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CHAPTER ONE

WELCOME TO CROCODILE CREEK!

The writing was gold on green, very patriotic, but what was a woman who’d grown up in a penthouse in inner city Melbourne, and to whom wildlife was a friend’s pet galah, doing in a place called Crocodile Creek?

She’d overreacted.

Again!

Though flinging her engagement ring at Lindy hadn’t really been overreacting—it had been a necessary release of tension to avoid killing either her erstwhile best friend or her stunned and now ex-fiancé, Daniel.

Overwhelmed by the sign telling her she’d finally reached her destination, Kate pulled the car over onto the grass verge and stared at the name of the town, heart thudding erratically at the magnitude of what she’d done, and with apprehension of what might lie ahead.

Could this unlikely place with the corny name—Crocodile Creek, as if!—possibly provide the answers she so desperately needed to rebuild her life?

She then considered the implications of the town’s name again. Nah! Surely nobody would build a town on a creek that actually had crocodiles in it.

But she glanced behind her towards what looked like, well, more like a river than a creek—and, just in case, put the car into gear again and drove on.

Up here in North Queensland anything might be possible.

‘Go through the town, over the bridge, past the hospital to a big house on a bluff.’

The directions the director of nursing had given on the phone last night had been clear enough. The road led through the town and over another rather rickety bridge. Looking out her side window, Kate was tempted to stop again, for there, virtually in the middle of the town, was a sandy beach, lapped by lazy waves that frilled the edge of a blue-green sea. Hot and sticky from this final day of a five-day drive, she looked with longing at the water, but someone called Hamish was expecting her at the house.

The house!

Could that be it?

The one perched on the bluff at the southern end of this magical cove?

As a child she’d dreamed of living in a house by the sea, a longing frustrated rather than satisfied by holidays at the beach.

Excited now, she drove on. Yes, that was definitely a hospital on her right. Low set and relatively modern, it was surrounded by palms and bright-leafed plants, but still had the usual signs to Emergency, Admittance and parking areas.

Past the hospital she went, to the house on the hill—by the sea—parked the car in a small paved area to one side, unloaded her suitcase and climbed the steps to the wide veranda.

The front door was open, but she tapped on it anyway, then called out a tentative hello before venturing slowly down the wide hall that seemed to lead right through the middle of the old building.

‘Have you any idea how difficult it is to organise a rodeo?’

The big man appeared at the far end of the hall, waving the handset of the phone as he spoke. A soft Scottish accent spun the question from bizarre to fantasy and when he added, ‘You’ll be Kate, then?’ in that intriguing voice, Kate smiled for the first time in about six months.

Well, maybe not quite six months.

‘I will be, then,’ she said, dropping her suitcase and coming towards him with her hand held out. ‘Kate Winship. When I phoned last night the DON said Hamish would show me around the house, so you’ll be Hamish?’

His large firm hand engulfed hers and the voice said, ‘Hamish McGregor,’ but something apart from the accent made Kate look up—into eyes so dark a blue they looked almost black, here in the shadowy hall of the big old house she’d been told was called ‘the doctors’ house’.

She removed her hand from his and backed away. One step. Two. Then she realised she must look stupid and backed far enough to turn her panicky retreat into a suitcase retrieval.

‘I’ll take that.’

He only needed one long stride, lifting it from her unresisting fingers.

‘We’ve put you in here. This was Mike’s room, but he and—Well, you’ll get to know everyone soon enough. Suffice it to say there’re more people sharing rooms these days than there used to be, which is why we’ve room for some of the nursing staff while the nurses’ quarters are renovated.’

He turned a teasing smile on Kate.

‘Fair warning, Nurse Winship. There’s been an epidemic of love racing through Crocodile Creek these past few weeks, so watch how you go.’

‘Love! That’s the last thing I’ll catch,’ she assured him. ‘I’m immunised, inoculated and vaccinated. The love bug won’t bite me.’

