Vertical Burn (29 page)

61. CARRIED AWAY BY THE CROCODILE

Engine 10 was parked at the base of the Columbia Tower on Fourth Avenue, the motor roaring as it powered the dual stage internal water pump, hose lines sucking water from a nearby hydrant. Finney walked over to the engine and ran his hand along the underside of the wheel well on the driver’s side before going inside the building.

Once inside, he was directed up the frozen escalators to the command post on four where Chief Smith had been temporarily left in charge.

“John?” Diana came toward him in full bunkers, her coat unbuttoned, flashes of a Hawaii Ironman triathlon T-shirt underneath. “John? I should have believed you. I’m sorry.”

“You would have been crazy to believe me.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Try to get them to listen.”

“They have to listen now.”

“Don’t bet on it.”

Several homeless people who’d been asked to leave were protesting their ouster. On the other side of the room firefighters still awaiting assignments lugged equipment inside from Fifth Avenue, building a stockpile of compressed air cylinders, hoses, spare nozzles, chain saws, pike poles, forcible entry equipment, gas-powered fans.

Chief Smith was talking on a cell phone when Finney arrived. “Chief, whatever you think you know about a high-rise fire, put it out of your mind.”

“I’ll call you back,” Smith said into the telephone. “You know something I don’t, John?”

“I know if you fight this according to Hoyle, you’re going to lose people.”

Chief Smith grew more alert; he’d already lost two firefighters that year and didn’t need to lose more. “Did you have anything to do with this?”

“Of course not. But I know this place is booby trapped. Whatever you try, it’s going to backfire. Don’t go by the numbers, and don’t count on any of the building’s systems kicking in. I wouldn’t count on water from that engine outside either.”

“What engine? What are you talking about?”

“The engine pumping into the standpipe is a phony. All it’s doing is tying up the standpipe connection.”

“What do you mean a phony?”

“It’s not the real Engine Ten. It’s a fake built just for tonight.”

Staring resolutely at Finney, Chief Smith picked his white helmet up off the counter and held it under one arm. “Look around. Nobody has to tamper with any systems to make this bad! This is as bad as it gets. We’ve got what? Thirty firefighters? We need five hundred? Don’t tell me to break the rules. And don’t try to feed me any more of your harebrained conspiracy theories.”

Several people had been clamoring for Smith’s ear, and as he turned his attention to a police sergeant at his side, a large volume of ankle-deep water came gushing out the doorway of the nearest stairwell. Smith turned to Finney and said, “I guess that phony engine outside is pumping phony water, huh?” Several firefighters ran over to contain it, stacking rolled canvas tarps inside the landing to dike the flow. Even so, long fingers of water spread across the floor.

After a couple of minutes, Finney found Chief Reese speaking to Oscar Stillman in a cubbyhole on the other side of the elevators. Finney stopped just short of the corner and listened. “No, you will not call in a task force from Tacoma. Or from Bellevue. You will limit your losses, and you will fight a defensive fire.”

“Damn it, Oscar. I’m the chief, not you. And I am not going to let all those people upstairs die. You think that’s what I want as my legacy?”

“Screw your legacy. Get those guys out of the stairwells. Then get as many civilians out as you can. After that, pull back. What we’re talking about here is saving firefighters’ lives.”

“I’m not going to pull twenty firefighters out so I can lose two hundred civilians.”

“You want me to spill my guts about Leary Way?” Oscar asked, lowering his voice.

“You do what you have to. Our first directive is to save lives.”

When Finney stepped around the corner, he looked at Reese. “God, I thought you were part of this. One day I saw you coming out of this building behind one of them.”

“I come out of this building every day. My wife works here.”

“I hope she’s not here now.”

“She’s home.”

“And you’re being blackmailed.”

Reese considered Finney for a moment. “Did you have anything to do with setting this?”

“Don’t look at me. Who checked out the building and told you it was invulnerable? Who’s telling you to pull out? Look, Charlie. Get somebody from the company that installed these systems and get them here fast.”

“I suppose we’re fakes, too?” Marion Balitnikoff stepped around the corner behind Finney, followed by Michael Lazenby in full battle gear. “And I suppose that rig we’ve got out in the street is a fake.”

“They’re part of it,” Finney said. “And yes, that rig outside is a fake.”

Reese said, “You’re going to have to leave, John. You’re in the way.”

1932 HOURS

Everyone’s attention was captured by four burly SPD officers wrestling with a firefighter in yellow bunkers. Diana’s heart leaped into her throat when she recognized Finney. Working together, they wrestled him to the ground and snapped handcuffs onto his wrists, one officer’s knee on his back, another putting his full weight on his neck. They dragged him through the foyer toward the doors on Fifth Avenue, past Reese and Smith, who both ignored the commotion, past the building security guards. It looked as if Finney were being carried away in the jaws of an animal, perhaps a great crocodile.

As they exited the building, Finney turned and looked back over his shoulder, and for just a second he caught her eye.

When she turned around to gauge the reaction of the other Seattle firefighters on the floor, most of the looks were shocked, but the faces of three men bore the definite aura of triumph: Balitnikoff, Lazenby, and Oscar Stillman.

Diana followed Finney and the police officers outside to Fifth Avenue, where one of the officers began speaking into the remote mike on his collar. Several engines were in the street, hose lines connecting one of them to a hydrant across the street, firefighters loading hose on their shoulders at the rear of that rig.

Keeping Finney in the center of their phalanx, the officers headed across the street.

