by Alex Kava
“How about that map?”
Vance yanked a laminated one from inside his rain jacket and unfolded it on a makeshift table. With his index finger he outlined the area they had cleared.
“Where do you suspect the slide began?” Creed wanted to know.
“We haven’t been able to send up a helicopter for any aerial views. Weather’s been a bitch. I’m estimating it started up here.” He pointed to a line just below the top of the mountain.
“And it ends where we’re standing?”
“For now. We’ve felt some additional debris flow off to our right. This rain don’t stop, even the area we cleared can’t be considered safe. Everything is still unstable. We tried to start in the most populated area. This thing gave way about ten-thirty last night. Some folks were already in bed.
“Houses that used to sit about three acres above slid or toppled down this far.” Again, he ran his finger over the map. “We have one house still intact. Slid clean off its foundation and rode down until it slammed into another house. But the other houses . . .” He let out a long sigh. “Hard to even recognize any of the mess. You’ve done a slide before?”
“Oso.”
Vance nodded. Nothing else needed to be said. Oso, Washington, had been one of the worst.
“Then you know what you get with these things: septic tanks, insulation, propane, a truckload of glass. A wicked brew of toxins that used to be homes.”
“What about survivors?”
“We’ve pulled fourteen. Two didn’t make it. Five were taken by ambulance. Some of the survivors are telling us they have family still in the rubble. But that’s just this area. We’re hoping you and your dog can help find them.”
Creed pulled the yellow fluorescent vest over Bolo’s head and secured it in place. The dog wiggled in anticipation. This particular vest had a strap running along the top from side to side that could be used as a handle if Creed needed to yank the big dog up and out of the muck.
“I didn’t realize there was so much gear for the dog,” Vance said from behind them, standing back but watching as Creed attached a tiny waterproof GPS unit inside a mesh pocket in the vest. It would sit just over Bolo’s right shoulder.
“Normally I’d rather not have him off leash, but in this case being attached to me will slow him down.”
Then Creed prepared himself. He tucked his pant legs into his hiking boots and ran four-inch waterproof tape around his ankles, sealing the seam. He already had on special socks that would wick the wetness away from his skin. He knew the tape wouldn’t necessarily keep his feet dry, but it would discourage snakes and other insects from climbing up his legs.
He strapped on his helmet, a ballistic shell that sat just above his ears. It was similar to the helmets Vance’s crew wore, only Creed’s didn’t include a communication headset inside. He chose to leave his gloves in his rain jacket pocket. In the other pocket he stuffed a knotted rope toy and zippered it in while Bolo’s eyes grew wide and his tail wagged. Most of Creed’s dogs were trained with toy rewards. Food was never used. Too many things could go wrong with food rewards. Last, he tugged on a small backpack with other items he or Bolo might need along their search. This particular pack had a one-snap release in case he got caught up in debris and needed to wrestle free.
Ready, he turned back to Vance. Something just occurred to him and he asked, “How did you know I was coming?”
“What do you mean?”
“Ms. Klein wasn’t on the admission list but you sounded like you were expecting me. Even knew I was a marine.”
“One of the guys told me early this morning.” He scratched at the thick mass of gray hair under his hard hat.
Creed shrugged it off. It probably didn’t matter. Instead he asked, “What about the DoD’s facility?”
“Don’t know much about it. It’s secluded on federal property. Classified crap. Nobody around here can even tell me what the facility was for, let alone how many people worked there. I’d say it’s about an acre northeast of these homes.”
“You think it was affected?”
“Oh yeah. That’s probably gone. But that late at night, I’m hoping there wasn’t anyone in there. We don’t even have it on our unaccounted-for list because nobody’ll give us any information.”
“My biggest challenge is the scent area for my dog,” Creed told him. “He’ll be confined to this area, but the scent could stretch all along the slide or at least as far as it’s been dragged. Where Bolo ends up alerting could be a part of the field, but it might not be exactly where the victim is.”
“No matter how far off he is, I’ve got to think he’ll still be saving us time.”
“There is one other thing,” Creed said. “From what you’ve described, this slide was powerful.”
“And fast. Never seen one like this before. We get our share in these parts but rarely one like this.”
“I have to warn you. There’s a good chance the houses aren’t the only things that have been ripped apart.”
8.
Washington, D.C.
Senator Ellie Delanor stared at the stack of files on her desk. In the corner of her office were a half-dozen boxes with more. Senator Quincy, who was heading the congressional hearing, had sent them over just that morning.
Her chief of staff stood in the doorway. The note he had handed her was supposed to prepare her for this.
“Was there some mistake?” she asked Carter.
She knew the answer but still hoped he could explain the delay as a simple mix-up. She didn’t want to believe that her colleague—the four-term senior senator from Illinois who had allowed her to be on the committee—would sabotage her before the hearings even began. But considering what she had put up with in the past, she shouldn’t even be surprised. The Senate was still a good ole boys’ club. She’d been warned. She already knew she would be the token woman for the camera crews at the hearings. Wasn’t this just another way of reminding her of her place?
