Storm Rising

by Sara Driscoll

  Meg’s breath caught in her lungs at the mental image of an elderly couple embracing as the floodwaters poured in through every crack and rose to cover them. Did they feel terror in the grip of the raging storm or comfort that in the face of a fatal disease, the darkness would take them together at the end?

  “When I got to the bedroom, I thought I could see something underwater in the light of the flashlight, so I went under to check.”

  “She never had a chance, and he wouldn’t leave her, so they died together. If she was that sick, he may have found it easier to find a way to go with her than survive without her.” Meg knelt down beside Charles. “You okay?”

  The young man swallowed and looked up at her. “I know I have to get a grip because we’re going to see a lot more of this today.”

  “Is this your first search after a disaster like this?”

  “Yeah.”

  Meg gave his forearm a squeeze. “Then give yourself a break. Take a minute, take a breath, and pull yourself together. We need you for the next one. There are people out there who need you.” She pushed off the roof and stood to find Corporal Smythe watching her. “Can we move on, Corporal?”

  “Just let me X-code the house.” Smythe grabbed a spray paint can with a neon orange lid from the boat and crossed over the roofline and down the far side. Meg followed to stand on the peak as he spray-painted a large orange X on the bottom part of the slant of the roof. In the top section of the X he marked the current date and time, in the left quadrant he marked their squad identification, in the right he marked INT for an interior search and underneath he painted 0-2.

  Zero survivors, 2 deceased.

  Snapping the cap back on, Smythe trudged up the slope.

  Meg stopped him before he could pass her. “Do we report in so someone else will retrieve the bodies later?”

  “Yes. They need us to keep going because the clock will be ticking for other victims. We’d waste too much time and it would be too risky bringing the bodies out through the skylight. When the water level drops, it will be safer. I’ll radio it in so they know. Come on, we need to move.”

  Meg followed him down the roof, calling Hawk to follow. He lithely jumped into the boat, but then stood looking back toward the house, his head tilted to one side.

  “Something wrong with your dog?” MacDougall asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “He looked confused.”

  Meg followed Hawk’s gaze back to the skylight. “He is confused. He found the victims and he doesn’t understand why we didn’t bring them out. This is going to be hard on him. To search dogs, finding the victim is the winning part of the game. When they are robbed of a live victim, it’s devastating for them. Many of them actually get depressed. Depending on how today goes, I may ask one of you to go ‘get lost’ ”—she mimed air quotes around the words—“so Hawk can find you. He has to come out of this day with a win, whether we do or not. Then he’ll be ready to take on tomorrow.”

  Understanding lit MacDougall’s eyes. “We’ll make sure he gets his find, no matter how the day turns out.”

  “Thanks.” She climbed into the boat. “Where to next?”

  “That way.” Smythe pointed in the direction of deeper water. “This is when we really need your boy. If anyone’s out there, we’re depending on him to find them.” His head rose and his eyes locked on the fire on the far side of the inlet.

  Meg turned to look at it too and couldn’t stop the involuntary gasp of shock. They’d been so busy, she hadn’t kept an eye on the fire. Now it was out of control, a huge number of houses ablaze, the whole hill that ran up the peninsula seemingly alight.

  “Luck is clearly not in our favor today,” Smythe said. “It may take a miracle to turn this around.”

  They pushed off and the motor flared to life.

  It wasn’t just Hawk who needed the win now.

  CHAPTER 6

  Inaccessible Hide: An odor source that a scent-work dog can smell and locate, but cannot touch with its nose.

  Saturday, July 22, 4:21 PM

  The North End

  Virginia Beach, Virginia

  By late afternoon the waters had receded and the teams were sent out to the storm-ravaged beachfront. As bad as the flooded and battered inlet neighborhoods were, at least they had been sheltered inland, while the exposed coastline had taken the brunt of the storm’s fury and the storm surge.

