Nothing was in the right place.
On her own bird, Teri knew right where everything was.
But this wasn’t a Night Stalkers flight, it was a USAF flight—surrounded by US Army Night Stalkers.
Air Force medics must be part Alaskan king crab with arms twice as long as any normal human. The bandages and the surgical kit were on opposite sides of the Pave Hawk’s bay, at least two meters apart. And the drugs were nowhere near the plasma cooler which wasn’t where she found the IV gear at all. Maybe they were octopi.
She liked that image. If she thought like an octopod, the layout almost made sense. Or like medics who usually flew in pairs. But that was a much less fun image.
Once again, her life was all disjointed.
Typically the Night Stalkers was just the opposite. She’d always liked structure, being able to see everything in a single gestalt. She’d liked it as a little kid, and the Army had offered that in spades. Special Operations times ten. There was a constant striving for the best, the most efficient, the most effective. A honing inward until everything was a perfect rote action.
Being a medic offered the same. Step One, Step Two, Step Three. In battle medicine, every moment or symptom became a logical decision-branch of choices. Breathing? Blood: spurting, flowing, or trickling…
The missions themselves, even the ones without a lengthy briefing, were still highly predictable for her life as a combat medic.
Fly into the zone three minutes behind the warfighters.
Lurk outside the zone.
Someone got hit or went down? Head in full tilt no matter what shitstorm was brewing.
By end of mission no one hit? Fly back just as clean and quiet as they’d arrived.
But not this time.
“One minute out,” the pilot announced.
“Thanks.” It was their longest conversation yet, which fit her down to the bones.
She peeked out the window. A mud brown river was wide and lazy here, like sluggish blood flowing through the heart of the typical African city. A handful or so of eight- to ten-story buildings scattered through a sprawling city of dusty streets and low adobe and concrete structures.
Teri preferred to focus inside the helo. This world she knew and understood.
Except here her gestalt was fractured into fifty pieces, like looking at someone with one eye where their nose should be and the other in their ear. With their lips out the back of their head, and their nose sniffing the sky so that you couldn’t help but see right up the nostrils and…
It was the same as every time she looked at her brother’s art. He was in what critics had dubbed his “Picasso phase”, not that she could tell it from anything else. It made even less sense to her than when Picasso had done it, but then she’d never understood her brother, never mind his art.
Or her parents’ art.
She’d been the odd one, the “scientist” in the artistic family.
That’s what they always called her: Ms. Science. It had almost followed her into the military. But by keeping her mouth shut and her head down, others generally left her out of their conversations. Just the way she liked it.
Now, once again, her “odd choices” were leading her to even odder places.
This mission had been scrambled off their ship, the USS Peleliu in the Gulf of Guinea, at the first news of the coup in Niger. Except the Night Stalkers had already sent their transports on a goodwill training mission to Senegal—so there was no combat search-and-rescue bird for her.
Without a CSAR flight, she’d grabbed sixty pounds of medical bag and tucked herself into a corner of the DAP Hawk gunship between a SEAL Team 6 commander and a four-thousand-round ammo case for one of the Miniguns.
Being resourceful, the Night Stalkers had picked up a flight of US Air Force Pave Hawks that had been visiting Ghana—four transports and two medical evac birds—but they’d only had one medic thanks to some awful bug one of the guys had picked up in the night market.
So, they’d refueled in northern Ghana and switched her over to the strange world of the Pave Hawk Alaskan crab kings. She’d meant to look at the other medic to see if his arms were normal-sized, but missed her chance.