-24-
Jack had passed two agents on his way back into the building; they were heading out to the gas station down the road, at Copell's order to buy a few copies of the Ordnance map, the same map Jack held in his hand. He dumped the map down on the table in front of Nina and Copell. "I just sent out Cochran and Newt..."
"I saw them on the way in."
Nina was flicking through the map to find page 24, and 25, a double spread, when she got to it she placed it on the table in front of them, "And you just had this in the car..." she prompted.
He smiled, "I've been teaching Kim how to drive, its part of her survival kit."
Nina smiled back, and then glanced at the two-page spread, her eyes widened. "He may have narrowed our search area more than he intended to." She muttered.
"What do you mean?" Jack queried.
Johnson passed her the satellite picture of their earlier search area and she rejected it, instead grabbing her own copy with the street names on, "These two streets marked the edges of our search grid during the searching for the call."
"So we've only got to search these three blocks?" Jack asked, watching as Nina's fingers ran along the side of the paper.
"Well if he was calling us whilst he was placing the bomb..." They both glanced up at Copell.
"I'll call the field office and the LAPD. Set up some road blocks, get some sniffer dogs..." Copell trailed off as Johnson passed him his cell phone.
"As soon as possible, it's nearly six, and I want to avoid the bulk of rush hour getting past them." Jack ordered. Copell nodded, and dialed the field office.
-24-
Jack, Nina and Copell didn't need to flash their badges at the officers manning the road blocks, it was so obvious to everyone that they were in charge that they strolled past the wooden barriers without even reaching for the little leather wallets, as they considered the logistics of running sniffer dogs and bomb disposal experts through every room in each building.
"We're rationing it by block, six dogs each." Johnson announced coming over from a canine expert, squatted by her dog, preparing to give it a whiff of a small lump of plastic explosive.
"Six?" Jack was worried about the chance that they'd be able to check all the buildings in time, he glanced down at his watch, which was counting down until 9-45 am, now moving from 3 hours and thirteen minutes to three hours and twelve. He glanced over at Nina, who had the same doubtful look on her face and then back at Johnson.
"Officer Marras from the K9 unit is over there." Johnson gestured to the young blonde who was squatted by a German shepherd.
Jack walked over to her. "Officer Marras."
She only glanced up at him briefly before returning her attention to her dog, "Yep." she greeted, and continued cooing the dog. Another officer handed her a plastic zip lock bag and she accepted it thanking him.
"How long do you think it will take to search each block?" Jack asked her.
"More time than you've got." She told him, and opened the bag, removing from it a lump of white solid; she paused before handing it to the dog, feeling the texture between her fingers. "But we'll have to hope we search the right buildings first."
She held the lump of plastic putty in front of the dog's nose until he barked and then put it back into the bag, she then walked away without saying goodbye to Jack, and took him past several boxes in the middle of the street. The dog was allowed to walk over each one in turn, and eventually he barked, and Marras gave him a small treat. "Zero error control test." Nina whispered to Jack, and then turned back to Copell, heading over to their small centre.
-24-
Nina had decided to walk the block alone, deciding that perhaps one agent alone would be more able to notice a suspicious individual than a hoard of yelping dogs, or a police cruiser. That and the fact that she'd been awake for an entire cold night, and the winter sun was warm. The street was deserted, the police officers had been forcing people to id themselves on sight, and most employees had decided to remain in their office buildings. The mayor hadn't given them permission to evacuate these three blocks of the city, especially as something like a hundred million dollars passed through these building's accounts in the course of the day. It was almost eerily quiet as she walked through the entrance gate into the Nielson Plaza. The central plaza was overlooked by sky-scrapers either side, huge towering glass buildings that made you had to angle your head so far back you thought your neck would snap, the entire plaza was in shadow, except the small portion illuminated by the mirror on the top of the shadow, which caught the light from the top of one building and reflected it on a small metal bench.
