Vertical Burn Part 29

"Whatever it is, I'm with you."

"Like h.e.l.l."

"You're going to need help, and you know it."

62. IN THE MOVIES THEY ALWAYS SCREAM.

The flashing red, blue, and yellow lights from nearby emergency vehicles reflected off the wet gla.s.s on Fifth Avenue, so that it resembled a street full of pirate treasure. The tread on the heavy tires crunched nuggets of broken gla.s.s. The street was beginning to stink of burning plastic, as smoke from the fire in the building mingled with fog and the heavy odor of diesel exhaust.

Finney pulled Ladder 9 to a stop, put the transmission into neutral, pushed the parking brake on the dash, and reached across to throw the rocker switch that would allow the transmission to power the aerial.

Without checking to see whether the cops barricading the street on the far corner had recognized him, he put his helmet on and walked around to the small control panel at the rear, where he put the hydraulic outriggers down on either side of the apparatus.

As a group of civilians watched from across the street, he climbed up onto the control tower on the turntable eight feet above the street, placed the toe of his boot on the dead-man control, flipped the switch to raise the RPM on the engine to fast idle, and pulled the black-k.n.o.bbed elevation lever. The aerial raised out of the bed. He swung it around, extending the sections toward the Columbia Tower. A few moments later, fully extended, the tip grazed a window on what he calculated to be the seventh floor above the street. He wasn't doing this to bring people down. People trapped on the upper floors in the building had no hope of rescue from outside the building.

Diana ferried equipment to the base of the turntable, while Finney slipped his arms through the straps of one of the MSA backpacks rigged with a one-hour bottle.

As he was cinching up the shoulder straps, Jerry Monahan came out unexpectedly from behind a gaggle of spectators on the corner of Fifth and Columbia. Monahan was wearing all his gear, including a mask in standby position. He was carrying a large plastic suitcase that contained his high-rise civilian escape invention, Elevator-in-a-Can.

"I don't know what you're trying to do, John," Monahan said, breathing heavily, "but you're not going up there."

"Get away from me, Jerry. I'm p.i.s.sed."

"I don't want anybody else hurt, most of all you. My G.o.d, I . . ." Monahan's words were heartfelt. "What are you going to do by yourself?"

"He's not by himself," Diana said, approaching the turntable with two bags of six-hundred-foot ropes they'd appropriated from Station 14's inventory minutes earlier, right after they stole Ladder 9.

"John, don't make me do something we'll both regret."

"It would take a conscience to feel regret."

"No, I feel awful about what's happened. That's why I'm going to save those people up there. I've got this invention. There's a few bugs left in it, but I think-" Without warning Finney knocked the older man to the ground. Monahan landed on his hip, his air cylinder striking the pavement with a loud, metallic thunk.

"Okay, okay," Monahan said, raising a hand as a gesture of supplication. His helmet was upside down beside him, his knuckles cut and bleeding from the gla.s.s on the street. "I deserved that. Just remember. You can't change anything."

As Finney walked to the rear of the apparatus, s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g the low-pressure hose from his facepiece onto the regulator on his belt, another firefighter approached unexpectedly. Robert Kub had on full bunkers, an hour bottle in an MSA backpack, and a pick-head axe. He was already sweating. "You guys need help," Kub said.

"You've helped enough," said Finney.

"Give me a chance. I want to do this with you. Whatever it is you're doing."

Finney brushed past without a word.

"Okay," Kub shouted to his back. "But I've been inside. Reese is running this like it's any other fire. The building engineer keeps telling them it will only be a few minutes until he gets water to the sprinklers, so they're all basically in a holding pattern until that happens. Every fifteen minutes he takes a break to stand in front of a television camera and yak. They're not going to get water to the sprinklers, are they?"

Finney turned and looked at Kub. "No."

"Let me help. I have to prove myself."

Finney had already calculated that if they each carried a spare bottle and paced themselves, he and Diana might just be able to climb seventy-odd stories before running out of air. That they would drain most or all of both air bottles on the way up was a given. A third person to help pack equipment up might make the difference.

"Take me with you. You need me, and I need to do this."

