“This is a lot of fuss just for a flash drive.” Saxon checked around the next corner. The opening of the tent flapped in the nonexistent breeze. The scent of curry spices hung in the air with a current of charred wood and the smell of too many bodies packed together with poor hygiene conditions.
His head swam, the heat beading drops of sweat across his forehead. He lifted a hand and swiped at his skin.
The world seemed to shift around him. Blood coated his fingers where it had dripped all the way down from the outside of his arm. He moved his fingers on that hand against one another, rubbing his thumb across his fingertips. Smearing the blood.
Hammer grabbed his elbow. “Easy.”
Kane’s voice came over the radio. “Package secure.”
“Meet us at the medical tent. Saxon needs a bandage.” Hammer’s arm snaked around his waist, and his buddy walked him under the flap of the tent. A long room flanked with medical beds on either side. Equipment seemed too sparse in here, except where crates had been stacked in one corner.
He didn’t need a hospital.
“Just put…” The name of the bandage eluded him. Saxon couldn’t string two thoughts together. “The thing on it. Let’s go.”
They had something with them that would go over his wound and stop the bleeding. At least long enough so they could get back to the rendezvous point and get picked up. There was a packet of it in the right thigh pocket of his cargoes. He reached down and patted it.
Hammer grunted. “And I went to the trouble of bringing you all the way to the finest hospital in Syria.”
A woman in a white lab coat over blue scrubs came over, her hair covered with a blue scarf. She had dark eyes that were like huge midnight pools trying to suck him under the surface. He tried to blink or look away, but she drew him. She said something, but he couldn’t make out the words that seemed to swim around him.
Hammer walked to the bed she indicated and dumped Saxon down on his back.
He hissed out a breath between clenched teeth and tried to focus on the woman, because she was the best-looking thing in this place. Like a single flower in a garden that was nothing but neglected shrubs and trampled bushes. One of those plants that only bloomed at night.
Hammer leaned over him. “You’re going to wanna stop talking, buddy.”
Great. Whatever he’d been thinking just now, he’d apparently been saying it out loud as well. The doctor lady tapped a syringe, then stuck the needle into the outside of his arm.
Saxon hissed out another breath.
She patted his chest. “Just a few minutes and you’ll be good to go.”
He couldn’t look away. “Does it cost extra for the express service?”
She smiled at him, and so many things in his life seemed to fall into place. “Only because you showed up in the middle of a malaria outbreak and I need to get back to treating patients. Not because you’re the only Americans in the place.” She spoke with a crisp British accent that made him want to ask her what her favorite kind of tea was.
A commotion over by the entrance to the tent drew his attention.
He could feel her begin to irrigate the wound on the outside of his arm. Ouch.
He attempted to pay more attention to Kane and Elias striding down the center aisle of the hospital tent with dark looks on their faces, coming over to where Hammer stood at the end of the bed.
Elias had dirt smeared across his forehead and the side of his head, and Kane had grazes on the knuckles of his left hand.
“Tell me, Doc…” Kane clasped Saxon’s hand and pushed something small and made of hard plastic between their palms. When Kane pulled his hand away, Saxon closed his fingers around the flash drive. “Are you going to be able to reattach his brain?”
Saxon snorted. “Even if she doesn’t, I’ll still be smarter than you.”
Behind Kane, Elias and Hammer spoke in low tones too quiet for him to hear. Saxon slipped the flash drive into his pants pocket.
The doctor said, “If you’re going to demand the express service, it requires minimal questions.”
Kane stared at the woman like he’d fallen in love. Saxon cleared his throat, and Kane looked down at him.
“Understood.” Kane replied to the woman’s comment, but Saxon knew it was meant for him. As usual, they were on the same page.
Saxon wasn’t here to find the love of his life. But if she was going to show up suddenly, he wouldn’t argue.