Carrie saw the guard by the door pull out a gun and instinctively dived for cover, screaming at Bass to be careful.
A blinding flash of brilliant light and a massive, deafening wall of noise smashed into her. The desk went flying, and she went flying with it. She hit the ground in a ball, and the heavy wooden desk landed all around her, her body tucked neatly in the leg space between the banks of drawers to either side of her. For once in her life, being small had been a boon.
She tried to shove the desk off, but it didn’t budge. Awkwardly, she turned around and pushed with both feet against the underside of the desktop. It moved slightly, and a shower of dust and debris rained down on her. She should have heard that stuff falling, but it hadn’t made any sound.
In fact, she only registered utter silence. Confused, she clapped her hands together. Nothing. Ohmigosh. Was she deaf? Had the explosion shattered her eardrums?
She pushed again on the desk, and a ringing noise started inside her head. It was almost more painful and loud than the original explosion. Her head started to hurt as if she had a massive, all-over migraine, and she paused to rest.
She pushed again with her legs, and the desk shifted a little more. Then, all of a sudden, it lifted away from her, and a dusty-faced Perriman stared down at her. His lips moved, and it looked as if he asked if she was all right. She pointed at her ears and shook her head to indicate that she couldn’t hear.
He nodded and flashed her an okay hand signal. It was okay that she was deaf? Or did that merely mean he understood her?
She mouthed, “Where’s Bass?”
Perriman reached under the desk and pulled on both her arms, dragging her free of what turned out to be the blasted remains of the office building. It had been reduced to a pile of kindling and twisted metal. Carefully, she picked her way clear of it.
Again, she asked, “Where’s Bass?” She could be whispering or shouting. She had no idea.
Perriman mouthed, “I don’t know.”
Oh, God. She turned to the debris pile that another man dressed like Perriman and a woman were picking through frantically. She joined in the search, shoving aside debris in wild panic.
He had to be okay. He had come for her. Saved her. Put his life on the line for her, the big, stupid, lovable jerk!
Bass had been just to the left of her when the explosion happened. She went back to the desk and started to work her way back toward the center of the blast. In about thirty seconds, she spotted something black. Fabric.
She shouted, “Over here!” and vaguely heard her voice inside her skull. Okay. Not permanently deaf, then.
The others joined her immediately, and the four of them tore at the pile. She’d found Bass’s leg.
Please God, let it still be attached to his body and let him be alive!
The three others worked together to lift away a section of wall, and Carrie spied Bass’s torso. Afraid like she’d never been afraid before, she grabbed his leg and gave a mighty heave. Where she got the superhuman strength to drag him clear while the others held the piece of debris off him, she hadn’t the faintest idea. But drag him she did. All two-hundred-plus pounds of solid muscle.
He was unconscious. The others dropped the panel and knelt around him. The woman pushed Carrie aside unceremoniously while one of the other men felt for a pulse under Bass’s chin and Perriman ran his hands over Bass’s body. Must be looking for injuries.
Perriman found something because, all of a sudden, the woman was sprinting away and then sprinting back with a backpack. She dropped it on the ground, and the men used bulky scissors to cut away Bass’s shirt.
Carrie glimpsed a black, ragged hole in Bass’s right shoulder with something black oozing from it. Oh, God. Had he been punctured by a piece of flying debris?
Vaguely, she heard Perriman snapping orders. The others started handing him medical supplies. She watched in horror as Perriman stuffed something that looked like a balloon into the hole and then blew hard on a tube attached to it. Then gauze was being slapped over the wound, tape slapped over that, and Bass turned over on his side. The hole on the back of his shoulder was much bigger and gushing what had to be blood.
Carrie pressed her hands to her mouth and prayed for all she was worth. She couldn’t lose him now. Not when she’d just found him!
She heard a voice as if from a distance and looked up. It was the woman, shouting in her ear, “Don’t faint!”
Carrie nodded resolutely. She wouldn’t faint. Not while Bass needed her.
Perriman grabbed Carrie’s hand and slapped it over the wound on the front of his shoulder, pressing down hard on a hunk of gauze. She nodded, understanding that she should keep pressure on the wound.
