Finished washing and gowning up, Adellich gently ushered Tovah from the room as the nurse finished preparing her unmoving patient for surgery. “It’ll be a few hours at the very least, so why don’t you get out of that uniform and take care of business. I’ll come down and let you know how things went once I’m through here, alright?”

With a last long look at the woman she’d helped rescue, Tovah nodded. “Good luck,” she said, squeezing his arm briefly before turning from the room and closing the door firmly behind her.

“I’ll need it,” Adellich remarked softly, walking over to his patient to begin the lengthy process of trying to save her life.

Tovah traversed the long hallway and entered the command center of the house. Her compatriots greeted the soldier warmly, ushering her into a shower and giving her clean clothing to replace the detested and blood spattered Iraqi uniform she had been forced to don.

Rolling up the sleeves and pant legs of the too-large garments, Tovah walked back into the large second floor room, coming to stand next to an earnest young man who was busily tapping codes into a massive computer terminal housed along the back side of the room. The young man looked up at her, smiling and removing his glasses, which he proceeded to clean on the tail of his shirt. “I’ve sent your information to Command, Ma’am. We’ve just been given orders to bug out in a week. Maybe less if the Iraqis cross into Kuwait sooner than expected.”

Rising, the young officer led his superior over to one of the large windows and pulled back the heavy curtain. Both looked down onto the bustling city streets. Off into the distance, Tovah could see Iraqi soldiers pulling heavy camouflage tarps over huge nests of armaments and military equipment. Tovah smirked as she noted that the soldiers weren’t half as interested in protecting the city and its attendant civilians from the threat of military reprisals. “I’ll bet you’re looking forward to getting out of here,” she remarked softly to the young man at her side.

“Home has never looked so good,” he agreed, closing the curtain and walking back to his post. “I haven’t seen my wife and daughter in almost a year.”

“You realize it’s likely to be just as dangerous there,” Tovah warned, looking over the man’s shoulder at the military strategy mapped out on the large computer monitor.

“Yes. Probably moreso. But I’d rather be with my family when war comes.” He blushed slightly. “There’s just something about looking into my daughter’s eyes that makes me want to fight harder for the freedom of our homeland.”

Tovah smiled warmly and clapped her compatriot on the shoulder. “I understand perfectly.”

Turning away from the young officer, Tovah found an unoccupied desk away from the middle of the action and sat gratefully down in the padded chair, staring into the blank computer monitor, lost in thought. She wondered if she’d ever see her homeland again. She was stuck about as far behind enemy lines as one could get, right on the brink of an all out war. Her thoughts traveled back to when she was a young girl, the only child of a marriage between an Israeli mother and an Egyptian father. Her father had been a soldier in the Egyptian army and his wife and daughter had been his biggest secrets. Growing up, the young girl had revered the impossibly tall man with the thick black hair and laughing brown eyes. She listened to his impressive tales of battles won, her young mind not even comprehending that the enemy her father spoke so proudly of defeating encompassed fully one half of her own heritage. Until she was much older, she never thought to question the fact that her mother seemed so impossibly sad during the telling of these particular tales of glory.

All the young Tovah knew was that she wanted to be a soldier like her father. It mattered not that women were not allowed in the Egyptian military. She’d change those rules when she was old enough. The day that the news came telling his family that her father died during a particularly bloody battle was the saddest of the young girl’s short life. She remembered being woken up in the middle of the night by her mother. She remembered being bundled into heavy clothing and taken down seemingly endless twisted alleyways that comprised the city where she had lived. She remembered her terror as large men with rough hands and rougher voices hurried her into the back of a hot, smelly truck without a word of kindness or explanation. But most of all, she remembered the totally empty look on her mother’s face and how her arms seemed stiff and cold as she wrapped her young, heartbroken daughter into a maternal embrace.

Mother and daughter had barely escaped with their lives to Israel. When her father had died, Egyptian officials had found on his person letters from his wife, a wife they now knew to be the enemy. The Egyptian army officer, hero of the battle, was given the burial of a traitor that day and his family was hunted down like dogs. Friends of the family had risked their own lives to ensure the safety of Tovah and her mother, sending them on a secret, desperate journey to Israel and freedom.

Tovah was jerked out of her reverie by a strong hand on her shoulder. She started slightly, swiveling her chair around to meet the warm eyes of her second. “How’d it go?” she asked softly.

“Better than it had any right to,” Adellich answered truthfully. “You want the rundown?”

“Yeah.”

