Troubleshooters 08 Flashpoint

by Suzanne Brockmann

  “Good.”

  Nash pushed past Schroeder to help organize the milling relief workers into teams. “Anyone with a medical background,” he shouted above the chaos. “First aid training included. Follow me.”

  “Murph!” Decker called for the big former Marine. “Find our supplies!” If those kids had been buried since the quake, they had to be in desperate need of water.

  Tess was thinking along the same lines, and as Murphy broke open a crate filled with bottled water, she was right there. She hefted four whole cases and started toward the cleared entrance to the school, staggering slightly under the weight.

  “Yo, Red,” she said to Will Schroeder, who was still standing by the door of the bus, just watching the activity. “Yeah, you! Make yourself useful.” She dumped two of the cases of water into the reporter’s arms.

  Decker wasn’t too far behind them with more water, but as he approached the entrance, Tess was already coming back out.

  The look on her face was one he knew he would remember all his life.

  “They can hear a tapping sound,” she told him. “There are more kids alive, I think probably in the basement. But in order to get to them . . . God, Deck, I think we’re going to need a hundred body bags.”

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  CHAPTER

  SEVEN

  “It’s another girl,” Tess said.

  Khalid murmured his thanks as he took the body from her and laid it tenderly on the worn boards of the wagon bed, making sure the child’s face was covered.

  “Amman probably made it down into the basement,” Tess said, as she’d said each time she’d made another terrible delivery out here from the ruined school building. God, it was hot in the sun—even hotter than it was inside the school.

  “But he may not have,” the Kazbekistani boy said, just as he, too, said each time.

  She looked into his eyes. She was more tired than she’d ever been in her life, but he was beyond exhausted. He’d been here since the quake hit, helping first by clearing the rubble and now by transporting the dead through this relentless heat to a mortuary that had been set up in a park down the street. It had been far more than forty-eight hours since he’d last slept.

  Although he was at most sixteen years old and slight of stature and build, to call Khalid a boy wasn’t quite accurate. He’d told her he’d been working to help support his family since his father had died three years earlier.

  Khalid’s English was remarkably good. He’d learned it at school, when he was younger, he’d told her one of the times she’d brought the body of yet another little K-stani girl out to his waiting wagon. He’d attended this very same school, where she’d been assigned the difficult task of removing bodies from the rubble, where he’d come searching for his little brother, Amman.

  The relief workers were no longer allowing family members near the ruins of the building—the parents’ understandable grief at finding their children’s bodies was hampering the rescue effort that was still under way.

  Khalid had gotten around that by pretending to be just another volunteer—and one with a horse and wagon at that.

  “Enough of the floor is clear now,” Tess reported, knowing that he wanted desperately to be inside that school, to see with his own eyes the progress that was being made. “They’re about to cut a hole through to the basement.”

  It was hoped that most of the nine hundred children who attended this school had been led down to safety in an old bomb shelter when the earthquake first hit.

  “And they’re sure that doing this won’t bring the rest of the building down on top of them?” Khalid asked.

  “Yes.” Tess was able to answer with complete certainty. “I know the men who’ve taken charge of the rescue operation. If anyone can get those kids out safely, they can.”

  Another relief worker appeared, his arms filled with another awful burden.

  Khalid moved to meet him, taking the body from the man’s arms. He flipped back the shroud to check the child’s face, covered it again, glanced at Tess, shook his head slightly. It was another girl. “Thank you,” he told the man.

  “Well, you’re not at all welcome.” It was Will Schroeder, the reporter, his red hair dulled from the relentless dust. He looked as shell-shocked and exhausted as Tess felt, sweat making paths down the sides of his grimy face. But unlike the female relief workers, he was wearing shorts and a T-shirt.

  Khalid took a step back, as if Will had struck him. “I beg your pardon, sir.”

  “No, kid . . .” Will wearily rubbed his forehead with the back of his forearm. The surgical gloves he was wearing were far from clean. “I meant . . . This is not the time or place to be so goddamn polite. Don’t thank me for handing you a dead seven-year-old.”

  “Forgive me, sir,” Khalid murmured, placing the child next to the others. “It is our way.”

  Dear Lord, there were so many of them. None were Amman, but every one of them was someone’s little brother or sister, someone’s precious child.

  Will was gazing at the back of the wagon, too. “Look at that. You know, your way is totally fucked.”

  There was an answering flash of anger in Khalid’s dark eyes. “Perhaps you would prefer if I acted more American. ‘Who did this awful thing?’ ‘An earthquake, sir.’ ‘Who caused this earthquake?’ ‘God, sir.’ ‘Find where God lives—we must invade! A preemptive strike before He does this to us, too!’ ”

  Will laughed his disgust. “Oh, that’s sweet. Go on and throw stones—”

  Tess stepped between them. “This isn’t helping. We’re all being pushed beyond our limits—”

  He spoke right over her, glaring at Khalid. “—because we all know you and your country have so much to be proud of!”