Then they were stuffing another balloon thing into the rear wound and inflating it. She gathered that it was meant to slow internal bleeding. More gauze, more tape, and Perriman put Carrie’s other hand over the whole mess again.
A few seconds passed, and then the woman took over pressing on Bass’s shoulder wounds and nodded for Carrie to look at something across the refinery.
Out of a big building on the far side of the facility, two figures came outside slowly. One leaned heavily on the other. The faint starlight glinted off the leaning one’s silver hair—
Uncle Gary!
He was dirty, disheveled, growing a scruffy beard, and had lost weight. But it was definitely him.
She bolted across the big yard, dodging debris from the explosion and flung herself at her uncle, tears streaming down her face.
“Thank God you’re safe!” she sobbed. “I love you, Uncle Gary!”
“I’m safe thanks to you and your friends,” he said in her ear.
Hey, she heard that!
“I never broke, baby. I never told them who you are. Never told them you were who they were looking for.” And then Gary was crying too, clinging to her as tightly as she clung to him.
The reunion was poignant and sweet, but she had somewhere else she urgently had to be. “I love you, Gary, but I have to go check on Bass.”
“On who? There’s a fish out here?”
She lost the rest of his words as she turned and ran back to Bastien’s side.
A discussion was underway over a radio about how to get Bass out to medical care the fastest. A helicopter from New Orleans would take a half hour or more to get here. There was a hospital in Morgan City, but by the time they carried Bass back to the boat, drove him to land, met up with an ambulance, and transported him, it could take as long or longer.
Perriman ordered, “Send a chopper. Tell it to fly like a bat out of hell. And make sure they’ve got units of blood onboard. My guy’s bleeding heavily.”
Carrie almost wished her hearing hadn’t started to come back as Perriman described Bass’s gunshot wound in gory medical detail.
Bass started to cough, and the sound was juicy. Bubbles of blood formed on his lips.
No, no, no, no, no. She couldn’t lose him.
Carrie crouched down beside him. “Don’t you die on me!”
Perriman touched her shoulder, and she turned to him, frantic. He explained gently, “He’s bleeding internally. It’s filling his lung. He may not last until help gets here.”
“What blood type is Bass?” she demanded.
“AB negative.”
“I’m AB negative!” she cried. “Take a pint from me. Take two! And help him breathe, for God’s sake! I can’t stand here and watch him suffocate!”
“Technically, he’ll drown,” Perriman commented. “Help me sit him up, Ford. Trina, set up an arm-to-arm transfusion from Carrie to Bass. We’ll hold off doing it as long as we can, but if Carrie wants to give him blood, I’m not going to stop her.”
Good call. She would open a vein herself if she had to in order to save Bass.
He breathed a little easier once he was upright, and his eyes fluttered slightly.
“Don’t you die on me!” she repeated.
“Don’t have. To shout,” he sighed.
She couldn’t tell if she was shouting or not, and she didn’t much care. As long as he heard her.
“I love you, Bass. You can’t die. You hear me?”
Trina commented dryly, “Most of southern Louisiana hears you.”
Carrie shrugged and kept right on shouting. “Stay with me, Bass. Fight to live. If I don’t get to run away from you, you don’t get to run away from me!”
He smiled up at her, a pale ghost of his usual bright smile, and then his eyes drifted closed once more.
“Wake up, Bass!”
Perriman looked up at her as she bent down over Bass. “He’s unconscious. It’s best this way. He shouldn’t suffer.”
“He’s. Not. Going. To. Die.”
“I like the way you think, young lady. Keep thinking that way.”
She nodded resolutely.
Ford, monitoring a blood pressure cuff on Bass’s arm murmured, “His pressure’s starting to drop.”
Perriman said tersely, “Now, Trina. Start the transfusion from Carrie to Bass. Keep the flow slow. We need to make this blood last as long as possible because it’s the only matching blood we’ve got until that helicopter gets here. Keep watching his vitals, Ford.”
Carrie held her breath, praying like crazy. “C’mon, Bass,” she cried. “C’mon! Wake up!”
Ford muttered, “Pressure’s stabilized. It’s low as hell, but he’s still with us.”