“They said that the DoD only just released them,” Carter told her, pointing to the boxes. The stack on her desk had been delivered yesterday morning.
She met his eyes, looking for any hint of whether he believed it. Sad, but these days she found herself relying on a twenty-eight-year-old glorified clerk as her bullshit monitor. That’s what happens when you discover your ex-husband has lied for most of your thirteen years of marriage. You don’t know who to believe.
“I skimmed through a few files,” he continued. “Blocks of blacked-out copy. Pages of it in some instances.”
“So what are you saying?”
“We never would have found much even if we’d received them two months ago instead of today.”
From the labels adhered to the outside of the boxes she knew the copies were from documents dated between 1951 and 1975. It was amazing to think how records were kept before computers. Hundreds of thousands of documents, sorted page by page. There was no easy way to access information from these bulging boxes of stack upon stack. It would take months to physically look through them, let alone read them.
And what good would it do? The DoD, the very agency that was being investigated, was the same agency that determined what was too sensitive, too classified, and needed to be blocked out.
Or was that exactly what the DoD wanted them to believe? She wondered if hers and Carter’s responses were what the DoD hoped for—that they would take one look and think that all of the important information was still classified. And maybe they wouldn’t bother to look at all.
Carter’s cell phone bleated its annoying ringtone. He pulled it out and glanced at the screen.
“It’s Senator Quincy’s office,” he told her, even as he tapped the faceplate to take the call, not waiting for her permission. “This is Carter.”
He listened, nodding as though the person on the other end of the line could see him.
Ellie watched him, realizing the kid had become a player—poker face, eyes steady, face expressionless, body casual and free of any fidgeting or ticks. When had he gotten so good at this that even she couldn’t read him? He had been such a sweet, innocent kid when she hired him, all bright-eyed and ready to adore her.
“Senator Quincy’s called an emergency meeting,” he said, interrupting her thoughts so suddenly she didn’t notice that he had ended his call.
“About the files?”
“Something about Dr. Hess not being able to testify tomorrow.”
“What?”
Colonel Abraham Hess was one of her witnesses. A brilliant biologist and medical doctor, he had earned an indisputable reputation in his fifty-five years in the army. A friend of her father’s, Ellie had known Hess since she was a child.
“There was a landslide in North Carolina.”
“He doesn’t have any family in North Carolina.”
Carter shrugged, already gathering his messenger bag and waiting for her.
“Something about a research facility,” he told her.
But all she heard was that her star contribution to these hearings was bailing on her, and she couldn’t let that happen. She grabbed a file folder, pen, and leather portfolio, always conscious of looking unburdened and in control. At the door she stopped and turned to Carter, who was ready to follow her. She pulled out a sheet of paper and jotted down several names and phone numbers, then handed it to him.
“Before you join me in the meeting, make a few calls for me. By this afternoon I want a subpoena delivered to Colonel Hess.”
“A subpoena?” He said it like he’d never heard the word before.
“Yes, Carter. It’s a congressional hearing. I can do that. He’s my witness and he will be there tomorrow.”
She didn’t wait for him to ask any more questions. Truth was, she had no idea if it was possible to do what she was asking. But she was tired of people bailing on her, tired of having boxes of files dropped off to be read in less than twenty-four hours, tired of being treated like a skirt who should simply be happy to sit and be pretty. If Colonel Hess thought he could take advantage of their family friendship to screw her over, he was sadly mistaken. Senator Ellie Delanor was finished being screwed over.
9.
Haywood County, North Carolina
Wasteland” was the first word that came to Creed’s mind. The gentle slope at the foothills of the slide was once a forest. Now the only indication that trees had ever stood there were the twisted roots that jutted out of the earth.
Creed took careful steps, instructing Bolo to do the same. The toughest part of training a dog for disaster work sometimes included asking the dog to act against his instinct. No running. No jumping. The impact could destabilize the debris and cause the ground the dog was jumping onto to give out beneath him. Thankfully no floodwaters raced across this area, but Creed knew they would likely encounter some and he’d need to keep his water-loving dog from bounding through it.
He expected the mud to suck at his boots and make walking cumbersome. In seconds the soles of his shoes were caked and heavy, rendering the treads worthless. He slid easily, challenging his balance. The ground was saturated and slick. To make matters worse, Creed could see that the floor of the slope was now made up of slick, green logs, stripped of bark, stuck in the mud, side by side, a long stretch of them for as far as Creed could see.
At first he wondered if a lumber company had lost a heap of their product. On closer inspection he realized they weren’t forested logs but tree trunks—upended by the force of the slide—scraped clean of their branches and most of their bark. So this was where the forest—the missing trees—had gone.
Twenty feet in front of him, Bolo was already sniffing and scratching at the ground. He walked in circles over the same spot, his tail straight out. His breathing was already rapid, nose twitching, ears pitched forward. Creed watched as Bolo’s tail slowly curled. Then the dog looked over his shoulder, looking for Creed. When Bolo saw he had Creed’s attention, he scratched once more, then sat down.
This was how the big dog alerted. But was it possible he already had found something? The debris field had to be overwhelmed with scent.
