Page 79 of Mountain Shadow

Her eyes fluttered open. That was a good sign.

“Jens,” she gasped.

“Don’t try to talk. Save your strength, Sarah.”

“Stay … with me,” she whispered.

“I’m not going anywhere. I’m going to take care of you, Sarah,” he said, infusing his voice with a calm and confidence he was nowhere near feeling.

He picked up his phone, praying for a miracle. His thumb left a bloody print on the device, but there was no signal.

Fuck.

It was seven thirty a.m. One and a half hours since he’d left Gael and Kat. He knew, with a certainty that came from knowing this team as well as he did, that they would already have dispatched several helicopters to the area. Gael was a tracker—he had the best sense of direction out of anyone in the team. If he was bodily able to lead the search, he would. And they would find them.

But that would take time. And time was exactly what Sarah didn’t have.

Put pressure on the wound.

Control the bleeding.

In his mind, he started cataloging the things he had—and the things he didn’t have—in his medical bag. The second list was much longer than the first.

He pressed a sterile, heavy gauze pad against the wound, then placed a clean T-shirt from his backpack over it, and pressed hard. Sarah moaned, then went quiet again. Jens steeled himself against her pain. He was going to cause her a lot more pain before the morning was over.

Within seconds, Sarah’s blood seeped through the T-shirt, covering his hands. With his spare hand, he brought out his pressure cuff. He was dismayed, but not surprised, to find her blood pressure was falling rapidly.

He needed something to tamponade the wound. Her clavicle, which had probably saved her life when the knife had gone in, was now making it difficult to control the bleeding by pressure alone.

A Foley catheter.

But that wasn’t in his kit.

He kept the conversation with himself going, looking for alternatives.

Keep the pressure on, as best you can, and administer isotonic fluids—just enough to maintain a palpable central pulse.

They kept isotonic fluids in the helicopter—but he didn’t have any on him.

Jens cursed in frustration and pressed harder on the wound. This time, Sarah didn’t make a sound.

Tears welled behind his eyes and he blinked them away rapidly. He had to think of something else—had to buy Sarah enough time until his team came, and they could get her to the hospital.

An idea came to him then. It wasn’t a particularly good idea, so at first he dismissed it. But there was no denying the truth—Sarah was going to die here, in this cursed mountain hut, if he didn’t do something.

With his free hand, he looked through the medical bag. Finally, he found what he needed—needles, a restriction band, a long Y-shaped tube and several empty citrated bags.

Doubt warred within him. He’d only used pre-hospital blood once before, while on a mission in Afghanistan, where he’d taken blood from a captain with O negative blood type and transfused it to a young sergeant who’d been bleeding out from a gunshot wound. It had worked, then, and was probably the only reason the sergeant was still around today.

While whole blood transfusions were not ideal, Jens he wasn’t worried about disease transmission—he was tested every month, and knew he was healthy. In terms of compatibility, his blood type was O negative, and he remembered Sarah’s blood type. He’d never been as glad to be a universal donor as he was now.

In principle, it should work. And he would give every fucking drop of blood he had to keep Sarah alive.

He didn’t want to loosen the pressure on Sarah’s chest an instant before it became necessary, so he used his mouth to tighten the band around his upper left arm. He found and punctured the vein, securing it with duct tape. Blood immediately started flowing into the small blood bag. While the blood collected, he kneaded the little bag gently with his left hand to keep it from coagulating.

The first unit collected quickly. Though he knew he should stop now, instinct and experience told him Sarah would need more than that—and he’d already crashed through any and all protocols.

He quickly exchanged the filled bag for an empty bag, watching as it, too, began to fill. Then he started an IV line in Sarah’s arm and began the transfusion.