The entire area was a testament to ancient art, the huge pewter statues, and the gardens. There were vines growing around the fences near the flowerbeds, and pink flowers in every corner. The pavement was cracked in places, but the gray stones still upheld their part in the grand design, which was probably very strongly competed for by architects from across the country.
Nina was tempted to sit down but knew she couldn't. Never the less, she approached the bench, until a cloud moved across the sky and blocked the light reflected in the mirror. She looked up at the offending cloud, letting her eyes run up the building below it. The cloud was small, it passed with in a few seconds, but Nina had to shield her sun-glassed eyes to keep looking at the building.
It was the Nielson Building, she remembered a few names from the maps, and it gave her an disturbing sense. Standing beneath it, forty something storeys high, nearly forty feet from its base she had trouble seeing to the top. The lower floors were concrete, and then as the building got higher the walls became mainly glass, with the odd panel of concrete. Giving a quick turn she realised that it was taller than the other buildings by at least ten storeys. Nina pulled out her cell phone, hoping that there was enough signal to call her superior's phone.
"Bauer." The signal was perfectly clear, one of the buildings must have an antenna stored in it, she thought idly.
"Jack, it's Nina, look...what's the tallest building in the search grid?" she asked him.
She heard Jack ask Johnson to tell him, and then heard him yell at him, impatient because they hadn't gathered that type of information. Nina was impatient too, and forgetting about any regulations she snapped, "Forget that, run down the street and see what you can see?"
Jack told her to hang on and then there were a few moments silence as he ran down the road. Jack had decided to stay at the operations centre, a tent with FBI logo emblazoned on the side that had been set up, and therefore wasn't far from the corners of the grid. It wasn't long before he spoke into the phone again. "Okay, I can see it, it's in the central block, hang on... I'll grab a map."
"Describe it to me." She ordered, exasperated.
"The tops all glass, its a good ten storeys higher than the buildings around it..."
"Sounds like the Nielson." Nina muttered.
"The Nielson?" Jack clarified, and Nina took a quick step away from the mirror's path as the cloud moved.
"Yeah, I'm stood in front of it, in the plaza." She told him, "I've got a weird feeling about it, Jack." She admitted.
"I'm coming to meet you." He muttered, and then hung up.
-24-
It took Jack a ten minutes to find her. He brought several agents, although he approached her alone, walking through the same archway she'd come through and coming to rest behind her. Nina was staring up at the tower. She'd noticed his approach, but chose not to acknowledge him until she thought he was still. "Hi."
Jack looked up at the tower. "This is the building?" he asked.
Nina nodded, and turned to him. "I think we should evacuate it and have all the dogs check the building for explosives." She said earnestly. The sunlight reflected across her vision when she looked at him, and she took off her sunglasses to avoid the glare.
"What is it?" he asked, his second wasn't one to ask for something so serious on a meaningless whim. If she wanted this building evacuated and searched she was certain this was it.
Nina glanced back up at the building. "It's the largest one in the area. I remember there are a few companies that provide secure escorts, bouncers..." She was reached for reasons, avoiding the one that she really didn't want to say.
"Nina." He caught her attention and she turned back to him. "What else?"
"He wants the publicity." She said simply, and looked back up at the building. "I'm not wild about the visual. It may not be a plane crash, but..."
Jack finally understood why she'd been so reluctant to make her suggestion. He looked up at the tower and had a flashback to the terrible atrocities of September the 11th. He could see the news reports and photographs from the papers, magazines, and news reports. He'd seen too many grieving families, signed too many condolences books. He'd been called in to help arrest and question several suspected terrorists. Now that she'd pointed it out, he could see the similarities; tens of thousands of people worked in this building, and the death toll could easily be just as high. He left her in the courtyard, and jogged back over to Copell.
"We're evacuating this building and getting the dogs in." He told Copell.
"The mayor didn't authorise..." Johnson began to protest.
"Get a hold of building security, I want those people out of there now!" Copell snapped, and his second in command nodded, and ran off into the building. Jack turned to look at Nina, still staring at the building and then retreated to Copell. "You see it?" Copell asked.
