by Fiona Quinn
“But, surely you needed to pee over a nine-hour time frame.”
“I held it as long as I could, then I just peed my pants. That was another punishment when we got home, and they discovered it. Apparently, the wood was damaged by the moisture.”
“Remi…”
“You went through worse,” she said.
“Me? No.”
“SERE training? Don’t they torture you to see what makes you break?”
“In SERE, you can tap out. It has ramifications, but that has to be part of your mindset. Here? You had no choices. You were a little kid getting rolled like some rogue wave in the ocean.”
“I don’t like getting myself into places I can’t get out of—elevators, airplanes, and now I guess hotel rooms.”
“How did you work it out that you’re able to cope? I’ve seen you struggle. You seem… You seem determined.”
“I was worse. I found my phobia to be debilitating. Then I read about Seligman’s Theory on learned helplessness. A dog was fine. But he was put through this experiment where they shocked the dog. It was a complicated research project, some of which is being debunked, if you will. But the theory helped.”
“Go on.”
“The gist is that this dog learned that he was going to get shocked, so he stopped trying. And I thought, ‘that’s not going to be me.’ I’m not going to lay down out of fear I’ll be shocked, punished, what have you. I’m going to go about my life as if it’s okay. And if I get shocked, punched, stabbed, bombed…well, I’ll deal with it. That mindset means I can force myself onto the plane or elevator. It doesn’t mean that my body and brain aren’t punishing me the entire time. I just push through it to the other side.” She pressed her forehead against T-Rex’s. “I need to believe that there’s another side to this.”
T-Rex tipped his head and kissed her. “We’re not helpless, Remi. We’re together in these trying circumstances. Do you know what that means?”
Remi shook her head.
“It means we have to keep trying.”
Chapter Thirty-Four
T-Rex
Sunday, Beirut, Lebanon
They lay there too hot and sweaty to even hold hands. It was pitch black. They’d decided to guard the phone batteries and the chem-lights for necessity. They’d been trapped for nearly thirty hours.
They’d eaten the hotel snacks. They each had a meal bar from Remi’s pack. There were two more bars that they set aside for tomorrow, but then they’d be down to a roll of breath mints.
T-Rex wasn’t holding out much hope for the senator. Remi had found an oil dropper in the senator’s makeup kit. They’d cleaned it with vodka and had used it to get some fluids into the senator.
If she expired, tragic in its own sense, it would also be a psychological hit. And T-Rex didn’t know what they’d do with the body. Lying here in survival mode with a corpse decomposing on the bed was a nightmare scenario. There wasn’t any place else to put a body, should it come to that. They were trapped.
Remi had had her moments. The fear had grown too big, and she stood there and screamed until she was hoarse.
He was dealing with his own demons. After Remi’s story of being crumpled up and trapped, beaten and trapped again, he was worried for her sanity in this situation. Though the pockets of time when she lost control were short-lived.
As T-Rex lay there, careful not to touch her skin, he raked his fingers through her hair. It soothed him, and she was asleep. To finally find her. To have hope in his life for love and connection again. To have it snatched away just as quickly seemed like the heavens were mocking him.
There was a sudden sound of shifting building materials that sent a flash of fear through his veins. Any minute, the weight above them could come crashing down. He’d pressed those fears away. But lying here in the dark, he could hear the screeching beams, the thunks and…scrambles?
On a lark, T-Rex licked his lips then whistled a shrill “come here” whistle that they sometimes used with the military K9s.
He paused. Could rescue be at hand?
Remi stirred, then shot upright. “What?”
T-Rex reached out in the dark for the chem-light they’d been saving and snapped it on. They were bathed in an eerie green light. “I thought I heard something.” He whistled again.
This time he was answered with barks.
“Ty and Rory?” Remi asked.
“No idea.” T-Rex pursed his lips a third time when Remi reached onto the mattress where their supplies were laid out for easy access. She had a flat orange hurricane whistle. She blew it three times.
The barks were closer.
There was scrambling and clawing above where the bathroom had been.
T-Rex and Remi moved underneath. “Get me up there, T-Rex,” Remi said, sticking the chem-light into her mouth and holding it between her teeth.
He squatted, and she flung her leg over his shoulders like a cheerleader at a game. Holding her thighs, he pressed up from his squat.
There, she worked to pull pieces free. With the last piece that she handed down to T-Rex, he heard. “Beautiful. Oh, you are so beautiful!” Her body rocked on his shoulders as she cried. T-Rex couldn’t see what she did. He figured she’d give him more information as she could.
“Miss Taleb?” a voice asked.
“Yes. Yes!”
“I’m Bear MacIntosh, Cerberus Tactical K9. This is Truffles, my search and rescue dog.”
Remi was crying too hard to speak.
“Ma’am, I can see you on the video camera. Are you alone in that room?”
She gulped down her sob, dragged in a hitched breath, and said, “No. I’m here with Senator Barb Blankenship and with Master Chief T-Rex Landry.” Off to the side, T-Rex heard. “All accounted for.” Then, “Ma’am, can you reach Truffle’s collar? She’s wearing two comms units, one for me to direct her, one for you to maintain communications with us.”