The medic ticked off the injuries on his thick fingers. “Her hands were a mess. Totally crushed. Probably by rifle butts if I’m not mistaken. I was able to save ‘em both, though. She should regain full use of them, God willing. Her shin bones were pretty much shattered by the shots her legs took. It was the weirdest thing, though. When I got in there to clean them out, they had already started reknitting! I’ve never seen anything like that before.” He chuckled ruefully. “She’s an interesting case, alright. Anyway, I went into her belly to take a look around. Her gut was fine. Her spleen was pretty much ruined, so I took it out and took care of a laceration on her liver. She has few cracked ribs, but she must have been able to protect herself pretty well despite her injuries, cause none of them penetrated a lung. She was really lucky.” Adellich shook his dark head. “She lost a lot of blood, but we’re replacing that right now. Some of her wounds were pretty badly infected, so we’re pumping her system full of antibiotics to take care of that. She’s really dehydrated, so we’ve also got fluids running into her.”

“Will she live?”

“Well, I can’t guarantee anything, but given what I’ve seen so far, I think that’s a pretty safe bet.”

Tovah blew out a breath of relief. “Thank God for that.” She smiled at her friend. “At least something good came out of this mission, huh?”

The medic returned his friend’s smile. “Yeah.”

“Can I see her?”

“She’ll be out of it for awhile. She just came out of surgery and we’ve got her on some pretty intense pain killers.”

“That’s ok. I don’t need to talk to her. I just want to see her. To reassure myself that she’ll be alright.”

Adellich looked at his commander intently. After a moment, he shrugged. “Sure. I can’t see the harm in it.” Helping her up out of the chair, the medic steered his friend down the long hallway and into the bedroom they were using as a recovery room.

Their patient was laying comfortably in the large hospital bed, a faint bloom of color already returning to her cheeks, courtesy of the blood being infused into her system via a pump located next to the bed. A soft chime sounded from the cardiac monitor seated on a shelf over her dark head, keeping time with the slow beat of the woman’s powerful heart. IV poles and tubing competed for space in the cramped quarters.

Both of the woman’s long arms were laying stiffly on the bed, bound up in the thick plaster of casts which came up to her fingertips. Likewise, her legs were heavily casted from toes to mid thigh. The crisp white gown hid the bulky bandage covering the large wound on her abdomen. And with all that, Tovah was still enraptured with the sight of the woman whose newly cleaned raven hair shone almost blue in the stark lighting of the room.

“She’s a beauty alright,” Adellich teased gently, easily reading Tovah’s thoughts. “I’d give anything to know her story.”

“So would I,” Tovah responded, coming to stand beside the bed. She stared intently down at the motionless figure. “Who are you, Jafit?” she asked again, whispering. “Wake up soon, alright?”

Adellich cleared his throat from his position by the doorway. “It’ll be at least a couple more hours before she wakes up,” he said. “Since it’s getting late, why don’t you go get some rest? I’ll have the nurse get you when she wakes up.”

Not taking her eyes away from the study of the woman on the bed, Tovah answered. “No. I think I’ll stay here awhile. She’s doubtless going to be disoriented when she wakes up. I don’t want her reopening her wounds.”

“Suit yourself,” the medic said, grinning to himself. “I’m going down to get something to eat. I’ll be back up later to check on her, alright?”

Pulling up a small stool beside the bed, Tovah nodded absently.

Softly clucking his tongue, Adellich left the room, closing the door softly behind him.

With a start, Tovah raised her curly head from the bed, beyond chagrined that she just spent some unknown amount of time sleeping, her head on the bed of the very person she had promised to watch over. Yawning and wiping her chin, the commander sat up, putting her hands on her hips and stretching out cramped back muscles.

She paused in mid stretch as a strange tingle traveled up her spine. Opening her eyes slightly, she was shocked to meet a pair of intense pale blue irises looking back at her, very much aware and sparkling with faint amusement. Tovah’s dark skin colored in a furious blush and she cleared her throat against the sudden dryness in her mouth. “Um, good …morning, I think. It’s good to see you awake. You’ve had a very rough time of it.” The commander stopped her babbling when she realized that the stranger probably didn’t understand a word she was saying. Clearing her throat again, Tovah’s gaze traveled down the relaxed form and up to the steadily beating cardiac monitor before again meeting the mesmerizing blues of her patient. “I really don’t know if you can understand me … .” Her voice trailed off. The stranger’s intent expression didn’t change, nor did she speak. “Um, well, my name,” she said, pointing to her chest and feeling faintly foolish, “is Tovah. Tovah Rybak. And somehow I’ve got to make you understand that you’re safe.” She looked around the room, scratching her neck behind the fall of her thick cinnamon colored hair. “And I’m not really sure how I’m gonna do that,” she said in an undertone. “Hmm. Well, ok. Just in case you do understand what I’m saying, you’re not in the bunker anymore. My friends and I rescued you from the Iraqis and brought you here to Karbala. You’re in a safe-house. Obviously, we’ve treated your wounds and I’ve just been waiting for you to wake up so we could talk.” She laughed a little. “And so here we are. You’re awake and I’m the one doing all the talking.” She thought she saw the eyes of the woman twinkle a bit at that last statement, but when she blinked, the expression was gone, replaced by that mesmerizingly intense stare that made her uncomfortable and giddy at the same time.