by Fiona Quinn
“Echo Six. I’m going to have trouble getting back to you. I’m caught in a traffic jam. Something’s up heading northeast. It doesn’t seem like a morning commute issue. I’m not sure what’s going on. Seems that the interest is directed toward the water. Have you heard anything?”
“Remi, is anything going on out the window?”
Remi scooted over to the balcony. After checking to make sure the senator was secured, Remi dragged her phone from the utility belt she had around her waist.
“There’s a fire,” she called over to him.
Remi quick dialed. She was speaking in rapid French. T-Rex thought of himself as reasonably fluent in the African pronunciations of French. This sounded different. He only caught words here and there. Nothing that was making a lot of sense to him. But she was obviously working the phones, probably calling her fellow wombats—that brought a smile to his lips.
Hopefully, Remi’s connections would give them the answers they might need to ensure this was a safe location to wait for medical help.
Remi slid her phone away as she came back over to him. She was dressed in her nightshirt with nothing underneath, her tennis shoes, and the utility belt. T-Rex made a mental note to ask her how she got that and her shoes on when the senator had woken Remi up.
“What did you see?” he asked, his hand planted on the senator’s shoulder so she wouldn’t be able to move.
“There’s a massive fire by the wharf. Over in that section, there is a trove of warehouses. No one seems to know what’s in the warehouse that’s on fire or how it started. I can’t tell you about toxicity or flashpoints. The emergency crews are heading out now. So if we need an ambulance, we won’t get one now. They’ll divert what resources they have over to the fire.”
The phone rang, and she answered. She started mixing languages together. Franglais. He’d listened to her seamlessly shift between Arabic, French, and English during their short time together. From the Arabic and English side, he could say she never missed a beat, and the translations were clean. She was nervous. Something had cracked her Teflon professionalism.
He didn’t understand the situation. But from the uptick in Remi’s voice, it was bad.
“Echo Actual. Winner, we have a compounded problem. Can you see a fire in the warehouse down by the water?”
“I’ve got it on my screen now. We’re trying to figure out what’s in the warehouse and if the fumes are toxic. My best advice right now is to stay put and wait for the embassy doctor to get—”
From over at the window, Remi’s scream filled the air.
He was instantly on his feet to get to her.
T-Rex was airborne, flying through space, with no sense of up or down. The ringing in his ears blocked all sound. He crashed into something solid, and the world faded to black.
Chapter Thirty-One
Remi
Saturday, Beirut, Lebanon
Remi’s ears filled with a high pitch whistle. She blinked her lashes, heavy with plaster dust. A bomb, her brain screamed at her.
It felt like a bomb. Could that be right?
Remi had been through them a few times. She’d developed a system.
Panic will kill you. Work the system.
It was an internal fight to grab hold of logic.
She stilled and started her assessment. First, where was she? Beirut. She’d come to see Jean Baptiste. She was in the hotel, in Senator Blankenship’s room. Blankenship had gone nuts, and Remi had helped T-Rex restrain her.
T-Rex!
She flung a piece of the ceiling from her shoulder and saw blood on her hand.
Stop. Don’t be an idiot. This calls for being methodical.
A bomb. No. There was a fire at the warehouse; Remi had seen the explosion. She knew what came after; it wasn’t the bomb at this distance that could kill her; it was the concussion that followed seconds afterward. As soon as she’d seen the explosion, she’d tried to warn the others. She’d opened her mouth, and all that came out was a high-pitched scream as she threw herself to the ground, hoping the wave would wash over her.
Hoping that the only impact might be to the window.
Luck wasn’t with her.
It was bad.
Remi slid her hand under the debris that covered her, checking to ensure she was wearing her utility belt. Her fingers tapped over her tourniquet and blood clotting bandages.
She couldn’t feel her body. Pushing off panic, Remi reminded herself that she was probably in shock. Give it a minute.
As Remi filled her lungs with dust and particles, she tried to cough and clear her throat. But her chest couldn’t rise.
Her legs were oddly cold.
T-Rex! If he wasn’t by her side helping her, something horrible must have happened to him.
Remi pawed at the curtains draped over her, pushing the particleboard off her chest. Glass flying, Remi lifted her head.
She could see nothing in the darkness. Fingers fiddling in her utility belt, she grasped at the plastic length of a chem-light. Snapping it, a halo of yellow lit the densely particle-filled air.
I have to find T-Rex, her mind repeated on a loop.
Do not leap into action. Remi had learned the hard way over her years in war zones. Yet there she was, pawing and struggling. “Stop,” she shouted aloud.
Her first task was to acclimate to the situation. Check.
Second, self-assess. Lifting and flinging debris off her body, Remi found herself for the third time this trip palpating joints and bones, checking to see that her bleeding was a trickle and not a spurt. Remi realized that her legs from the thighs draped downward from a small hole in fallen beams. The front of the building was gone. Blown away. The exterior wall had vanished. Her naked legs were exposed to the cool early morning air.
Her head seemed to swell as her brain tried to focus, think, act correctly. A dull thud. A rock beat pulsing around her eyes.
Screams and sirens erupted around her as if the world had suddenly woken from a nightmare.
