Challenging the Doctor Sheikh Read online

  Dakan. Where was he? Was he down here too?

  What was she supposed to do? Should she stay put and not collapse the rubble more, or just take a chance on getting herself out, regardless of what happened to the rest of the building if she went plowing through?

  She laid her head back down, one arm still wrapped around the baby. She squeezed him enough to let him know she was there, then set to rubbing his back, trying to shush him as she took inventory on the room and tried to wake the woman.

  She hadn’t asked her name. What kind of person met someone and spoke with them but didn’t ask their name?

  “Hello?”

  “Hi?”

  “My friend?”

  She tried several more greetings, trying to get some answer from the woman.

  Nothing came. No movement.

  Not far above her, maybe five feet, floor joists jutted from the part of the building still above ground. It wasn’t deep enough to be a basement. Crawlspace of some kind? Some of the joists remained connected to the floor and angled down to touch the bare earth beneath. One lay across her other arm. She wriggled it free without too much trouble but it soon began to throb.

  More dust and dirt showered down on them, and the baby’s coughing cries began to sound like gasps for air.

  “Nira?”

  Dakan’s voice, loud and rough with fear, carried through the opening above to her, even above the sound of the baby’s cries. She patted his back, trying to get him to calm as she called back to Dakan.

  “I’m okay, I think. But the baby can’t breathe!”

  “I hear him. Is your scarf still on?” he yelled back.

  She squirmed to pull her other arm free from the tight space it was wedged into. When she did so, one of the joists directly above her, one that had one end planted to the right of her hip and the other still wedged against the remains of the flooring, fell a few inches.

  “The floor is coming down!” she screamed, kicking her legs free from beneath the woman’s and shooting her feet into the air to catch the bottom of the joist.

  “Dakan!”

  He didn’t answer. God, where had he gone? He hadn’t even finished his instructions about the baby.

  He’d asked about her scarf. She pulled it off with her now free hand and shook it out as best she could, then put it around the baby’s face, holding it with one hand as the other patted his back to try and help him clear his lungs. She didn’t know what else to do.

  Her mother had been right. She’d come to the Middle East, and now she was going to die here. Like stupid tourists who got stupid ideas about seeing exotic foreign lands and wound up being crushed by spontaneous building demolition.

  The baby coughed hard once more and began to breathe more easily.

  “Nira?”

  He’d come back. He’d come back.

  “He’s a little better, I think,” she called back. “But his mother hasn’t moved. Or answered. And the floor! Dakan, the floor is going to fall if I let go...”

  He called from above again, “I’m going to climb down to you. I found a way from the healer’s consultation room.”

  The consultation room?

  That was...

  She looked through the dust-clogged shafts of light and got her bearings. She’d fallen straight down, so the consultation room Dakan where had gone was...on the other side the floor she was holding up.

  “No! Dakan! No! Don’t come that way!”

  “There’s no other way,” he called back.

  “Don’t come that way. I can’t hold more weight. Most of it’s being transferred to the ground, but if the angle shifts, it’s going to come down!”

  She waited a few seconds, preparing to tense her legs for all she had. Was he going to do it anyway? Was he still up there?

  The baby started screaming again in earnest now that he’d had a chance to catch his breath, and pushed at the scarf she kept pulled over his face.

  “What should I do? Can you see another way?”

  Nira lifted her head to look past the rubble and the dust.

  “How much of the floor is intact in the waiting area?”

  “It’s not safe to walk on. I tested it.”

  “Get to the crawlspace. Find an access door. Or knock a hole in the foundation below the consult room and come in below the floor.”

  She patted the baby again and made a shushing sound.

  “Hurry!”

  CHAPTER TEN

  OUTSIDE THE HALF-COLLAPSED building men approached, running with tools in hand. When Dakan relayed Nira’s suggestion to the men, they went round to the far end of the building to begin knocking a hole in the foundation.

  Dakan left them to it and went to pack a small bag to take down with him. Face masks. Water. Small respirator. Bandages. His pathetic penlight, which seemed completely unequal to the task of lighting up a low, dusty basement. Crawlspace. Whatever she’d called it.

  He made it back to the building in time for them to start pulling rocks out of the opening.

  One large stone came, then some smaller ones. He couldn’t even hear over the noise whether or not the floor was still up, whether Nira was calling for him, whether the baby was even still crying. Metal on stone, metal on stone...strike after strike until an opening big enough for him to squeeze through appeared.

  “No one else come in until I say so,” he instructed. It’d benefit no one to have more hurt if there was some way around it. Scout first. Make evacuation decisions after.

  Dakan pulled a mask on and crawled through the hole and down to the packed earth floor about a meter below.

  He immediately heard the crying baby.

  When he’d slithered his legs through, he got back up and reached out for his bag.

  He pulled the mask off his mouth so she could hear him. “Nira?”

  “Please, hurry!” she called back immediately. He put the mask on and turned on his flashlight, then stood as much as he was able to move at a crouch to where the floor had fallen in.

