3000 Degrees (12 page)

“Received.”

That was good news. Only seven minutes after the alarm went off, the fire was located and essentially contained. Mike knew men were on the roof, which meant they had more than likely punched at least one hole through it. Mike took another step and his radio crackled again.

“Rescue 600 to Command.” It was Jerry Lucey “We're up at the roof. We have heavy smoke and embers showing.” The puffs and wispy streams had turned into a rushing contrail, roiling and oily and flecked with glowing orange highlights. But that was all right, too. At twenty minutes after six o'clock, everything was going the way it was supposed to. The men had entered, vented, and now they were beginning to attack. Routine, the same operation they'd executed a thousand times before.

W
ith Casello downstairs helping gather the hoses, Yogi tried to pull the door closed, keep the fire contained until they could get some water on it. He had to lean back, put his considerable weight into the effort, fight against the draft that dragged the door toward the flames. The physics were all wrong: the heat should have been pushing the door out, away from the flames, not creating a whirlwind draft rushing into the fire.

Robert A. found Yogi wrestling with the door a few moments later. He'd tromped down from the roof after the skylight had been smashed out, then detoured into the second floor when he heard the radio transmissions.

“Hey, Yogi,” he said, “that don't look too good.” His tone was mock worry, his grammar deliberately garbled for effect.

“No, it don't,” Yogi said. “Come and look what I found.” He was still smiling, playful, like a kid who'd just found a steep and bumpy hill to roll down on his bike. Sure, it looked dangerous. But that was the fun of it.

He gave Robert A. a look into the room, then wrenched the door closed again. Within seconds, four other men arrived with the hoses, a pair of two-and-a-half-inch lines and one inch-and-three-quarter line. It took a moment to charge them all, to get water from the engines up two floors and across the warehouse to the nozzle.

“Better put your masks on, boys,” Yogi said once the lines were charged. He was still grinning. “This could get ugly.”

He let the door swing open and stepped toward the flames with a hose. The shutoff valve on the smaller line got snagged on something screwed to the wall just inside the doorway, taking one hose out of commission. With the two larger ones, the men moved to their right, spraying a deluge into the fire, almost five hundred gallons a minute between them. They knocked down the first bank of flames quickly enough, then advanced through a burned-out doorway to a second front.

The fire in there was more intense, a howling orange wind. The hoses were useless against gases so hot; the streams of water were vaporized into steam a few inches out of the nozzle, then whooshed away by flames that moved like the afterburners of a jet, streaked with cobalt blue and screaming horizontally into the elevator shaft, following a wide path to the vent in the roof.

The heat was eating through the ceiling, melting away the staples and the joists that held the electrical system in place. Yogi was near the firewall, trying to advance the line, when a tangle of wires fell from above, knocked him off balance. He wobbled, stumbled, fell backward, through the doorway, landing flat with a view of the ceiling. Above him, he saw something strange. Smoke was streaming
into
the fire, like the ribbons of a thunderhead racing into a funnel cloud. He stared at it for a second or two, perplexed. “Hey, Cap,” he hollered to Robert A. “Something don't look right. Everything's moving the wrong way.”

He got to his feet. He wondered how much air he had left in his tank. Reinforcements, a fresh crew of firemen, were on the way to relieve the guys handling the hoses. Yogi headed for the door, going down for a new bottle of air.

A
t 6:23, Mike McNamee was making his way into the ground floor of the warehouse for a firsthand look at the conditions. His men were radioing updates from all over the building, telling him where the fire was burning, how it was moving. George Zinkus told him there was heavy fire showing at the C-D corner, where the cold storage offices used to be, one of two areas of the building with windows cut through the exterior walls. The flames weren't spreading outward, though, just burning up into the elevator shaft. Mike Coakley, up on the roof, reported that a swirl of embers was rushing out through the open skylight.

So far, so good. The blaze was contained in the center of the building, the heat and the smoke blowing straight up through the vent. He had five hoses moving into position, three from the B stairs and two from the C side, effectively surrounding the flames. And nothing was spreading. Mike was about fifty feet from the firewall, coming from the entrance on Arctic Street, and he could hear the fire and smell the smoke. But the air wasn't noticeably warm, and it was still clear, not even enough stray vapors to sting his eyes or scratch his throat. The only thing that struck him as unusual was how bright the inside was on that floor.