Jack nodded, angry that their 'Dave' had chosen such a vivid reminder. He grabbed his radio. "Someone get me Officer Marras." He yelled into it, and there was a loud crackle. There was a short pause, and he heard a vaguely familiar voice. "Marras here."
"I need your entire team up here at the Nielson building." He ordered her.
-24-
Nina glanced at her watch. It was 9:32, and she was walking through the seventeenth floor with four of the sniffer dogs. Officer Marras had divided the dogs into three teams and they were going through the building. Checking sections of each building, leaving the fire escapes and lifts free for the continuing evacuation of building.
Officer Marras was obviously more inclined to speak to her dogs than other people. She'd been curt, speaking only in quick sentences and often leaving a conversation whenever she got bored. She preferred the company of her dog, Prickle, often leading her far ahead of the rest of the team. Given the nature of their work Marras couldn't pet Prickle until she'd found something, and unfortunately that meant that she was gradually retreating further into herself, and had become more and more tense since the day began.
Nina walked up the access stairwell against the flow of traffic. There didn't seem to be enough people leaving the building, and whilst she was hurrying them along, many seemed too intent upon their work to move much faster, to finish their phone conversations or computer work. Marras was on the floor above them, and the remaining four dogs on the lower floor were now making their way up the stairwell, where several sinophobic workers had moved to allow space.
Nina lifted her radio to her lips and pressed the button that allowed her to send. "Floor seventeen is clear, we're moving to eighteen now." She said, releasing the button. She heard twenty or so seconds of static before Jack responded.
A man who worked as an architect on the tenth floor had asked about their investigation, and informed them that the building was actually quite structurally sound, they'd designed it. He boasted that should a bomb go off anywhere above the twenty-second floor, the lower floors should remain intact, and only the floor of the explosion and those above it would be at risk of collapse. Fuelled by this they'd decided to remain in the building and search until the very last minute, but Nina was doubting the chance that they'd manage to either get everyone out, or check the minimum necessary number of floors.
Nina sighed as she passed Marras in the corridor. She and her partner were satisfied with their sections of this floor, and were heading up to the next floor. She called over the confused voices of the workers for Marras to come back. "I want you to check all the sections of floor twenty." She ordered them.
"We haven't done nineteen yet." Marras told her, as though it was the most obvious thing in the world. Nina didn't appreciate her tone.
"I know that, I want you on twenty. We'll finish off eighteen and do nineteen." Marras headed back off to the stairs before Nina could finish. "Marras!" she yelled. The blonde turned and cocked her hip impatiently. Nina could have sworn Prickle did the same. "Radio me when you're done with twenty." She called, and the two agents headed off.
-24-
An explosion ripped through the building, and they all felt it shake. The sound was something similar to a thousand pianos falling, and Nina ducked from a falling piece of plasterboard ceiling, she heard the dogs yelp, and turned to see that the dogs belonging to the two officers she'd been working with had knelt on the floor. One, which she had been told was quite young, was covering its eyes with its paws, and Nina couldn't help, even in the circumstances but think it was cute. She ripped her radio off of its belt loop. "Which floor?" She yelled into it, backing away from the screams of people running down the stairway. They still hadn't all evacuated.
There was no response. "Johnson, Copell, Jack...which floor?" she screeched, looking warily up at the roof, and wishing she'd interrogated the architect on the support of the twenty fifth floor.
She soon heard Johnson's voice on the radio, he'd obviously gotten some binoculars and reverted to counting, eventually he was able to answer her, "Twenty-nine, it's on twenty-nine!" he told her, and Nina ran out into the masses of people and began running up the steps.
-24-
The people leaving floor twenty-nine were few, many of them injured. The stairwell seemed to be perfectly intact, but as soon as she opened the door she could see flames in the far end of the corridor. She found an officer, knocked out of the way by the rubble, but slowly picking himself up. "The upper floors aren't safe, make sure anyone who can get down gets down safely." Nina ordered him.