Over the next several minutes, blood trickled from Carrie’s arm through a thin rubber tube into Bass’s.
“That’s about a pint,” the woman called Trina announced.
Carrie reached out fast to block her from removing the needle from her arm. “I can give him more,” she insisted.
“A little. But we’re not bleeding you out to save Bass. He’d kill us if we let anything happen to you.” Trina leaned close to murmur, “He loves you, you know.”
Carrie was starting to feel a little light-headed. Surely she hadn’t heard Trina correctly.
In the distance, Carrie thought she heard the thwocking sound of a helicopter. Please, please, let her be hearing that correctly.
The SEAL named Ford glanced at his watch. “Twenty minutes flat. Impressive. They must have firewalled the engines and oversped everything to get here this fast.”
“Damn straight they did,” Perriman muttered. “Where’s Mick?”
“He’s alive, dazed, but mostly unhurt,” Trina said. “I told him to lie down and rest while you guys worked on Bass’s wounds. Bass warned him in time to get out of the truck.”
“Saved my life, he did,” an Australian-accented voice came out of the dark.
“I want you on that helicopter, too,” Perriman ordered. “You were way close to that truck when it blew.”
The Aussie protested, “I’m not the one hollering fit to wake the dead. Carrie needs the ride back to town more than I do. Besides, we’ve got a little cleanup to do around here.”
And that was the first moment it had dawned on Carrie to wonder, “What happened to Lonnie?”
The SEALs traded looks over her head. Perriman said evenly, “He won’t be a problem to you any longer.”
“Is he dead?” she demanded. “He is, isn’t he?”
“I can neither confirm nor deny that,” Perriman answered. “Ford, Trina, go feed the alligators.”
It took her a moment. But then it hit her. They were going to dispose of Lonnie’s body where alligators would eliminate any evidence of what had happened tonight.
“What about his men?” she asked.
“We didn’t kill any of them. If they survived the blast, they’re welcome to find their way out of here. It’s not like they’ll go to the authorities to report us. And frankly, after tonight, I’m confident they’ll never want to tangle with any of us again.”
That caused a chuckle all around.
The thwocking sound was loud, even to her impaired hearing, and a violent blast of down-drafting air announced the arrival of the medevac copter. Paramedics rushed over to them, pushing a wheeled gurney with them.
Everything happened quickly, then. Bass was lifted onto the gurney, an IV attached to the needle already taped in his vein from the first transfusion, and then she was being hustled alongside the running medics and shoved into the chopper. Hands strapped her into a seat, and then they were soaring skyward.
The medics worked urgently over Bass, and she tried to take up as little space as possible, staying out of their way while they fought to save Bass’s life. They emptied three bags of blood into him during the ride. That couldn’t be good.
The ride seemed to take forever, but eventually, the helicopter bumped onto a hard surface, and there was another rush of people and gurneys and running across a roof to an elevator.
She was pulled away from Bass and pushed into an examining room while Bass was rushed on down the hallway into surgery.
And then the waiting began.
She barely paid attention when a doctor came in to examine her ears and declared her eardrums intact. He assured her that her hearing would return to normal shortly, warning her that she might experience some ringing in her ears for several days. The decision was made to admit her for observation to make sure she wasn’t suffering from a concussion. She could live with that.
At some point, Cole Perriman poked his head into her room to tell her that Gary had also been admitted, suffering mainly from dehydration and a bit of malnourishment, but that he would be fine.
“How’s Bass?” she asked urgently.
“Still in surgery.”
Ford, Trina and Mick joined Perriman, holding a silent vigil for Bass in her room. They didn’t speak much, they just sat in the shadows like patient ghosts, waiting in utter stillness.
As for her, she couldn’t seem to be still. Nothing was ever going to be right again if Bass didn’t make it.
How could she ever have considered leaving him? She’d seen him and his companions commit violence tonight. They’d rescued her uncle and saved her life. And frankly, she couldn’t work up a whole lot of dismay or even disapproval that they’d done it. They were, indeed, the good guys.
Now, if only she got a chance to tell Bass that.
And to tell him she loved him.