Vicky Peterwald: Survivor (Vicky Peterwald Series Book 2) Page 5

  THE rocket-propelled grenade must have had a double charge.

  The first explosion threw the car into the air.

  The second explosion shot a stream of molten metal through the cabin, wiping out the wall between Vicky and the driver. His body burst into flames

  He died before he had a chance to scream.

  Commander Gerrit Schlieffen’s body protected Vicky from the spatter. He uttered one sharp cry of pain before he locked his mouth shut.

  Then the car hit the ground and bounced.

  Gerrit was thrown off Vicky and against the shattered partition.

  He groaned and seemed to lose consciousness.

  Vicky knew his back wasn’t right, and his left leg was bent all wrong.

  The Grand Duchess once again found herself struggling with a safety belt. It came free just as the car settled to the earth with a groan.

  Then the automatic weapons fire started. Lots of people were emptying their magazine at something.

  In Vicky’s personal case, bullets slammed into the armored glass above her head. It held—for the moment, but it was bending in, and large cracks were showing.

  Very soon, someone would be firing an automatic weapon through that window.

  Vicky was unarmed. Maybe Princess Kris Longknife could hide an automatic under her simple black dress, but this Grand Duchess hadn’t.

  With one glance, she spotted Gerrit’s automatic in a shoulder holster. It was in her hand a second later.

  About then, the armored window gave up its pretenses and fell at her feet.

  Outside, in the night, a man in a black mask and black clothing struggled to pull an emptied magazine from his assault rifle and load another.

  As taught by Gunny, Vicky aimed the automatic with both hands. She leveled it at the gunner’s face and fired once. She brought the weapon down from its recoil and fired a second time.

  Both took the attacker in the face.

  It was hard to tell with the mask, but he seemed very surprised to be shot.

  That was okay. Vicky was quite surprised, too. For someone who had been shivering only a minute ago, she was holding her weapon quite steady.

  Now there was more automatic weapons fire. The reloading must have been completed.

  Vicky waited, her own automatic aimed at the empty window.

  But now the noise of the night was changing. While most of the shooting before had been on full automatic, suddenly there was another brand of shooter out there. Now a single shot, followed quickly by a second joined the fusillade. There were more of those quick, staccato shots and less of the fully automatic riffs.

  Then, for one wonderful moment, there was total silence.

  Gerrit groaned. His head lolled on his neck.

  “I need a medic,” Vicky yelled.

  “Medic needed.” “Medic” was passed up some line.

  Vicky didn’t know whether other people needed medics or if that was just her request being passed along. She was not willing to wait in line tonight.

  “This is the Grand Duchess, and my protection needs a medic. Now!”

  A woman in the dark green uniform that Vicky had seen patrolling around the estate appeared in the blasted window. Her rifle was held high and aimed at the sky.

  “The medic’s coming.” Her eyes took in the commander. “Oh shit. We need more than a medic. Sergeant. Get a medevac headed this way. Now!”

  CHAPTER 14

  THAT night would forever be a blur in Vicky’s memory.

  Medics arrived and cautiously surveyed Gerrit’s injuries. Their faces showed more concern than Vicky wanted to see.

  A helicopter beat its way into the field on one side of the ambush site. The assailants had fired the rocket from the trees on the other side. They’d launched their assault from there, too.

  Maybe they’d thought they could complete their slaughter before the gun trucks trailing a mile behind the convoy arrived.

  Or maybe they didn’t know about the reinforcements.

  Either way, all eight of the gunners died on the spot. So did way too many in the escort cars.

  Colonel Mary White braked to a halt just as the chopper arrived.

  She surveyed the wreckage of the failed attack and shook her head.

  “They should have rocketed the passenger compartments. They went for the agents and drivers instead. I think they wanted to survive this night,” she spat as it began to rain.

  The colonel turned to Vicky. “So you lived, and a lot of good men and women died.”

  “It happens that way too often around me,” Vicky bit out.

  A moment later, the medics began extracting Gerrit from the limo. “Don’t bend the back,” was whispered softly.

  “Bend the leg if you have to, but not the back.”

  Now Vicky found herself shivering.

  A medic brought a thermal blanket to her and offered to take away the blood-splattered uniform coat. Vicky pulled it closer.

  The blanket went over it.

  The chopper lifted with Vicky and Gerrit aboard, along with two horribly burned agents who were still breathing.

  One died screaming halfway to the hospital.

  Vicky trailed Gerrit into the emergency room as far as they would let her. When they shunted her aside, she took a chair in the waiting room, staring blankly at the door Gerrit had disappeared through.

  She didn’t notice the guards until a woman with captain’s bars gently lifted the automatic out of the pocket Vicky had stuffed it in when she began to feel safe.

  The captain clicked the safety on, then handed the weapon off to a police officer.

  “Is that evidence?” Vicky asked dully. Her brain didn’t seem to be engaged in anything. Anything but watching the door with Gerrit behind it that never opened.

  “I’ve been told there will be a hearing,” the police officer replied. “Not to establish any guilt, Your Honor, but to figure out how we screwed this one up so bad.”

