El Jefe was lying on his back, the last of the seven saline bags hanging from the collapsible IV stand. The man had spent the last two days on a gurney being carried by two soldiers (who switched out every half an hour), and his face and arms were covered in a light film of dirt. If he didn’t wake up in the next day and a half, Gina feared that without any more saline bags, his kidneys would begin to shut down.

Gina pulled the phone from her waist. She had no idea how long it would be until Bill or Patrick realized the phone was missing. The phone was a newer model of the same brand the WHO had used, and Gina powered it on.

It’d been a year since Gina had last made a telephone call, and it had been two years since she’d had a cellphone, but she had one number memorized.

She edged to one of the mesh windows and glanced out. The window was at a severe angle, but Gina could see four soldiers sitting around a now blazing fire. She assumed the fifth soldier was sitting outside her tent. Fortunately, he wasn’t the one who spoke English, so even if he overheard Gina speaking, he would think she was talking to her patient, which she’d done plenty of over the past three days.

Gina hunkered at the far back of the tent and pushed in the ten digits. She put the phone to her ear, but the call failed. She checked the connection.

No signal.

Although satellite phones could theoretically work anywhere on the planet, they needed a direct line of sight to space, and Gina knew the thick jungle canopy could interfere with the signal.

She waited a few minutes, then tried again.

Again, the call failed.

“Dammit,” she whispered, gritting her teeth.

She heard a noise and glanced out the mesh window.

Patrick was strolling back into camp from wherever he’d been. He would most likely go check on Bill, and then he would see the backpack and the missing phone and connect the dots.

Gina had to act now.

After she’d cleaned the wound on El Jefe’s head, the soldiers had confiscated her two scalpels and anything else sharp enough to be used as a weapon. Gina whipped her head around, looking for anything with an edge she could use. She grabbed her medical bag and sifted through the contents. She found nothing. Then she saw the stethoscope and blood pressure cuff she’d tossed aside after returning from checking on Bill.

Her eyes widened.

At the bottom of the ear tubes was a four-inch piece of slim metal that created the tension between the two sides.

The binaural spring.