Remi slid backward, unsure of how stable her spot was.
Turning and getting on all fours, then up in a bear crawl, the chem-light held between her teeth, Remi inched through the building material.
She made it to the bed and the senator, an island amongst the wreckage. The senator seemed unconscious.
Dead?
Remi’s stomach sloshed as a wave of nausea hit her. She stilled and panted until she regained control.
Lowering her ear to Blankenship’s chest, hearing a constant beat, feeling the steady rise and fall of Blankenship’s lungs, Remi felt little relief.
Remi pulled a pillowcase off the pillow and used it to remove the chalky white powder from Blankenship’s face, lest it fill the woman’s lungs and suffocate her.
Holding the light up, she searched for T-Rex. “As big as he is, this shouldn’t be hard,” she said out loud. But he was nowhere.
Panic gripped her throat. Her hands buzzed. Normally, this was the time when adrenaline receded. She could think with crystal clarity. But this time, someone she loved was in danger.
Loved?
She’d revisit that thought later. Because right now, she saw the sole of T-Rex’s boot.
Remi fought against her system that wanted to freeze, to hold her captive, to keep her from moving over to that boot and find it had been severed from T-Rex’s leg. That he had bled out. That she’d lost him within moments of finding him.
Inch by inch, she struggled forward.
Breath by breath, she forced herself to lift ceiling plaster.
Squatting and grabbing hold of the beam, sobs swelling and catching in her throat, she power lifted with an adrenaline surge she had never experienced before. It was less than a foot, but she was able to sidestep and get the beam to the side.
“Remi,” T-Rex called.
“I’m here. I’m here. I’ll get you out. Cover your face if you can.” She worked for long minutes, fear sweat making her hands slick. Plaster dusted caked in the web of her fingers
.
She uncovered him inch by inch until he reached out his arms to her, and she collapsed into them. “Good god, you scared me,” She indulged an outburst of tears. They cleaned her eyes of debris, and she honestly couldn’t control these sensations. She had to work through them. Her hands patted over T-Rex’s body, looking for wounds or breaks.
“Stop. Remi, look at me.”
She blinked, recovering her equilibrium.
“Are you okay?” he asked. “You’re bleeding.” His calm and steady seeped into her skin, soothing the prickly heat of her limbic system’s gushing survival hormones.
“So are you.” Her voice was hoarse. “Let’s get you out of there.”
What they discovered wasn’t good.
While the three occupants had come through the blast in fair shape, the building had not.
They were sealed into the room. The structure wasn’t stable. They were on the sixteenth floor with ten stories above them, the façade was destroyed, making the building’s collapse seem inevitable.
Remi’s mind went to the hospital. What about the people in those beds? Jean Baptiste.
They checked the landline. Remi and T-Rex tried their cell phones. Nothing.
“The cell tower probably fell,” T-Rex said. “Or maybe everyone’s jamming the lines by making calls at the same time.” He couldn’t raise Winner on his comms.
“Here’s what we know,” T-Rex reviewed. “The three of us are alive, and our injuries are not life-threatening. The senator seems to have lost consciousness. Not from the blast, from whatever was going with her health before these circumstances.”
“Right.” Remi nodded.
Had the senator not gone nuts, he would have been in the hall and probably dead. Remi would be in her room, no idea what that looked like, alone. So if there were a miracle, it was that T-Rex was with Remi, and they could work as a team to survive.
“We’re together.” He caught her hand. “That’s a plus.”
“For sure,” Remi said.
“We’re going to be on our own for hours if not days,” T-Rex said. “The first responders were heading to the wharf fire. I doubt they could have survived that blast.”
Remi clutched at her chest. My god, all of those people!
“Winner, Havoc, Ty and Rory, people with skills know exactly where we were at the time of the blast. They’ll come for us.”
“Ty and Rory were on foot out there. Dear god. They were out there!”
T-Rex squeezed her hand. “We can’t help them. They were seven miles out when I was on comms with them. They were southwest of our location, out throwing ball on a ballfield. Okay? Chances are good that they’re fine. Havoc was even farther away, protected in an armored embassy car. They will move mountains to get to us.”
“We can’t get out on our own and send rescue in for the senator? No. Sorry. There probably aren’t any rescue workers in the area. They all would have been over working the fire at the time of the blast. So…” Remi sighed as she let that thought sink in. It’s what happened to the first responders in New York on 9-11. “They’ll need to come in from surrounding areas. And you would leave me before you left the senator because you’re on a mission.
“We’re here for the duration. There’s a beam holding the door in place. And honestly, we have no idea what’s happening on the other side of that door.”
“Hunker down.” She nodded.
He took both her hands. “We’re going to be fine, Remi. We’re going to work the problem.”
“Okay.” She had no idea what that could mean in this set of circumstances.
“Show me what you have in your utility belt.”
Remi carefully folded the dust-covered comforter out of the way, trying to preserve any spots of cleanliness. She unclasped the bag and laid each item carefully onto the sheet.
T-Rex held the glow stick.
“Mata Hari, you’re a genius,” he said, fingering the items.
He touched the water pouches. “This could be lifesaving. What’s this purple thing?”