It took a few moments for Diana to take in what happened next.

There was a noise high above. She didn’t know what it was until she saw Finney turn and, using his chest and shoulder, bull two of the policemen back toward the doorway she was standing in. They had retreated six or eight steps when a loud impact occurred in the center of the street. Particles of something small and hard stung Diana’s face. Water began spraying into the air in several directions, some of it onto her. A second impact in the street struck the roof of the engine and threw more particles at the building and at her. Then all was quiet except for curses and the water gushing into the street from severed hose lines.

The two police officers who’d been in front had turned and chased Finney, so that all five had missed the explosion by eight or nine feet. A window had fallen into the street. If Finney hadn’t turned them around, they might all be dead. The officers were wet from the hoses, and even though they’d missed the center of the impact, two of them were bleeding.

“What the hell happened?” asked the officer closest to Diana. “I thought he was trying to escape.”

“A window broke out upstairs,” Diana said. “He was trying to get you out of harm’s way. I think he saved your life.”

“That was a window? Shit, it sounded like a cannon.”

Another section of glass crashed to the street, this smaller than the first. Pushed by flame and heat and maybe by firefighters attempting to ventilate, falling sheet glass would probably continue to come down into the street like guillotine blades all night.

Diana knew those large sheets of windowpane wouldn’t fall in a straight line. Like maple seeds, they fluttered this way and that, some landing a hundred yards or more from the base of the building. Some would land flat, others on edge. They would cut hose lines, destroy cars, kill people.

When Diana looked up, she saw a dull glow in the sky. “You think that’s one floor or two floors burning?” she asked two firefighters who’d taken shelter beside her.

The shorter firefighter, Murphy, said, “Doesn’t matter. If it’s not two, it will be. They don’t have water on it yet, so you know it’s going to lap. It’s going to gut the whole building. I wish I could remember what temperature steel loses its integrity at.”

“Two thousand degrees,” Diana said.

“It won’t be the heat,” said the second firefighter. “The smoke’ll kill those people upstairs long before the fire reaches them.”

“They better start evacuating this whole downtown core area,” said Murphy. “I think this is coming down.”

“Where is he?” asked the tallest policeman, approaching the firefighters. “Have you seen our prisoner?”

There was nothing in the street now but three engines, severed hose lines, and spurts of water taller than a man.

Diana watched as the officers spread out on the sidewalk trying to locate their prisoner. One by one, the fire department drivers ran to their rigs and moved them out of range. Somebody yelled to the drivers that base was being set up two blocks away on Sixth Avenue between Cherry and Columbia. While the police officers warned her to stay out of the street, she crossed Fifth Avenue on foot.

She found him two blocks away staring at her from the shelter of a darkened doorway, his hands still cuffed behind his back. Their eyes met. He seemed surprisingly calm, as if waiting for a bus. Or for her. “Just a minute,” she said, and walked to Ladder 9, opening compartment after compartment until she found their bolt cutters, then, sans cuffs, they walked back down the hill together. The police were gone. More hose lines were being laid to standpipe and sprinkler connections outside the tower, while other firefighters stood guard for falling objects; pumpers were set up to pump in tandem in order to build more pressure. They were going to have to raise the water an appreciable distance. No sooner had firefighters laid a line to a nearby sprinkler connection than a large wedge of glass fell and severed it, water gushing into the street like blood from an artery. Firefighters began raiding a construction site half a block away, carting plywood sheets to protect their hose lines. A group of civilians from a restaurant down the street helped.

Finney said, “They’re pumping all that water onto an open floor somewhere. They’re going to have to lay hose up the stairs as high as the fire.”

“The fire’s on eighteen,” Diana said.

“You mean the first fire’s on eighteen.”

They could hear trucks and engines as, two blocks away, the base area began filling with new arrivals. Most of the newcomers had sped from earlier emergencies with empty water tanks, half-empty air bottles, and dirty or missing equipment. Most of the firefighters Finney and Diana saw coming down the street were already exhausted.

Carrying a ladder at waist height, a tarp laid out on the rungs, equipment stacked on the tarp, a quartet of firefighters trudged down the sidewalk. Their load was so heavy they could barely walk. Although Diana warned the officer that, in order to avoid falling glass, the ongoing procedure now was to enter the Columbia Tower via the tunnel in the building across the street, he ignored her and made a beeline across the carpet of broken glass on Fifth Avenue. When one of them dropped a portable radio unnoticed, Finney pocketed it.

Listening to the division reports on the radio, they heard the officer who was running the operation upstairs say, “Columbia Command from Division Sixteen. We have a report from our standpipe team. They’re on fifty-one. They’re okay for now, but they’re trapped and out of air. They’ve encountered a lot of heat but no fire. No sign of any more survivors. None of the standpipe outlets they checked were open. The water’s coming from above them. I’m not going to send anybody else up. Repeat. It’s too dangerous to send anybody else up. The stairs are getting hotter every minute.”

Finney looked up at the fog.

“What are you going to do?” Diana asked.

“What makes you think I’m going to do anything?”

“Whatever it is, I’m with you.”

“Like hell.”

“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 glass on Fifth Avenue, so that it resembled a street full of pirate treasure. The tread on the heavy tires crunched nuggets of broken glass. 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-knobbed 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 pissed.”

“I don’t want anybody else hurt, most of all you. My God, 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 glass on the street. “I deserved that. Just remember. You can’t change anything.”

As Finney walked to the rear of the apparatus, screwing 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 glass 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, God. 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.