He saw Mike Conley, the captain from Engine 13, and one of his men dragging a two-and-half-inch across the warehouse, toward the stairs on the C side. “Just cool the shaft,” Mike told the captain. “We don't want to lose the stairs.”

He heard his call sign on the radio. Fire Alarm trying to raise him. He pressed the talk button. “Go ahead, Fire Alarm.”

“Command, be advised that a citizen just reported to a police officer that there may be two people that live in that building.”

“Received.”

Mike wasn't concerned. He knew the rescue teams would be searching the building as a matter of course. Rescue men always assumed someone could be lost inside, and they kept looking until the heat or the smoke forced them out. Twenty minutes after the first alarm, most of Worcester Cold Storage seemed less menacing than the average house fire. Away from the actual flames, none of the men had even bothered to put their masks on.

For the next few minutes, Mike kept in contact with the engine crews trying to position the lines. Engine 16 tapped a dead hydrant, which required rerouting a water supply through another pumper. He keyed his radio again. “Engine 2, can you feed a couple of lines into their lines from the next nearest hydrant?”

“Chief, the next available hydrant is across Grafton Street, so we'd have to block Grafton.”

Mike considered the logistics, tying up a main access road. Engine 2 radioed again. “Do you want me to lay it across Grafton?”

“No,” Mike said, “I'm going to send you around the other way. You're going to have to go up the long way. Ladder 5 is blocking here. You have to go up and over Wall Street, come back down, lay down.”

A minor annoyance. A short delay in getting some more wet stuff on the red stuff. But nothing critical.

Eight minutes had gone by since Fire Alarm passed on the report of people living in the building. Mike figured it was time to ask for a status report. “Command to Rescue.”

“Rescue.” It was Dave Halvorsen.

“Rescue, did you check the rumor that we have a couple of homeless people living at the rear of this building?”

“Checked the second and third floor,” Dave replied. “Found nothing, Chief. We're moving our way up.”

Another six minutes ticked by. Outside, trucks lumbered through the streets, men screwed connections onto hydrants. Every line was charged, Engine 1 had plenty of water to spare, Engine 2 ended up feeding only its own lines.

At 6:38, Dave Halvorsen called Mike again. “Rescue to Command,” he said.

“Command, go ahead.” Mike had worked his way up to the third floor, where the conditions were the same as the first, only a vague haze of smoke.

“Chief, we're up on the fourth floor. We can hear fire crackling, but we can't see anything. We are in the rear of the building, on the C side.”

Mike misheard the transmission, felt a shudder of worry. “Did you say you have more fire on the fourth floor?”

“We can hear the fire crackling, but we can't see any fire at all. But we can hear it.”

That sounded better. Relief pushed away the dread. “Okay,” Mike said. “That's because it's running right up the shaft.”

Mike moved into the vestibule on the third floor. He pushed through another door, deeper into the warehouse. His eyes followed the beam of his light, picking out the columns. In the gloom, the room looked like a labyrinth. A million bad secrets could be hidden in there. He got on the radio again. “Interior to Fire Alarm.”

“Fire Alarm.”

“Put out an emergency broadcast to all companies operating inside to use extreme caution,” he said. “There could be holes in the floor, and to use extreme caution as they are moving.”

“Received.”

He heard alert tones over his radio, then Fire Alarm repeating his warning. He took a few more steps, then stopped, considered his own advice. Unlike the men looking for homeless tramps or the guys spraying water, he was alone, wandering deeper into a burning building with no hose to lead him back if things turned bad, no partner to watch his back. And Halvorsen and one of his men had searched this floor a few minutes earlier. Mike knew they'd been thorough. He decided to retreat to the stairs.

He turned around. In front of him were three identical doors. His felt his stomach tighten. He opened all three doors, one at a time. Behind each, he saw another room.
Shit.
He retraced his steps in his mind.
Through two doors, left, straight, right, stop, turn around, left, straight, right.
He should have been back where he started. His gut twitched again.
This is bad.
He took a deep breath, steadied his nerves.
Just listen. It's gotta be one of these.
He stood stone still, even held his breath for a long moment, focusing on the smothered sounds of boots clomping up stairs, men hollering, axes and Haligans bouncing against railings and walls. He cocked his head toward each door in turn. The noise seemed louder through the middle one, but barely. He reached for the handle.

