Chapter Seventeen
Petra
Realizing there was an emergency, others who had been at the tidal pool were finding their way to the scene.
Carlos maintained a wave lookout.
Beans threw himself down on a boulder and looked into a round hole that looked like an old-fashioned well. A bit wider. Certainly, large enough for even as big a man as Hawkeye to go in.
Looking over the lip, watching the water rush in, Petra formed a picture of what had happened.
The man wasn’t in the chimney. He sounded like he was further under the rock. If he were trying to get out, the waves would keep pushing him in.
These waves weren’t as big as the three rogue waves. But the horse guy that morning at the hotel, while she was waiting for her tidal pool adventure ride to show up, had talked about how difficult the current was and that he had suggested not risking the disappointment of a failed attempt at snorkeling.
Petra imagined that the man had been pushed into a small cave.
At least there would be oxygen between waves.
Possibly.
Probably.
But she remembered being a child on the beach body surfing and what happened when a wave hit, and she was rolled without any power against it. She imagined the guy getting battered against the rocks, then using what time he had to suck in air and cry for help.
He needed to stop using his energy to signal.
“We’re here,” Petra called into the opening. “We’re affecting a rescue. You’re not alone.” Petra got all that out before the next wave hit.
The tourists huddled in one group. The locals stood closer, looking prepared to leap into action.
“Who drove down here?” Petra asked. “Not people in the car, but the person who had their hands on the steering wheel. Can you step forward?”
The men gathered.
Men—these were probably teens still in high school trying to earn a few bucks on the weekend, making the tourists scream and laugh with an adventure that was just an everyday drive for them.
“Okay, guys, in a minute, I need you to go through your vehicles for anything helpful you might have—ropes, blankets, first aid kits, carabiners, climbing gear, tow webbing. I need you to think outside of the box. Something to use as a splint for broken bones. Be imaginative. Just make sure you can bring it back without injuring yourself. One crisis is enough for today. I need those things here so we can figure out what resources we have to try to help this guy.” Petra turned to the woman. “What’s his name?”
“Terry,” she whispered, clasping her hands together and holding them to her chest.
“And you are?”
“M-m-m-melissa.”
The wave was going out. “Terry,” Petra hollered into the hole, “Melissa is safe. We’re working on getting you out. Try to reserve your energy. Your goal is to keep breathing deeply.”
There were no cries for help since she’d told Terry they were on the scene.
That might be a good thing.
Or it could bode very badly.
Petra pulled her phone from her bikini top.
No bars.
“Anyone have connectivity?” she asked, holding her phone aloft.
“No one does,” Beans said. “We don’t get cell reception until we’re up on the road.”
Petra scowled. “How far up?”
Beans cast his gaze back toward the vehicles. “At The Social Club with the drinking pig.”
“Far then. I need someone who has a vehicle that hasn’t been breaking down every five minutes like ours was. You all know each other. I need the person with the most reliable vehicle to get to a place where they can make emergency calls.” She was using the voice her instructors taught her at Quantico, speaking from the chest. It was an authoritative sound that convinced people to comply. The one that made everyone aware that she was in charge.
Did she want to be an authority and in charge?
Honestly, no.
This wasn’t a television show. There were no guarantees. There was a man who could very well die in the next few minutes, and it could well be that there was nothing anyone could do.
But if that did happen, everyone would have a better psychological outcome if they knew they had participated in a rescue attempt.
One of the young men half-raised his hand as if he were in class. “My car is solid. I can drive out and get help.”
“Okay, good. What’s your name?”
“Bobby.”
Petra reached out her hand. “Can you give me your phone, Bobby?”
Petra tried to come up with the right message to send to 9-1-1 when it occurred to her that if those crazy waves hit the entire coast, Terry wouldn’t be the only person in dire straits today.
Desperate calls could well be overwhelming emergency services.
Petra was going to reach out to Cerberus. If they didn’t have the right equipment, at least they’d have the expertise and the brawn needed to attempt the rescue.
Closing her eyes momentarily, she recalled the number Hawkeye had put into her contacts that morning before heading out to surf with Cooper.
What a grand time they must be having.
