The three little boys saluted me at exactly the same time.

The flight lasted eight agonizing minutes. The helicopter bucked and dropped like a stone in the violent downdrafts, but I barely noticed. My hands were busy checking the seals on the chest decompression needles, organizing the rapid-infusion lines, and preparing doses of ketamine and tranexamic acid.

Beside me, Whitmore had his eyes shut tight, his lips moving in silent prayer.

"Open your eyes, Garrett!" I shouted over the deafening whine of the twin turbines.

He opened them, his face green.

"When we hit the ground, you don't look at the chaos," I told him, leaning close so he could hear me. "You look at the airway. You look at the bleeding. If a man is screaming, he’s breathing; find the one who is quiet. That’s who needs your hands. Do you hear me?"

Whitmore swallowed hard and nodded. "I hear you."

The Jayhawk banked sharply, its searchlight cutting through the torrential rain to illuminate the disaster zone below.

Hangar 12 had folded like an accordion. The central steel roof trusses had sheared off under the fury of the gale, crushing two maintenance vehicles and collapsing onto a platoon of naval technicians who had been securing equipment. Sparks showered from severed electrical conduits, hissing as they struck pools of standing water.

The helicopter wheels touched down on the tarmac with a bone-jarring thud.

The side door slid open, and the freezing Atlantic wind hit us like a physical wall.

"Move!" I yelled, tossing the first surgical kit into the mud and leaping out into the storm.

We ran under the shelter of the partially collapsed hangar. The scene was pure pandemonium. Base firefighters were using hydraulic spreaders to lift a massive steel girder, while corpsmen knelt in the mud, applying pressure to catastrophic wounds.

"Surgeons on scene!" a petty officer screamed. "Over here! We’ve got an entrapment!"

I sprinted toward the far wall. A young sailor—scarcely nineteen years old—was pinned from the waist down beneath a collapsed steel support beam. His face was gray, his breathing shallow and rapid.

Beside him, a corpsman was pumping an ambu-bag with desperate rhythm. "Crush injury to both lower extremities! His femoral artery on the left is compromised, and the beam shifted two minutes ago! His blood pressure is forty over nothing!"

Whitmore knelt beside me, his hands shaking violently as he looked at the twisted metal and the pool of dark blood expanding into the water around the boy's hips.

"We can't lift the beam," Whitmore stammered, looking around frantically. "If we lift it with the crane, the rest of the roof will collapse! But if we don't lift it, he bleeds out in five minutes!"

"Then we don't lift it," I said, opening the field amputation kit.

Whitmore stared at me in horror. "You can't do a field disarticulation under a live collapse zone! The vibrations alone could drop the entire truss on us!"

"Look at his eyes, Garrett!" I grabbed Whitmore’s collar and forced him to look at the dying boy. "He has three minutes of life left. If we don't take the leg to free him from the pin, he dies right here in the mud. Are you going to let him die because you're scared of the ceiling?"

Whitmore stared at the sailor. The boy’s eyes fluttered, looking up at Whitmore with the same desperate, pleading look that Marcus Miller had shown hours earlier.

Something shifted in Whitmore’s posture. The arrogance was gone. The academic detachment was gone. In their place, the real doctor—the healer buried beneath years of hospital politics—woke up.

"Ketamine," Whitmore said, his voice suddenly dropping into a steady, focused register. "Give him fifty milligrams IV push. Reed, I'll secure the femoral clamp if you cut."

A grim smile touched my lips. "Good man. On my count."

For the next four minutes, the world narrowed down to the beam of a tactical flashlight and the tip of a scalpel. Rain poured through the cracked roof above us, soaking our scrubs, while the wind shrieked through the exposed girders like a dying animal.

Whitmore worked with surprising speed, using a vascular clamp to isolate the severed artery while I freed the crushed limb from the mangled iron. Just as the final clamp locked into place and the corpsmen hauled the boy onto a backboard, a sickening screech of twisting metal echoed through the hangar.

*“LOOK OUT!”* a firefighter screamed.

A secondary support cable, whipped loose by the gale, snapped with the force of a cannon shot, sending a twenty-foot iron crossbeam hurtling down directly toward Whitmore’s head.

I didn't think. Nine years of muscle memory took over in a microsecond.

I lunged forward, throwing my entire weight into Whitmore, tackling him across the wet concrete.

The beam crashed down into the spot where Whitmore had been kneeling a split second before, shattering the concrete into shrapnel. A jagged piece of the twisted truss caught me across my left shoulder and back, driving me hard into the flooded floor.

Darkness flared behind my eyes, followed by a searing, white-hot burst of pain.

"Reed!" Whitmore yelled, scrambling to his knees in the mud. He grabbed my arm, pulling me clear of the shifting rubble. "Reed! Talk to me!"

I coughed, tasting iron and rainwater, but forced myself up onto one elbow.

"The... the boy," I gasped, clutching my shoulder where blood was already soaking through my black thermal. "Did he make it to the bird?"

Whitmore looked back toward the Jayhawk, where the litter was being lifted into the cabin, the sailor’s monitors showing a stabilizing pulse.

Whitmore turned back to me, rain streaming down his face, his eyes shining with absolute reverence.