The Impossible Alliance Read online

  Land mine.

  The boy had probably stumbled across the Russian “butterfly” version. As she wrapped one hand about the boy’s bloody calf, the other around his mangled wrist, Alex was painfully aware of the brutal irony of the butterfly’s success. Unlike the American “Bouncing Betty,” Russian mines weren’t designed to kill, but to maim, thereby removing the injured soldier from the battlefield, along with the second soldier assigned to haul the first man to safety.

  Rebelia might qualify as a battlefield, but the boy she and Jared shouldered though the crowd and inside the heavy glass doors was not a soldier. He was an innocent child, dammit!

  She was dimly aware of Jared barking orders in German as they reached the hospital’s sardine-packed main hall. Unfortunately, for all his brilliant memorization skills, the man’s accent truly stank. She pulled herself together and repeated his butchered requests for a doctor and a bed as the crowd parted. The pair of armed guards who met them took one look at the child and promptly waved them forward, paving the way into a large open bay with twenty steel cots crammed along both ends. All but the last two were filled. Jared commandeered the closest empty cot as three more men raced into the room, their no-longer-white coats and stethoscopes flying.

  A battered-and-bruised doctor led the fray.

  Roman Orloff.

  To her surprise, he took one look at the boy and cursed. Orloff shouted something over his shoulder and one of the men behind him peeled off to swing around and grab the boy’s grandmother. The man pulled the sobbing woman close and led her from the room. Alex kept her hands clamped about the child’s mangled limbs, desperately attempting to keep the kid’s remaining blood from seeping into the bleached sailcloth and bed linens as Orloff and the remaining physician reached the cot. Jared peeled the flannel shirt from his back as Orloff hooked his stethoscope to his ears and closed his still-bruised eyes so he could concentrate on listening to the kid’s heart. By the time Orloff pulled the scope from his ears, Jared had torn two strips of flannel from his shirt.

  He shoved the first strip at Orloff, keeping the second for himself. Together the two fashioned dual tourniquets about the boy’s seeping forearm and lower thigh. The Asian doctor hovered behind Orloff, responding to Jared’s demand for blood typing in halting German.

  This time, she cursed.

  Jared snapped his gaze to hers as Orloff added his own spate of German before shouting for an amputation kit. Since they already knew the Rebelian neurosurgeon had been trained in the States, she assumed he’d stuck to German for his assistant’s benefit. Unfortunately, from the confusion on Jared’s face, his own translation skills were worse than his accent.

  He turned to her. “What’s wrong?”

  “The boy’s name is Mikhail. They’ve treated him before.” She glanced down instinctively at the dark-red stains still spreading across the cot despite the tourniquets. Even she could tell the child desperately needed a transfusion. But that wasn’t the worst of it. “Mikhail’s blood type is B negative.”

  Rare enough in the States. But in a city where two out of three hospitals, as well as damned near all free clinics, had already been destroyed it was an impossibility. Alex jerked her chin toward Orloff as he retrieved what had to be the amputation kit and began to lay the instruments out on the empty cot. She swallowed firmly at the sight of the jagged saw and jerked her gaze back to Jared’s. “Orloff says he used their last bag of B negative six days ago. Their last bag of O negative went into another patient two days before that. They drained the last of their doctors and able-bodied staff this morning.”

  Jared’s curse matched hers.

  She leaned close to him. “I can call my brother. See what he can…arrange.”

  That sharp, tawny gaze met hers. They both knew she was referring to ARIES. They both also knew that by the time Marty Lyons and his local contacts found a donor, the kid would be dead.

  She wasn’t surprised when Jared shook his head, but she was ready to argue.

  He stunned her by turning to Orloff, not even attempting German as he settled on clear, crisp, carefully enunciated English. “I’m a U.S. Army medic. I have B negative blood. Get me an IV line and two needles. I’ll donate it myself now.”

  Relief flooded Orloff’s dark eyes. The purple welt on his right cheek stood out as he barked a series of orders to his assistant, as well as the physician who’d finally returned from escorting the boy’s wailing grandmother to another room.