He set her suitcase on the bed and turned to look at her, dark eyebrows rising to meet brown-black hair that flopped in a heavy clump over his forehead. The eyebrows were asking questions, friendly questions, but there was no way she was going to answer them. The hurting was too new—too confusing—too all-encompassing. She had to learn to cope with it herself before she could share it with anyone—if she could ever share it.

But he was still watching her.

Waiting …

Diversion time.

‘Why are you organising a rodeo?’

His smile returned, softening his rather austere features, parting lips to reveal strong white teeth.

All the better to eat you with, Kate reminded herself as a niggle of something she didn’t want to feel stirred inside her.

‘It’s for the swimming pool.’

‘Of course—a swimming pool for bulls and bucking horses.’

A deep, rich chuckle accompanied the smile this time. Had she not been immune …

‘We’re raising funds for a swimming pool at Wygera, an aboriginal community about fifty miles inland. The kids are bored to death—literally to death in some cases—sniffing petrol, chroming, drag racing, killing themselves for excitement.’

The smile had faded and his now sombre tone told her he’d experienced the anger and frustration medical staff inevitably felt at the senseless loss of young lives.

‘And when’s this rodeo?’

‘Weekend after next. That’s why the house is deserted. Whoever’s off duty is out at Wygera, organising things there—not so much for the rodeo as for the competition for a design for the swimming pool. Entries have to be in by today and the staff available are out there registering them and sorting them into categories. All the locals are involved. I’m on call for the emergency service. Did you know we have both a plane and a helicopter based—?’

The phone interrupted his explanation, and as he walked out of the room to speak to the caller, Kate opened her suitcase and stared at the contents neatly packed inside. But her mind wasn’t seeing T-shirts and underwear, it was seeing young indigenous Australians, so bored they killed themselves with paint or petrol fumes.

You’re here to trace your mother’s life, not save the world. But the image remained until Hamish materialised in the doorway.

‘Look,’ he said, brushing the rebellious hair back from his forehead. ‘I hate to ask this when you’ve just arrived, but would you mind doing an emergency flight with me? There are fifteen kids from a birthday party throwing up over at the hospital so the staff there have their hands full.’

Kate closed her suitcase.

‘Take me to your aircraft,’ she said.

‘When you’ve put something sensible on your feet. Nice as purple flowery sandals might be, they won’t give much protection to your ankles if we have to be lowered to the patient.’

‘Are you criticising my footwear?’ she said lightly, embarrassed that he’d even noticed what she was wearing on her feet. Embarrassed by the frivolous flowers.

She opened her case again and dug into the bottom of it to find her sensible walking boots. The rest of her outfit was eminently practical. Chocolate brown calf-length pants, and a paler brown T-shirt with just one purple flower decorating the shoulder. But a woman couldn’t be sensible right down to her toes—especially not when these delicious sandals had called to her from a shop window in Townsville the day before.

Pulling off the sandals, she sat down on the bed to put on her boots, uncomfortably aware that Hamish hadn’t answered her.

Uncomfortably aware of Hamish.

‘You don’t have to wait—just tell me where to go. Is it to the airport? I passed that on the way in.’

‘Regular clinic flights leave from the airport. And retrievals leave from there if the aircraft is being used. But today it’s the chopper.’

He didn’t move from the doorway and Kate was pleased when she finally had her boots laced tightly and was ready to leave.

She followed him through the house, out the back door and into a beautiful, scented garden. She glanced around, trying to identify the source of the perfume that lingered in the air, but Hamish was striding on, unaffected by the beauty. Too used to it, she guessed.

‘We’ve a helipad behind the hospital to save double transferring of patients,’ Hamish explained. ‘The service has two helicopter pilots and one of them, Mike Poulos, is also a paramedic, so we can do rescue flights with just him and a doctor, but when he’s off duty and Rex is flying, we take two medical staff.’

‘Is it a traffic accident?’ Kate was glad she’d been running every morning. Keeping up with Hamish’s long strides meant she had to trot along beside him.

‘Apparently not.’

It was such a strange response she glanced towards the man who’d made it and saw him frowning at his thoughts.

‘It was a weird call and, now I think about it, maybe you shouldn’t come,’ he added.

