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Bright was startled out of his recollections of the events of the past week and a half by the shouts of the ensign as she ordered the launch lowered in preparation for the transfer of the first group to the yacht.
When he looked up, he saw the yacht bobbing up and down barely a hundred yards from the coastguard cutter. Pushing away from the railing, he made his way across the deck so he could climb down and join the group in the launch.
The trip over to the yacht took no time at all, and within five minutes of the first shouted order, Bright and the people with him were on board.
A quick search of the deck revealed that Luke wasn’t up there, so while two of the army medics he had brought along checked the guards to be sure they were suffering no ill-effects from the tranquiliser darts they had been hit with, he descended into the interior of the yacht. He moved quickly, driven by concern from the abrupt end to the phone call from his friend, the third of his team of medics on his heels.
When he found him, he was alarmed to see Luke slumped on the floor of the last cabin in a pool of blood. “You’d better get in here,” he called out urgently to the medic, who had stopped to check on the two unconscious officers in the companionway.
“I’ll be there in a minute, I need to finish checking these guys out,” the medic called back.
“No, get in here now,” Bright ordered sharply. “There’s an injured man in here. How bad is it?” he wanted to know when the medic appeared in the doorway of the cabin.
“I’ll need to examine him before I can tell you that.”
Bright waited anxiously a short distance away, his eyes never leaving his friend, as the medic checked him over. His concern increased with each passing second as the expression on the medic’s face became ever more sombre.
“Well? Is he going to be alright or not?” he asked when the medic finally stood.
“I can’t be certain. It’s definitely serious. One bullet got past the side of his vest, and I think it’s still in there. His arm’s been shattered as well, and he’s lost a lot of blood. If he doesn’t get into surgery soon, things might not go well for him.”
“That’s going to be difficult to arrange,” Bright said, as if the medic wasn’t aware of that already. “It’ll take some time to get back to shore. Ensign,” he said into the radio he was carrying.
“Morales here, over,” the ensign answered from the bridge of the cutter.
“How long to get back to base?”
“Thirty minutes or so,” came the reply. “Is there a problem? Over.”
“We have a guy here who needs emergency surgery.”
“I can radio for a chopper. It could be here in fifteen or twenty minutes. It could get the patient to hospital before we could reach base, over.”
“No!”
Bright was startled by the sudden exclamation. He had thought Luke was out of it. When he turned to his friend, he found him attempting to push himself up and being held down by the medic.
“No chopper,” Luke said slowly and carefully, forcing the words out.
“We don’t have a choice, you need surgery,” Bright told him. “A chopper is the only way to get you into an operating theatre in time to save your life.”
Luke continued to try and sit up, despite the pressure on his shoulder from the medic. “No chopper,” he said with a slow shake of his head. “I’ve survived shit like this before. I’ll be alright.”
“You have a bullet somewhere in your lower abdomen, your arm is badly damaged, and you’ve lost a lot of blood. You need the bullet removed and your arm dealt with, that means surgery. A chopper can be here in twenty minutes, maybe less, and you can be in surgery in about ninety minutes,” Bright told him. “If we don’t get a chopper it’ll take at least three hours to get you into surgery. You could bleed to death in that time.”
“I’ll take the risk,” Luke said with a groan.
“You’ve already taken enough risks,” Bright said. “Tell me again why we couldn’t have handled this differently. There was no reason for you to put yourself at risk like this. If we’d told Sofia’s guards what was going on, you wouldn’t have been shot.”
“You agreed that we can’t be sure one of them hasn’t been bought by Noir or Renault, or that they might let slip what was going on to someone who has.” Every word was an effort for Luke to get out, but he kept going. “We did this to protect your witness. She’s what’s important, not me, that’s why we did it this way. If you call for a chopper and have me rushed to hospital, it could blow the entire operation. We’ve got no way of being certain Noir wouldn’t find out, and then this will have been a waste of time. Any surgery I need will have to wait until we get to the base. The surgeon there can sort me out.”
“I’m not willing to take a chance on you dying because you’re stubborn.”
“I get paid to take chances like this. If I don’t make it, you’ll just have to forget about the second part of the plan. Just do what I say, Ben, we’re doing things my way,” Luke said in as firm a voice as he could manage when it looked as though Bright was going to argue further.
“Fine, it’s your call,” Bright said after staring hard at his friend for several long moments. “But I’d better not regret this. Ensign Morales, come in, over.”
“Morales here, over.”
“Cancel the chopper,” he told her reluctantly. “We’re not going to need it, over.”
There was a brief period of silence, followed by, “Are you sure, sir? Over.”
Bright was tempted to say no, and have her request the chopper despite Luke’s determination, but he didn’t. “Yes, I’m sure. But keep it on standby in case the situation changes.”