  The crawlspace wasn’t a solid open rectangle—there was a corner in the earth, leading to what he imagined would appear L-shaped if viewed from above. Along the walls leading to the turn, there were shelves with jars, cans and dry goods...which meant there had to be stairs somewhere. He found them when he rounded the corner, still intact despite the floor above partially covering them, built into the side of what must have been a trapdoor concealed in the waiting room.

  Just to the left, he saw the woman’s head, then bent to crawl under wooden boards to reach her.

  “I found her,” he called to Nira, checking for a pulse and then listening to her labored breathing. “She’s alive. Can you see her?”

  “Her legs were on mine.”

  He dropped the awkward bag so he could crawl over the prone woman, where he found Nira on her back, her feet braced against a thick, precarious-looking board above her, and a screaming baby on her chest.

  The air suddenly felt even denser than the dust, heavy and hard to breathe through. Every instinct told him to drag her and the baby out of the way and get them out of there. But the woman... There had to be a way to get them all.

  “If I hold the floor, can you crawl out with him?”

  “I don’t think so. My arm hurts. Take him. Take him out and come back.”

  She was putting on a brave face, but he could hear fear making her voice wobble.

  He couldn’t look at her arm yet, not until he got back. He also couldn’t leave her here without any help. If nothing else, he could help her breathe better. He whisked his mask off, secured it over her mouth and tucked behind her ears.

  “I think I saw a faster way to get the woman out. I’m going to get them to knock another hole in the foundations at the corner of the
room right next to where the floor fell. Is that okay?”

  She paused to think. Maybe it wasn’t just his mind that had become sluggish... After a few long seconds of looking in the direction he’d mentioned, she nodded.

  “Should be.” Her words were muffled, but he could understand her. “Crawl over me with him, it’ll be easier to get through that way than climbing over her. Don’t put any weight on anything wooden.”

  “I’ll be right back. Hold on a little longer,” he said, swinging one leg over her and then the other, then picked the baby up from her chest, clamped him snugly to his chest with one arm, stuck the flashlight in his mouth, and crawled through with the still screaming baby, retrieving his bag along the way.

  It felt like it took him a year to make it to where he could stand and walk at a crouch back to the opening.

  Once there, he passed the screaming baby through, following it up with the bag, and directed the men to make another hole in the foundations at the back of the building, and gave the best location he could, along with another order to do it carefully because rocks tumbling in could hurt someone. The stairs would make it easier to carry the woman out without so much danger of dropping her.

  When he finally made it back to Nira, her legs were shaking and she looked pale. He grabbed her wrist and checked her pulse. It was fast and her arm shook just as her legs did. “How do I brace the wood?” he asked, just as the sound of the pickaxes starting to attack the foundations came to them. It sounded like the right area at least.

  Pushing the mask back, she got a deeper breath and said, “Big rock. Plant it at the base where it touches earth.”

  “How big?”

  “Like a bowling ball with angles instead of smooth.”

  “Okay.” He’d seen them pulling stones like that out of the foundations. This sent him hurrying back to the opening once more.

  He heard rocks falling in at the other site, but there wasn’t anything he could do about it now. He gave instructions to the men still at the hole, and they produced three rocks that were almost the right size, but not quite.

  Dakan took the two biggest and hurried back.

  “There aren’t any that big. These two were the biggest...”

  She looked at them, considering. “Wedge the small one under the space between the wood and the dirt, then put the big one behind it. When you have it, tell me and we’ll test it.”

  Dakan had to backtrack around her head to reach the end. He did as instructed, roughly shoving the rocks into the earth in the hope they’d slide slower.

  “Take your feet away.”

  He tilted his head to get a visual of her and watched as she relaxed her legs but didn’t remove them. The board started to slide again and her legs kicked back into position, taking the weight once more. Strain showed on her features and in her groans.

  He pushed on the rocks. “It’s not working.”

  “Step on it. Use your feet. Legs are stronger than arms.”

  That wobble of fear turned into a full voice tremor that shifted the sounds into some kind of wrongness that alarmed him further. He had to get her out of there.

  Dakan braced himself against the intact rock foundation, one foot on the big rock he’d placed, and ground down with all his might.

  The board actually slid in the other direction, enough to lift the tilted floor a few inches.

  “Did you lift it?”

  “Yes,” he said, then, “Is that bad?”

  “No. I’m letting go...”

  Once again she relaxed her legs, but this time the boards didn’t immediately start to fall.

  “It’s holding. Can you get up?”

  He rounded the treacherous board, careful not to touch it, and reached for her unhurt arm to pull her through the hole to where the woman lay. Nira nodded toward the woman. “We should get her away from the—”

  At that moment daylight spilled in through the foundations where the men were making their holes.

  “I don’t even have a neck brace for her,” he muttered, shaking his head.

  “Is the baby okay?”