“Yes. Does it matter which one I take off?” Remi asked, her voice thick with emotion.
“If you can see color, choose the orange collar.”
Remi worked to hand that down to T-Rex. “Thank you, ma’am,” Bear said as Remi scrubbed her fingers into the blonde coat of the British lab. “Ma’am, I’m going to recall Truffles now if you can pull your hands free.”
The “No!” that rose up her throat sounded primal. Like her last hope was being ripped from her.
Bear waited her out. When Remi calmed, he said, “We have your location. I’ve plotted the path Truffles took. We have communications open.”
“Please!” Remi said.
“We need Truffles to come out so we can assess your needs and get equipment into you. You have the comms. You’ll be talking to Bob, our chief tactical operations commander. We’ve got you.”
With a sigh and a blown kiss, Remi let go of Truffles. Over the comms, they heard, “Truffles, back to me.” And the lab wriggled herself out of sight.
T-Rex got Remi onto the ground before he said, “T-Rex Landry.”
“Hey, T-Rex, Bob here. I see you have a chem-light. Can you take me through your situation?”
Remi sat on the floor out of his way as T-Rex walked Bob over to see Senator Blankenship. “We’ve made diapers for her. But she hasn’t voided in a while now. We’re down to a single packet of emergency water.”
“We’ll send in a hose.”
T-Rex held the camera to the notebook of vitals information. He described as best he could what had happened with the senator.
“No unusual foods, contacts with animals, anything that would help explain her behaviors?”
“Nothing.”
“I need you to slowly move in a grid pattern clockwise ceiling to floor, move the camera over two feet, slowly sweep ceiling to floor. We need our engineers to understand the stability of that room.”
“When is Truffles coming back?” Remi called out.
“Ma’am, our team is putting together a rescue pack based on this information. Food, water, air,
medical supplies. Truffle’s job is to find people in urban disasters. She’ll keep searching for other victims since you have your own K9 out here.”
“Rory’s coming?” Her voice sparked with hope.
“Yes, ma’am. He’s been trained in tunneling work. He’ll be to you soon. T-Rex, if you would finish your surveil?”
***
As Remi and T-Rex waited for Rory, Bob played a book on tape for them over the comms.
That wasn’t something that T-Rex had heard of before, but he’d admit it was a great distraction. It seemed to help Remi settle.
By the time they got to chapter eight. Ty came over the comms. “T-Rex, man, you holding up?”
“Affirmative.” He sent a wink to Remi. “Four syllables.” He hoped to lighten the mood.
She tried to smile.
“Rory is almost to you. You should hear him coming through the hole in a moment. If you’d catch him when he jumps, that’d be good.”
Remi held the light high. T-Rex reached his arms out as Rory’s black nose poked out of the hole and looked around. T-Rex patted his hands on his chest and reached out again, taking the full brunt of Rory and his packs.
After T-Rex unhooked the two hoses from his side clasps, and unsnapped the bags, Remi took over Rory, talking baby talk and whole body hugging him, scratching between his ears, letting him roll over for a belly rub.
Dogs are good medicine.
“Water in the clear hose,” Ty said. “Air supply in the black hose. Check them both, please.”
“They’re functioning,” T-Rex said.
“In the pack on the left is an IV for the senator. The doctor wants it on a slow drip.”
T-Rex pulled out the equipment and went to work. She was so dehydrated that he was having trouble finding a vein even using all the tips and tricks he’d learned along the way.
It was a good thing the senator was blacked out and couldn’t feel this.
T-Rex conferred with the doctor and ended up running a line into her foot.
He looked up to see Remi watching him with her eyes filled with warmth. He sent her a wink, and she smiled over Rory’s head.
“Got it,” T-Rex said.
“Okay, next, you need to insert a catheter. You’ll find the catheter and void bag on the right side of Rory’s packs.”
T-Rex lifted his thumb off the comms button. “Remi?”
“Yes.”
“The senator needs a catheter.”
“Yes.”
“I think you should probably do that part.”
“Why? I don’t have your level of medical training.”
“But you’re a woman.”
“I’m not following.”
“You’re a woman. You have female parts.”
“Yes, we established that in your room a while back.”
T-Rex spread his arms wide. “I’ve never done female catheter training.”
“They’ll talk you through it.”
“Remi, please.”
“Agh. No. I don’t know how to do that. I’ve not been trained like you have.”
“You have the same parts. You’ll know best how to work things,” T-Rex tried.
“I beg to differ. I’ve never been up close and personal with any other woman’s body parts. You have. You are much better equipped in every sense of the word to do this.”
Remi was probably right. He just felt all kinds of awkward about touching a woman’s private body while she was passed out. But following the doctor’s instructions, he did it.
And now he was glad it was in his rearview.
Pulling out a packet of hospital wipes, Remi and T-Rex gave the senator a bath and dressed her in one of the oversized T-shirts from Rory’s pack. They moved her onto a sterile sheet. She was clean and hopefully comfortable if she could feel anything at all.
Once the doctor had okayed their work, Ty told them Rory needed to come out of there. That was going to be a trick.
Remi obviously found solace from the rescue dogs.