  “Not so much as you!”

  “For God’s sake, both of you! This isn’t about politics—it’s about dead children!”

  Khalid turned away, but Will was still practically quivering with anger.

  “You think this isn’t about politics?” he asked. “Look at that wagon,” he ordered Khalid, raising his voice. “Just look at it! What do you see? Don’t you notice anything special about your cargo? Or is it just another load to carry, another chance to earn a fast buck?”

  “Stop that!” Tess took off her gloves, took his arm, trying to tug him back toward the school and away from Khalid. “He’s a volunteer, and you know it! It’s costing him to help—he still needs to feed that horse, and on what, God only knows!” She stepped closer to Will, lowered her voice. “Show a little compassion. His brother’s somewhere in that school.”

  Will pulled free. “Well, he doesn’t have to worry. His brother’s probably safe in the basement.” He turned to speak directly to Khalid. “We just uncovered the basement door. And the bodies of about twenty more girls who were locked out.” He spat the words. “Because God forbid they occupy the same fallout shelter as the boys, use up all the air, eat all the supplies . . .”

  Dear God.

  “Look at that wagon,” Will told her again. “Those are mostly girls.”

  He was right. Tess had carried out body after body, and they were nearly all . . . Dear God.

  “Someone told me that out of nine hundred kids in this school, only about sixty were girls. They were taught in their own special classroom, carefully segregated from the boys. Their parents paid nearly three times as much for them to attend and considered themselves lucky that their daughters were getting any kind of education at all. Lucky, yeah.” Will laughed, but it was a terrible sound. “The teachers brought the boys into the basement and goddamn locked the door on the girls.”

  With one final accusing look at Khalid, he headed back toward the school.

  Tess felt sick. “They couldn’t have done that.”

  Khalid didn’t say anything, but the look on his face told her that they, indeed, could have.

  “Dear God.” She followed Will more slowly into the schoo
l where the stench of death just kept growing stronger in the late afternoon heat. Twenty more bodies, he’d said. All girls.

  Tess was dripping with sweat. It was running in a stream down the backs of her legs, soaking through her clothes. Local rules, the same ones that kept boys and girls from sharing a classroom—or a shelter during an earthquake—dictated that women be covered at all times. She couldn’t so much as roll up her long sleeves.

  The heat and the news that Will had just shared made her light-headed, but her discomfort, she knew, was nothing compared to that of the women waiting just down the street for that next wagon, about to find out that their children—their daughters—were dead.

  “Hey.”

  Tess looked up to see Nash coming toward her. He was moving fast, as if he thought he might have to catch her. Truth was, she was feeling faint.

  “You okay?” he asked, concern in his eyes.

  She started to nod yes, but couldn’t do it. “I think I might throw up.”

  “Yeah,” he said, taking her arm and pulling her out of the path of traffic. “I know the feeling. You just heard about that locked door, huh?”

  She nodded, searching his eyes. “Is it true?”

  “Come on, sit down. Here . . .” Nash led her all the way back outside, to an area beneath a sheet someone had set up to provide shade. “Sit,” he ordered, pulling her down onto a pile of concrete blocks. “Where’s your water bottle?” He didn’t wait for her to answer. He just turned, shouting, “Dave!”

  “I just had some,” she told him.

  “You need more than some.” He knelt in front of her, pulling her shirt up and out of her pants and fanning the fabric so that air moved against her body. “Look at you. You’re boiling over. You need to be pouring water down your throat pretty much continuously in this heat. Desert rations are—”

  “Minimum one and a half gallons a day,” she finished for him. “I know. I read the packet.”

  Nash didn’t laugh. He didn’t even smile. “Did you do the math, too? Because that works out to about a bottle every hour. Come on, Tess, use that big brain that’s in your head. You should be carrying around a bottle of water—and you know it.”

  “Yeah, well, guess what? I’ve been carrying around other things,” she retorted hotly, glad for the anger that surged through her, knowing that without it, she might’ve started to cry.

  And Nash knew it, too.

  It was pretty remarkable. On him, the dust and the sweat actually looked sexy. It made his dark hair appear as if he were going gray, which, when it finally happened for real, was only going to succeed in making him even better looking than he already was.

  Which was saying something.

  If he was tired, if he felt like crying, too, he didn’t let it show. He had a haphazardly bandaged gash on his right forearm that must’ve hurt something fierce, and a scrape on his cheek.

  It must’ve hurt . . .