Finney looked into Kub's eyes for a few moments. Kub was right. They needed help. He extended his hand; they shook. "Go get another hour bottle."

Kub said, "They sent a team to rescue three or four people on fifty-one, but they never got past twenty because of the heat. Two of 'em got burned and are headed for the medics. What happens if you can't get up?"

"We'll get up."

While he waited for Kub to ready his equipment and begin his ascent, Finney turned to Diana. "If we don't get out of this, I love you."

Gray eyes twinkling, she said, "And if we do get out of it, you don't?"

He laughed. "I know we haven't known each other that long. And my life has been in such turmoil. But I do love you." When she didn't reply, he continued, "So? What do you think?"

"I don't know. I guess I need more information."

He took her in his arms, an awkward maneuver, considering they were both wearing close to sixty pounds of equipment, MSAs on their backs, facepieces slung around their necks, portable radios in their chest pockets, axes in scabbards at their waists, full bunking trousers with multiple layers of heat and vapor barriers, rubber boots, and Nomex coats. Her lips made him want to whisk her away and watch the fire on TV over the bar in some cozy Italian restaurant in Belltown. When they separated, two or three spectators across the street whistled and applauded. "Is that the sort of information you were looking for?"

She smiled, and he knew that if she didn't love him now, she would. Then, as he looked into Diana's eyes, Finney said, "Look, if things get too rough, I want you to turn back."

"Sure, you, too."

"I mean it."

"Yeah? What else? You going to open the doors for me? Carry my handbag? Listen to yourself. Ordinarily, you're stronger than me. I'll grant you that. But you've had a lot of shocks to your system. You're not anywhere near a hundred percent, and you're going to need all the help you can get."

Finney put his helmet back on and looked up at Robert Kub, who had secured his spare bottle and a rope bag and was making his way up the rubber-coated rungs of the aerial. Shards of gla.s.s were embedded in the soles of his rubber boots. His progress seemed painfully slow until Finney remembered how much weight he was carrying: fifty-odd pounds of personal protective equipment, a spare bottle, a rope bag with six hundred feet of rope in it. They all knew this could be their last fire. If they succeeded, they would be terminated. If they failed, they would be dead.

Before they could follow Kub, two chairs and a flaming desk fell to the sidewalk, crashing to the pavement forty feet away in sequence like lopsided meteors. When it landed, the desk sounded like a gun going off.

Moments later a large yellow package struck the pavement with the sound of a tree breaking in half, bouncing as high as the roof of Ladder 9 before dropping back onto the ground. A yellow helmet bounced off the base of the building and spun in the street like a broken top. A firefighter had tumbled into the street.

Diana, who'd been facing the other direction, realized what had happened, and said, "Oh, G.o.d. No."

The face was unrecognizable, but the name across the tail of his jacket said "Spritzer."

"Barney," Finney said. "Works on Engine Nine. He's got kids."

"I just saw him at the funeral," Diana said. "He's the nicest guy in the world."

Kub, who'd stopped halfway up the ladder, glanced down and said, "The street's going to be full of our friends if we don't get moving."

Before he'd proceeded five more rungs, another body hit the street, a woman in a skirt that had blown up over her waist on the descent, her mouth and nostrils ringed with soot and blood. She didn't bounce. She just broke and lay splayed out ten feet from Spritzer. They looked like a pair of discarded rag dolls. It was odd, Finney thought, that neither had made a sound during the plunge. In the movies they always screamed.

63. THE OLD MAN TRIES ONE MORE TIME.

For almost a full minute, Diana watched Robert Kub pounding on the plate-gla.s.s window with his service axe, the pick head bouncing off with no discernible result. They all knew the designated breakout windows in a high-rise had white dots in one corner, but n.o.body had ever bothered to tell them how to locate them from the outside, especially when the windows were tinted.

After a while Diana heard the sound of gla.s.s breaking and looked up to see parts of a window dropping to the sidewalk. She could hear the two men talking through the intercom at the tip of the aerial.

"d.a.m.n," Kub said, gasping. "If I'd known it was going to be this much work, I wouldn't have volunteered."

"You never did like work," Finney joked.