The uniformed cop shook his head of any debris and wiped at a cut on his lip. Eventually he nodded at Nina, and ran towards the exit. She grabbed her torch light, which was still in her back coat pocket, and held her sleeve over her face, ducking down at she ran towards the flames.
She almost didn't hear the radio over the creaking building and cracking wood. "Nina? Which floor are you guys on?" it was Jacks voice, very urgent.
"The dogs are on twenty five." She told him, walking slowly towards the flames. She noticed a man on the floor, his leg so badly burnt his suit had adhered to his skin. "We're going to need some paramedics up here, Jack." Nina proceeded further towards the flames, stepping through the broken glass door of a company into their smashed work space. There were more people in here too.
"Where are you?" he asked.
"On twenty-nine." Nina replied, bending down to feel for a pulse in each person in turn. "We're going to need several ambulances up here, Jack." she told him, as she looked down at her bloodied hand, she refused to wipe it off, and step over several fragments of desk to reach what were potentially more people across the room.
"You shouldn't be up there, Nina." Jack warned, "It's not stable."
"There are people up here." she told him, putting the radio down on the desk as she noticed a piece of rubble trapping one man. A large beam that had fallen from the ceiling, pieces of debris were still trickling down, but the man was conscious underneath the beam and groaning.
"Hang on." She whispered to him, and wrapped her hands under the edges of the beam, and lifting it. It was heavier than she had presumed, and it dropped back down. The man wailed. She decided to give it one more try, realising she was risking seriously hurting him. She took a deep breath and looked around her, grabbing the top of a chair. She lifted the beam in a huge burst of strength and lifted it, wedging the chair piece under it for a moment to regain some strength. The chair back gave way and Nina barely caught it, pushing it off to the side and just clear of the mans body. The inhaled deeply to recuperate, checking the mans pulse again as he went silent.
He was alive, breathing with a lot of difficulty. She rested against the desk, tossing back her hair, and sucking in sharp breaths. She didn't notice another lump of ceiling fall on top of her.
Jack had passed two agents on his way back into the building; they were heading out to the gas station down the road, at Copell's order to buy a few copies of the Ordnance map, the same map Jack held in his hand. He dumped the map down on the table in front of Nina and Copell. "I just sent out Cochran and Newt..."
"I saw them on the way in."
Nina was flicking through the map to find page 24, and 25, a double spread, when she got to it she placed it on the table in front of them, "And you just had this in the car..." she prompted.
He smiled, "I've been teaching Kim how to drive, its part of her survival kit."
Nina smiled back, and then glanced at the two-page spread, her eyes widened. "He may have narrowed our search area more than he intended to." She muttered.
"What do you mean?" Jack queried.
Johnson passed her the satellite picture of their earlier search area and she rejected it, instead grabbing her own copy with the street names on, "These two streets marked the edges of our search grid during the searching for the call."
"So we've only got to search these three blocks?" Jack asked, watching as Nina's fingers ran along the side of the paper.
"Well if he was calling us whilst he was placing the bomb..." They both glanced up at Copell.
"I'll call the field office and the LAPD. Set up some road blocks, get some sniffer dogs..." Copell trailed off as Johnson passed him his cell phone.
"As soon as possible, it's nearly six, and I want to avoid the bulk of rush hour getting past them." Jack ordered. Copell nodded, and dialed the field office.
-24-
Jack, Nina and Copell didn't need to flash their badges at the officers manning the road blocks, it was so obvious to everyone that they were in charge that they strolled past the wooden barriers without even reaching for the little leather wallets, as they considered the logistics of running sniffer dogs and bomb disposal experts through every room in each building.
"We're rationing it by block, six dogs each." Johnson announced coming over from a canine expert, squatted by her dog, preparing to give it a whiff of a small lump of plastic explosive.
"Six?" Jack was worried about the chance that they'd be able to check all the buildings in time, he glanced down at his watch, which was counting down until 9-45 am, now moving from 3 hours and thirteen minutes to three hours and twelve. He glanced over at Nina, who had the same doubtful look on her face and then back at Johnson.
