Page 1 of Stranded with the Surgeon

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‘Mayday…Mayday…’

‘Cessna Bravo Papa Tango… Three zero niner… Engine failure…’

‘Mayday…Mayday…’

The pilot sounded way too calm for the emergency to be real, Jennifer Allen decided. Mind you,sheprobably sounded equally dispassionate when calling for, say, a scalpel, buzz-saw and rib spreaders to crack someone’s chest in the emergency department in a desperate last-ditch effort to save a life.

Failure was virtually inevitable in such a scenario.

Maybe a radio message requesting assistance for a light plane about to crash into the side of a mountain was a kind of formality as well. Part of a predetermined protocol. Something you did to demonstrate that you’d done absolutely everything possible when any real hope was lost.

‘Mayday…Mayday…’

The scenes were badly disjointed. The budget for this movie must have been incredibly low. A wingtip dipped sharply. A woman screamed. The rocks and scree slopes of the terrain were close enough for her to pick out a single alpine flower in a tussock. A mountain buttercup, the real name of which was a Mount Cook lily. That was a nice touch, Jennifer thought, showing the setting to be a New Zealand mountain. Despite only a split-second view, every white petal could be counted, framing the golden centre and looking rather like a floral poached egg. The image was frozen onto her retina by the shock of being suddenly plunged into… nothing.

How had they achieved that total blankness? And why was the theatre so damn cold? Jennifer reached out to pull her bedclothes more securely over her body, but she was still too deeply asleep, trapped in the odd dream featuring a disaster movie. She tried to roll over instead, but the rest of her body was as uncooperative as her arm had been. One foot had gone to sleep and Jennifer could feel the pins and needles of awakening nerves. But wasn’t her whole body asleep? The confusing notion made Jennifer want to give up and admire the buttercup again, but the image had vanished.

The weight on her body was far more than bedclothes could account for and, strangely, it was steadily increasing. Jennifer didn’t have a dog and she had slept alone for years. The weight was now enough to be causing pain – even to make breathing difficult, and she made a huge effort to surface from sleep and that lingering dream. To open her eyes and reach out to push the weight away.

Something was terribly wrong.

Jennifer couldn’t move. And what she could see only inches from her face had to be an illusion. Part of a dream that wouldn’t quit. The hand dangling in mid-air with the fingers an inch or two from the floor was that of a woman. The one who had screamed so piercingly, perhaps? The skin texture was that of someone a generation older than herself, and the rings that the hand displayed on its fourth finger included a beautiful eternity band of diamonds and sapphires.

The ring seemed oddly familiar, and Jennifer could feel herself frowning. The whole hand was familiar, in fact. She had seen it – reaching out for another hand. An older man, with tufty grey hair and a cheeky grin, was helping the woman climb into a small plane. Jennifer had already climbed in. She had the tiny back seat of the five-seater plane all to herself and she had been fastening her seatbelt and watching the other passengers embark.

‘Mayday…Mayday…’

The realisation that the ‘dream’ had been a replay of reality, if not reality itself, hit Jennifer in a single blow. The cold was real. They had been travelling above the bush line over mountainous country. It had been a gloriously sunny spring day, but that was meaningless at an altitude that could collect snow all year round.

The hand was lifeless. Jennifer knew that as instantly as she understood the significance of the ambient temperature. The woman’s chest was the object weighing her down and there was not even a flutter of movement that might suggest the woman was still breathing.

Panic clawed at her throat. She had survived a plane crash and now she was trapped beneath a body that probably weighed twice as much as she did. How long ago had they hit the ground? Jennifer had no memory of the impact, and she might have only been unconscious for a very short period of time. What had felt like a deep sleep and a drawn-out dream could have been only seconds.

Small planes carried a lot of fuel in their wings. Any moment now and something could ignite and explode.

Jennifer wasn’t about to survive a crash landing only to be burned alive, trapped in the tail section of a tiny aircraft, thank you very much. She twisted and pushed, trying to find purchase for her feet.

‘Aahh!’ Her cry was one of frustration, pain and a not inconsiderable amount of fear.

‘Who’s that?’

Jennifer’s breath caught in a gasp as a mixture of relief and hope surged through her. She wasn’t the only survivor.

‘I’m Jennifer Allen,’ she called back. She couldn’t see anything past the body on top of her. ‘Who’s that?’

‘Guy Knight.’

‘Are you the pilot?’

‘No.’ The tone was slightly dry, suggesting either that being a pilot was not something he would have aspired to – or that Jennifer should have known who he was. Now that she had ruled out the person in charge of the plane, of course, she did know.

Guy Knight was the solid, younger man who had been seated beside the pilot in the front and, yes, she had seen this man before – had heard the name. He’d stood up to ask a quite intelligent question at the end of her presentation on managing cardiac tamponade yesterday. But he couldn’t really expect her to have remembered the name of one small-town or rural GP out of the hundreds who had been attending the weekend conference on emergency medicine, could he? They had all seemed to want to talk to her. To ask questions. To pick the brain of one of the conference’s keynote speakers.

‘I need some help here.’ Fear sharpened Jennifer’s tone. ‘I’ve got a dead body on top of me and I can’t move.’

‘Are you injured?’

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