  I get dinged up a lot. She heard an echo of his voice from that night he’d come up to her apartment. They’d talked about things she hadn’t expected him to talk about. He’d told her how he’d gotten injured on the roof of the Gentlemen’s Den. He’d been stabbed in the leg, although he brushed it off as inconsequential, calling it “getting dinged up.” He’d told her—although not in so many words—that he often got dinged up. On purpose.

  Tess was no expert, but she suspected that Jimmy Nash used physical injuries to drown out emotional pain.

  She touched his hair, his cheek, knowing that even though he didn’t show it, this day had to be as hard for him as it was for the rest of them. “What happened to you?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “I tripped and . . . It was nothing.”

  He was on the verge of a full-scale retreat, but Tess stopped him by putting her arms around him. She knew she wasn’t supposed to, and she certainly didn’t want to give him the wrong idea, but she couldn’t help herself. She needed the contact. The comfort. And she knew that, as much as he pretended otherwise, he needed it, too.

  Jimmy Nash tensed for only a fraction of a second before he put his arms around her and held her just as tightly.

  He smelled good. How on earth did he manage to smell good? And, oh, God, it felt so nice to be in his arms again. He’d put his arms around her on the bus, but it hadn’t been like this.

  She wasn’t in love with him—she was smarter than that—but in that moment, she knew the truth. She could have loved him. Big-time. He was a fool for having thrown that away.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered, as if he could read her mind. But she knew he was probably apologizing for countless other things. The heat. The horror. The injustice.

  “She okay?”

  It was Dave. Jimmy let go of her to take two bottles of water from him. “Thanks.”

  “She’s fine,” Tess said, forcing a smile as—shit! Some of her tears had escaped—she quickly wiped her eyes.

  “She heard about the door,” Jimmy told Dave as he opened one of the bottles and handed it to her.

  Dave looked at her as she sipped the water, sympathy in his eyes. He had a face that didn’t quite match his long hair, kind of like Tom Hanks in Castaway. “Don’t go back there,” he told her. “It’s grim. It’s . . .” He shook his head. “We can move them in stages. I’ll bring them out here, you can take them the rest of the way to the wagon.”

  “That’s not necessary,” Tess said.

  “Yes, it is,” Dave said.

  He was gone then, as quickly as he came, leaving Jimmy sitting in the dust in front of Tess, watching her drink her water.

  “So it is true,” she said. “That the door was locked.”

  He nodded. “Do yourself a favor and don’t go back there.”

  “I’m not a child,” she told him. “You don’t need to protect me.”

  “I know. I also told Deck not to go back there. He doesn’t need to see this either,” Jimmy said. “And believe me, I don’t think of him as a child.” He looked away from her, over toward Khalid and the wagon, as if he were deciding whether or not to tell her something. But when he spoke, all he said was “You know, you and Decker have a lot in common.”

  The high-pitched whine of the floor being cut made it impossible for her to respond to that. Jimmy pushed the water bottle up toward her mouth, tucked a stray piece of hair behind her ear.

  But then he moved back. He was looking at something over her shoulder, and she turned to see Will Schroeder watching them as he went past.

  “He knows who we are,” Tess said.

  Jimmy didn’t try to speak over the noise. He just nodded.

  The saw finally shrieked to a stop. “Why is Decker doing that? Why can’t we just open the basement door?” she asked.

  “There’s a fallen beam leaning up against it,” Jimmy told her. “It could jeopardize the structural integrity of the building if we move it. At least that’s what Murphy said. I had no idea, but he’s some kind of engineer.” He laughed. “Who would’ve guessed? You learn something new every day, huh?”

  You do, indeed.

  Tess had learned quite a bit that very afternoon. She’d learned that although there was a great deal of bad in the world, there was also good. And it sometimes came from the most unexpected places.

  She’d followed Jimmy at the Ikrimah airport terminal and watched him approach a Muslim woman who had a blanket on the ground covered with some of the most beautifully crafted jewelry she’d ever seen.

  Jimmy had selected a bracelet. Tess didn’t speak the language, but she understood the conversation just from watching. The woman told him that the rice was too much payment for what he was buying.

  He picked out a necklace then, too, giving the woman that roll of nickels he’d gotten from the bookstore in the San Diego airport. Tess had puzzled over that for a long time on the flight. What on earth did Jimmy Nash want with forty nickels?

  Now she understood.

  Those coins were what this woman used to make her jewelry. She must me
lt them down and . . .

  Jimmy had asked the woman something, gesturing toward one of the children. The woman pulled the child closer—a dark-haired little boy who couldn’t have been more than four years old.

  As Tess watched, Jimmy greeted the boy, even shook his hand. He then passed out candy bars to all of the children. He had only three, but none of them complained about having to share the treat.

  “He is my sister’s child,” Tess heard the woman said to Jimmy in heavily accented English, glancing back at the littlest boy. “He doesn’t speak American. His mother is very sick. He doesn’t know it, but he will soon be my child.”