‘I’m coming. Weird what way? Domestic situation?’

‘No, just weird. The caller said there was an injured man in Cabbage Palm Gorge and gave a GPS reading. You know about satellite global positioning systems?’

‘I’ve heard of it but, generally speaking, street names are more useful in Melbourne. Corner of Collins and Swanson kind of thing.’

A glimmer of a smile chased the worry from his face, but not for long.

‘Because it’s a gorge, we might have to be lowered from the chopper.’

‘Been there and done that, though not, admittedly, into a gorge. But I have been lowered onto an oil-rig in Bass Strait in a gale, and that’s not a lot of fun, believe me.’

They’d reached the helicopter, and the conversation stopped while Hamish introduced Rex, a middle-aged man with a bald head and luxuriant moustache, then they clambered into the overalls he handed them.

‘It’s three-quarters of an hour to the head of the gorge, but until we’re over it and get the right GPS reading, we won’t know where the bloke is. I can’t land anywhere in the gorge itself, and going down on the winch without a landing spot marked isn’t an option in that country—too thickly treed. So I’ll land where I can at the top of the gorge and you’ll have to abseil down.’

Rex was talking to Hamish, but glancing warily at Kate from time to time.

‘That’s fine,’ she assured him before Hamish could answer. ‘I’m qualified for that and did a winch-refresher weekend only a month or so ago.’

Taken because she’d thought she’d be going back to the emergency department at St Stephen’s and on roster for rescue missions …

‘We’ll see,’ Hamish objected. ‘I think I should go down first to find the patient. If he’s mobile, we won’t need two people.’

‘No go, Doc!’ Rex told him, hustling them into the cabin, handing Kate some headphones then checking she’d found her seat belt. ‘It’ll be dusk by the time we get there and, though it’s not as deep as Carnarvon or Cobbold Gorge, Cabbage Palm’s no picnic. Even if you find a suitable place to lift him from, I won’t be able to do it tonight. And RRS rules say two staff for overnighters.’

RRS—Remote Rescue Service, Kate worked out. She hadn’t realised when she’d asked the agency for a job at Crocodile Creek that it had such wide-ranging services. She glanced at the man with whom she was about to spend the night. He was frowning again.

‘Do you suffer some kind of knight errantry towards women, that you’re looking so grim?’

Because he wasn’t yet wearing his headphones, she had to yell the question above the noise of the engines. He turned towards her and shrugged, but didn’t reply. Which was fine by her. Helicopters weren’t the best places for casual conversation.

They lifted off the ground and Kate wriggled around so she could see out the window. The hospital was cradled by the curve of a creek—no doubt called Crocodile—to the west, but to the east there must be a view of the blue waters of the cove. She could see the doctors house on the bluff overlooking the cove, then the stretch of sand and water and another bluff on the northern end, on which perched a sprawling, white-painted building set in lush tropical gardens.

Beyond the creek, on the landward side, was a reasonably sized town, a cluster of larger buildings lining the main road. She’d driven past them earlier, noticing a pub, a grocery store and a hairdressing salon.

The helicopter swung away, and now all Kate could see were the slopes of hills, many of them covered with banana plantations, while beyond them rainforest-clad mountains rose up to meet the sky.

‘It’s cattle country once we’re over the mountains.’

She turned to Hamish and nodded acceptance of his statement, soon seeing for herself the open stretches of tree-studded plains. Rex seemed to be following what appeared to be a river, with more closely packed trees marking its meandering course. Then more hills appeared, rugged, rocky sentinels rising sheer from the plains, the setting sun catching their cliffs and turning them ruby red and scarlet.

So this was what people talked about when they used phrases like ‘red centre’ to describe Australia. Kate pressed her face to the window to get a better view.

‘You’ll be seeing it firsthand before long,’ Hamish reminded her, and, right on cue, the helicopter began to descend. It took another twenty minutes but eventually Rex found somewhere he could safely set down. He turned off the engine and, with the rotor blades slowing, he climbed back into the cabin and began to unstrap the equipment they would need.