Rory leaned against Remi when she stood and sat in her lap when Remi was on the floor. Rory was always good around people in distress. It was as if he absorbed their pain and then shook it off.
When Ty was recalling Rory, T-Rex watched Remi gird her loins for this loss of fur compassion.
T-Rex draped Rory over Remi’s shoulders, then put Remi back in her cheerleader pose on his shoulders. Standing under the hole, Remi ducked her head and shoved Rory forward. Rory disappeared with a final wag of his tail.
When T-Rex lowered Remi back to the ground, they wrapped into each other’s arms.
“We have light. Food. Water. And air,” Remi said. “We have comms. We’ve helped the senator. We’re in such a better place than we were a few hours ago.”
T-Rex was too relieved to speak. He just needed a minute to let go of the bleak pictures that had been forming in his head before Truffles showed up.
“It’s hard to let the dogs leave,” she whispered.
“Rory will be back if we need him,” T-Rex soothed. “So now we get cleaned up with our own wipes. We put on the fresh shirts. We have a clean place to sit on this tarp.”
She stepped out of his arms. “What happens next?”
“The engineering team will look at our situation and plan for a way out.”
“Which could take days. Weeks.”
“It could.” He wasn’t going to lie. “But we have what it takes to survive. That’s what we’ll do, survive to tell the tale.”
Chapter Thirty-Five
T-Rex
Monday, Beirut, Lebanon
“Okay, here it is,” Bob said. “Our engineers are looking at the videos that the dogs are bringing out. Humans can get as far as the west stairwell on your floor. From there, we simply don’t have a way to get you out. They’re talking about bringing in a crane and starting to offload the building materials from the top.”
“How long would that take?” Remi asked.
“Weeks to do it in a way that the building doesn’t collapse on you.”
“T-Rex and I could survive that with provisions coming in. So, I’m not freaking out about this information. For me, I know we can survive it. But Senator Blankenship. Weeks? I just don’t see her living that long without medical help. I’m just wondering if…”
“Anything you’ve got would be helpful, Remi,” Bob said. “We have the military engineers in there working on this.”
“When the blast first happened, my legs were outside.”
“Wait, say that again.”
“When I woke up from the blast, my legs were dangling outside of the building.”
Bob called out to someone. “Hey, hand me those pictures there would you? Thanks.” His voice came back strong. “Okay Remi, I’m looking at the close ups of the exterior of your room. I don’t see any cavities into your space. Where were you standing during the blast?”
“I was looking out the left corner of the window. I saw the blast go up. I screamed. I knew that the concussion was the thing that was most dangerous. I threw myself to the ground. When I revived enough to assess my situation, I was outside of the building from my thighs down. I was covered in debris that weighted me down or I might have just slipped out the hole.”
T-Rex’s hand squeezed her arm as if keeping her from that fall.
“I don’t see it,” Bob said.
“T-Rex and I moved things around to try to stabilize the room. The hole was covered up. I could try to find it and signal you.”
“Hang on before you move anything and put yourself in danger of getting cut or moving the wrong thing. Give us some time to see if that would be at all useful. We need to consult with the engineers. Things are difficult out here on the ground in terms of space to organize a rescue. And that building isn’t stable.”
“Okay,” Remi said her gaze holding on T-Rex’s.
“We need to find the hole,” he said. “Slow and smooth. Extra care that we don’t make anything unstable.”
/> It didn’t take long.
A half hour of effort gave them a four-by-four hole. T-Rex imagined Remi waking up dangling halfway out the way she’d described, and his body slicked with the cold sweat of fear. T-Rex pushed those sensations down. Remi’s emotions had calmed, and he’d do nothing to put her back in the dark place she’d been battling.
She handed him the red bedspread, and he pushed it through the hole, letting it dangle so the rescuers could see it.
“Red fabric. We’ve got you,” Bob said over the comms. “Okay. Let’s try to come up with a way to use that to our advantage. A helicopter is going to be a no-go, we can’t risk the down draft collapsing the structure or degrading it further. There are other folks like you in the pockets. Truffles is finding them and getting them survival equipment.”
“Good girl, Truffles,” Remi said. “When I get out of here, it’s steaks for the rest of her life.”
***
The paramedic from Israel was the one who rode the basket on the crane cable to their hole.
He slid into their room, and then he and T-Rex wrestled the senator onto the backboard where she was strapped in tight.
Her vitals were erratic, and that was concerning, but soon she’d be on the ground, into an ambulance, and out of the country.
It took the rescuers most of the day.
And now it was night.
“It’s going to be okay,” T-Rex said.
“That basket. Tied. Dangling. Oh my god. They need to medicate the shit out of me.”
“It’s better that they don’t. You’re going to be fine.”
“I’m going to be tied down.”
“Okay. I get your point. Besides medication, what would help.”
“You. Can we go down together? Would the basket hold us both?”
“We’re going to have to leave it up to the rescue folks.”
“Okay.” She exhaled vehemently. “Can you be the one who straps me in?”
“That I can do.”
“Will you go first so your there to get me out?”
“Are you okay being in here by yourself? If I go first, I can’t strap you in.”