CHAPTER ONE

      ‘OH…MY God!’

      Victoria Preston had, as usual, timed her journey carefully to avoid the kind of traffic hassles commuters around Auckland, New Zealand were having to face these days.

      This scene of total chaos was the last thing she had expected to see on her way to work.

      This was no traffic hassle.

      This was a disaster!

      It must have happened only seconds ago, while Tori had been singing—no, shouting happily—along with the song rattling the windows of her ancient VW Beetle, just before she’d rounded the bend onto the downhill stretch that led to the bridge across the river.

      Another car was pulling to a halt on the other side of the bridge, but Tori was officially the first on the scene as she killed the engine on her car and leapt out.

      And what a scene!

      A logging truck lay twisted across the road, blocking the narrow bridge. The driver’s cab had smashed through the concrete side of the bridge and now hung sideways in mid-air, one giant wheel still spinning slowly. Tori could see the bloodstained, starburst pattern of cracks in the windscreen and a figure slumped over the oversized steering-wheel. The only thing holding the cab above the water, a good twenty metres below, was the twisted coupling holding the cab to a platform now only half-full of huge logs of wood.

      The spilt logs had done serious damage to the car the truck must have been trying to avoid hitting as it had come off the one-lane bridge. One had also taken out a minibus, which had presumably been travelling behind the car. The van-style bus lay tipped on an angle to one side, with the weight of a massive tree trunk crushing its side doors.

      Tori could see a face in the driver’s compartment of the van. It was the face of a young child and the sound of screaming suddenly cut through the stunned silence that had been the ominous background during the few seconds it had taken Tori to size up the situation and realise the magnitude of this disaster.

      ‘I’ve called an ambulance.’ The shout from the bridge on the other side of the logging truck was barely audible. ‘How does it look from your side?’

      ‘Not good.’ Tori was moving towards the minibus. ‘Call the emergency services again. Tell them it’s a multi-casualty incident.’

      ‘How many people?’

      ‘Don’t know yet,’ Tori shouted back. ‘I’m about to find out.’

      The child in the van was screaming too loudly to hear Tori. She could see a woman in the driver’s seat, her face covered in blood, moving her arms feebly. At least she was moving, which was more than the driver of the logging truck appeared to be. Another child could be seen, huddled in the gap between the two front seats. He or she was crying, adding to the muted sounds of distress coming from within the vehicle, but that child, too, was clearly breathing adequately.

      Tori couldn’t see any further into the rear of the minibus. So far she had counted four patients, two of whom were seriously injured. How many more people were trapped in the back of the van? And there was yet another vehicle involved in this crash.

      ‘I’ll be back in a minute!’ Tori tapped on the intact windscreen of the van and the child in the front stared in wide-eyed terror. ‘You’ll be all right, sweetheart. Just hang on for a bit. I’ll be back.’

      This was so hard, leaving the child with such inadequate reassurance and then disappearing from view. This never happened when she was on duty as a triage nurse in the emergency department of the Royal North Shore hospital where she worked. Patients came in neatly packaged on stretchers, with an ambulance officer who could tell her how seriously injured they were. Details of the worst cases would have been radioed through en route, in fact, and the trauma room would have been set up with a whole medical team ready to receive the injured.

      This was the front line. A place Tori had never been. Thank goodness she had attended that introductory Urban Search and Rescue course last year. Even the most basic procedures for dealing with a multi-casualty incident were helpful and still fresh enough to be pulled from her brain despite the horror of the situation.

      She had to see as many of the people involved as she could. A thirty-second evaluation to determine priority of treatment. Airway, breathing and circulation. Disruption to any of those three were the immediately life-threatening scenarios.

      For the purposes of triage, she could take the few seconds needed to open an airway and determine whether someone was breathing, and if they were bleeding badly she could apply a pressure