“It’s a device that lets me pee standing up like a man does.”
“That’ll come in handy. The bathroom collapsed.”
“Collapsed, collapsed? There’s no water?” Remi thought they could probably snake an arm over to the tap. If the pipes were broken, there was always water in the back of a toilet tank.
“It’s gone.”
Remi’s knees buckled, and T-Rex grabbed her by the elbows, holding her until she steadied again. “We’re careful with what we have. The team is coming for us.”
She nodded.
T-Rex checked the senator’s vitals and documented the stats and the time in Remi’s waterproof notebook.
Then they started on the room, working methodically together to find what resources they could. There was a bottle of vodka in the senator’s suitcase. They used it to clean off their skin and their cuts. They staunched the blood and tied on bandages that T-Rex cut from a cotton T-shirt in one of the senator’s drawers.
They piled what construction pieces they could to brace the ceiling and walls and stabilize their space. It was like being in a cave.
“No exterior light, but you have three light sticks. Each will last about eight hours. Two today, none while we sleep, another tomorrow.”
Her hand shot out. “Wait, how long do you think it will take to get us out of here?”
Chapter Thirty-Two
T-Rex
Saturday, Beirut, Lebanon
They sat on the floor with their backs to the bed. With chores done, as much as possible, they needed to sit still. Remi had enough water pouches in her belt to keep them from dehydrating for about twenty-four hours, though what they could do about hydrating the senator, he wasn’t sure.
When they added in the minibar juices and a couple of sodas, that survival clock could tick a little longer.
There was a few days’ worth of survival calories available. But T-Rex had seen these things go on far beyond a few days. They needed to be conservative in everything they did to stretch their resources out as far as possible. Resting, sleeping, keeping their movements to a minimum…
“Do you always sleep in that pack, or did you have women’s intuition that something bad was going to happen?” T-Rex asked.
She leaned in for a kiss. “I went to bed thoroughly contented from our being together. I slept better last night than I remember sleeping in my life until the senator showed up on my balcony.”
“I can’t imagine what that scene was like to wake up to.”
“Startling, to say the least. About my utility belt, with the places I report from, yes, I sleep with my gear around my waist and my shoes on my feet. I never know when I have to leap from my bed and survive the night.”
“There’s a story there.”
Remi was using her tweezers to pick splinters out of T-Rex’s bicep. “There’s a story everywhere.”
“You’ve done this before?” he asked, nodding toward his arm.
“Sure. I’ve had to help my colleagues and myself on occasion.”
“The scars on your leg?”
“Shrapnel. I got off easy with the scarring. Others…well, it was a bad night.” She put a shard onto the tissue and went back to her task. “I took a class in combat first aid to help myself or my friends if one of the crew goes down.”
Wincing as she dragged out a piece of metal an inch long, T-Rex focused on Remi instead of the pain.
Man, is she pretty.
He'd like to pull that elastic from her hair and feel the silken strands.
“Sorry about this, but something’s in there. I can just feel it with the tips of the tweezers. There. Don’t move.” Remi trapped the object in the tweezers and gently pulled it. “There. I think that’s it for this cut.” She poured a capful of the vodka over the wound.
Not the best thing to do, but under the circumstances, there weren’t better choices.
T-Rex needed to bring this episode up with his tea
m when they got out of here. From now on, there should be a survival pack in each of their principal’s rooms with a minimum of seventy-two hours of supplies. Having them in his own room ready to grab and bring on site was a mistake.
Remi was smart to wear her tennis shoes and survival bag to bed. In her line of work, in the dangerous places she traveled, she knew that she could just stand up and run in an emergency.
That was too much to ask of anyone they were guarding but having everything prepped and within easy grasp would be good.
“Top of the hour,” T-Rex said. “I need to pause your brutality to write down the senator’s vitals.” He stood and rounded onto the bed. “I wish I knew what we were dealing with here,” he said, peeling back the senator’s eyelids to check pupil constriction, making sure the senator wasn’t brain dead.
“Yeah, you know, I was taping her in London when we were all down at the bar with Diamond. Diamond is so lucky that she was relegated to the robotics team and sent to Jordan. She’s going to go home unscathed,” Remi said.
T-Rex counted the senator’s pulse in her right then left wrists and at both of her ankles, documenting the numbers.
“Diamond seemed pretty uncomfortable around the senator. She and I both knew that night that something was off.” Remi pulled her phone from the end of the bed. The cell phone wasn’t connecting to the Internet or to a cell tower.
She was scrolling and tapping, grateful she always charged her phone before falling asleep. “At the time I took this video, I thought that I’d hand this off to Liu. He’s my managing editor. This kind of reporting isn’t my strength. It probably needs a great deal more attention than I could give it. Maybe my colleague Lisette whom I displaced on this trip.”
T-Rex was now counting Senator Blankenship’s breaths per minute. “You said you taped a video? Give me a second, and we can watch it together. Maybe there’s a clue to help us figure this out.”
“It wasn’t just about the senator’s health. This video was thickly seeded with information that hadn’t been in the public domain. It seemed to answer some questions my friends had been pondering.”
