‘Lily,’ he repeated patiently. ‘Cute as a button. Half islander, half French. We all thought she looked like Audrey Hepburn, only curvier. Sexiest thing on two legs. She went through med school, then went home to work on the little island where she’d been raised. Wasn’t that Kapua?’ He paused, sorting old memories. ‘Hey, weren’t you two an item? I was a couple of years above you but I seem to remember… I’m right, aren’t I?’
Ben’s hands stilled. For a moment-just for a moment-a surge of remembered pain washed through him. Lily.
Then he regrouped. ‘We’re talking about seven years ago,’ he snapped. ‘The trivia you keep in that tiny mind of yours…’
‘But Kapua is Lily’s island?’
‘Yeah,’ Ben said, remembering. He’d been so caught up in the urgency of the job that until now he hadn’t thought of the link between Kapua and Lily. But, yes, Kapua was definitely the place Lily called home.
‘Is she still there?’
‘How would I know? I haven’t heard from her for years.’
‘It’d be a joke if she was among the insurgents.’
‘A great joke,’ he said dryly, starting to pack again.
They were moving fast. News had hit that morning of an insurgent attack in Kapua. The islanders needed help, desperately.
Kapua was the biggest of a small group of Pacific islands. Its population was an interracial mix of the original Polynesians and the Spaniards who’d decided to colonise the place centuries ago. There was little sign of that colonisation now. The Spaniards had obviously decided the Polynesian lifestyle suited them much better than their own, and the island’s laid-back lifestyle continued to this day.
But things were changing. Ignored by the rest of the world for centuries, the island had recently been made more interesting to other countries by the discovery of oil. The island’s rulers had shown minimal interest in selling it. To sell the oil could change their lifestyle, but it would leave their descendants without resources when it was finished. The islanders had therefore decided to make the oil last maybe a hundred years or more, and so far they’d sold nothing.
That decision seemed to suit most islanders, but greed did dreadful things. It took few brains to guess that the insurgents who’d stormed the capital would be interested in only one thing-oil money.
‘It’s just as well the island has big friends,’ Sam said, moving on, and Ben nodded. The call for help had been frantic. The insurgents had blasted their way into Kapua’s council compound, and there were reports of deaths and chaos across the island. This wasn’t a political take-over where oil wealth would be shared among the whole population. The opinion of those who knew was that this would be a group with outside backing-backing that could potentially cause instability in the entire Pacific region.
With such destruction-with human loss and chaos-there was little choice for Kapua’s political allies. Troops were therefore flying in immediately. Among them would be Lieutenant Ben Blayden, M.D.
She’s probably forgotten me, he thought grimly. What’s the bet she’ll be a fat island mama by now, with six or seven kids?
That thought made him smile. Domesticity would have made Lily happy. All through her medical training she’d ached to be home.
‘My island’s family to me,’ she’d told him. ‘Come and see what it’s like.’
Not him. He was in too much of a hurry to get where he wanted, and he wanted action. The thought of settling on a remote island and raising children made him shudder.
But Lily…
‘Lily was great,’ he told Sam. ‘She was a good-looking lady.’
‘Look her up when you get there.’
‘Pop in and make a social call during the gunfire?’
‘Maybe it’s not as serious as reported,’ Sam said optimistically. ‘Maybe you can persuade the nasty men to put away their guns, pour margueritas for everyone and go lie on the beach.’
‘As if.’
‘You never know,’ Sam said, yawning. ‘But at least it’ll be action. See if you can find a few bodies that need sewing up. Nice interesting cases. I’ll be there in a flash.’
‘You want to take my place?’
‘After you persuade the boys to put their guns away,’ Sam said, grinning. ‘You’re the front-line doctor. Not me.’
‘I can’t find Benjy.’
Lily was making her way through the crowded hospital, terror making her numb. All around her were people who needed her. The criminals who’d taken over the compound had shot indiscriminately, seeming to relish the destruction they were creating. The death count at the moment stood at twenty but there were scores of injured, scores of people Lily should be caring for right now.
But Benjy…
At first sign of trouble, when Kapua’s finance councillor had stumbled through Lily’s front door that morning, clutching her bloodied arm, Lily had told Benjy to run to Kira’s house.
Kira was Lily’s great-aunt, a loving, gentle lady who was like a grandmother to Benjy. She lived well away from the town centre, in an island-style bure by the beach. Benjy would be safe there, Lily had thought as she’d worked her way through the chaos of that morning.
Then, at midday, an elderly man had stumbled into the hospital, weeping. Kira’s neighbour.
‘Kira,’ the man had wept. ‘Kira.’
Somehow Lily had finished treating an islander she’d been working on. A bullet had penetrated the man’s thigh, causing massive tissue damage. He’d need further surgery but for the moment the bleeding had been controlled. As soon as she’d been able to step away from the table she’d run, to find that Kira’s hut had been burned, to find Kira dead and to find no sign of her son.
She’d stood on the beach and looked at the carnage and felt sick to the stomach. Dear God…
Where was her little boy? Nowhere. By the time she returned to the hospital she was shaking so badly that her chief nurse took control, holding her arms in his broad hands and giving her a gentle shake.
‘What do you mean, you can’t find Benjy? Isn’t he with Kira?’
‘Kira’s dead. Shot in the back, Pieter. That kind, loving old lady. And Benjy’s gone. There’s no one on the beach at all.’ Her breath caught on a sob of terror. ‘Where would he have gone? Why isn’t he here?’ She was close to collapse, and the big islander pushed her into a chair, knelt before her and took both her hands in his.
‘Maybe he’s with Jacques.’
‘I don’t know where Jacques is either. Oh, God, if he’s…’ She buried her face in her hands.
But Pieter was hauling her hands down, meeting her gaze head on. He was the island’s most senior nurse, sixty or so, big and gentle and as patient as any man she’d met. The look of fear in his eyes now made her more terrified than she’d been in her life. If Pieter was scared…
But he had himself more together than she did. ‘So Benjy’s probably with Jacques,’ he told her. ‘Or he’ll be hiding. It’s a good sign, Lily. Benjy’s the most sensible six-year-old I know. If we look for him or for Jacques, it’ll only jeopardise us all. You were crazy to have left the hospital yourself.’
He hesitated then, but they had to face facts. ‘I’m sorry, but you need to block Benjy out, Lily. You’re our only doctor and we need you. Trust Jacques to take care of him. For now Benjy’s on his own and so are we.’
It was dusk as the Chinook carrying Ben hovered over the northern beach, its searchlights illuminating the sweep of sand while they assessed whether it was safe to land.
‘We have the north beach secured,’ they’d been told on a shaky radio connection by a deputy head of council who’d seemed to be having trouble speaking. ‘They don’t seem to be near. And the hospital’s ours. That’s all.’
A problem with an idyllic island existence, thought Ben grimly, was that it left everyone exposed to the nasties of this world. Life in paradise is all very well if everyone feels that way. The majority of islanders hadn’t owned guns. They’d never dreamed of needing them and it had left the way for the few to run riot.