"Look who's talking. I'll be dragging your sorry a.s.s up those stairs."

"I'll clip a carabiner to your backpack to make it easier for you to give me a tow."

The next voice Diana heard was so close it startled her. "Listen to me." Jerry Monahan was on the turntable behind her, one of his eyes beginning to swell shut from Finney's fist.

"There's no stopping this," Monahan said. "Bail out now, while you can."

Tinny and laced with the sounds of rubber boots on broken gla.s.s, Finney's voice came across on the speaker. "Diana. Come on up."

They'd left a spare hour bottle, the Halligan/flathead axe combination, and a bag of webbing for her to carry, the tools banded together with a strip of rubber. It was going to be tough enough without battling Monahan. As she reached for the spare bottle, Jerry Monahan took her in a bear hug from behind, from which she quickly managed to extricate both arms, though he kept hold of her torso.

"Let me go."

"No can do, Miss Moore. I've done some boneheaded things in my life, but one of them is not going to be letting you get yourself killed."

Diana freed the flathead axe from the tool package and dropped the Halligan. "Let me go."

There was an intimacy to the a.s.sault that Diana couldn't escape, this old man breathing into her ear like a lover, smelling of cloves and hair oil and perspiration and the blood on his face. "Listen to me. Finney doesn't have anything to prove. Finney didn't have anything to do with that woman in the burn ward."

"The police think he did."

"Paul was at Riverside Drive that morning. After Finney left, Paul set the fire. That old woman just happened to get in the way."

"Lazenby?"

"Yes. When he realized that old woman could ID him, he hit her over the head and dragged her upstairs; tied her up with some twine."

"What about Gary Sadler?"

"They set that other fire to get rid of John and Gary both. Gary was on to me. They hauled Gary back into the building. It was hard for me when I found out. I mean, I worked with both those guys. None of this has been easy. But we can change that. We can do something good here. We can use my invention to get those people out."

"Let go."

"I know it doesn't make any difference in the real scheme of things, but I can't let you guys die the way Gary did."

With the flat head leading, Diana swung the axe between her legs. A short, crisp blow. Monahan dropped onto his side, then rolled off the apparatus and fell eight feet to the ground. She'd broken his leg.

64. HERDING CATS.

Using a grease pen, Oscar Stillman scrawled a floor plan for the building on the wall next to the stairwell. Chief Reese had appointed him information officer in charge of briefing the stairwell teams. The teams would, directly after speaking to him, climb to floor sixteen, take a short breather, and from there go to the fire on eighteen.

Years from now when people asked Oscar what part he'd played in the Columbia Tower debacle, he would tell them he'd been at the hub of the conflagration, had been head information officer. With time, Reese would, of course, develop into a pitiful and despised figure, especially since he'd personally vouched to the police that Finney's allegations about the building were spurious. It tickled Oscar to think of Reese trying to explain himself, particularly after Oscar and the others denied Reese had asked him to inspect the Columbia Tower's fire suppression systems. There was supposed to have been a written report, but Oscar hadn't turned it in.

Information officer. He liked that. It was a lofty-sounding moniker and would lend credence to the details he would parcel out in the years to come.

So far, most of the groups Oscar briefed were comprised of mutual aid companies from outside the city, young men eager to die in a building they knew little about and had no stake in. Oscar had to admire their gung-ho att.i.tudes and youthful faces, even as he mentally ridiculed their commitment to this folly.

The Columbia Tower had been built with pressurized stairwells to keep the smoke at bay, phones for firefighters on every floor and in the elevators, water tanks on floors twenty-five, thirty-seven, and fifty-eight, as well as a five-thousand-gallon tank on floor seventy-seven, which should have supplied the initial water for the sprinklers. There were fire pumps on level A and floors thirty-six and thirty-eight. On paper the system worked great.

Because of the elaborate preparations Oscar and his partners had made, few of those systems were operable. What they'd left intact were blinking lights and shrieking alarms, anything that might amplify the chaos. The phones didn't work. They'd scuttled several key sections of sprinklers and standpipes, so that no matter how much water was pumped into the system it would never pressurize. There was little danger in leaving the fire pumps and water tanks intact-any water from them was destined to bleed down the interior stairwells through a series of strategically broken pipes. A torrent in the stairs would not only make work difficult, but would, after some hours, cause unG.o.dly problems in the bas.e.m.e.nt.

