Why now?
The painfully slow backward movement finally reached a successful turning point. Sam eased her arm free and then pushed it forward, finding she now had plenty of space to move in the desired direction. There was room to get onto all fours after the short squeeze and Sam found herself crawling, like some overgrown infant, with the light from her helmet illuminating the shape ahead of her.
‘How on earth did you fit through that gap, Alex?’
‘Sheer skill,’ he responded easily. ‘I’m just too good.’
‘Huh!’ Sam’s snort was not without an element of affection. Alex Henry might well be the best in their team of elite paramedics but she wasn’t about to encourage any personal trumpet blowing here. ‘I suspect you’re some kind of shape-shifter,’ she told him. ‘You can turn into a snake any time you like.’
Another chuckle. ‘Funny you should say that. My last girlfriend said something rather similar.’
The corner of Sam’s mouth lifted into a private, wry smile. Sonia must have tried too hard to pin Alex down, then. She must have been given the brush-off, probably in the nicest possible way, but women did tend to get rather passionate about staking a claim on Alex Henry.
Hardly surprising given the combination of dark, good looks, a very sharp intelligence, humour and a career that was dramatic enough to make most females go at least a little weak in the knees.
Funny that it had the opposite effect the other way around. The same skills Sam possessed in the way of courage, assertiveness and determination were always enough to scare men away remarkably fast.
‘You guys OK?’ The shout came from well ahead. From one of those strange people who actually did this sort of underground thing as a sport. He was the member of the group who had been left uninjured by the passage collapse and had been able to return to the surface and summon help.
‘We’re fine,’ Alex called back. ‘Minor hold-up in that last stretch.’
‘Yeah. Bit tight, isn’t it? You can see why the other teams need to go the long way with their gear.’
The skills and tools needed to deal with people buried under rock were being brought in by the team of Urban Search and Rescue technicians whose helicopter had landed in this remote part of the west coast of New Zealand’s South Island only minutes after the SERT team’s arrival.
‘You’ve got a bit of deeper water coming up and then the pit’s round the next bend after that.’
‘How deep’s the water?’ Sam tried to sound casual but there was no way she was in the mood for any underground diving.
‘Only a couple of inches. No big deal.’
It felt like a big deal for Sam. The water was running swiftly enough to splash continuously into her face. The volume was enough to make the waterproofing of her overalls inadequate and within seconds the leather gloves she wore felt like concrete mittens. In a few minutes she was going to have to negotiate a tricky climb down a narrow, flexible aluminium ladder that was a permanent fixture on this caving route. Doing it with frozen hands and wet boot soles was not going to be fun.
But who’d ever promised that her chosen profession would always contain elements of pleasure, anyway? And had she ever really enjoyed pushing herself to such limits or had it simply evolved into a way of life? With three older brothers competing for the attention of a father who’d been a legend in the police force, achieving something beyond expectations had been the only way to get noticed.
Sam had been far too young when her mother had died and not being noticed had made for a lonely existence. Maybe the real pleasure to come from testing herself had been in the approval of others and she had merely swapped one tribe of males for another in adulthood.
It was not a pleasant revelation. If the thrill had come from chasing that approval and for some reason that was suddenly no longer enough, then Sam was about to face a major life crisis comparable to the childhood trauma of losing her mother. What did she have to show for her thirty-four years on earth apart from an impressive array of pre-hospital emergency medical skills and a passion for practising them under the most difficult conditions imaginable?
Nothing, that’s what.
It was her life. And for the last five years, since leaving a road-based ambulance job, Sam had lived and breathed SERT. Her friends were her fellow team members and their partners, so her social life revolved around people who shared her passion. Her sport and recreation consisted of training in whatever area of skill was deemed useful and any spare time was taken up with minimal attention to life’s chores in order to gain opportunities to improve her knowledge base.
She was a SERT geek!
Proud of her status as the only female to make the grade. Happy to be one of the boys and eager to hurl herself into whatever dangerous mission she was lucky enough to score on her shifts.
The appreciative whistle from Alex broke the downward spiral of Sam’s thoughts that were trickling beneath what she needed to focus on as she carefully made her way down the ladder. Sadly, it wasn’t her skill in managing to keep the ladder so steady during her descent that he was admiring.
‘Will you look at that?’ he exclaimed. ‘I’m beginning to understand why you guys do this stuff.’
‘Amazing, isn’t it?’ But the agreement from their guide was perfunctory. ‘Come on, we need to go this way.’
Sam had only a few seconds to scan what had impressed Alex so much. The vertical drop from the higher-level tunnel ended in a huge cave festooned with stalactites over a black pool of water where massive stalagmites protruded like islands in an alien seascape. Shadows from her lamp cast shadows that accentuated the eerie scene but there was no time to do any more than register and file away the new experience. Not far into the tunnel leading away from the other side of the pool was where the accident had occurred. One man lay unable to move, thanks to a badly fractured leg. Two other men lay either beyond, or beneath, the rockfall, which had been caused by a minor earth tremor. It was fortunate there was no time to dwell on the possibility of another earthquake.
‘Bruce! How’re you doing, buddy?’
‘Thought you were never coming back, Mike.’
‘Sorry, mate. I had to wait for the chopper to get here so I could show them where you were. This is Alex and that’s Sam. They’re paramedics.’
‘Hope they’re good at shifting rock. My leg can wait.’
‘I’m not so sure about that.’ The beam from Sam’s lamp revealed an ominous pool of blood glistening on the dark rock beneath their patient. She stripped off her leather gloves and flexed her fingers repeatedly, but they were still too cold not to fumble with the zip on the pack Alex had brought with them.
‘I heard someone calling. I think it was Tim.’
‘Really?’ Mike’s relief was evident. ‘How long ago?’
‘A while back. I dunno. I’ve kind of lost track of time a bit. Arrrgh!’
‘Sorry.’ Sam had cut and pulled away the remnants of protective clothing over Bruce’s leg. Alex ripped open the packaging for a large gauze dressing and emptied a saline sachet to dampen it. He was ready to cover the open wound with the protruding bone on Bruce’s thigh.
‘We’re