  “I don’t know.” He didn’t know if either baby was okay, the one he’d carried out or the one still in the woman’s womb. But they had a way out close by now. He climbed the stairs and helped shove the rocks outward. When the hole was big enough, he stepped down the few stairs, grabbed Nira and hustled her up to the hole. “You first.”

  “You need help with her. She’s heavy.”

  “Your arm is hurt. Don’t argue. The other men will come and help me move her.”

  He grabbed her hips and thrust her up and through the hole, and someone helped pull her through, then two men came down to help him with the pregnant woman. She still hadn’t regained consciousness. He took out his stethoscope and listened to both mother and fetal heartbeats for a minute, counting. “Hers is a little slow, but the baby’s holding on.”

  Within a quarter hour the helicopter lifted off with all his patients on board. Nira held fast to the baby even though her arm hurt. With some effort, she kept him from removing the makeshift hearing protection Dakan had fashioned with cotton, gauze pads, and tape. There was nothing else Dakan could do for anyone right now, but he’d get them to the trauma center in Dubai at least.

  With one hand keeping the unconscious woman’s pulse monitored, he watched Nira and the intensity with which she watched the baby in her arms. She’d swaddled him snugly enough to mostly immobilize his arms, and watched his chest move since the headphones muffled her ability to hear his breathing.

  So much for his plan to tell her everything tonight. His family would just have to understand. Nira wasn’t moving to the palace yet. Once the woman and baby were off to Dubai, he’d call his mother to let her know, then examine Nira’s injuries.

  No one could expect him to lay all that on her after the day they’d had.

  Tomorrow would have to sort itself out.

  * * *

  The helicopter touched down at the airport and Nira had to turn the baby over to the crew so they could transport him and his pregnant mother to the hospital in Dubai. It’d taken Dakan promising to send the helicopter back to the village to fetch the father for her to let go of him.

  The one bright spot from it all was that the injured woman had briefly roused during the flight to the capital, and now they’d both receive the kind of medical care in another country that they should’ve been able to get in their own.

  When they were gone, Dakan put an arm around Nira and steered her toward a car that she hadn’t even seen arrive. As soon as she’d climbed in, sleep overtook her and the next thing she knew, he was gently rousing her outside the dreadful hospital.

  “What are they going to do here? I don’t want to be treated here.”

  “I’m going to X-ray your arm.” He swung the door open and clamped an arm around her waist to get her out with him.

  She moved with him. It was too hard to put up any real resistance right now. “You said there wasn’t an X-ray.”

  “I had a temporary set up until the hospital is finished, and imported a couple of technicians.”

  “I don’t think it’s broken.”

  “Good. Let’s double check.”

  She didn’t want to double check. She wanted to go back to the flat, run a hot bath, and soak away the pain and the grime she carried in equal measure. But she got out, because getting out and getting it done would get her to that hot bath faster. “Where did you put it?”

  “Behind the building in a bus, like the mobile diagnostic clinics they take to the villages in the UK. We’ll move it inside when the room for it is built.”

  Inside the lobby, her gaze naturally drifted in the direction of the current remodel. Long pieces of plastic sheeting had been secured to the ceiling and hung to the floo
r, discouraging people from going into the surgical theater and keeping the construction dust somewhat under control.

  So it was really happening. Not that she could see much. Dakan led her the other way and soon she was in a curtained bay, being handed a gown.

  “I don’t need a gown for an X-ray.”

  Dakan continued to hold it out to her. “A building fell on you, Nira. You had a beam fall on your arm, and you used your legs to keep the ceiling from collapsing. Put the gown on so I can examine you. Unless you want the other doctor on duty to do it.”

  “I don’t want another doctor to do it.”

  “Good, because I wouldn’t allow it anyway.”

  “Can I get the X-ray done first?”

  “I’m looking for other areas to screen.”

  Nira sighed and turned around, “Unzip me, then. But I’m only stripping down to my underthings, then you’ll look at me and I’ll get dressed again before we go to the bus for an X-ray. I’m not walking around in a hospital gown with my bum on display.”

  “Fair enough,” Dakan said. So obviously he could compromise a little.

  She felt the zip slide down until his knuckle brushed the small of her back. It was the simplest touch, but a wash of awareness that hit her. He might as well have licked her.

  It was the wrong time and place for that kind of reaction. They were destined to be together, for at least a time...and she wanted it. She just didn’t want it in a hospital bay.

  To hurry things along, she tugged on the shoulders of her dress to dislodge the garment and wrestle her arms out of it.

  “Is it ill fitting?” she heard him ask from behind her. “You’re jerking at that material like it’s stuck to you with glue.” His hands closed over hers and he took over, easing the material down much too slowly. She wanted this over with.

  Princess seaming in the simple green dress allowed it to fall to the floor as soon as the zipper passed her waist and opened to the hips. She stepped out of it, picked it up, and faced Dakan.

  No power on earth could make her look at him, though. She knew he wasn’t looking at her like that right now, but the day had wiped out her confidence. Confidence required a steadier, calmer mind than she had right now. And probably a bath first.