The Long Walk Back
Does everyone deserve a second chance?
As an army trauma surgeon Kate knows how to keep her cool in the most high pressure of situations. Although back at home in England her marriage is falling apart, out in the desert she’s happy knowing that she’s saving lives.
Until she meets Cooper. It’s up to Kate to make a split-second decision to save Cooper’s life. Yet Cooper doesn’t want to be saved. Kate’s determined to convince him to give his life a second chance even though its turning out dramatically different from how he thought. Along the way, can he convince Kate to give love a second chance too?
Also from Rachel Dove
The Chic Boutique on Baker Street
The Flower Shop on Foxley Street
The Long Walk Back
Rachel Dove
ONE PLACE. MANY STORIES
Contents
Cover
Blurb
Title Page
Author Bio
Acknowledgements
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Epilogue
Endpages
Copyright
RACHEL DOVE
is a mum of two from Yorkshire and a post 16 teacher specialising in early years education and SEN and Autism.
She has always loved writing, has had previous success as a self-published author, and is the author of The Chic Boutique on Baker Street and The Flower Shop on Foxley Street. Rachel is the winner of the Mills & Boon Prima Flirty Fiction competition.
She is the winner of the 2016 Writers Bureau Writer of the Year award and has had short stories published in the UK and overseas. She is currently working on her sixth book, and can often be found glued to a keyboard.
She is currently undertaking an MA in Creative Writing and if not writing or working from home, she can be found walking the dog or hanging out with her family. She may have a slight addiction to Pickled Onion Monster Munch, but she will deny it when asked.
Acknowledgements
First of all, big thanks as always to my lovely editor Anna Baggaley, who listened to my rambling pitch for this book in a busy London wine bar, and backed me in writing it and bringing it out into the world. This book was one I wanted to write for a while, and thanks to you and HQ/Harper Collins, it’s finally here.
Also thanks to my physiotherapist Matt, from The Sandal Clinic in Wakefield, who not only fixed my tricky back, but answered my many questions and gave me pointers on sources for the medical parts of this book. Thanks also to the British Army and Help for Heroes for their information, and their service.
A huge helping of gratitude as always to my lovely family of authors, readers and bloggers, who spur me on and inspire me every day. There are too many of you to list, but a big mwah to you all. I love to hear from readers, and I hear such lovely comments. Thank you.
Lastly, as always a massive thank you to my family, especially my husband Peter and our sons Jayden and Nathan. Thank you for putting up with the piles of clean washing everywhere and takeaway food while I tapped away on my laptop for so many hours. I love you all. Miss you Max.
To my husband Peter, who never reads my books, but inspires them anyway.
Thank you for putting up with me.
PROLOGUE
That day. The day I learned an answer to one of mankind’s big questions: what do you see when your body is at the point of death? Not your average day. An average day is going to work, coming home, parking your fat arse on the couch in front of the TV, a takeaway perched on your knee while you piss and moan to yourself about how skint you are, how the country is going to the dogs, how much you hate your job. That is an average day, one that blends into countless others through the years, till you wake up in your fifties, bored, bald and fat, wondering at what point the dreams of your younger self went down the toilet. That was never going to be me, and my choices in life led me to this day, what looked like my last day. Karma is a bitch, I hear you on that one.
An hour earlier, I was doing a routine sweep of the area with my unit. Of my thirty-one years on the earth, I had spent fifteen of them in the army. We were out in Iraq, pushing back the terrorists that threatened the small villages we were camped near to. Many of the villagers wanted us here, and the tensions were rising.
It’s not like on the news. You think it all looks the same. Desert, broken buildings, busted vehicles, shattered people. There is no beauty on the news, but it exists here. We fear what we don’t know, what we can’t control, but here people live the same as us in many ways. I have seen photos on walls, gardens lovingly tended, children loved and cared for. The actions of few cause the outcome for many, and I saw it every day. I joined to serve, to have a purpose, but I also enlisted to find the family I never had. So now I fought for them too, with them by my side.
There had been a lot of unease the last few weeks, and you could feel the stress, the taut emotions of the people and the enemy, even through the hot, dry air. I had had a bad feeling in the pit of my gut for days, and when the shots had started firing, I knew why. They had been gearing up to take us down, and as prepared as we thought we were, we were still caught with our pants down that day.
‘Pull back!’ I boomed gruffly to my charges. ‘Come on, go, go, go!’ I started to run for the nearest building, the one we had just finished sweeping. It was abandoned, full of empty homes, food still rotting on tables that would never host a family meal again. I kept looking over my shoulder, watching my guys take shelter one by one. A hail of shots whizzed past my ear, and I threw myself against the side of the nearest car. Hunching down, I looked to where the shots were coming from. Two of my guys were still on the way to the shelter – one hunched over, not moving. The other, Travis, was dragging him to safety. Blood followed them like a trail of gunpowder as they desperately tried to escape. Another barrage of shots rang out, and Travis jerked. He had been hit, but he kept going, pulling Smithy along with him, hung over his shoulder. They weren’t going to make it. I jumped up, firing a volley off at the top of the building, the source of the shots but they fired back. Hunching down again, I shouted at Travis to get a move on, grabbing my radio and running towards them.