"Officer Marras from the K9 unit is over there." Johnson gestured to the young blonde who was squatted by a German shepherd.
Jack walked over to her. "Officer Marras."
She only glanced up at him briefly before returning her attention to her dog, "Yep." she greeted, and continued cooing the dog. Another officer handed her a plastic zip lock bag and she accepted it thanking him.
"How long do you think it will take to search each block?" Jack asked her.
"More time than you've got." She told him, and opened the bag, removing from it a lump of white solid; she paused before handing it to the dog, feeling the texture between her fingers. "But we'll have to hope we search the right buildings first."
She held the lump of plastic putty in front of the dog's nose until he barked and then put it back into the bag, she then walked away without saying goodbye to Jack, and took him past several boxes in the middle of the street. The dog was allowed to walk over each one in turn, and eventually he barked, and Marras gave him a small treat. "Zero error control test." Nina whispered to Jack, and then turned back to Copell, heading over to their small centre.
-24-
Nina had decided to walk the block alone, deciding that perhaps one agent alone would be more able to notice a suspicious individual than a hoard of yelping dogs, or a police cruiser. That and the fact that she'd been awake for an entire cold night, and the winter sun was warm. The street was deserted, the police officers had been forcing people to id themselves on sight, and most employees had decided to remain in their office buildings. The mayor hadn't given them permission to evacuate these three blocks of the city, especially as something like a hundred million dollars passed through these building's accounts in the course of the day. It was almost eerily quiet as she walked through the entrance gate into the Nielson Plaza. The central plaza was overlooked by sky-scrapers either side, huge towering glass buildings that made you had to angle your head so far back you thought your neck would snap, the entire plaza was in shadow, except the small portion illuminated by the mirror on the top of the shadow, which caught the light from the top of one building and reflected it on a small metal bench.
The entire area was a testament to ancient art, the huge pewter statues, and the gardens. There were vines growing around the fences near the flowerbeds, and pink flowers in every corner. The pavement was cracked in places, but the gray stones still upheld their part in the grand design, which was probably very strongly competed for by architects from across the country.
Nina was tempted to sit down but knew she couldn't. Never the less, she approached the bench, until a cloud moved across the sky and blocked the light reflected in the mirror. She looked up at the offending cloud, letting her eyes run up the building below it. The cloud was small, it passed with in a few seconds, but Nina had to shield her sun-glassed eyes to keep looking at the building.
It was the Nielson Building, she remembered a few names from the maps, and it gave her an disturbing sense. Standing beneath it, forty something storeys high, nearly forty feet from its base she had trouble seeing to the top. The lower floors were concrete, and then as the building got higher the walls became mainly glass, with the odd panel of concrete. Giving a quick turn she realised that it was taller than the other buildings by at least ten storeys. Nina pulled out her cell phone, hoping that there was enough signal to call her superior's phone.
"Bauer." The signal was perfectly clear, one of the buildings must have an antenna stored in it, she thought idly.
"Jack, it's Nina, look...what's the tallest building in the search grid?" she asked him.
She heard Jack ask Johnson to tell him, and then heard him yell at him, impatient because they hadn't gathered that type of information. Nina was impatient too, and forgetting about any regulations she snapped, "Forget that, run down the street and see what you can see?"
Jack told her to hang on and then there were a few moments silence as he ran down the road. Jack had decided to stay at the operations centre, a tent with FBI logo emblazoned on the side that had been set up, and therefore wasn't far from the corners of the grid. It wasn't long before he spoke into the phone again. "Okay, I can see it, it's in the central block, hang on... I'll grab a map."
"Describe it to me." She ordered, exasperated.
"The tops all glass, its a good ten storeys higher than the buildings around it..."
"Sounds like the Nielson." Nina muttered.
"The Nielson?" Jack clarified, and Nina took a quick step away from the mirror's path as the cloud moved.
