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‘Here.’ Grabbing Nilson’s hand, she pulled it into the soldier’s chest. ‘Plug your finger right...there. Good. Now, don’t move it. Jones, get ready with the anaesthesia. If the procedure is successful, he’s going to start to wake up.’
Slipping her hands around the heart, one on the posterior surface and the other on the anterior, Mattie began to massage from the apex upwards whilst ensuring she kept the heart horizontal. All the while she counted under her breath, trying to achieve optimal beats per minute of around eighty.
And then she felt the heart begin to take over, beating harder, faster. A return to full cardiac output—along with more bleeding.
‘Don’t move your finger.’ She looked grimly at Nilson. ‘We’re going to need to get him back to the field hospital for surgery and a full repair. It’s down to you to keep that hole in his heart plugged until we get there.’
And the moment Operation Strikethrough was over she was going to head back to the UK to see her father. If she could catch him on a good day—though they were rarer now—maybe she could ask him about Kane and see what he had to say.
Because if today had taught her anything, it was that it was true what they said—life really was simply too short.
* * *
‘He’s worse than I last time I was here, Hayd.’ Mattie held onto the kitchen doorframe, her back to her brother as he prepared fresh tea for their father.
‘I know,’ Hayden replied grimly. ‘I wish it hadn’t been so long but...’
It hung there between them, unspoken. Between tours of duty, exercises away and compulsory courses there was no possible way that they could see their father more frequently. It was why they had employed a live-in carer, not just so that they knew he was being looked after but also because it provided him with the company and stimulation he needed. As well as allowing him to remain in his home where everything felt familiar to him. Safe.
The military was the life they had chosen, just as it had been the life that he had chosen. Still, it didn’t entirely diminish the guilt.
‘He keeps thinking I’m Mum.’
‘He keeps thinking I’m his buddy from the Falklands.’ Hayden arched his eyebrows and Mattie laughed, some of her sadness receding for a moment. ‘There’s no point trying to correct him, Mattie. If it gives him some pleasure, why not just leave him?’
‘I know, I just...’ She wrinkled her nose. ‘At least with you, you’re getting all the secret stories he never he told us over the years.’
‘True. Some of them are shocking, even to me. Dammit, we’re out of milk.’
‘Vera will be back in an hour with the shopping. No doubt she’ll bring some in.’
They’d both offered to do it for her, but the older woman had tutted them away and told Mattie that they were here to visit the Brigadier and not to do errands for her. It had surprised them both when she’d also told them that their father usually liked to accompany her to the shops, taking his time to potter up and down the aisles, even if he couldn’t remember what they were doing there.
‘I’ll nip to the corner shop, if you’re okay with Dad?’
‘Of course.’ Pushing herself off the doorframe, Mattie plastered a bright smile on her lips and smoothed her jumper, which was in her mother’s favourite colour. No wonder her father was getting confused.
She strode confidently back into the living room.
‘Hey. Dad, Hayd is just going out for milk for our tea.’
‘Hayden?’ Her father lifted his head from his paper to frown at her. ‘Mary, darling, he’s at university—how can he go to the shop?’
‘It’s Mattie, Dad. Your daughter. Not Mum... Mary.’
‘Mathilda?’ His peered at her harder, before covering smoothly. ‘Of course. I was just miles away. How have you been?’
‘I’ve been well, Dad.’ Mattie smiled, relieved he had recognised her. Sometimes he didn’t realise even when she told him. Soon it wouldn’t matter what she said.
‘Another tour?’
‘There’s a plan for a new army battalion,’ she told him, even though she knew he wouldn’t remember. ‘I was running the medical support arm, seeing if the new strategies would hold up.’
‘I remember testing a new strike plan back in 1992, or was it 1993? In between operational tours.’ He smiled a soft, almost haunting smile. He was sinking back into his memories already. ‘Operation Strongarm, we called it.’
‘This was Operation Strikethrough,’ she told him, trying to pull him back to the present even though she couldn’t have said why. And then another thought hit her. ‘I saw Kane.’
‘Kane?’