  “I paid a visit. Someone tried to kill me. Good people died in my place,” Vicky muttered, distracted only a bit from her vigil. “That’s the way it always happens.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” the police officer said.

  The captain brought Vicky a cup of warm coffee. Black, sugared sweet and strong. “The colonel says you didn’t eat much dinner.”

  Vicky sipped the hot liquid and winced at its taste. Under the captain’s eyes, she took another sip. “I talked a lot. Grand Duchesses seem to do that a lot.”

  “All of them?” the captain asked.

  Vicky shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve never met another Grand Duchess. Now of princesses, I know at least one. She talks way too much as well.”

  Vicky considered what she’d said for a moment, then added, “Only she talks better. People do what she talks them into.”

  “Hmm,” the captain said, and settled into watchful silence beside Vicky.

  Time passed. Maybe Vicky dozed. Maybe she didn’t but stayed in a haze somewhere between asleep and awake.

  She did notice that somehow the room had sprouted a forest of armed men and women. Uniformed police. Agents who had the hard look of men who defended people with their lives and had close friends who had lost their lives to that duty. Military police.

  Vicky had to visit the restroom. Six women escorted her in and waited while she did what she could.

  As Vicky settled back into her chair, a chair that was in the same place as the one she had left but seemed to have been replaced with one a lot more comfortable, she turned to the captain.

  “Guards guarding the guards?”

  “No one should have known where you went last night. At least, no one who wasn’t with you. Someone leaked. Now we don’t trust anyone.”

  “Sorry about that. It’s the money. My loving stepmama really wa
nts me dead.”

  “All the way out here? Hell, lady, when did you arrive?” the captain asked.

  “Yesterday afternoon?” Vicky guessed. “Don’t take it too bad. The money is hanging out there all the time. Local players spot me and see lots and lots of commas in their next paycheck.”

  Vicky paused. She knew her thinking was muzzy. “I think all that keeps me alive is that they jump at the chance and don’t really staff it out.”

  The captain’s face was grim. “There might be some truth in that. This is our first major assassination attempt since we set ourselves up to run our own show. You talk like it’s something that happens to you every day.”

  Vicky found herself laughing. It was dry and half-insane. “At the palace, we had four in one day. Maybe it was three. I forget.”

  “How do you stay sane?”

  “Am I?” Vicky answered the question with one of her own.

  After that, Vicky must have fallen asleep. Her next recollection was waking up with her head on the captain’s shoulder and drool dripping from her mouth onto the poor woman’s uniform.

  Vicky sat up straight and tried to wipe the woman’s shoulder clean. It looked better after a few swipes.

  Glancing around, Vicky asked, “How long was I out?”

  “Almost three hours. They’ve got a bed ready for you.”

  “Thank them, but no thanks. Was there any report on Ger . . . the commander?”

  “No one’s come out that door,” the captain said.

  “Well, seeing how we’ve slept together,” Vicky said, “I’m Vicky, sometimes called Victoria, the Imperial Grand Duchess of Peterwald.”

  “I’m Captain Inez Torrago. Rangers. Your Honor.”

  “It’s Your Grace the first time you address me. Ma’am or Commander after that. I wish we could have met under better circumstances,” Vicky said, and stood, stretched, and marched for the door.

  The Ranger captain followed.

  Vicky pushed the door open and took a peek. Medical gear. Lots of it.

  And a nurse who immediately headed for her in full and high dudgeon.

  “You can’t be here.”

  “I’m the Grand Duchess Victoria Peterwald.”

  “I don’t care if you’re Mary, Queen of Scots. You’re not hurt and not medical staff. Get back on the other side of the door before I bust your head.”

  “I’m game,” Vicky said.

  “Head trauma goes to another unit. You can’t get in here that easy.”

  “What does it take to get in here?”

  “I’ll see if one of the doctors can spare you a moment. Now get back where you belong.”

  Since the nurse was now nose to nose with Vicky and looked mean enough to break a head or three, Vicky retreated.

  “Would you have defended me from a head-breaking?” Vicky asked the captain as she withdrew back to her chair.

  “Interesting question,” the captain said, apparently giving it serious thought. “I’m not sure whether my duty would be to help her bust you one or defend you. I think I’d have tossed a coin on that one.”

  “Heads you bust me, and the coin has two heads?”

  “Something like that. We haven’t had that many Imperials out this far lately. Kind of hard to figure out how to treat one of them just now.” The words were hard, but the hint of a smile softened them.

  Vicky settled back in her chair. “I’m properly put in my place. Damn, how busted up was Gerrit? How long can it take?”

  The captain offered no answer. Vicky hadn’t expected one.

  Her own conclusions were bad and getting worse.

  Damn, if he hadn’t been taking care of my shivers, he’d have had his seat belt on.

  Another hour passed at a glacier’s pace. The captain sent a uniform out for sandwiches. Vicky played with the ham and cheese on rye more than she ate it.

  Then the doors opened, and a woman in scrubs came out.

  Somewhere Vicky had heard a Navy corpsman say that they always sent a woman doc to deliver the hard news.

  Vicky stood and prepared to hear the worst.

