Over and over she was grateful for Luke Marriott’s presence. What good fairy had brought him to Eurong tonight? Lisa needed attention as much as Martin, and Nikki knew that alone she would have struggled to keep both alive.

Finally the metal panels were ripped from the frame of the car. Martin was freed first. As Nikki, the ambulance driver and the assisting men carefully lifted his unconscious frame on to a stretcher, Nikki turned helplessly to Luke.

‘It’ll be another ten minutes before we have Lisa free,’ Luke told her. ‘How far’s the hospital?’

‘Five minutes.’

‘Take him and send the ambulance back for us,’ he ordered, and there was nothing Nikki could do but obey.

She didn’t have time to think of Luke Marriott for the next half-hour. Nikki didn’t have time to do anything but hold desperately to her patient’s fragile grip on life. Both she and Martin were fighting, she thought grimly, but only one of them was aware of it.

The nursing staff of Eurong’s tiny hospital were out in force-the full complement of five nurses and a ward’s maid were all at the hospital before Nikki and her patient reached it. In a tiny community like Eurong, word travelled fast. Everyone knew these two kids, and the nurses were grateful for anything they could do to help.

But there was so little…Nikki set up an intravenous infusion, took X-rays and then monitored her patient with an increasing sense of helplessness.

‘He’s slipping.’ Andrea, the hospital charge sister, took Martin’s blood-pressure for the twentieth time and looked grimly to where Nikki was adjusting the flow of plasma. ‘Isn’t there anything we can do?’

‘The plane’s on its way from Cairns,’ Nikki told her. ‘It’ll be here in an hour. They’ll transport him back there.’

‘But he’s slipping fast.’

‘I know.’ Nikki looked helplessly down at the boy’s pallid face. She suspected what was happening from the X-rays. There was pressure building up in the intracranial cavity. She was faced with an invidious choice-to operate here with her limited skill, or put the boy on the plane, knowing that by the time the plane landed in Cairns he’d probably be dead. ‘I can’t operate,’ she whispered. ‘I haven’t the skills…’