"Yeah, I'm stood in front of it, in the plaza." She told him, "I've got a weird feeling about it, Jack." She admitted.
"I'm coming to meet you." He muttered, and then hung up.
-24-
It took Jack a ten minutes to find her. He brought several agents, although he approached her alone, walking through the same archway she'd come through and coming to rest behind her. Nina was staring up at the tower. She'd noticed his approach, but chose not to acknowledge him until she thought he was still. "Hi."
Jack looked up at the tower. "This is the building?" he asked.
Nina nodded, and turned to him. "I think we should evacuate it and have all the dogs check the building for explosives." She said earnestly. The sunlight reflected across her vision when she looked at him, and she took off her sunglasses to avoid the glare.
"What is it?" he asked, his second wasn't one to ask for something so serious on a meaningless whim. If she wanted this building evacuated and searched she was certain this was it.
Nina glanced back up at the building. "It's the largest one in the area. I remember there are a few companies that provide secure escorts, bouncers..." She was reached for reasons, avoiding the one that she really didn't want to say.
"Nina." He caught her attention and she turned back to him. "What else?"
"He wants the publicity." She said simply, and looked back up at the building. "I'm not wild about the visual. It may not be a plane crash, but..."
Jack finally understood why she'd been so reluctant to make her suggestion. He looked up at the tower and had a flashback to the terrible atrocities of September the 11th. He could see the news reports and photographs from the papers, magazines, and news reports. He'd seen too many grieving families, signed too many condolences books. He'd been called in to help arrest and question several suspected terrorists. Now that she'd pointed it out, he could see the similarities; tens of thousands of people worked in this building, and the death toll could easily be just as high. He left her in the courtyard, and jogged back over to Copell.
"We're evacuating this building and getting the dogs in." He told Copell.
"The mayor didn't authorise..." Johnson began to protest.
"Get a hold of building security, I want those people out of there now!" Copell snapped, and his second in command nodded, and ran off into the building. Jack turned to look at Nina, still staring at the building and then retreated to Copell. "You see it?" Copell asked.
Jack nodded, angry that their 'Dave' had chosen such a vivid reminder. He grabbed his radio. "Someone get me Officer Marras." He yelled into it, and there was a loud crackle. There was a short pause, and he heard a vaguely familiar voice. "Marras here."
"I need your entire team up here at the Nielson building." He ordered her.
-24-
Nina glanced at her watch. It was 9:32, and she was walking through the seventeenth floor with four of the sniffer dogs. Officer Marras had divided the dogs into three teams and they were going through the building. Checking sections of each building, leaving the fire escapes and lifts free for the continuing evacuation of building.
Officer Marras was obviously more inclined to speak to her dogs than other people. She'd been curt, speaking only in quick sentences and often leaving a conversation whenever she got bored. She preferred the company of her dog, Prickle, often leading her far ahead of the rest of the team. Given the nature of their work Marras couldn't pet Prickle until she'd found something, and unfortunately that meant that she was gradually retreating further into herself, and had become more and more tense since the day began.
Nina walked up the access stairwell against the flow of traffic. There didn't seem to be enough people leaving the building, and whilst she was hurrying them along, many seemed too intent upon their work to move much faster, to finish their phone conversations or computer work. Marras was on the floor above them, and the remaining four dogs on the lower floor were now making their way up the stairwell, where several sinophobic workers had moved to allow space.
Nina lifted her radio to her lips and pressed the button that allowed her to send. "Floor seventeen is clear, we're moving to eighteen now." She said, releasing the button. She heard twenty or so seconds of static before Jack responded.
A man who worked as an architect on the tenth floor had asked about their investigation, and informed them that the building was actually quite structurally sound, they'd designed it. He boasted that should a bomb go off anywhere above the twenty-second floor, the lower floors should remain intact, and only the floor of the explosion and those above it would be at risk of collapse. Fuelled by this they'd decided to remain in the building and search until the very last minute, but Nina was doubting the chance that they'd manage to either get everyone out, or check the minimum necessary number of floors.