As another group approached with hose lines on their shoulders, Oscar collared the officer and tried to gather everybody together. It took a full minute. Firefighters. Unless they saw flame, it was like herding cats.

"Okay," Oscar said, surveying the eight firefighters and two officers. It tickled him the way the officers made their men stand with hose loads on their shoulders while he spoke, even though in an hour none of them would have the strength to lift a dirty sock. If they'd been his men, he would have been filling their gullets with Gatorade and making them rest before the ordeal.

Oscar pointed to the diagram on the wall. "You'll find that most floors in this building will have this approximate layout. The elevators are in the center. They're not working now, but we have a specialist looking into it. The two main stairwells are fairly close to each other. You are about to enter stairwell A, which we have designated as the firefighting stairwell. When you get inside, you'll notice lines have been laid. That's because there's a problem with the standpipes. The building engineers tell us they're going to get that licked in the next half hour or so."

Oscar pulled open the stairway door to reveal a dark and noisy stairwell with eight inches of fast-running water blurring the steps, enough to knock a careless man off his feet. A cloud of smoke drifted out as he closed the door. Water might have escaped, too, but somebody'd diked the inside of the doorway with rolled-up canvas tarps. The whole thing was turning into a delightful clutter. The worse it became, the harder it was for Oscar to stifle his laughter. He'd even heard a story about a dead firefighter in the street. These county guys were so panicked they were inventing their own urban legends on the spot.

"We've had smoke problems down here, but you'll have more higher up. Use your masks. And think about whether your five-minute warning bells are going to give you enough time to find a fresh bottle. The second stairway is not to be used for firefighting. If and when we get it pressurized properly, B will be reserved for bringing down victims. We start fighting fire from both stairways, they'll both be contaminated with smoke. Understood?"

The first officer, a heavyset man with a florid face and webs of burst blood vessels across his bulbous nose, took off his helmet and said, "I heard stairwell B was s.h.i.tty already."

"It is. We're working on it."

"Why not put up our own fans? We can clear a stairwell."

"That's been tried. It made it hotter. It also fed the fire on eighteen. Okay. Now, there's a restaurant on seventy-six. The Tower Club. There was a wedding banquet going on below that. We think there's around two hundred people up there, including staff."

"No sprinklers anywhere?" asked a firefighter.

"All we know is they're not working on the lower fire floors."

"What do you mean lower fire floors?" asked the first officer. "We were told there was one fire. On eighteen."

"Figuring out which floors are involved and which are not is going to be one of your a.s.signments. We have TV cameras, but there's so much smoke they're not telling us much." Oscar might have told him about the fire on fifty-six, which had been raging for some time, but he thought that was better coming as a surprise; besides, he didn't officially know about it yet.

"How long are these bottles going to last?" asked the officer. "Going up stairs."

"What you've got here is a seventy-eight-story building-seventy-six actual tenant floors. When they run the Columbia Challenge each spring, even the fittest athlete firefighters running these stairs in full bunkers need a change of bottles before the top. One firefighter who's run it said he used two bottles and ended up uns.c.r.e.w.i.n.g his low-pressure hose so he wouldn't suffocate when he ran the second one dry. Remember, you move slower, you use less air. I'm no physiologist. I couldn't give you the numbers.

"Okay. Listen, it's going to lap on you. It's going to break out the windows and work its way outside the building to the floor above. There are plumbing and electrical chases cut through the floors, so it's traveling up in that manner, too. Remember the three firefighters in Philadelphia? They ran out of air, called for help, and gave the wrong floor number? By the time they found them, they were dead. Keep an eye on those gauges. Know which floor you're on. This isn't a p.i.s.sy little house fire, where you can bail out a window. You bail out of one of these windows, you better sprout wings.

"Now, one important fact we do know is that none of these doors have unlocked the way they're supposed to unlock when the building's in fire mode. If it hasn't already been broken into, you'll have to break into every floor you enter."

"What about master keys?" somebody asked.