‘I’ll send you down first, Doc, then the gear, then you, Sister Winship.’

‘Kate, please,’ Kate protested, but Rex just shook his head.

‘Rex is an old-fashioned gentleman. He calls all the women by their proper titles,’ Hamish told her. ‘Tried to call me Dr McGregor for the first few months I was here, but I kept thinking he must be talking to my father and didn’t answer, so he finally gave it up.’

Hamish was checking the equipment bags as he spoke. Once satisfied that each contained what it should, he’d lower it out of the helicopter. Rex set up a belay rope, using one of the helicopter’s skids as the anchor point, and Kate was reassured by the professionalism of both men.

‘You’ve got the radio but once I leave the top of the gorge you won’t be able to contact me until I’m back overhead in the morning. Use the hand-held GPS to find the patient. When it’s light, if you can see a space—maybe near the waterhole—that’s clear enough for me to do a stretcher lift, you can radio me the position.’ Rex was looking anxiously at Hamish, obviously unhappy that he had to abandon the two of them. ‘I’ll fly over to Wetherby Downs for the night, refuel and be in the air again at first light. Back here soon after six.’

‘We’ll be OK,’ Hamish assured him, handing an abseiling harness to Kate, then fastening himself into a similar one. He followed this up with a helmet, complete with headlamp. ‘Kate, you’re sure you’re happy about this? You could stay with Rex. It wouldn’t be the first time we’ve broken RRS rules in an emergency.’

‘Not on my first day,’ Kate joked, hiding a tremor of trepidation. The gorge wasn’t all that deep, and dropping down the cliff-face would be simple, but the sun had already left the bottom of the cleft and the shadowy gloom beneath them seemed … unwelcoming somehow.

She watched Hamish disappear, and when he gave the signal helped Rex haul the reinforced rope back up. They hooked the two backpacks, one with medical gear and the other with the stretcher and stabilising equipment, onto the rope, then added another which, Rex explained, held emergency rations.

‘There’s a little gas stove so you’ll be able to have a hot cuppa later tonight,’ he said. ‘No fires, though, it’s a national park.’

Kate nodded, though she was certain park rangers would forgive a small fire should it be needed for warmth or survival.

She watched as Rex lowered the rope. Hamish would undo the gear, then send the rope back up, and it would be her turn.

Strong arms caught and steadied her as she found her feet, then Hamish unclipped her harness and signalled to Rex he could haul it back up. But the pilot was obviously anxious for he repeated all his warnings and instructions about contact before Hamish finally signed off.

He reached down and swung one of the backpacks onto his shoulders, then lifted the other one.

‘That’s mine,’ Kate told him. ‘If you want to be gallant, take the smaller bag.’

He grumbled to himself, but held the medical equipment pack up for her so she could slip her arms into the straps.

‘We’ve a way to walk,’ he warned, and Kate grinned at him.

‘My legs may not be as long as yours, but they’ll get me anywhere we need to go, so lead on.’

He muttered something that sounded like ‘damned independent women,’ then turned his attention to the GPS, marking their current position as Landmark One, then keying in the position of the injured man.

‘It’s about eight hundred yards in that direction,’ he said, showing Kate the route map that had come up on the small screen.

They set off, picking their way through the wide-leafed palms that gave the gorge its name, clambering over the rocks littering the banks of the narrow creek that had cut through the sandstone over millions of years to form the deep but narrow valley. The creek was dry now, at the end of winter, but, come the wet season in late October, and it would roar to life, marks on the cliffs showing how high it could rise.

Darkness was falling swiftly, but they’d left the creek-bank and were walking on more stable ground, the light from their torches picking out any traps for their feet.

‘It shouldn’t be far now,’ Hamish told her. ‘I’ll try a “coo-ee.”’

The thought of a Scot using the Australian bush call made Kate smile, but Hamish’s ‘coo-ee’ was loud and strong, echoing back to them off the cliffs. Then they heard it, faint but clear, definitely a reply.

