But even with his newly smashed thumb, Andy lashes the overhead tarp and proofs it against aftershocks. The heavy-lifting equipment hasn’t arrived, which makes Colin uneasy. They’re supposed to have a scissor press that can lift and hold ten tons indefinitely. Andy has watched videos of it in action. The motor whirs and whines, blowing out hot exhaust, and the press moves imperceptibly. Patience is the key. It takes twenty minutes to lift that much weight — a combination of hydraulics and leverage so arcane that it might as well be magic — but even three centimeters, the length from the tip of his thumb to the first knuckle, is enough to free someone.
“We’ll have to start without it,” Colin says, cracking his knuckles. Colin’s a postbox, solid and thick, with a jaw that juts out like it’s ready to accept letters.
Andy secures the sides of the tent, unfolds and aligns the cots. He empties his pack of his protective fire gear and slips tools into the loops on his utility belt. He cradles his helmet in the crook of his arm, the straps undone and hanging about, and takes his place in line, where they stand at attention. He tucks his injured thumb into his fist.
“Right,” says Mike. “Let’s get to it.”
Dusk. The Balaji apartment complex.
This is the third building Andy has searched. These buildings once had names and windows and exterior features; now they had fuck all. At the first building, on his first tunnel down, he shone his torch onto a man’s scalp—“Are you all right? Can you move?”—only to realize that it was a head on a torso. The other half of the body had been pincered away. He’d wasted his breath, unable to tell the living from the dead. For the next two hours, he kept quiet, lips tight against the airborne plaster until Colin called off the search. At the second building, dust sifted down from above, and the interior rumbled and hissed as it rebalanced. Pebbles tumbled from an unknown height, and Mike simply shook his head. No.
The sun slides beneath the horizon, and light struggles into the air, a bloody glow that drains from the atmosphere. Civilians, dressed in civilian rags, pick at the wreckage to reach the twenty-five or so missing persons reported trapped inside the Balaji. Their friends and family. They haul bricks and cinder blocks with their bare hands and relocate the rubble down a line. Some men look as if they haven’t eaten in days, skinny enough to break in two. They heave rocks into one another’s arms, shirttails out, and where they wipe their hands on their pants, they leave smears of blood. Nosebleeds cake into their mustaches, dark as pitch, and when the soldiers tell them to make way, they shift the line. They’re determined to do something.
Andy and the crew approach the central staircase of the lobby, the only part of the Balaji that hasn’t compacted, and Colin sends Andy in with a warning, “You feel anything go wrong, hear anything out of the ordinary, and you get the fuck out.” Andy clamps his hands into fists to keep from shaking because everything he’s learned feels useless. During training, he had to crawl through a twenty-meter concrete tunnel no wider than a body. The tunnel was worn smooth by endless recruits before him, and a trickle of water ran down the center for authenticity. Even outfitted with a breathing apparatus, Andy made good time, being smaller than the others, but toward the far end, the pipe tightened so that the tunnel pressed against his back and stomach with each breath. His own odors concentrated, and he wondered if his light-headedness was a lack of oxygen, the onset of claustrophobia. If he couldn’t do this, then this was the end of his career. He curved his shoulder toward his chin and let his left arm lie limp as his right pulled him forward. He reached the end of the tunnel, where it opened enough for him to rise onto his hands and knees, and he turned himself around, sitting on his ankles and rolling backward, readying himself for the long crawl back.
The opening before him is a mouth, as far and deep as he can see, full of teeth. Andy secures the mask around his face, clicks on the torch attached to his helmet. Ready. Phil and Reg hold the line circling his stomach, and from elsewhere, he hears team members call, “Please respond if you can hear me.” Andy musters the strongest voice he can. His voice needs to penetrate the filter mask into the space ahead. Bent girders deflect the sound. Around him, shorn steel cables: sharp, impaling objects poking his body. Floors here were raised without support beams, and the walls, thick as a slice of bread, stood without plinth. It’s no surprise that this building collapsed; it’s more of a surprise that it didn’t collapse long before. The upper floors lean against each other awkwardly. They threaten to tear away at any moment, and as if Phil and Reg sense his reticence, they pull at his cord to confirm that he’s fine, and he replies, a single tug. He drops to his knees and faces a dark void—“Anyone here?” The staircase is a broken back, and the debris, like splintered bones, grabs his clothes, and Andy doesn’t realize how badly he’s scraped until he notices rust-colored pinpricks on the orange surface of his suit. If it weren’t for his torch, he wouldn’t be able to count the fingers in front of his face, and a chill settles on his cheeks and eyelids. The air is stagnant, and Phil calls, “Anything?” and Andy says, “No, I’m going farther.”
He can’t be more than five meters in, but the void he’s working in is less than a meter high. He uses both hands to undulate forward on his belly like a snake. He won’t let himself imagine what this place must have been like, how it must have once been filled with the noise of children and families, how it smelled like the curry carts in Whitechapel. With each movement, Andy sends plumes of white dust into the air. Desks, frying pans, cribs — all effaced, indefinite. Up ahead, a bundle of black-rubber-coated wires sway as if in a breeze, and these wires are connected to a gray blouse, and Andy says, “Hello?” in a paper-thin voice, then louder — it’s hair, a woman’s black hair, and her head tilts back, and he sees her eyes, and Andy calls out, “Reg! Reg! We’ve got a live one!” and turns back to ask, “Are you all right?” but her eyes glaze over, and her face contorts, as if she had given up hope long ago, and he says, “We’re going to get you out.” She snaps to life — her eyes widen, and she speaks rapid-fire Hindi, which he can’t understand, and he says, “We’re here for you,” which she can’t understand, and Reg asks, “Can you reach her?” If his arms were three meters longer, he’d be able to, but there’s so much between them: cinder blocks and rubble, boulders and Sheetrock, and he tells her, “I’ll be right back. I promise,” and once he’s out, Mike does a rapid assessment: “Physical condition? Head and shoulders visible. Good. Rest of body? Unknown. Obstructions? Many. Working space? Tight.”
Mike requests a translator, a thin Indian man who puts on a harness and shimmies into the void like a cat. Andy can’t get the woman’s face out of his head — suffering from dehydration, shock, bottomless fear. He’s made a promise to her, hasn’t he? And even if she didn’t understand, he’s bound to it. The translator tells them, “It’s her foot. Her foot is caught,” and Andy’s heart jumps—amputation, we’re going to have to amputate to get her out—something Andy never imagined doing, but the option hangs like a dark cloud, and the Indian fellow says that he can’t get close to her, and Mike asks, “Who’s the short man in your unit?”
Andy says, “Me. I’m the short man.”
It’s up to him; he has to do this, and the U clamp goes back onto his waist, and he crawls in as the others clear the entrance, giving him every bit of space they can manage. Andy clears what he can, rock by rock, and anything he can’t push aside, he breaks with his hammer. He lies on his stomach and taps away impediments; the sound echoes around him, and the woman calls out now and then, as if reminding him of her presence. His gloves make a tight grip on his hammer difficult, and it sometimes slips out of his hand. He shifts a chunk of debris and wonders if he’s going to cause a rockslide, if he’s going to need a rescue himself, and his breaths grow louder, and he can smell her fear, its acridity, and his own perspiration, his body steaming in the suit. So close. The woman stretches out her arm, her fingers wiggling toward him. Almost. He reaches out until the skin at his armpit feels ready to rip and — he makes contact. He takes her hand and squeezes it; he’s there, he’s kept his promise, she’s going to be OK, and he’s going to bring her out of this hole, and their lives will be there waiting for them on the other side.