But she was sure that if she sent Hawkeye an SOS, he and his merry band of brothers would drop their surfboards and head her way.
Still, it was a long shot.
Could Terry hold on that long?
As Petra typed out her message, she said. “Bobby, first call 9-1-1.” She continued to tap. “This is a message to a rescuer friend of mine.” She handed him the phone. “I’ve pressed send, but it won’t go out until it’s in range of a cell tower. You have to get it in range, and then you need to wait there. I’ve put in a code to pull up your GPS location. My friends will follow the signal to you. And you need to bring them here. They can’t find me if they don’t find you.”
“Got it.”
“Can you do that?” Petra looked up, locking her gaze on this young man’s.
His body swelled with purpose. “Get into cell range, wait for the rescuers. I bring them here.”
“Don’t forget to call 9-1-1,” she reminded him. “Go!”
Bobby raced away on long, thin legs, bounding up the side of a cliff, an athletic blur of motion.
“Okay, those with cars, go gather supplies and come right back here.” She reached out. “Beans.”
He turned back to her.
“I’m taking the cord from your hoodie. Does anyone else have a cord? Shoelaces? Anything I can use to make a line?”
Very quickly, the group was in motion. Those who weren’t given a task moved out of the way, poised and ready to act.
What Petra needed now were facts. Data.
The way to get that? Eyes-on. Well, camera-on.
With the video recording, Petra tied together a make-do line of anything that could be grafted into a length that might reach Terry.
Slowly, she lowered her phone.
Even though she had a watertight case, she didn’t want the waves to batter her phone against the rocks, rendering it useless, so she waited for a wave to come in as she started lowering to give herself as long as possible in the hole when the wave receded.
Holding the string steady so it wasn’t spinning and collecting a dizzying whir of images was paramount.
Petra moved—slow and steady—to get as much information as she could.
Even so, what she got was mostly an image of a rock wall.
Over and over, Petra lowered the camera down the blow hole.
Every time she did, Melissa became more agitated. “What are you doing? How is this helping? Terry could be drowning.”
Before Petra said something sharp to the distraught woman, the drivers were back with an array of gear.
She spread the items out and came up with a plan.
The phone was probably a good idea. But it hadn’t panned out.
She needed to go down herself to understand the situation. And with the climbing gear that the guys had produced, she felt like it was doable, if not safe.
Petra held up the bike helmets. “Whoever brought these, you are a genius. Kudos.” She strapped one on.
She arranged the people to hold the rope, then tied herself into a hasty—the kind of quick and dirty way someone can get a rope on for a climb.
Was it weird in her sundress?
Only in that the rope between her legs was against her flesh, and she was going to come out of this with some severe abrasions.
Did she care?
Hell to the no.
She strapped the helmet in place, taking the time to adjust it properly—Petra wasn’t interested in having her brains bashed against the rocks.
“Listen up,” she bellowed over the wind and surf. “When I have information, I’ll communicate it to you. You are not to call down there asking for updates. You’ll break my concentration. I don’t want to hear anything from you unless you’re warning me about another giant wave or that there’s a rescue crew on site. Not within sight. On site, ready to act. Okay?” She looked around the circle. “Is everyone in agreement? Are we all on the same page?”
The body stances of the people around her were an interesting mixture. They all seemed to have some combination of anxiety and relief that someone was doing something.
She could see the adrenaline at work in their systems, telling them to act, but not having a ready way to use it up made them fidgety.
Mostly, they were shocked that this was how their day had turned out.
Rightly so.
Usually, people don’t run into circumstances where they are suddenly part of a lifeline.
Petra’s focus followed the hot pink climbing rope to the four men, who were gripping a section. Sitting on their butts, legs bent, feet wedged into the rocks the way Petra had instructed, they could use their leg strength, too.
“If things work out the way I want them to, you guys won’t be exerting for a while. I’ll mostly have my own weight. I just need you to get me over the lip. This is a good opportunity to test how this feels and check your grip. Make sure it’s something you can sustain because once I’m down there, my life will literally be in your hands.”
She shouldn’t have said that.
It didn’t rally them the way it did at boot camp or Quantico.
One of the guys released the rope to swipe his hands over his shorts. She could see the rings of sweat at his pits.