‘Well, at least he’s conscious,’ Hamish said, reaching back to take Kate’s hand to guide her in the right direction—hurrying now they knew they were close to their patient.

The man was lying propped against the base of the cliffs, an overhang above him forming a shallow, open cave. A very young man, haggard with pain, trying hard to hold back tears he no doubt felt were unmanly.

‘Digger said he’d let someone know, but I thought he was just saying it to make himself feel better about leaving me,’ the lad whispered, his voice choking and breaking on the words.

‘Well, he did the job and here we are,’ Hamish told him. ‘One doctor and one nurse, all present and correct. I’m Hamish and this is Kate, who’d barely set foot in Crocodile Creek when we whisked her off on this adventure.’

‘Crocodile Creek? You’re from Crocodile Creek?’

He sounded panicky and Kate knelt beside him and took his hand, feeling heat beneath his dry skin.

‘We’re the Remote Rescue Service,’ she said gently. ‘And now you know us, who are you and what have you done to yourself?’

She brushed her free hand against his cheek, confirming her first impression of a fever, then rested it on his chest, unobtrusively counting his respiratory rate. Twenty-five. Far too fast. She’d get him onto oxygen while Hamish completed his assessment.

The Scottish doctor was already kneeling on the other side of their patient, taking his pulse with one hand while the other released the clasps on the backpack. Kate swung hers to the ground and moved so her light swept over the patient’s body, picking up a rough, blood-stained bandage around the young man’s right thigh.

‘There’s a bullet in my leg,’ he said, and the phrasing of the answer made Hamish frown, although he didn’t question how or why, simply repeating part of Kate’s question.

‘And your name?’

The lad hesitated for another few seconds then finally said, ‘Jack. My name’s Jack.’

He was radiating tension that Kate guessed was more to do with his circumstances than his condition, although he seemed very weak. But if his tension arose from being abandoned, injured, in the middle of nowhere, surely their arrival should have brought relief.

And the name? Had he opted for Jack as a common enough name or was he really a Jack? Kate didn’t know, but she did know it didn’t matter. Jack he would be while they tended him, and part of tending him would be getting him to relax.

Hamish was doing his best, chatting as he ran his hands over Jack’s head and neck, asking him questions all the time, satisfying himself there were no other wounds and no reason to suspect internal damage. Where was the pain? Could he feel this? This? Had he come off his horse? Off a bike? Hit his head at all?

Jack’s responses were guarded, and occasionally confused, but, no, he hadn’t fallen, he’d stayed right on his bike. It was a four-wheeler.

And where was the bike?

He looked vaguely around, then shook his head, as if uncertain where a four-wheeler bike might have disappeared to.

The smell hit Kate as she fitted a mask and tube to the small oxygen bottle she’d taken from her backpack. She looked up to see Hamish unwinding the bandage from Jack’s leg. Necrotic tissue—no wonder the boy was feverish and looked so haggard.

‘How long since it happened?’

Jack shrugged.

‘Yesterday, I think. Or maybe the day before. I’ve been feeling pretty sick—went to sleep. Didn’t wake up until Digger moved me here this morning.’

‘Where’s Digger now?’ Kate asked, holding the oxygen mask away from his face so he could answer.

‘Dunno.’

Hamish raised his eyebrows at Kate, but didn’t comment, saying instead, ‘His pulse is racing. He needs fluid fast. I don’t want to do a cut-down here, so we’ll run it into both arms. If you open the smaller pack you’ll find a lamp. Set it up first then in your pack there’ll be all we need for fluid resuscitation—16g cannulae and infusers for rapid delivery. You’ll see the crystalloid solutions clearly marked.’

Kate found the battery-operated lamp and turned it on, a bright fluorescent light pushing back the shadowy evening. Now it was easy to see what they had—sterile packs of cannulas and catheters, bags of fluid, battery-operated fluid warmers, boxes of drugs.

‘Good luck,’ she said to Hamish as she handed him a venipuncture kit. ‘We’re going to get some fluid flowing into you,’ she added to Jack, as she found the fluid Hamish wanted and began to warm the first bag. ‘And that means inserting a hollow needle into one of your veins. But because you’re pretty dehydrated, your veins will have gone flat so it won’t be an easy job. I’m betting Hamish will need at least two goes to get it in.’