Nina sighed as she passed Marras in the corridor. She and her partner were satisfied with their sections of this floor, and were heading up to the next floor. She called over the confused voices of the workers for Marras to come back. "I want you to check all the sections of floor twenty." She ordered them.
"We haven't done nineteen yet." Marras told her, as though it was the most obvious thing in the world. Nina didn't appreciate her tone.
"I know that, I want you on twenty. We'll finish off eighteen and do nineteen." Marras headed back off to the stairs before Nina could finish. "Marras!" she yelled. The blonde turned and cocked her hip impatiently. Nina could have sworn Prickle did the same. "Radio me when you're done with twenty." She called, and the two agents headed off.
-24-
An explosion ripped through the building, and they all felt it shake. The sound was something similar to a thousand pianos falling, and Nina ducked from a falling piece of plasterboard ceiling, she heard the dogs yelp, and turned to see that the dogs belonging to the two officers she'd been working with had knelt on the floor. One, which she had been told was quite young, was covering its eyes with its paws, and Nina couldn't help, even in the circumstances but think it was cute. She ripped her radio off of its belt loop. "Which floor?" She yelled into it, backing away from the screams of people running down the stairway. They still hadn't all evacuated.
There was no response. "Johnson, Copell, Jack...which floor?" she screeched, looking warily up at the roof, and wishing she'd interrogated the architect on the support of the twenty fifth floor.
She soon heard Johnson's voice on the radio, he'd obviously gotten some binoculars and reverted to counting, eventually he was able to answer her, "Twenty-nine, it's on twenty-nine!" he told her, and Nina ran out into the masses of people and began running up the steps.
-24-
The people leaving floor twenty-nine were few, many of them injured. The stairwell seemed to be perfectly intact, but as soon as she opened the door she could see flames in the far end of the corridor. She found an officer, knocked out of the way by the rubble, but slowly picking himself up. "The upper floors aren't safe, make sure anyone who can get down gets down safely." Nina ordered him.
The uniformed cop shook his head of any debris and wiped at a cut on his lip. Eventually he nodded at Nina, and ran towards the exit. She grabbed her torch light, which was still in her back coat pocket, and held her sleeve over her face, ducking down at she ran towards the flames.
She almost didn't hear the radio over the creaking building and cracking wood. "Nina? Which floor are you guys on?" it was Jacks voice, very urgent.
"The dogs are on twenty five." She told him, walking slowly towards the flames. She noticed a man on the floor, his leg so badly burnt his suit had adhered to his skin. "We're going to need some paramedics up here, Jack." Nina proceeded further towards the flames, stepping through the broken glass door of a company into their smashed work space. There were more people in here too.
"Where are you?" he asked.
"On twenty-nine." Nina replied, bending down to feel for a pulse in each person in turn. "We're going to need several ambulances up here, Jack." she told him, as she looked down at her bloodied hand, she refused to wipe it off, and step over several fragments of desk to reach what were potentially more people across the room.
"You shouldn't be up there, Nina." Jack warned, "It's not stable."
"There are people up here." she told him, putting the radio down on the desk as she noticed a piece of rubble trapping one man. A large beam that had fallen from the ceiling, pieces of debris were still trickling down, but the man was conscious underneath the beam and groaning.
"Hang on." She whispered to him, and wrapped her hands under the edges of the beam, and lifting it. It was heavier than she had presumed, and it dropped back down. The man wailed. She decided to give it one more try, realising she was risking seriously hurting him. She took a deep breath and looked around her, grabbing the top of a chair. She lifted the beam in a huge burst of strength and lifted it, wedging the chair piece under it for a moment to regain some strength. The chair back gave way and Nina barely caught it, pushing it off to the side and just clear of the mans body. The inhaled deeply to recuperate, checking the mans pulse again as he went silent.
He was alive, breathing with a lot of difficulty. She rested against the desk, tossing back her hair, and sucking in sharp breaths. She didn't notice another lump of ceiling fall on top of her.