  The high-rises along the ocean shore fared best, being constructed of rebar-reinforced concrete built to withstand incoming storms. They looked worse for wear, many of their metal or glass balcony enclosures ripped away by the hurricane-force winds, but they stood tall, spearing up in the now cloudless blue sky, pale columns in the blinding sun.

  Devastation spread all around them. The concrete boardwalk between the high-rises and the beach lay hidden by sand piled high over any remaining railings. The classic iron-and-glass street lamps bore testimony to the fury of the storm—not a single glass globe remained intact, and only a few posts still stood upright; most tilted drunkenly or had toppled, some obliterated by the sand below. A smattering of the palm trees lining the boardwalk remained standing, but only the odd truncated palm frond remained among the jutting stems. Houses by the seaside had been hollowed out by the combined forces of the wind and the crushing weight of the storm surge, stripping away many of the lower-level supports, leaving precarious, top-heavy, mushroomlike structures. Often, they were only roofs missing all exterior supports, balanced delicately on a few load-bearing walls stripped of nearly all interior possessions.

  The National Guard was using drones to search some of the worst of the damage and those areas most inaccessible. They could fly the small crafts over piles of debris, watching intently for signs of human life on their small video displays. They used the flexibility of the remote vehicles to enter houses unsafe for human explorers, darting through rooms via ragged holes on the minuscule chance anyone could have survived the storm. It saved time, safely cleared structures, and created a search list for actual human and dog forays.

  Lauren Wycliffe and her black-and-white border collie, Rocco, rejoined the Human Scent Evidence Team for this part of the search. Meg needed only one look at Lauren’s face to read how her day had gone so far. Brief greetings, followed by a commiserating hand squeeze—Us too. It’s been awful—and they were ready to start again.

  Craig Beaumont gathered his team around him. Even though he’d only been coordinating the searches and hadn’t been in the boats with the teams, the stress of the day’s searches was etched into his expression, reminding Meg of the complexities of organizing a recovery of this scale. They were only seeing their own pockets of the search; Craig was liaising with every group on site, trying to make sure that all areas were covered, nothing got missed, and not a single man-hour was wasted. Lives hung in the balance and that weight lay on his shoulders.

  Craig snapped open the map in his hands and then passed one end to Scott to hold so he had a hand free. The beach strip ran down one end of the map, the city an organized grid moving inland, away from the water. “This is our search area, here where the commercial part of the waterfront opens out to private homes,” Craig said. “Without that line of big high-rise apartments and hotels to shelter the streets behind them from the storm, this area was wide-open to catastrophic damage. Keep in mind that what you see in this map is no longer going to resemble current status. Something as simple as a street grid no longer exists in the same way. On the way here, I passed a house ripped off its foundations and sitting in the middle of a street. Trees are down, telephone and power poles too, but the power’s out in this area, so at least that’s not a hazard. Dominion Virginia Power is all over the place, cleaning up downed lines so they’ll be able to get power back up and running as fast as possible, but it will probably be more than a week before that happens in some areas. Parts of town farther inland already have power restored, so those are the areas where they’re using community centers to accommo
date evacuees and searchers.

  “Now, to put it in perspective, this is where most of you were this morning.” Craig circled the Rudee Inlet on the map, then dragged his finger northward. “This is where we are now. This area took the brunt of the storm surge in Virginia Beach, although I hear Norfolk also got hit badly to our northwest. The winds and storm surge followed the hurricane’s counterclockwise spin and pounded Norfolk in the extreme. I’ve already had a request for us to be there tomorrow, but we’ll go over that tonight when we’ve cleared today’s searches. Now that it’s low tide, they need us here. The water pulling out has revealed a lot of damage. And while the chances of anyone surviving in these areas are beyond slim, this is our chance to make sure. High tide is at 22:11 tonight, so we stick with this area until we lose the light. I’ll get food brought in so you can keep searching.” He glanced down at the dogs, all lying quietly at their handlers’ feet, taking a moment of rest while they could. “It’s been a long and discouraging day for the dogs. Will they make it?”