  Alex recaptured Jared’s stare, undaunted by the determination blazing within. What the hell was he thinking? The man might have been sucking down a steady supply of water for the past three days to replenish the fluid volume in his blood, but he was still a pint or more low on red blood cells himself. The child would need another two—at least.

  “You can’t—”

  His terse glare cut her off.

  She didn’t care. “I mean it, you can’t—”

  “The hell I can’t.”

  She waited until Orloff jackknifed up to head for a cabinet of supplies near the center of the room. She grabbed Jared’s hand, keeping her hiss low in case any of the patients that appeared to be hanging onto their every word actually understood English. “You do this and you could end up dead.”

  “It’s not your decision.”

  “It is. If you won’t think of yourself, consider our job.”

  “Dammit, it doesn’t—”

  “No.”

  He twisted his hand until his fingers were locked to hers. He squeezed hard. “It doesn’t matter. I don’t matter. Accept it.” His grip loosened. Her blood rushed back into her fingers as he sighed heavily. “I have.”

  What the devil was that supposed to mean?

  Before she could demand an explanation, Orloff returned, intravenous line and an obscenely large-bore IV needle in hand. A needle that would soon be used to drain Jared’s blood. She dragged her gaze to the boy, and prayed. Her own original petty needs and goals for the day faded beneath that tiny cherubic face. A face that was growing paler by the second. Her gaze slipped down the boy’s limp body. As Orloff’s assistants took over the surgical repair of the boy’s viciously amputated limbs, Jared’s dusky fingers moved over the child’s remaining good, if deathly white, arm. Jared secured a rubber tourniquet to the kid’s nonexistent biceps before swiping that slender inner elbow with alcohol, then waited patiently as Orloff did the same. A swift pierce of the smaller needle into the kid’s vein, followed by an equally swift stab by Orloff into an artery running down the underside of Jared’s right forearm, and the biological connection was complete. Alex watched as gravity aided the morbid transfer, slowly but surely draining the scarlet blood from Jared’s body into the child’s as he pumped his fist over and over to force it to drain even faster.

  She closed her eyes, inexplicably terrified by the sight. She told herself she was worried about their case. Worried about the agent who’d saved her life. Hell, even anxious to keep the man alive so her nocturnal fantasy life could remain intact.

  She was lying. She was worried about him.

  “Are you okay?”

  She opened her eyes, grateful the question had come from Orloff—now reduced to playing waiting assistant himself—and not Jared. She couldn’t face him. She couldn’t face that slender tubing of dark-red blood. She damned sure couldn’t sit here and watch it drain out of him. Watch the life drain out of him. But neither could she turn her back on him. She stunned them both by threading the fingers of her left hand blindly into his, clamping onto the solid, reassuring warmth of Jared’s larger hand as she raised her gaze to stare into Orloff’s eyes.

  “H-how long?”

  Those deep-brown, compassionate pools shifted to the scarlet tubing, then to the steady, simmering amber of Jared’s eyes.

  She continued to avoid both.

  The doctor shrugged, openly studying the recent gash on Jared’s exposed biceps. “Twenty, thirty minutes. Your friend appears healthy. It may take as little as fifte
en.”

  The gash in Jared’s hamstring, flashed before her eyes. The way he’d nearly passed out in the cabin three mornings before. The way his strength had begun to flag toward the end of their half-hour, all-out sprint this morning as they struggled to meet the truck and rebel driver Marty Lyons had arranged. It wouldn’t take fifteen minutes to drain Jared’s next pint of blood. It would take forty, at least.

  She couldn’t sit here that long.

  She drew a deep breath and latched on to the one reprieve she had left and offered it up. “As you’ve already discovered, my fiancé is a medic in the U.S. Army. His name is Jeff. Jeff Coleman. As for me, we’ve already met, Dr. Orloff.” She extended her free hand beneath that dark, widening gaze. “Alice Marko. I believe you stitched up my scalp following an unfortunate accident several weeks ago?”

  The man took her hand. Again, he stared, but not at her face. Rather, he studied her right ear. That was when she knew for certain.

  He knew.

