Hearing Jules's strained voice pushes on adrenaline-fueled Israeli rescue workers racing against time to pry him from the ruins, as four days after the Haiti quake hopes fade of finding more survivors.

The quake may have come and gone days ago but the urgency here remains palpable: this team has pulled out all the stops to save someone whose life is hanging in the balance.

And the clock is ticking.

With hearts set racing by the slim chance they could help pull off a miracle this long after Tuesday's devastating temblor, the team of 22 men toils on to save just one person, sweating through the back-breaking work, hour after hour, inch by inch, amid the stench of rotting corpses.

"Today is the last day that I think we will be able to find survivors, mainly because of dehydration," said Rami Peltz, one of the rescue workers on the Israeli team.

Facing the real possibility that what remains of this collapsed tax office could come crashing down on them, the rescuers grimace as they chip, dig, saw and drill their way, slowly, painstakingly, inching closer to the person trapped beyond their sight.

It is grueling, exhausting work. "We work centimeter by centimeter," said one team member soaked with sweat after 10 minutes in an cavity where the team is hacking and drilling toward their target.

The survivor has made it this far, four days after the 7.0-magnitude quake felled thousands of buildings across the capital of the poorest country in the Americas.

But he is trapped with a steel reinforcement cable around his neck and a huge piece of ceramic flooring pinning his legs, said one team member Moshe Sadir.

All around them, there are dead bodies and more dead bodies. Some of the people survived the building collapse but then expired in the days that followed. No rescue team made it their way in time.Related article:Nameless corpses pile up in mass graves

That is what happened to Nadine, the wife of Adras Belly, a Haitian man who brought the Israelis to this spot to search. But it was bad news for him; rescuers called and called. She did not answer, and dogs found no trace of her.

Foreign rescue teams are spread out across the sprawling Caribbean capital of two million even as the clock ticked down on chances for a miracle.

They take their cues from various sources: UN staff sent some to locations where survivors were believed to remain, and desperate relatives dispatched others to spots where loved ones were still missing, and voices and moaning could be heard inside.

Very few of the stories have a happy ending.

Most end in sorrow and the discovery of a tangle of dead bodies.

"The first 72 hours are so important. After that the chances just drop off dramatically. That is why it is so important to hurry" early on, said Jose Ignacio Bugella Yudice, here from the civil protection service in the Spanish city of Getafe.

The Spanish team worked with colleagues from Iceland in a half-collapsed building where rescue dogs can detect any lucky if unlikely survivors.

"Only the dogs can tell us if there is life in there. Then we pinpoint the spot and we secure it. The rescue operation can take 10 minutes, or several hours," said Magnus Hakonarson, with the Icelandic rescue team ICESAR.

At the Port-au-Prince telecoms building, a rescue team from Costa Rica had no luck as it called and called but got no answer from inside the flattened building.

"When the dogs do not confirm somebody is alive in there, we have to move on to another spot swiftly. So now we are going to a school. But I would say there is a less than three percent chance of finding survivors in this city," said William Hernandez, leader of the Costa Rican rescuers.

"The best hope really is for a small person, who needs little oxygen, which is why a child may be found alive" even at this point, he said.

"That has happened before," Hernandez said. "But it all depends on the space they have and what shape they are in after the collapse."

But surviving a building collapse and then 30-degree Celsius daytime temperatures without a drop of water for days on end is unlikely -- and less likely by the minute.

"Some people end up dying of their injuries, or from dehydration or brain trauma," said Andres Madrigal with the Costa Rican team.

But for Jules, his will to live help him beat the longest odds.

"He just kept saying when we finally saw him at the bottom of the hole -- 'I want to live, don't leave me,'" a member of the Israeli team said.

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