by Mark Wheaton
His nose started picking up something else at this point, neither smoke nor rats nor gasoline nor people. It was a threat. He scanned the darkness for its source, though this time the odor was coming off another canine.
Suddenly, the chilling, high-pitched call of a coyote pierced through the otherwise silent night and Bones spotted his first would-be attacker: a skinny, gray-red coyote hurrying across the street towards him on spindly legs. No sooner did he see first than he spotted two more on the way, called by their scout. They were skinny little animals with long, fox-like snouts, bushy tails, and incredibly sensitive ears that had been able to pick out Bones’s approach, even if his scent might have been obscured by every other smell in the air.
Unlike the timber wolves he’d encountered in Pennsylvania, this pack was desperate for fresh meat and could tell that Bones, still suffering from a myriad of injuries, wouldn’t be anywhere near 100-percent in a fight. Recognizing this himself, Bones began preemptively barking and barring his teeth, but this didn’t even slow the coyote’s pace. Though it seemed the pack hadn’t decided which of its number would lead the charge, they didn’t appear to be expecting much of a fight.
Bones backed up three steps, acting the wounded gazelle just enough to get one coyote out in front of the others. When it was far enough away from its pack, Bones launched forward. He caught the surprised animal off-guard and tore out its throat in one smooth motion. To drive his point home, the shepherd then lifted the fresh coyote carcass over his head, shook it around in his jaws a moment, but then let go. It flew a couple of feet before dropping lifeless onto the broken, rubble-strewn street.
But the coyotes were only momentarily put off by this display. They saw it for what it was: the one card Bones had to play. Now that it was on the table and the advantage had passed back to the pack, they quickly encircled the shepherd with their teeth bared.
Bones began barking. The coyotes barked right back and snapped their saliva-dripping jaws. Bones stamped his feet a bit to show off his impressive claws, but the coyotes didn’t slow their advance. Not even when Bones dropped his shoulders and opened his mouth to allow the dead coyote’s blood to sluice through his bottom teeth onto the pavement did the coyotes seem to notice.
Realizing he wasn’t going to be able to bluff his way out of this one, Bones spread his front legs to give himself an open stance and waited to be attacked.
That’s when three shots rang out from above Bones’s position, all fired straight into the air. The coyotes immediately sprinted away. A second later, Bones did the same in the opposite direction. The shepherd only got a couple of yards before a man holding a rifle leaped down from the rubble of the building alongside the dog and blocked Bones’s way. Instinctively, Bones barred his teeth again and barked at the man.
But then another man jumped down behind Bones, slipped a choke chain around the shepherd’s neck, and pulled it tight.
“Out of the frying pan and into the fire,” said the man standing in front of Bones. He stepped forward and revealed himself to be Paul, the Israeli commando team leader. “Sharon told us that you were some big fancy cadaver dog. Lucky for us, lucky for you.”
Bones continued growling. Paul extended a hand. But as Bones leaned forward for a sniff, Paul punched him in the snout. The shepherd reared back, snarling in anger.
“The man your friends killed back there? My wife’s youngest cousin. When we get done here, I’m going to eat your fucking heart, dog. But until then you’re on the team.”
Bones continued bucking at the choke chain, lunging forward and snapping at Paul, but the commando had already turned and walked away.
V
“So you do have a name.”
Sharon was walking over to sit next to Bones as the sun rose over the mountains way out past Pasadena and the Angeles National Forest. The Israeli team had pushed on through the night, creeping down what was left of Sunset Boulevard until they turned south on Doheny, and went down a steep hill. They established a base camp at the intersection of Santa Monica and Doheny in a park opposite what had once been the Troubadour. Most of the buildings along Santa Monica had only been one or two stories high. When they came down, there was so little rubble compared to everywhere else that it simply made the area appear as it did before the city was even established. The park had been chosen due to its location at a major intersection but also because it afforded clear lines of fire both up and down the hill. Because of the park’s fallen trees, it was also easy to camouflage the two trucks the commandos had brought with them. Additionally, it was chosen due to its proximity to the next day’s target.
“Bones,” Sharon said, sitting next to the shepherd and handing him a piece of fruit. Bones’s stomach was still torn up from eating the rotten hot dogs the night before, but he readily accepted the food, swallowed it whole, and then expectantly looked up at its provider for more. “You saved us back there. Paul claims his team had been waiting for the right moment and knew the rats were on their way, but I was there. We would have been toast if it wasn’t for you. Sounds like your military is still looking for you as you’re presumed missing in action but not dead.”
Bones continued waiting for another apricot.
“I just wanted to say ‘thank you,’” Sharon said. “And I know what Paul said, but I won’t let him do anything to you. We do need your help, though.”
Bones nuzzled his snout into her hand. She smiled. “I knew I could count on you.”
The shepherd pushed his nose through her hand to her pocket, discovered the three remaining apricots, and deftly removed them with his tongue, slurping them down as Sharon ran her fingers across the hair under his chin.
