Chapter One
Kandahar, Afghanistan, Six Months Ago
Running a tired hand over his face as he walked over the rutted path that led from the combat hospital to his temporary barracks, Dr. Cain Turner glared at the cracked brown earth. He missed grass. Hell, he missed anything green at all. A tree… a bush… a plain shrub. In this ugly brown, burned wasteland, color was a dwindling commodity.
Afghanistan looked exactly like the shithole he always imagined it would.
Six months into his deployment, he still hated the tiny, backward country as much now as he had on the day he arrived.
Only his reasons had changed.
When he’d landed in this godforsaken dirty hellhole, he’d simply missed his life. As an emergency room doctor in Paradise, Tennessee, he’d seen his fair share of tragedy. People died. It was a shit consequence of living. It was also part of being a doctor – dealing with mortality. You couldn’t save every patient. At home, however, those deaths had been somewhat expected. He watched his patients succumb to ailments like cancer, diabetes, heart disease. He witnessed elderly patients dying of natural causes on almost a weekly basis. Other than the occasional car wreck or freak accident, the carnage and devastation he’d seen was minimal.
Here, in this hell on Earth, it was a whole different story. Good men and women died every day. Sometimes it was his own men, but even more often, it was their Afghani allies. Men like the translator that had just flatlined on his table. Ahmad Marhat’s greatest sin had been that he’d wanted to keep his family safe. He’d taken the job as translator for the United States Armed Forces in order to guarantee those he loved would be kept free of harm, protected from the Taliban forces that ran rampant in his small village. He’d been blown up for his effort.
And that was just the latest casualty that had landed in his operating room.
There’d been scores of others, and Cain didn’t see any bright light shining at the end of the long and winding tunnel that he’d been living in for months.
The whole war was fucked.
Dusting the dirt from his Army Combat Uniform before he walked into his sparse barracks room, he coughed, wincing as he tasted the grit that seemed to forever be clogging his throat. Fucking sand! There was no escaping it. It got into everything. His ears, his eyes…his goddamn mouth. It was the first thing he tasted in the morning and the last thing he tasted at night.
Slamming the door to his room with more force than necessary, he rolled his head on his shoulders, and tried to relieve some of the tension in his shoulders. He knew it was useless. His tight muscles were a side effect of his job, hours spent hunched over the open body cavity of a patient he’d known was doomed before he touched his scapel.
He’d stood over Ahmad for six damn hours, working to stem the bleeding, shocking the dying man’s heart back to life three times before he’d been forced to call a time of death. That part… pronouncing a comrade dead… was a part of the job he’d become all too familiar with - way too fucking familiar.
Shaking his head, Cain knew the man would be yet another nightmare that woke him up, shaking and sweaty, in the wee hours of the morning. If he was lucky, he’d get a couple of solid, uninterrupted hours of sleep before the almost nightly terrors drove him back to consciousness. He’d long forgotten what it felt like to sleep an entire night. If some emergency at the hospital didn’t wake him first, the fucking nightmares would.
Screams and blood and the gory agony of too many gruesome deaths.
That’s what his dreams consisted of these days. Though tired to the marrow of his bones, he dreaded closing his eyes.
Who the fuck could blame him? They were calling him the fucking Soul Reaper in the surgical ward, for Christ’s sake. In the last month, he’d lost half his damn patients. Injuries had been extreme and extensive lately. IEDs had been blowing with scary regularity, rendering victims all but dead before they ever made it to him. Hell, their own base had taken more than its fair share of indirect fire over the past week. Tensions ran high and tempers burned hot among his brethren.
At first, he’d tried to tell himself that this God awful feeling he held in the pit of his stomach wasn’t going to last forever. Called up from the National Guard, his tour of duty was slated to be only fifteen months long. As one day had bled into another, however, he realized that time moved at a different pace in this pit. Nine months into his deployment, he’d learned a hard lesson.
One day could feel a thousand hours long when you were surrounded by the violence of war.
He now understood why his dad, a Korean War vet, had said that war was, indeed, hell. Those pitying looks he’d received from the old man when he’d gotten his orders to report to Kandahar made a lot more sense to him now.