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frantic tone was a long way from a soft Southern drawl. “You’re gonna be okay, Jimmy boy!”
    The second soldier’s leg was barely attached, causing blood to gush onto the floor, turning it red.
    When a medic asked the third soldier if he could move his hand, he couldn’t.
    No shit, Sherlock, Shane thought. Since it looked as if it’d been broken in about a hundred pieces.
    Outside the hospital, a series of thuds from insurgent bombs erupted, sounding like massive, backfiring engines. Apparently accustomed to such sounds, and utterly focused on their patients’ wounds, not one of the doctors or nurses bothered to look up.
    The fourth soldier had taken a bullet in the head, but after being quickly stabilized, he and the guys with the bloody leg and broken hand were rushed out of the ER, destined for Balad, the Trauma III Air Force theater hospital sixty miles north of Baghdad.
    Shane had been in Iraq long enough to know no one stayed in this place long. Medical care downrange worked like a conveyor belt. Any wounded soldier injured in Baghdad would probably land here first, with the more serious being coptered out to Balad.
    After Balad, they’d be flown on a C-17 to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center at Ramstein Air Force Base in Germany.
    Then, finally, back home to the United States.
    Those less severely injured were usually sent to a U.S. base in Kuwait for a few weeks’ convalescence. After which they’d return to duty.
    One of the soldiers who’d stormed in with his unit had been triaged and was sitting in a chair, waiting patiently for someone to stitch up a slash down the side of his face. His eyes were open but glazed, and in that thousand-yard stare, Shane could see whatever horror they’d experienced out there beyond the relative safety of the Green Zone.
    The electronic beat of the heart monitor attached to the soldier Kirby was working on suddenly turned into a long single note as he flatlined.
    She shook her head. Briefly closed her eyes, then called the time of death.
    Turning to the soldier’s buddy, who had tears pouring down his cheeks, she touched his arm and said, “I’m sorry.”
    “Thank you for doin’ your best to save him, ma’am,” he choked out.
    From the floor she plucked the dog tags that had been ripped off him and checked the engraving. “Corporal Tyree was Protestant?”
    The soldier nodded. “Yes, ma’am. A Methodist. He’d always go to services whenever we happened to be in some camp when they were bein’ held.”
    “Well, then, I think we should say a prayer together, soldier,” she said, stripping off her latex gloves.
    And as Shane watched, she gently took the grieving young man’s hand in hers, and although he couldn’t quite hear all of what she was saying, he did pick up on her asking that both the corporal’s life and tragic, too-early death would help hasten a much-needed peace and bring the war to an end.
    The leader, who’d been the first off the Hummer, came over for the prayer, as did the rest of the unit. And for those brief couple of moments, silence descended over the ER.
    And then, just like that, the moment of peace was over, and everyone got back to business as usual.
    Except for Kirby, who turned toward Shane. She seemed unsurprised to see him, making him wonder if she’d been aware of his presence all along. Even though he’d always considered himself an expert at compartmentalizing, that impressed the hell out of Shane.
    “Well, isn’t this is a surprise,” she said, coming over to stand a professional three feet from him. “What can I do for you, Captain?” She skimmed a look over him. “You don’t look like a man who needs any more shrapnel pulled out of him.”
    “I’ve managed to stay out of trouble,” he responded.
    She was wearing a boxy blue scrub shirt over BDU cammie trousers she’d tucked into a pair of bloodied combat boots. She wasn’t wearing a bit of makeup, and the dark shadows beneath her eyes told of a lack of