Page 36 of Heart of Danger
The door whooshedopen and a man rushed in—pale, thin, balding. He was wild-eyed. “Mac! I can’t find Pat or Salvatore. We need help in the infirmary, quick! Where are they, do you know?”
The three men rose. “Down in Silver Springs.”
The pale man held up a wafer-thin piece of plastic. “Pat’s not answering and neither is Salvatore. How can they not be answering?”
“Shit,” Blondie said, running a hand through his sun-streaked hair. “Pat told me she was negotiating for a new imaging machine that hasn’t hit the market yet. She was was—” A sidelong glance at Catherine and his jaws clamped shut. Whatever it is he was going to say, he wasn’t going to say it in front of her.
A thin sheen of sweat covered the pale man’s face. “They’re not supposed to be gone at the same time. And why aren’t they answering their phone?”
Mac rose. He was so close to her, Catherine had to crane her neck to watch his face. He flicked a glance at her, and answered without Blondie’s hesitation. Maybe he trusted her more. Then again, maybe her memory was going to be wiped.
“Pat and Salvatore told me the new equipment is held in a shielded shed because some of the medical equipment the company sells has radioactive isotopes. So they won’t be reachable.” He looked at a huge black wristwatch and frowned. Even in the bright overhead light nothing in the wristwatch reflected light. “They should have been back by now.”
“Fuck.” The pale man’s lips folded in. Sweat now ran down his face in rivulets though it was chilly in the room. “What the fuck we gonna do?”
Mac looked at the pale man with a frown. “I’ve had training as a medic, Sam. You know that. What’s wrong?”
“You might be trained as a medic, Mac,” Sam answered, “but I don’t think your training will have covered this. It’s Bridget and she’s about ready to pop her kid. Any minute now. So you know what to do?”
There was absolutely nothing even remotely funny about Catherine’s situation. She was trapped among hostile men, another band of hostile men had trashed her apartment and were looking for her.
But for one fleeting second she nearly laughed out loud at the expression on Mac’s face.
He had trained for bullets and broken bones but childbirth had him panicked.
Childbirth?
Shit, shit, shit.
Bridget was the wife of Bobby Gibson, ‘Red’, the community fixit guy. Red could repair a rocketship on its way to the moon. He kept their community running and Bridget helped Stella with the cooking.
Bridget had been lured to the States on the promise of a contract as a nanny for a very wealthy west coast family and had ended up being little more than an indentured servant. One, moreover, that the husband of the household had his eye on.
She’d been confiding in the handyman, Red. When Red heard her screams as she resisted rape, he rushed in to rescue her and punched the industrialist in the mouth. The industrialist had ties to the mob. Red and Bridget fled with the clothes on their backs.
They made their way to Haven the way everyone else did—seemingly by some kind of dog whistle sent out to only those capable of hearing it. Both of them were mainstays in their little community and everyone was looking forward to the birth of Bridget’s baby, the first in their community.
It was likeeveryonewas expecting that fucking baby.
They were all, to one degree or another, outlaws and outcasts. Exiles in their own land. They’d made a sort of a country of their own here and now the first citizen was about to be born. The idea made even Nick smile. Occasionally.
Now this baby everyone was looking forward to, who was supposed to be born in a month, was coming early, right when the two nurses who ran the infirmary were both away.
Sam, Nick and Jon were looking at him. He was their fucking leader, wasn’t he? So why shouldn’t they look to him? Except…fuck.
Childbirth.
Mac knew how to deal with most situations. Security, war strategy and tactics, firefights and close quarter combat…he’d trained his entire life to be a warrior and knew instinctively what to do.
His medic training had been thorough. He was good with injuries, had dealt with a lot of them in the field. Pack a bleeding wound, start up a field IV, splint a broken bone, fine. But apremature birth? Not so much.
For the first time in living memory he was paralyzed with indecision. With any other situation he’d have said to hold it until Pat got back but even he knew babies waited on no one. They arrived on their own goddamned schedule. And a month early—what the hell did that mean? Would they be needing an incubator? Because they sure as hell didn’t have one.
So what the fuck was he supposed to do? He had no clue and he did not want to fuck this up. He was looking forward to this birth as much as anyone. He was goddamned if he was going to lose the baby or the mother.
“I can help.” Everyone turned at the soft words. Catherine twisted her hands. “I don’t practice medicine, I’m a researcher , but I am an MD. And I rotated through OB-GYN for three months. I want to help.”
“Absolutely not.” Jesus. They had no idea who this woman was. How she’d found them. He couldn’t send her to the infirmary, expose even more of their secrets.