  “Yes.” Lauren answered for the whole group. “We’ll keep them hydrated and give them a full meal when it’s time. They’ll go as long as we do. And then they’ll have a well-deserved rest tonight.”

  “Okay. One last thing. There’s no cell coverage in this area, so it’s all satellite phones from here on. Stay in touch with regular updates, even if you have nothing major to report. This has the possibility of being a very dangerous search area, so I need to know you and your dogs are safe. These are the areas we’re going to cover.” Craig outlined the search areas assigned to each team, describing the challenges as he knew them. He assigned adjacent areas so each handler had another handler relatively close if anyone ran into trouble and first response was tied up. “Keep in mind, this scenario will change on the fly. Do not enter a structure you feel is unstable. X-code any structure you search. If you need assistance from another team or from first responders, call it in, and I’ll make sure they get to you. Now, get out there. Sunset is 20:18 tonight and we’ll only have at most a half hour of light after that. Clock’s ticking.”

  A half hour later, Meg and Hawk found themselves walking down what had been Highway 60, Brian and Lacey beside them. About two hundred feet ahead, Scott and Lauren trudged down the road with their dogs, headed for their own search areas.

  Craig’s map had shown a network of streets between Highway 60 and the ocean, and an earlier peek at Google Maps satellite view revealed houses crowding the beach, hugging the grass-topped dunes that looked out to sea. Now her line of vision was unimpeded to the pounding surf. Dozens of houses were simply gone, washed away as if they’d never been.

  If anyone had still been in them, there was no helping them now.

  “How did the rest of your morning go?” Brian’s words lifted Meg from her contemplation. “The last time I texted you, you sounded pretty discouraged.” He glanced down at Lacey trotting at his side. “Lacey sure was. She started gnawing at her paw after we found the fifth or sixth deceased victim.”

  “Poor girl.” Meg ran her fingers over Lacey’s back, earning her a quick, ear-perked look from the dog. “These kinds of searches are so hard on them. We had a terrible start to the morning, but got lucky later on. There was a family trapped in their two-story house with the water nearly to the roof. Dad drowned downstairs trying to keep the water out, but Mom, her newborn baby, and two other kids made it up to the attic. Then Mom threw a postpartum clot and stroked out, leaving the care of all four of them in the hands of her ten-year-old son. Not knowing what else to do, he stood at their attic window bellowing for help. I couldn’t hear him, but Hawk could. Launched himself out of the boat because we weren’t going fast enough and swam right to the window where the boy stood in waist-high water. We got them all out.”

  “Did Mom make it?”

  Meg nodded. “We can thank Todd for that. I got him on his cell and told him the symptoms. He confirmed it was an ischemic stroke and told us what we needed to do for her and what meds she needed immediately to save her life. We called in a Coast Guard chopper with a medical team and they got her into the chopper and had meds flowing before they even had everybody off the roof. Then they airlifted the whole family right to the hospital. Her chances for a full recovery look pretty good, thanks to Hawk and Todd. Even another hour or two would have changed her life forever, or ended it.”

  “A full recovery is crucial now that she’s lost her husband. Those three kids are going to need their mother more than ever. Hey, I think this is where we split up.” He pulled out his phone and checked the map on the screen. “Lacey and I will leave you guys here. Good searching.”

  “You too. Be safe.”

  “Always.” He tossed her a saucy grin as he and Lacey continued down the road.

  For a few seconds, she watched them go. Then she turned to study the remnants of the once-charming row of houses to her left. Highway 60’s divided roadway had created a small buffer zone against the punch of the storm. While many of the houses lining the coast had collapsed, been shredded to bits carried off by the wind, or simply washed out to sea, the structures on this side of the highway were still standing, even though they were piled high with debris and studded with overturned and stacked vehicles.

