Free The Third Gate by Lincoln Child Page B

brought it over, unwrapping it from the sterile covering. Rush knelt before the struggling man and carefully threaded it into the incision he had made. He checked the placement, grunted, then rose.
    “Chest drain,” he rapped.
    Another medic trotted over, pushing a floor stand that held a white-and-blue plastic device that, to Logan, looked like a blood-pressure monitor on steroids. It had several vertical gauges, and two clear plastic tubes led away from its upper housing.
    “Suction-control stopcock?” Rush barked.
    “On.”
    “Fill water seal to two millimeters.”
    “Yes, Doctor.”
    As the medic added water to the device, Logan saw the reservoir chamber turn blue. Meanwhile, Rush attached one of the plastic tubes to the line inserted into the injured diver’s chest. Logan glanced over at the diver: his struggles were weaker now, his movements erratic.
    “Catheter in place,” Rush said. “Initiating suction. Setting pressure at minus twenty cm H 2 O.” He snapped a switch on the device, then began turning a stopcock on the unit’s housing. Instantly, the liquid in the suction control chamber began to bubble. Rush turned the stopcock farther; the bubbling increased. The tube leading from the incision in the diver’s side began to fill with mingled water and blood.
    “If we can get the fluid out of the thoracic cavity quickly enough, the lungs might reinflate,” Rush told the medical tech. “There’s no time to operate.”
    The large room fell silent except for the hum of the machine and the bubbling of water draining from the tube.
    Rush looked from the man on the stretcher to the water seal and back again in growing agitation. “He’s becoming cyanotic,” he said. “Increase vacuum pressure to negative fifty mmHg.”
    “But such a high level—”
    Rush rounded on the tech. “Damn it, just do it.” Then, walking briskly around the stretcher, Rush opened the now-motionless diver’s mouth and began administering artificial respiration. Fifteen seconds passed, then thirty. And then, quite suddenly, the diver’s limbs jerked; he coughed up blood and water and then took a deep, ragged breath.
    Slowly, Rush straightened. He looked at the diver, then at the water seal. “Dial it back to negative twenty,” he murmured.
    He glanced around at the assembled faces, then pulled off the gloves. “Keep an eye on the collection chamber,” he told the nurse. “I’ll go prep medical for a thorough evaluation.” And without another word, he turned on his heel and strode out of the Staging Area.
    As lunchtime approached, Logan found that his feet—he’d been wandering around the facility, trying to get his bearings—had brought him unbidden to what appeared to be the medical center. If there were really only a hundred and fifty people on the project,Medical seemed to him larger than necessary—until he recalled how far they were from any kind of help.
    The center seemed quiet, almost somnolent. Logan walked down the central corridor, looking through the open doorways, at the empty beds and unused equipment. A woman at the nurse’s station was making notations on a clipboard. He passed a large open area labeled OBSERVATION . The injured diver was here, surrounded by various diagnostic machines.
    Logan continued, stopping at the next room. This was apparently Rush’s office; the doctor was inside, his back to the door, speaking into a digital voice recorder.
    “A catheter was inserted into the thoracic cavity and tension pneumothorax alleviated before the condition could degrade to a mediastinal shift or air embolism,” he recited, “either of which might have caused the case to terminate fatally, due to the fact that under the circumstances it would have been unfeasible to …”
    Realizing someone else was in the office, Rush snapped off the recorder and turned around. Logan was shocked by what he saw: the man’s face was gray, his eyes puffy and red. It looked almost as if he had been crying.
    The