Chapter 3 - Commander in Scrubs
General Robert Sterling.
The name hit my ears like a mortar detonation.
Sterling had been the architect of the forward surgical rapid-deployment doctrine in the Middle East. More than that, he had been the commanding officer who stood beside my hospital bed at Walter Reed when I awoke from a coma following the helicopter crash outside Erbil. He was the man who pinned the Silver Star to my chest and whispered, “Take whatever time you need, Tessa. The uniform will be waiting when you’re ready.”
“His vitals?” I asked, my voice snapping instantly into clinical detachment. The tired, soft-spoken floor nurse vanished completely; in her place stood the hardened commander of Forward Surgical Team Nine.
“Crush injury to the pelvis, open tension pneumothorax, and suspected blunt rupture of the thoracic aorta,” Vance reported without missing a beat. “Local civilian paramedics brought him in twenty minutes ago under a civilian alias. His security detail was riding in the secondary escort vehicle that got crushed by the jackknifed semi. The civilian surgical staff here took one look at his scans and said he was non-operable.”
I spun around to face Harold Pierce. “Who is the senior attending vascular surgeon on call tonight?”
Pierce swallowed hard, pulling at his collar. “Dr. Gregory Hayes was scheduled, but his vehicle was trapped on the south pass by the blizzard. The only attending trauma surgeon currently in the building is... well, it’s Dr. Mercer.”
Every pair of eyes turned toward Mercer.
The man looked like a walking ghost. His hands were shaking so violently that he had to brace himself against the wall to keep from falling. “I... I can’t operate on a thoracic aortic rupture,” he stammered, his arrogant bravado completely evaporating into pathetic terror. “Not with our limited storm staff! That’s an eighty-percent mortality procedure even in a level-one university trauma center! It’s suicide! If he codes on the table, it’s a career-ending malpractice disaster!”
“You see?” Vance scoffed, disgust dripping from every syllable. “A man who wears surgical whites to impress women at charity galas, but soils himself the moment real blood is spilled.”
“Shut up, Vance,” I commanded.
The Colonel snapped his mouth shut immediately, lowering his head. Harold Pierce nearly gasped aloud at the sight of a full-bird Army Colonel taking orders from an employee he had planned to fire fifteen minutes earlier.
I stepped directly into Mercer’s personal space. The doctor flinched, shrinking back into the drywall.
“Mercer,” I said, my voice steady, sharp, and flat. “You spent three months telling this entire floor that you were the supreme medical authority in this hospital. You told me to stay out of the doctors' way. You claimed credit on a complex ventricular conversion that you were too paralyzed to manage yourself. Now, you’re going to prove whether you’re a physician or an empty suit.”
“I... I can’t do it alone,” Mercer whimpered, tears of humiliation finally welling in the corners of his eyes.
“You’re not doing it alone,” I said, reaching down and picking up my surgical badge from the counter, snapping it into place over my navy scrubs. “You are going to be my second assist. You will hold retractors, you will monitor suction, and you will do exactly what I tell you, when I tell you, without offering a single word of commentary.”
Mercer looked at me, stunned. “You’re... you’re letting me in the OR?”
“I need an extra set of hands with an active medical license to verify civilian operative records, and every other surgeon is snowed in,” I replied coldly. “You wanted to manage trauma, Mercer? Put your gloves on. We have eight minutes before Sterling’s chest fills with blood.”
I turned toward Paige Redmond. “Paige.”
“Yes, Major—I mean, yes, Tessa!” Paige snapped to attention, her posture straightening instinctively.
“Clear Operating Room One. Prep four units of uncrossed O-negative, six units of fresh frozen plasma, and wake up every circulating nurse who knows how to open a vascular tray. If the blood bank gives you friction, tell them Harold Pierce will personally fire every technician on duty by sunrise.”
Pierce nodded frantically. “Whatever she says! Give her everything! Drain the regional blood reserves if necessary!”
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“Let’s move,” I said.
As I marched down the hallway toward the scrub sinks, stripping off my outer layer and pulling on sterile surgical caps, the civilian medical staff scrambled in every direction. For three months, they had seen a ghost. Tonight, they were going to see why the Pentagon kept my name stamped in red.
