You can do this.
“You’ve got a fever. I need to check your wound. May I?”
“Yes.”
Kristi removed the bloody bandage, relieved to find neither gangrene nor red streaks on his thigh. “You’ve got an infection. The bullet is still inside the wound. I will need to take it out. It will be painful.”
“Do it.”
She summoned her courage, met his gaze. “If I help you, do you promise to let me go, untouched and unharmed?”
She had never played hardball as a nurse, never made a patient’s treatment contingent on how that person treated her. But this was about survival. She didn’t have a lot of options here.
“Yes. Yes!”
“Okay, then I will help you.” Kristi glanced around. “I need light. It’s too dark in here. It would be easier for me to work if we could raise you up off the ground.”
The man shouted at the others behind her. They lifted and carried him outside to a rough-hewn table roughly the size of a picnic bench, Kristi following behind with the duffel bag.
She glanced around, her stomach knotting. They were deep in the forest. Worse, there were no other women in sight.
Focus.
She set the duffel bag near his feet, took out some gloves and the IV kit. “Do you have a name you’d like to be called?”
“Jidda.”
“Jidda, I’m going to hook you up to some intravenous fluids and antibiotics. I’ll need someone to hold the IV bags high above you so the liquid can run into your veins. The fluids will make you feel better, and the antibiotics will kill the infection.”
She wasn’t sure any of this made sense to him.
Jidda spoke to the men, and one stepped forward.
Kristi went to work setting up the IV, checking Jidda’s hand and arm for veins. “You’ll feel a stick.”
Jidda didn’t so much as blink.
She set up the IV with lactated Ringer’s, piggy-backing the antibiotics onto the fluids. Then she took out the Versed and a syringe, measuring out just enough to knock him out for about thirty minutes. “It’s going to be very painful when I take out the bullet. This medicine will make you sleep so you don’t feel it.”
She injected the medication into his IV and watched his eyes drift shut.
* * *
The next morning,Malik stood with Isaksen and Segal in the hallway outside Conference Room 2 at Cobra HQ, the three of them speaking so as not to be overheard. “If Cobra doesn’t get the assignment, I’m flying to Lagos myself.”
“Alone?” Segal glared at him. “Brother, that’s crazy.”
Isaksen shook his head. “You think you can walk into a Boko Haram camp or a den of Fulani bandits and take them on yourself?”
“What would you do if it was Samantha?”
“Samantha and I are getting married. You and Kristi haven’t talked for a year.”
Shields came around the corner, leaned close, lowered her voice. “Good news. It wasn’t Boko Haram.”
Relief washed through Malik, almost knocking him on his ass.
Not Boko Haram.