37
Polina
Waiting is the one thing medical training never actually prepares you for.
We pulled into position at 8:00 in the morning, three kilometers out from the Morozov compound, and the two nurses from Dr. Orlov’s clinic had the folding tables up and the supply cases open before I finished pulling on my gloves. I organized the triage station the way I always organize a trauma bay, which is to say by order of what I’ll need first when someone comes through the door bleeding. Chest seals on the left. IV lines coiled and ready. Suture kits stacked by size. The portable defibrillator charged and within arm’s reach.
Katya helped without being asked. Sasha poured cups of terrible coffee from a thermos and started handing them out like candy.
Nobody pretended we were anywhere other than where we were.
I put my phone on the corner of the table with the screen facing up. The radio sits on a separate table to my right, manned by oneof Boris’s men, a compact, quiet operative named Stepan who has spent the last twenty minutes adjusting frequencies.
“Sit down,” Katya orders from the folding chair behind me.
“I’m checking the supply inventory.”
“You’ve checked it twice.”
“I’m checking it a third time.”
She doesn’t argue. She gets up and refills her coffee instead, and when she comes back, she positions her chair two feet closer to mine without commenting on it. Sasha pulls her knees up to her chest on the crate she claimed as a seat and wraps both hands around her cup, and the three of us settle into the particular quiet of women who know exactly what’s happening three kilometers away and have agreed, without saying so, not to fill the space with noise that won’t help anyone.
The radio cuts to life at 9:23.
“Perimeter breached,” Boris reports through the radio. “Alpha team is in position. Some resistance at the north gate, nothing the team can’t handle.”
I breathe in through my nose and out through my mouth.
A second check-in comes at 9:51. “Resistance heavier than expected on the east side. Two Kozlov injuries, neither critical. We’re pushing through.”
Katya’s hand finds the arm of my chair. I pretend not to notice.
“They’re doing fine,” Sasha assures us both.
“I know,” I reply, which is not the same thing as believing it.
The radio goes quiet for seventeen minutes. I know it’s seventeen minutes because I check the clock on my phone at 9:54 and again at 10:11, and the gap between the two numbers is something I feel in the back of my skull.
Sasha gets up and stretches. One of the nurses, a young woman named Vera who introduced herself this morning with the handshake of someone who wanted to make a good impression during a crisis, refills the water basin without being asked. The other nurse, an older man named Gerasim who has clearly done field work before and has the quiet competence to prove it, does a secondary check on the blood pressure cuffs.
At 11:13, a different voice comes through. Ruslan.
“Lev’s team is inside the main building. Second floor. We’ve got eyes on two confirmed guards down in the east corridor.”
I press two fingers to the inside of my wrist without thinking about it, checking my own pulse the way I’d check a patient’s, because apparently I’ve forgotten how to regulate my own body like a normal person.
“That’s good,” Katya comments. “That means they’re through the hard part.”
I nod along, but really, confirmation just means Lev is inside his father’s walls. I’ve thought about this moment all morning, trying to decide whether it would feel different when it actually arrived. It does, and not in the way I expected. There’s no relief in it. Knowing exactly where he is and having no ability to reach him is worse than not knowing, because now I have something specific to be afraid of.
A wounded Kozlov soldier arrives at 11:29, half-carried by a younger man who looks barely twenty and is doing an admirablejob of pretending he isn’t scared. The injured man took a round to the outer thigh, clean entry and exit, no arterial involvement from what I can see through the field dressing someone applied before they got to me.
“Sit him down,” I tell the young one, and he does.
The work takes over the way it always does. I strip the field dressing, irrigate the wound, check the tissue for damage I can’t see from the surface, and find none. My hands move through the motions of suturing with the muscle memory of ten years while my ears stay on the radio. Boris checks in at 11:34. Operation ongoing. No specifics.
“You doing okay?” I ask my patient, whose name I learn is Byron and who is twenty-six years old and clearly determined not to look weak in front of a woman.