  Meg studied the mass of slivered wood, shattered glass, and tangled metal and wondered where to start.

  The dog running that part of the show shifted at her feet. Dressed once again in his vest and boots to protect his vulnerable paws, but this time off the leash and heeling at her knee, Hawk was recharged after the short break, several drinks of water, and some high-energy treats. “You ready to go, boy?”

  Hawk looked up at her, eyes bright and tail wagging enthusiastically. Let’s go!

  “Okay, Hawk, find them.”

  Hawk instantly put his nose into the air, searching for scent, and trotted in the direction of the nearest collapsed house.

  A low, insistent buzz crept slowly into Meg’s consciousness. Involuntarily, her heart rate spiked and her gaze swung upward, quickly finding the small, dark silhouette streaking through the sky. She forced herself to calm down, pushing against the involuntary jolt. Not carrying a bomb. Here to save, not kill. But part of her kept one ear on the craft, tracking it as it flew overhead and past. The scars from their case last May were still too fresh.

  Hawk made quick work of the first several structures, searching through and over debris, but with no sign of victims, living or dead. Meg sincerely hoped that everyone in this vulnerable area was smart enough to have fled when they had the chance. She could only imagine what it had been like here last night, totally exposed, one-hundred-mile-per-hour winds and a wall of water twice the height of most of these houses crashing over the area. These houses had been built to withstand a rugged nor’easter, but none had been built to withstand last night’s challenges.

  The fourth house they approached was on the corner of one of Highway 60’s cross streets, although now it appeared more like a sand-covered creek bed. This open conduit had allowed the storm surge to charge up the street from the beach. While the mammoth wave would have been spreading out and losing height at that point, it had momentum on its side and had sliced into the house like a chef’s knife, cutting away a huge swath of the lower floor on the street side, along with a smaller piece of the second floor. This left most of the upper story of the house hanging in midair, held in place by only a few shaky bits of crossbeam and a smattering of roof trusses.

  The moment Hawk got near the structure, his posture changed. His tail went up, waving excitedly from side to side, and his whole body took on an air of alertness that spoke of possibilities.

  “Do you have something, Hawk?”

  Her dog glanced back over his shoulder, the gleam in his eye answering her question.

  “Good boy!” Meg kept every ounce of positivity in her voice, but she eyed the house with skepticism. It did not look stable, and the last thing Craig needed was to tie up a team that got into trouble, taking up th
e fire department’s precious time digging out a rescuer and her dog. She pulled out her satellite phone and called Craig. “Craig, we found something. Hawk is giving strong indications, but it’s not a good situation.”

  “Where are you?” Craig asked.

  “Corner of what was Highway 60 and 43rd Street. Two-story cedar shake Craftsman-style home. The storm surge hit it and took out half of the first floor. Most of the second floor is hanging in place, but I’m not confident about the stability of the house. How fast could we get a fire team here?”

  “Let me call you back.” Craig ended the call without a goodbye. He called back less than a minute later. “They’re saying forty-five minutes to an hour.”

  Meg studied the house. As if feeling the weight of her gaze, the structure creaked ominously. “I don’t think we have that long. Let me check it out. Maybe just have Brian on alert in case I run into trouble.”

  “Meg, do not get into a situation you can’t handle. You have a tendency to sometimes bite off more than you can chew.”

  “No, I have a tendency to bite off exactly what I can manage. I won’t take any unnecessary chances and I’ll let you know the status. Meg out.” She ended the call and then spent five seconds glaring at the phone in her hand as if it were Craig’s face. Then she rolled her shoulders and stuffed the irritation away. Craig meant well and always had his teams’ best interests at heart. Sure, his command had bumped up against her stubbornness a few times, leading to a suspension in a previous case when she defied one of his orders, risking her life and Hawk’s to save a victim. But when push came to shove, he would always be in her corner if she ran into trouble.

  “Let’s try not to jam him into that position,” she muttered to her dog.