don’t mind telling you, I was terrified.”

Yeah, too good to be true, Tom thought. He could see that Jennings was getting upset. It was a natural reaction. He knew that people who’d sustained head injuries, or sometimes just had their noses broken, often suffered severe depression soon afterwards. But at least the headshot had turned out to be better than a round in the leg or shoulder, where massive blood vessels were situated. In Nigeria, he’d watched a man bleed out in less than five minutes after being shot in the upper thigh. A medic had told him the femoral artery, which lay close to the surface of the skin, had been severed, and had retracted back up into the pelvis. And the shoulder housed a ball-and-socket joint that was all but inoperable if it got pulverised by a bullet.

Tom put his hand on Jennings’s forearm. “It’ll be all right. Trust me.”

“Who were they?”

“We don’t know for certain. But you did your job.”

“The hell I did. I got shot and Lyric has been kidnapped by a bunch of psycho Islamic terrorists, the way I see it. We lost some good people, too. Becky was a fine woman. It’s a goddamned disaster,” he said, using his palm to wipe his eyes dry.

Tom sucked his bottom lip, nodding. “There’s a CIA guy outside if you need anything.”

“He should be looking for her. It’s a waste of resources. Nobody gives a shit about me. You think someone’s gonna creep up the fire escape and smother me with a pillow, or inject poison into one of these tubes?”

“No, I don’t. Now get some rest.”

He grabbed Tom’s wrist. “Find her, Tom. Just find her.”

“I made a promise to her. I will keep it.”

“And kill them. Kill them for murdering our own and doing this.”

Tom smiled, weakly. “Rest. Then home.”

He patted Jennings on the arm and left.

“He’ll be fine, thanks for asking,” Tom said to the CIA guy, just wanting to take it all out on someone, but regretting it instantly afterwards.

The CIA man remained silent. Just stared hard. Tom guessed he didn’t even have the kudos to rouse a response any more. Besides, often people who said nothing said a helluva lot; all of it derogatory.

He’d been told to return to the embassy where, no doubt, he would be subjected to the second of many frame-by-frame debriefings on what had gone so badly wrong. As he reached the fire door at the end of the corridor he shoved it open. He stopped at the top of the stairs and sank down, engulfed by a sense of guilt and failure that had no hope of personal resolution, and not for the first time.

Involuntarily, he saw his mother’s face. He’d broken a promise to her, too.