‘Hightower, can you see him?’ I screamed into the radio. My sniper on the roof, Bradley, was my ace in the hole.
‘Nearly, the slippery bastard is hidden well. He has a child up there with him, using him as a human shield.’
I cursed under my breath. I reached Travis and grabbed Smithy from him. Travis was bleeding badly, but it looked like a shoulder wound.
We ran hell for leather towards the shelter, Hightower screaming into the radio.
‘He’s reloading Coop, get a move on!’
I was almost at the shelter, Travis was just ahead, racing to get ready to help Smithy, who was still out cold. My muscles burned from the effort of dragging him along with me, but I ignored the pain, pushing on.
‘Almost there,’ I shouted back into the receiver. ‘Find a shot, and take him down!’
I struggled to breathe, and my mouth was coated with a new layer of dust every time I managed to pull in a ragged breath. I could hear commotion around me, and moved my head to the side to look for Smithy. I could see him a few feet away, and I knew without a doubt he was dead. I turned away, already wanting to erase the memory of his crumpled form from my memory. I coughed, and felt a warm trickle run down my cheek. Not good¸ I thought to myself. I could hear my friends, my comrades in arms, running towards me, firing shots off, barking orders at each other. There was no white light, no images of me running around in short trousers, nothing. I could see nothing but dust, flashes of weaponry, and the smell of panic and desperation in the air. I felt bone tired, and a little voice inside of me told me to sleep. I tried to shake my head, keep myself awake, but the warm feeling spread through me. My body wasn’t responding. It was like slipping into a hot bath after a long, cold day. I could feel my muscles began to relax, and my throat filling up with liquid. I tried to spit, to turn my head, but my eyelids were already fluttering. I thought of the boy, no doubt dead now on the rooftop. I wondered if he had parents around to grieve for him, people who would mourn his death. And that’s the last thing I remember.
CHAPTER ONE
Kate was pulling faces into the camera when the call came in to tell her casualties were en route. She turned around to face the opposite direction, shielding her son from the images of people who had been running behind her.
‘Mummy has to go now, sweet pea, but I will call you back as soon as I can, yeah? Remind Dad to take you to football practice after school, okay?’ Her son rolled his eyes.
‘He never checks the calendar Mum, you know that. When are you coming home?’ Trevor tapped her on the arm, waving to her son’s image on the phone screen.
‘Hey Jamie, good luck at practice! Kate, we have to go,’ he said, frowning in apology. From the look on her colleague’s face, it was bad. She blew a kiss at her son. Jamie rolled his eyes but blew one back.
‘I am eight Mum, when I’m nine there are no more kisses, okay? It’s well embarrassing!’
Kate laughed. ‘No deal kiddo. I will be wanting kisses when you are all grown up. I have to go, see you soon. Love you.’
Jamie smiled weakly. She knew that this was hard for him too, but she couldn’t miss the opportunity. ‘Love you too Mummy,’ he said, and his face disappeared from view as the call ended. She knew he would understand when he was older. She hoped that he would be proud that his mother went out there, did something with her life; that he would remember that instead of the times she worked late, went away, was an absent parent. Mothers were a different breed to fathers. Fathers could have it all, but mothers were judged no matter what they did. She loved Jamie, but when she stood there in a messy house, with leaking breasts and a screaming newborn, she knew it would never be enough. He was her world, but she still wanted the moon and the stars. Men could have that and no one batted an eyelid. A woman wanted to do the same? Judgement would follow. She wanted Jamie to grow up in a world where that particular glass ceiling was gone, replaced by open sky. If she could help smash it, all the better. She would make it up to him when she got back.
Kate threw the phone into her bag, grabbed her scrubs after throwing her clothes onto her cot bed and got herself ready in record time. Grabbing her kit, she raced to follow Trevor to the hospital tent nearby. She covered her eyes as best she could from the dust that the incoming helicopter kicked up in the sandy dirt that their medical camp was perched on.
Doing a three-month stint with the Red Cross as a trauma surgeon was not for the faint-hearted, but Kate Harper loved every bloody minute of it. She had two weeks left, and although she missed her boy dearly, she knew that going home to her usual hospital job would be an adjustment. Not as much as it would be going home to Neil, her husband of seven years. She had to admit to herself, the distance between them lately mounted up to more than miles, and she didn’t quite know what to do about it. The thought of seeing him again filled her with anxiety. She knew that this trip had changed something between them, it had stretched the elastic of their relationship thin. She wasn’t sure it could spring back this time. Did she even want it to?