• • •
It turned out that Sharon was a mid-level executive for the nonprofit wing of a massive foundation set up by a multi-billionaire, Ivan Stephane, whose money came from two sources: yogurt and privatizing the world’s sources of fresh water. Many felt he was one of the world’s most effective villains when it came to subjecting the poor to further hardships. A notorious example involved Chinese peasants who had been farming the same land for generations. They suddenly found themselves forced to pay for the water that irrigated their fields as the government had sold a controlling interest in the nearest river to the multi-billionaire’s corporation. In order to rehabilitate his public image, he had set up the Stephane Foundation with a substantial endowment to contribute millions to worthy causes around the world. Because of this, every negative article written would almost be forced to acknowledge the irony of his oppressive business practices due to his great (and tax write-off-able) philanthropy.
After each fiscal year, the culmination of the foundation’s annual charitable endeavors was an international conference held in Los Angeles to promote ethical and “green” business practices that gathered the controllers of almost 20-percent of the world’s GDP, or $10 trillion, in one place. This conference invited finance ministers from the world’s leading economies, governmental representatives from emerging nations, well-heeled captains of industry and barons of the world markets in order that all could be brought together to discuss how they might work to better society and the human race.
Of course, what the gathering had become known for were the endless negotiations between those with the money and those with the natural resources, leading to deals in which public and private money from wealthy nations was passed along to their less fortunate neighbors, but in a way where said money could only really be spent on that which would directly benefit the donor nation in the first place. Money for roads was donating, but the roads would run between a foreign oil company’s refineries and bases of operation. Hospitals would be invested in, but only if long-term contracts were negotiated with western corporations that would supply the hospital with everything from surgical masks to Q-tips. Public utilities were constructed but were loans, not donations and the terms of the deals made it so that the lucky country would be paying back those who built the dams, the power plants, a
nd the electrical grids for decades to come.
With interest.
It was six days of extraordinarily high-end extortion and exploitation that left the attendees wealthy and those who the contracts were meant to help anything but.
Sharon worked for the foundation as a financial advisor to those responsible for not only maintaining but growing the endowment. Sharon’s primary interactions were with representatives of the Israeli government on one side and then a number of the world’s largest financial institutions on the other. A number of these institutions had majority stakes in the Boursa, Israel’s Tel Aviv-based stock exchange, which listed not only 600 some-odd companies, but also numerous government and corporate bonds, hundreds of mutual funds and then an ever-fluctuating number of ETFs, or exchange-traded funds.
While the Boursa was hardly the world’s largest stock exchange, it was one of the fastest growing and had recently signed memoranda of understanding between it and the Shanghai Stock Exchange, as well as the London Stock Exchange. Those seeking to expand their wealth and influence on the Boursa were the exact type to be attracted to the Stephane Foundation’s annual conference. It was Sharon’s job to make sure all interested parties not only were invited but were treated like royalty while in attendance.
Unfortunately, this year’s conference, held at the Beverly Hilton Hotel, fell on the same weekend as the twin earthquakes. The Boursa had all but crashed, losing investors hundreds of millions, destabilizing the Israeli Finance Ministry and the government at large, and creating a fiscal emergency that the world hadn’t seen since 9/11. For the sake of their nation’s economy, the Israeli commandos had been sent to rescue survivors and identify the dead in order that temporary reassignments of control of government finances could be made permanent and the deceased brought back to Israel for burial. To an outside observer, such a mission might seem mercenary and even cold, but with the world’s markets already trembling due to the destruction of its fifth largest economy, the city of Los Angeles, desperate measures were called for.
• • •
“Though the U.S. government cannot officially recognize the legitimacy of our mission, it has given us access to both satellite photos and heat detection intel from the initial military flyovers, which indicated there were a number of survivors still inside the hotel,” Paul explained to the team as they assembled Monday morning to go over the day’s plan. “Admittedly, that intel is now days old and reflects a pre-Second Quake reality. What we do know is that the Beverly Hilton, while not intact, did not receive the level of structural damage of a lot of the city’s other buildings, which suggests there may be survivors. But again, those survivors might not have stayed at that location. We are going in primarily to identify bodies if we can find them, extract survivors and gather intel on the location of any that might have moved on. Additionally, we’re to recover and destroy anything confidential or otherwise potentially compromising to the Israeli mission at the conference. Are we all on the same page?”
Everyone was.
Even though Arthur was semi-retired, he’d been a lawyer for decades and whereas many might find a mission like this surprising, he understood from the get-go. His only problem with it, in fact, had been when he learned that Sharon’s rescue had little to do with her, but more her convenient ability to identify all the players, living or dead, they might encounter in the hotel.
“Isn’t that dangerous?” he had asked her. “What if the building comes down around you?”
“If it wasn’t for my position, those mercenaries wouldn’t have picked me up, and these commandos wouldn’t have saved me from the rats,” Sharon had replied. “I’m not above singing for my supper.”