“There are lots of people around who can grab onto the back of the rope. Make sure you let them know you need help before you actually need the help, okay?” She tried to reassure them.
She got bobbled head nods and wide fixed eyelids instead.
Adrenaline was definitely kicking around their systems.
Good. That would give them extra strength.
Petra sat down, dangled her legs into the hole, and waited for the wave to recede. She bent her head and yelled. “Terry, I’m coming down to you! Coming down now!” She wanted the guy to have a moment to get that thought into his brain.
He had to be in shock.
He had to be thinking that this was a hell of a way to go.
People worried about heart attacks and car crashes, house fires and bad guys. She bet no one ever thought, I desperately hope I don’t die by being bashed to death in a blow hole in Paradise.
Petra rolled over until her hips balanced on the edge of the hole and her stomach was toward the ground. She gripped the rope and called out, “Lower away.”
The men pulled their elbows into their ribs and braced to take her weight.
With her free hand, Petra pressed away from the rocks, looking up to see Beans doing his job as her spotter and conveyer of her directives.
Glancing over, she made sure that Carlos was still acting as a rogue wave looker-outer—was there a word for that? Wave guard?
Doesn’t matter. Here I go.
Below her, seawater swept into the blowhole.
The men lowered her.
On the second wave, Petra was ankle-deep in water. She visually marked that space by focusing on a rock that jutted out. “Hold!” Petra waited for the wave to recede. “Lower!”
Down, down she went.
One of Petra’s superpowers was that she genuinely believed she could do anything she wanted to. It might mean a little learning or training, but yeah, in body and brain, anything she wanted to do was within her reach or had been so far.
Of course, her list of wants hadn’t included such things as professional opera singer, MMA fighter, or Olympian, so there hadn’t been anything to dissuade her magical thinking.
Petra’s other superpower was a wide range of interests, which led to a wide range of skills that might be part of the illusion that she could conquer anything.
Did she really think that with a length of hot pink rope from a cargo hold and a bunch of good citizens, she could do this ?
Maybe she was just acting on her military training, which taught her to run toward the enemy.
And then, FBI training.
Okay, she reasoned as the next wave came to her hips. She did have some training.
But this, under any circumstances, was beyond her capacity.
And with a lack of proper equipment, it was foolhardy.
And yet here she was in a blow hole, for crap's sake.
Petra tipped her head up so her voice would carry to the rope crew. “Hold!”
The rope was rough against her skin, abrading the top layer, and exposing her nerves to the salt water.
The pain was a good sign that she was in her body—thinking, rational, following what training she had that she could apply here.
When adrenaline stopped the pain, she’d need to reassess. Adrenaline could tell her body it was fine when, in fact, it hid a life-threatening injury.
Petra did not plan to die today.
If she died, it was likely Terry would die as well.
If she died, it served no good. Petra set those parameters, “no pain means I need to come back up and form a new, more plausible plan.”
Another wave roared into the hole, and Petra shoved hard into her borrowed tennis shoe-clad feet to brace as the wave whooshed in.
It was surprising how loud it was as the small space captured the roar and sent it ricocheting up the sides to release toward the sky.
She was surprised at how much space her heart took up in her chest and how the sound of her blood processing through the four chambers joined the roar of the wave.
Sucking in a lung full of air and pinching her nose, Petra squeezed her eyelids tightly together. The wave only came to her chin, but the spray sprinkled salt onto her lashes.
When the wave receded, Petra looked down to see how far it was to the opening. Leaning down, she could almost get her fingers around the lip.
“Terry, are you in good enough shape to follow instructions?”
“Help.” Terry croaked.
“All right, Terry, listen up. I need you to count backward from a hundred by twos.” It seemed a cruel thing to do, but Petra’s brain was conjuring all kinds of scenarios where drowning people pulled their rescuers to their deaths.
If Terry panicked and dragged her down, Petra too could get trapped by the waves and possibly not escape this blow hole alive.
Before Petra went any further, this man had to prove he could—at least at this moment—process rationally.
“Ninety-eight. Ninety-six. Ninety-four.”
“Terry,” Petra called, “a wave is coming. Brace.”
“Please, please, please help me.”