Creed approached slowly, trying not to slip. When he took too long, Bolo stood and turned to watch him. He scratched the surface again, as if saying, It’s here. What’s taking you so long?
This time when Bolo sat, he stared at the zippered pocket of Creed’s rain jacket where he’d seen his rope toy disappear to earlier. But Creed couldn’t reward the dog for a possible false alert.
There was a break in the logs where Bolo sat—no logs for at least a ten-foot stretch. Instead of tree trunks, it looked like a sheet of metal partially buried in mud. It could be part of a building. Maybe a piece of roof. Creed pulled on his gloves and swept one of his hands over the surface. He dug away clots of mud, looking for a seam or an edge. In other places the metal was buried under almost a foot of dirt and chunks of asphalt. Suddenly he jerked back in surprise when he realized what he was looking at.
It was the undercarriage of a vehicle.
He hadn’t been able to recognize it at first because the tires and wheels had been sliced away. He could smell gasoline but it was faint, and from the fracture lines in the metal he guessed the gas tank had been ruptured, the contents leaked and spewed over the hillside as the vehicle tumbled.
“We have an overturned vehicle here,” Creed called out to Vance and his crew, who had respected Creed’s wishes and stayed back while he and Bolo worked.
“Damn it! How’d we miss that?” Vance said.
“I wouldn’t have recognized it either if Bolo hadn’t alerted.”
Vance looked from the vehicle to the dog as though the significance had only just occurred to him. That the dog may have sniffed out victims. He turned back to his men and yelled, “Hurry it up. Get the excavator. We’ve got a vehicle down here.”
To Creed, he said in almost a whisper, “So the dog is telling you that someone is still down there?”
“I told you about scent being spread across the entire slide. I can’t make any promises.” Creed glanced at Bolo patiently sitting and waiting for his reward. “He seems convinced, though.”
“Someone’s alive?”
“Bolo’s a multitask dog.”
Vance stared at Creed, then finally asked, “So what the hell does that mean? I thought he was a search-and-rescue dog.”
“He is. He tracks human scent, but that includes decomp.”
Vance stared again and Creed waited to see the realization come across his face. That’s when he muttered, “Crap! That’s what I was afraid of.”
Just then Bolo stood again. His ears twitched and pitched forward. He lowered his nose to the ground and cocked his head. But he wasn’t sniffing. He was hearing something.
Vance started to speak and Creed put up his hand to stop him. He tried to listen.
Nothing. He couldn’t hear a thing.
He watched Bolo while Vance waved his arms at his crew to stay back. The big dog was no longer scratching for more scent. He cocked his head from side to side, listening to something below that only he could hear.
Was the earth giving way again? Some dogs could sense landslides before they started. Creed scanned the surroundings, rotating his head only and keeping his feet planted while he examined the wall of dirt behind them.
“You think—” Vance started.
Creed cut him off again with a finger to his lips. Now Vance’s eyes darted around, too, but he followed Creed’s lead and kept stock-still.
That’s when Creed heard a muffled dog bark.
He glanced up. Vance had heard it, too.
“Your dog found a dog?”
Creed shook his head. “He knows not to alert to animals.”
Vance’s bushy eyebrows drew to
gether. Again Creed waited. This time when Vance realized what that meant, he yelled out to his men, “Get that equipment over here. Now!”
10.
Once Creed’s dogs alerted he pulled them aside, making way for the experts to do their job, whether it was a forensic team or, in this case, a rescue crew. He tried never to blur the line of where his job ended and their job began. It was important that his dogs knew, too.
As Creed led Bolo away, he tossed him his rope toy, careful to pitch it for a catch that didn’t require the big dog to jump. Strings of saliva flew from his mouth as he caught it. Bolo had been drooling because of the wait, even with the distraction of the muffled dog barks.
Creed hated delaying rewards, but false alerts were always a concern. Whether the people in the vehicle were dead or alive, Bolo had found them despite hundreds of pounds of mangled metal and layers of mud. He deserved his reward. Creed would let him prance around with it for a while before they started back to the staging area.
He guided Bolo to a sloped area above the rescue where the ground felt solid. Closer to the wall he could smell the musty earth. In the debris underfoot he noticed a mixture of broken bricks and splintered branches. Pieces of glass sparkled in the gray muck. Already he was concerned about Bolo’s paws.
Vance directed a mini Bobcat excavator instead of the larger Caterpillar Creed had seen close to the staging area. He could hear Vance telling his men to be careful as he waved to the machine operator. Creed guessed they’d try to use the tooth bucket to dig around the vehicle or attach and lift. Either process could trigger another slide.
Creed called to Bolo, his palm up, and the dog surrendered his toy without hesitation. He’d barely stuffed it in his pocket when Bolo’s nose started working. Before Creed could stop him the dog moved along the wall of dirt, nose in the air, whiskers twitching, tail straight out. No doubt this entire area was slathered with scent, running with the mud and debris as it rolled and slid down the slope. Creed would need to pull him off. They could start there again later. That’s exactly what he was thinking when he heard the crack.