  Orloff’s thick brows rose pointedly as he squeezed her right hand, his solid, welcoming grip telling her so much more than the carefully masked expression in his eyes. “It’s a pleasure to meet you again…Alice. A true pleasure.”

  She allowed her lips to mirror the soft twist in his. “Thank you, Doctor. For the stitches. And the rest.”

  He inclined his head.

  She might be meeting the man for the first time while completely conscious, but she knew in her bones that unlike Karl, Roman Orloff would never betray her—or them. Though she had to confess she was relieved when she felt the tension ebb from Jared’s fingers, as well, not to mention the matching, steady trust that replaced it.

  Orloff glanced past the team of doctors still working in rapid, efficient concert to seal the raw edges of Mikhail’s tiny limbs and tipped his head toward the door beyond.

  “Alice, would you care to join me in my office?”

  Chapter 7

  His ass hurt like a son of a bitch.

  Jared ignored the terse silence to his right, as well as his own bitter anatomy lesson, as he leaned back against the threadbare seat, clamping down on a groan as the taxi hit its thirtieth pothole in five minutes. His left hamstring, his right leg, his ass, his lower back— There was no way around it, his entire body hurt. Unfortunately, short of shooting up in the back seat of a rusted cab in the middle of a darkened, bombed-out back alley of Rajalla, there wasn’t a blessed thing he could do about it. Not until they reached Orloff’s house and the beckoning relief of the capped syringe of Demerol the good doctor had slipped Alex on their way out.

  The dizziness returned as the cab turned onto the city’s main drag, slamming into the thirty-first pothole. He shifted his gaze to the row of shot-out antique street lamps that had once added to Rajalla’s Old World charm as the taxi bucked again. The jolt succeeded in ripping half the air from his lungs, purging it through his teeth on a full-blown, ragged groan.

  “I told you we should have left after they finished draining your blood.”

  He waited for his lungs to restart, the light-headedness to pass, before he shifted his stare across the back seat of the cab. “Thank you, Doctor Morrow. I’ll keep that medical advice in mind…tomorrow.” He might not be able to see light in those blackened street lamps, but he could make out the fire in those green eyes.

  “Tomorrow you rest.”

  Like hell he would. Not with Orloff and his meager staff still in that overcrowded triage bay, frantically treating everything from dysentery and pneumonia to land-mine and gunshot wounds. Come dawn, he’d be headed back to Rajalla’s sole surviving hospital, back to that triage room, setting bones, patching gaping holes and rigging IV lines into what was left of some barely out-of-diapers kid who’d happened upon a hunk of metal that looked a lot like a makeshift Frisbee with wings…but was a whole lot deadlier.

  “I’ve never felt so damned useless.”

  “I know.” His sigh followed hers, both filling the dark.

  How many mines had been left on the battlefields of the world? Battlefields that had then become some unsuspecting kid’s deadly playground?

  He now knew firsthand that one was too many.

  Alex was right. They had to take better care of the world. It might be too late for him, but it wasn’t for that poor kid. Or the next.

  The cab turned another corner, jolting again as the beam from its sole headlight swept a burned-out hovel twenty feet beyond the edge of the pocked road. A once white, now scorched two-story building stood beside it. It wasn’t until the car stopped that Jared realized they must have arrived. He double-checked the shadowy number welded to the rusting wrought-iron gate.

  The house was Orloff’s.

  Alex bailed out as he held up several eurodollars to cover the fare plus another fifty miles.

  The cabbie shook his scuffed jaw. “I cannot. Not for friend of Roman Orloff. Not for doctor, also.”

  He was about to argue the point, until he caught the fierce pride in the old man’s eyes. It looked a hell of a lot like the gleam he’d seen staring back at him from his bathroom mirror when he was seventeen. Jared stood back and waited for the cabbie to pull away, then tossed the bills neatly through the window. He ignored the vile curse hanging on the night as he turned back to Alex. It hadn’t been meant for him anyway.

  “You insulted him.”

  He snagged her elbow. “He’s too poor to be insulted.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t think that’s possible.”

  “Trust me, it is.”