Being here was a very different kind of working away. Their phone calls were always snatched seconds. When she did get time to call, the signal often dropped, leaving them to play frustrated phone tag with each other. When he was away for work at conferences, they could chat leisurely. Him from his safe snug hotel room at the side of some motorway. Her from their bed, with their son sleeping soundly nearby. Their conversations consisted of errands to run, Jamie’s school day, their work days. The logistics of their married life together. Here, the calls were clipped, short. Checking in. Are you and Jamie okay? Is it bad there? She couldn’t talk about her day. What would she tell him, about the lives she saved? The ones she lost? She didn’t want to think about them, let alone try to form words, to explain them to a man who worked in a safe office all day, watching the clock for meeting times, not for giving time of death. It narrowed their conversations. She couldn’t help but feel mad if he moaned about his day, about things that Kate had already realised didn’t matter in the grand scheme. Neil got mad that she was so closed off and cagey about her life there. Other times she could feel the resentment in his voice, as though she were away on a girly holiday and he had been left holding the pre-teen. They could fill a book with everything they couldn’t say. She couldn’t remember the last time she had told him she loved him. She pushed it to the back of her mind, she had to work now. Some puzzles were easier to solve than others. Long distance relationships weren’t easy. They both knew that, but it wasn’t forever.
The chopper landed, the metal glinting in the early morning scorch of the sun. Kate grabbed her hair, pulling it tighter into her ponytail, and raced to meet the stretcher. She snapped a pair of gloves on as she ran, though she wasn’t sure how sterile they would be given the sand flying around. Her colleagues at home would balk at some of the makeshift operations set up in these tents. The medicine was the key though, patching people up, getting them home. The rest was done as best they could under the circumstances. It wasn’t all pretty and clean here. In this environment, fighting death was bloody, messy and fast. Split second decisions were crucial.
‘What do we have?’ she asked the army medic pulling the patient out on the gurney, keeping his head dipped below the spinning chopper blades.
‘One dead in the field, two injured. This one is Captain Thomas Cooper, his unit was ambushed. Multiple injuries, IED, left leg. Flatlined twice on the way here, his vitals are shot. He has shrapnel injuries to his leg and torso, he hasn’t been conscious since impact.’ The medic glanced across at her. ‘We need to move fast.’ Kate nodded, running alongside the trolley as they raced for the trauma tent.
‘What meds has he had?’
‘We started him on a course of strong antibiotics and 10mg of morphine. We had no time for anything else, we had to get him out of there.’
It didn’t look good. Cooper’s eyes fluttered, and Kate noticed what a beautiful shade of green they were, the contrast made all the starker against his deathly pale skin and blood splattered face. They raced into the tent, transferring him from the stretcher to one of the hospital treatment tables. He never made a murmur. Kate grabbed a pair of scissors from her kit and cut away the remnants of his trousers, showing torn black boxers underneath. His left leg was a bloody mess. They had to stop the bleeding, or he would lose his life too. Looki
ng at his right leg, she saw shrapnel protruding from his bloody wounds. These were comparatively superficial wounds; had he not been running flat out, she surmised that both legs would have hit the homemade bomb and been in the same state. The only reason this soldier had any leg at all was the position of his running body as the blast hit. She got to work, barking out orders to the staff running around the bed next to her. The whole tent was a hive of activity, and Kate blocked the noises out. On her first week here, she had been useless. She was no stranger to traumatic injuries, but the relative silence of the wards and operating rooms back home was a world apart from the sounds that surrounded her on a daily basis now. Strapping grown men, screaming, calling for their mothers, their wives, their gods, helicopters and booming sounds of bombs nearby, gunfire in the distance. All of these sounds had taken some adjustment, but now she tuned them out, was able to concentrate on what her colleagues were saying, the heart sounds she listened to in damaged chests, the gurgles and moans from the bodies she tended to. Kate ran over to Trevor.
‘The Captain’s not looking good. We need to stop the bleeders in his chest and right leg too. He’s lost a lot of blood.’
Trevor nodded, working on another patient as he listened to his colleague and one-time student.
‘You have this Kate.’ As she turned to run back, he shouted after her.
‘Kate, save him if you can. He saved two others in the field, his troop only made it out because of his actions. Only one died, and he will be angry enough about that when he comes to. We owe it to him.’
Kate ignored the slab of thick tension that nestled in her throat. ‘Roger that.’
‘They used a kid as a human shield Kate, the sniper had to take them both out to save our men. An innocent kid. No one else gets to die today.’ Kate ran back to Cooper. She thought of her earlier phone call with her son. Worrying about him missing football practice, whether he had eaten breakfast. A world away from being used as a weapon in a war he didn’t cause or belong in. A mother had lost her child today.