An eight-man team led by Paul would go in with Sharon and Bones while a two-man team would stay outside with the vehicle, where Arthur would be sequestered. Arthur had tried to stay out of the commandos’ way, but Paul seemed to bristle every time he saw the older man. One more mouth to feed, one more potential liability if a fast escape was called for.
For his part, Bones had been mostly ignored. One of the youngest commandos, a man named Nashon Sahar, had fed and provided water for the shepherd and that, coupled with the apricots from Sharon, had the dog feeling better than he had in days. He was also glad to be away from the mercenaries and back in the field. He recognized and felt comfortable with the martial attitudes of the soldiers around him, though he didn’t know what would be required of him by the men.
When everyone had struck their campsites and loaded up their gear, Paul walked out of cover and onto Santa Monica Boulevard, taking the morning’s temperature. When he felt he had a good sense of it, he turned back to the men and nodded.
“Let’s move out.”
The two trucks were empty except for their drivers and the civilians, Sharon in the lead vehicle, Arthur in the rear. The commandos crept alongside the trucks as they slowly made their way down Santa Monica into Beverly Hills. They passed beautiful, but decimated houses on the right and brutalized office buildings as they went. A long stretch of twisted chain-link fence looked less like it had been in an earthquake and more a tornado, as it had been wound in on itself to the point that it had gouged great holes in the ground around it.
The commando team kept moving, passing the intersection with Beverly. They came to a relatively undamaged stretch of road that probably survived solely because both buildings and trees had been pulled back far enough away from the street to leave it unaffected. They soon reached a sign that announced the Beverly Hills Police Department on their left, but they could see nothing of it. The police headquarters, the library and the courthouse had not only been flattened, they’d also crumbled down into the multi-level parking garage below, leaving little trace.
“That it?” asked Nashon, who was on point.
Paul looked up ahead and saw the Beverly Hilton rising on the right, obscured only by the bell tower of an Episcopal church that had somehow managed to say upright. From that distance, the Hilton looked as if it had suffered a bomb blast that had shattered all its windows and generally made a mess of things, but it also looked relatively intact.
The Hilton was actually a series of buildings that included the main hotel, a ten-story, V-shaped building that contained 570 rooms, but also two additional buildings that housed innumerable ballrooms and conference rooms that extended out from the main structure bordering on either side a long, U-shaped driveway/turnaround that could accommodate the countless limos and town cars of the hotel’s most famous annual event, the Golden Globes.
Unlike the sheer devastation seen elsewhere in Beverly Hills, the miraculous sight of the still intact Beverly Hilton would give anyone reason enough to believe that someone inside during the quake may well have survived.
As they reached the hotel, Paul switched from speaking seldom to hand signals only. He signaled for the two trucks to stop at the mouth of the driveway but still out of sight from anyone passing on Santa Monica.
In Nashon’s care at the end of a makeshift leash, Bones watched as Paul went first down the Hilton’s driveway, his eyes everywhere at once, looking for movement. The team leader looked like a gunfighter in a movie stepping through a quiet Old West town he felt sure was teeming with the enemy on both sides. He walked with his hands wrapped tightly around the Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine gun, swinging it in different directions as if hoping any would-be sniper might flinch and give away his position if finding himself on the wrong end of a gun barrel.
There were actually a handful of bodies lying around the driveway, which only added urgency to Paul’s caution, but when he got closer to them he could see that they’d died of severe trauma likely after falling or jumping from the windows above. Disturbed by the sight, Paul moved on and tried to shake the images from his head.
Through all of this, Bones remained completely still. He understood what was required of him and maintained his rigid composure.
It was about a hundred yards from the mouth of the driveway to the hote
l entrance, ground Paul covered in a little more than a minute. The hotel lobby appeared open air until one realized that all the glass had been blown out and the flapping curtains and splintered marble weren’t simply evidence of a crazy architect’s mad aesthetic. Paul peered into the dark recesses of the building for a moment but then turned back to his men and nodded.
“Let’s go,” Nashon whispered to Bones.
The commandos, Sharon, and the shepherd now moved down the driveway to join Paul. They were just as careful as their team leader, knowing that some ambushes simply hold their fire until the point man has passed, but no attack came. As the soldiers’ boots crunched down on the broken glass of hundreds of different windows, Bones stepped lightly to avoid getting shards in his pads. For his part, Nashon couldn’t help but stare up into the wall of potential snipers’ nests above them, all empty hotel rooms, all with wind-carried curtains to mask the movements of a rifleman.
After they reached the hotel’s entrance without incident, Nashon and the others could immediately see that visibility would be spotty at best. There was some breakage that allowed light in here and there, but the group could see that large chunks of the ceiling and walls had crashed down, smashing through the floor into whatever was underneath, which would make for treacherous going. It would be impossible to tell how stable the ground beneath their feet would be.
Paul turned and nodded to Nashon.
“Let the dog go.”
“Just like that? What if he wanders away?”
“This is his job. If he wanders away, then he’s no use to us anyway.”
Nashon nodded and unchained Bones. The shepherd looked up at Paul.
“Do your thing,” said the team leader.