  He should have kept his mouth shut.

  Maybe it was the light-headedness he hadn’t quite been able to shake since the moment he’d finished draining off another pint of blood. Maybe it was the body aches that had settled in during the four-hour gunshot surgery he’d ended up assisting Orloff with as soon as his own IV needle had cleared his arm. Hell, maybe it was the trio of muscle cramps that had taken up residence along the length of his remaining good leg an hour before—and hadn’t loosened yet. He didn’t know. All he knew was that he’d already revealed far too much about himself during that conversation he and Alexhad shared that morning in the cabin. He should have kept his mouth shut then, too.

  But he hadn’t.

  And now it was too late.

  The pity had already locked into that exhausted green gaze, softening it further. He ignored it, snagging her elbow abruptly as he retrieved Orloff’s house key from his pocket. Unfortunately her two good legs reached the iron gate first. She dropped her hand onto the rusting latch—and kept it there. “Is that why you joined the Army? Because you were poor?”

  He waited.

  The gate remained closed.

  He sighed. “I joined because my mom needed the medical coverage.” A split second later, he realized he could have lied. Then again, maybe not. That ever-eroding good judgment again.

  So this was how it started. Husky words whispered in the dark, couched in compassionate conversation. Dangerous confessions offered in a futile attempt to unburden the heart, to share the load. Maybe even ease the soul. Right. What it was—what this was—was a mistake. But at least it was one that would correct itself eventually. Because these whispered words, this particular confession, wouldn’t be hanging around forever. Not for him.

  What do you know. An honest-to-God blessing in disguise.

  She kept that blasted sympathetic stare fused to his, despite his stony silence, her hand on the gate. “I don’t understand. My dad was Navy. While I don’t really remember him—he died when I was two—I do remember receiving medical coverage until I graduated from college. My mom still has it.”

  What the hell. “Your folks were married.”

  “So…your mom became your dependent?”

  The damned gate stayed shut.

  “Yup.”

  Idiot. The acid was already eating a path up his throat.

  “That’s pretty rare, isn’t it? Getting a government agency to accept a parent as a dependent? I know beca
use Sam did it for someone, but it almost didn’t go through and, well, the guy’s situation was pretty dire. I mean—” She must have realized how bald that sounded because she swallowed the rest.

  He swallowed the acid—until she started up again, this time softly.

  “What was wrong with your m—”

  “You gonna open that gate sometime tonight? Or are we gonna be standing here come dawn?”

  The gate swung open.

  He stalked through. Or, rather, tried to. “Thanks.”

  He forced himself to keep moving. To keep from hearing her response, true. But also to keep his leg from buckling under him. Nor did he want her catching sight of the iron clamp he’d placed on his jaw, especially as he cleared the three steps that led up to the front door. He shoved Orloff’s spare key into the lock and pushed the door open before her hand could fuse to that handle, too, then stepped into the house, hitting the wall switch with more force than necessary.

  Light flooded the small foyer.

  “Thank you.”

  He glanced at the hardwood stairs on their right as their vision adjusted. The steps, like the house, had seen better days. But also like the house, the freshly waxed stairs and buffed banister had been meticulously maintained. Given Orloff’s grueling schedule, not by him. Must be the maid Marty’s background investigation had noted when the man had checked the house for wiretaps, bugs and booby traps earlier in the day. Unfortunately he and Alex didn’t have a report on the woman. Yet.

  “Orloff mentioned he has daytime help. The guest bed’s supposed to be made up, though.” He pointed to the stairs. “Up there. Middle door.” When Alex didn’t move, he nudged her toward the stairs, closing in behind her before she could argue. From the way her feet had been dragging all the way out of the hospital tonight, she was as tired as he was.

  By the time they reached the top step, his legs were damned near begging for rest. Alex reached the door first and pushed it open. He slipped his arm around her torso, flicking the light switch on as he nudged her forward again. He immediately wished he hadn’t. The room was half the size of their cabin, but that wasn’t the problem. Nor was the armoire or the equally modest desk, chair crowding the tiny room. It was the bed. The only bed in the room.