‘I’ll have you know, Sister Winship, I’m known as One-Go McGregor,’ Hamish said huffily, taking the tourniquet Kate passed him and winding it around Jack’s upper arm, hoping to raise a vein in the back of his hand or his wrist.

The needle slipped in. ‘See, told you!’ Hamish turned triumphantly to Jack. ‘Aren’t you glad you didn’t bet?’

Kate had tubing and a bag of fluid ready, and she turned her light onto the cliff-face behind their patient in search of small ledges where they could place the bags.

They changed places, Kate starting the fluid flowing into Jack’s vein, then setting the bag so it would continue to gravity feed through the tube. And all the time she talked to him—not about how he’d come to have a bullet in his leg, but about what she was doing, and how it would help.

‘Once Hamish has you hooked up on that side, we can start pain relief and antibiotics. It’s the infection from your wound that’s making you feel so lousy.’

‘Actually,’ Hamish said mildly, ‘getting shot in the first place would make me feel pretty lousy.’

Jack gave a snort of laughter, and relief flowed through Kate. Surely if he could laugh he’d be OK. But he was very weak and the wound, now she could see it, was a mess. A deeply scored indentation running from halfway down his thigh towards his hip, then disappearing into a puckered, blue-rimmed hole. Dried blood on the bandages suggested it had bled freely—but not freely enough to keep infection at bay.

Hamish set the second bag of fluid on the ledge behind Jack, then probed through the contents of the backpack.

‘I’ll get some antibiotics into you with that fluid, then I want to check your distal pulses and test sensation in your foot and lower leg. Kate, would you watch for renewed bleeding from the wound? We know you’ve been lucky, Jack, in that the bullet didn’t go into your femoral artery. And how do we know that?’

Hamish had found what he wanted—a small bag of fluid Kate recognised as IV antibiotic medication diluted with saline. He spiked it with an IV administration set, connected it to a second port in the IV line he had running, then placed the small bag on the ledge so the drug could be administered simultaneously with the fluid.

‘Because you’d have bled to death by now—that’s how we know the bullet didn’t hit your artery,’ he said cheerfully. ‘But it might have damaged a nerve, which is why I’m going to prick your foot, or the velocity of the bullet might have chipped a bone and sent that as a secondary missile to squeeze against the artery, which is why I’m going to check to see if blood is still flowing in your foot.’

Kate watched Jack’s face and saw that Hamish’s matter-of-fact approach was just what the young man needed. In fact, he was interested enough to ask, ‘Why does Kate have to watch for bleeding?’

‘Good question! Go to the top of the class.’ Hamish smiled at him. ‘Kate has to watch because you’ll have damaged some blood vessels, but smaller veins and capillaries have the ability to close themselves off if that happens. Problem is, once we build up your fluid levels, they might get all excited and open up again—bleeding all over the place.’

‘Ouch!’

Jack jerked his leg, and the bleeding Kate was watching for began right on cue.

‘Well, you’ve feeling in your toes and a weak but palpable pulse in your ankle, so I’d say you’ve been a very lucky young man. Unfortunately, that luck’s about to change. I need to clean up that wound and, although I’ll anaesthetise the area around it with a local, it won’t be comfortable. Kate, how about you shift over to Jack’s other side and talk to him while I work? Can you talk and pass instruments and dressings?’

Kate stared at the man who was taking this situation so calmly, chatting away to Jack as if they were sharing space on a city bus, not a cave at the bottom of a gorge at nightfall, while someone with a gun lurked somewhere in the darkness.

‘Well?’

Hamish smiled at her and she shook her head, then realised he might think she was answering his question.

‘Of course I can talk and pass things,’ she said, immediately regretting the assurance when his smile broadened and he threw a conspiratorial wink at Jack.

‘I thought so,’ he gloated. ‘Most women can talk and do other things, can’t they, mate?’