  CHAPTER 15

  THE young woman approaching Vicky was almost tiny. However, her informal medical garb could not hide the power and purpose with which she moved. She had a medical-records board in the crook of her arm.

  “You are?” she inquired curtly of Vicky.

  “Vicky Peterwald,” she answered.

  “The Imperial Grand Duchess, Victoria of Greenfeld,” the Ranger captain corrected.

  “Hmm,” the doctor said, making a notation on her board. “And you are related to the patient how?” came out cold and fast, from having been said far too often.

  “He’s sworn to give his life to protect mine,” Vicky fired back with meaning.

  “Oh. No box to check off for that, but I believe that I can knock something together for our Patient Privacy Office.”

  “How is Gerrit?” Vicky demanded, having been stopped by as many bureaucratic roadblocks as she could handle for one night. Morning. Whatever!

  The doctor raised an eyebrow at the way Vicky used Gerrit’s first name. “Commander Schlieffen is in bad shape,” she said. “We expect that he will live, but he will need extensive additional care to recover from his injuries, and his recovery may not be to his former levels.”

  “How badly is he hurt?” Vicky demanded.

  “We’ve handled most of the minor cuts and burns from the RPG attack,” the doctor said. “It’s his back and leg that are the real problems.”

  “Back and leg,” Vicky repeated.

  “His back was broken. The break is in the lower part of the back. He has control of his hands and arms.”

  “But his legs?” Vicky asked. She could not make herself ask about his other valued attributes below his belt. His ability to give and take such pleasure. His driving force pounding between her legs.

  “We have managed to stabilize the break and are doing all we can to see that there is no further damage that will lengthen his recovery or make that recovery less than full.”

  Vicky weighed all the dodges in that statement. Thank God the woman hadn’t retreated behind medical jargon and technical mumbo jumbo. His lower back was broken. Not some medically exact statement like a T-2 or L-50 break that told a layman exactly nothing. Vicky knew what she’d been told and could feel the full impact of those words in her gut.

  “And his leg?” Vicky finally asked.

  “His femur was shattered in several places. We are stabilizing it, but first we had to stop the bleeding. We’ve succeeded. We can begin trying to piece the bone together, but the break is complex and very near the groin. If I had all the equipment I had five years ago, it would not be a problem, but now, with so much of our modern gear off-line for lack of spare parts or consumables, we will have to do this the old-fashioned way.”

  “What are you getting at?”

  “Trying to repair the bone is a chancy process with possible extreme damage to flesh and arteries. He could die. It might be safest to amputate the leg.”

  Vicky took that blow in the gut. She’d heard Sailors from backcountry planets talk about a mule kick in the stomach; now she felt one full up.

  Vicky found herself retreating to her chair. She sat in it sideways, trying to force her brain to think.

  Gerrit might lose his leg. Would he rather lose his life or his leg?

  Again Vicky saw Admiral Gort sprawled out, facedown on the deck, his blood and brains spreading out from the bullet he’d taken that had been aimed at her.

  Would the Navy officer rather have lost a leg, the use of his lower quarter, and returned to his wife? Or would he rather be facedown in gore rather than live the rest of his life as half a man?

  Would the angry widow have preferred that human fraction to the body in the fla
g-draped coffin?

  Now Vicky realized why the doctor had asked for her relationship to this man. Did a few wonderful hours passed in passionate embrace qualify her to make this call? A crippled life or quick clean death.

  “He’s Navy, isn’t he?” the Ranger captain asked. “Could he get better care up on the station?”

  “Yes,” Vicky demanded, whirling in her seat to face the doctor.

  “Possibly. Assuming we could stabilize all his issues and the lift up to orbit didn’t kill him or wreck everything we’d done for him.”

  “Computer, get me Admiral von Mittleburg.”

  “It’s awful early in the morning,” the doctor said.

  “Mittleburg here,” her computer announced.

  “Admiral, Commander Schlieffen has been seriously hurt in defense of my life.”

  “How bad?”

  “Doctor, can you release the official report?”

  “To a doctor.”

  “If you can’t pass it through me, transmit it direct to the duty team at the station sick bay,” the admiral said crisply.

  Three computers swapped addresses and authorizations, and the commander’s medical records were beamed up to the doctor on duty.

  “That’s a bad one,” a new voice observed on net. “What do you plan to do?”

  “We think we can stabilize his back so that a year or two of treatment and rehabilitation should return him most of the use of his lower quarter. It’s his leg. There are a lot of pieces. We’ve just gotten the bleeding controlled. If we amputate it now, could the Navy clone him a new one? We sure can’t these days.”

  “Doc?” the admiral said. “Would he be better off up here?”

  “No doubt, but what would a launch to orbit do to all the fine work the good doctors down there have done?”

  “Would it help if you had some of our gear down there with you?” the admiral half asked, half ordered.

  “I can give you a list of our off-line equipment and the parts we need to get them up and running,” the Sevastopol doctor offered.

  “Send us the list,” the Navy doctor said. “I’ll have my med techs and supply technicians go over it with me.”

  “Your Grace,” Admiral Mittleburg said. “I see you’ve had a full evening. I’d have called you myself except I’m just now getting the report of the attack. Heads are going to roll.”