Mike played his light across the walls of the room behind the door. On the far side, the beam slid across another door, one that looked the same as every other one. He tried that one. It led into the vestibule, which seemed familiar. He scanned the perimeter, found the stairs behind a cement partition. If he'd blinked, he would have missed them.

He let out a heavy breath when he reached the steps, felt a chill in his spine. Firemen were trained to keep their bearings even in total darkness. In most buildings, they could follow the walls because they always led to a window or a door. If that didn't work, they would keep track of their movements, remember the number of steps and direction of each turn. Mike had done that hundreds of times before, crawled miles through blinding black. This time, upright and guided by a flashlight, he was fumbling through a funhouse of matching doors and shifting angles. Creepy building. He decided to check the fourth floor, but not go in as far.

11

A
MILE AND HALF FROM THE BURNING WAREHOUSE, IN THE
Grove Street station, Lt. John Sullivan kept his attention on the radio, monitoring the progress of the attack through the static-fractured chatter. He wasn't terribly concerned. All the voices were calm, controlled, no edge of concern in anyone's tone or phrasing. It sounded like a messy fire, an unpredictable rogue. But it was under control. Other than the single dead hydrant that had forced McNamee to reposition trucks, the battle was going as smoothly as any such firefight could.

Lt. Tom Spencer crossed the apparatus floor at about six-thirty Three men from Grove Street, all on Engine 16, had rolled out the door thirteen minutes earlier when the second alarm had been struck, and he noticed some of the other guys were getting antsy. He saw Sullivan, the lieutenant on Engine 3, fiddling with his gear next to the passenger side of the truck. Sully stepped through one leg of his pants and into one boot, then the other, pulled the suspenders up, dipped a shoulder through one loop.

“What are you doing?” Tom asked. He said it with a teasing sneer.

“Just getting ready,” Sullivan said. Sully knew. He'd already told Jay Lyons:
Three alarms. I can smell it.
“Always gotta be ready, you know.”

Tommy let out a good-natured laugh, shook his head as Sully snapped the suspenders over his other shoulder. He liked Sully, mostly because he knew him outside of the station—their teenage daughters were best friends, and one of them was always driving his girl to the other one's house. One on one, away from the job, Sully was a good guy. He had his problems in the station, though. They held the same rank, and had for six years. Tom always hoped Sully would learn from watching him, figure out how to lead his men without pushing them, exert his authority by example rather than bluster. Maybe it was the age difference, Sully's youth getting in the way. Tom had been on the job almost twice as long, since 1979, had worked his way up slowly. When Sully made lieutenant in 1983, he was the youngest officer in the department, only six years behind him. Some of the guys thought he overcompensated, barked out orders so no one would forget the young guy was in charge.

If a third alarm was struck, Tom was ready. He felt his medallion againt his chest. It was a silver icon of St. Florian, the patron saint of firefighters. Now there was a saint a man could get behind. Florian was a Roman soldier and a closet Christian in the second century who, according to legend, once saved an entire town from burning by throwing a single bucket of water on the flames. But he fell out of favor with the emperor because he refused to slaughter his fellow Christians or renounce his faith. He was whipped, flayed alive, and set on a pile of kindling to be burned to death. “If you burn me,” he told his executioners, “I will climb to heaven on the flames.” So the soldiers tied a rock around his neck and threw him in a river instead.

Tom's grandmother had given him the medal on his first day as a fireman, and he'd worn it every day since. At the beginning of each shift, he'd take it from his locker and drop it over his head, then button a collared uniform shirt over it. He never wore the department-issued T-shirt. Too casual for an officer. Then he would pin his badge, number seventy-nine, to his breast pocket, where he always kept a pen and a small, spiral-bound notebook. That was one of the obvious differences: Tom looked like an officer because that's what he happened to be; Sully pinned his silver bars to his knit winter cap because that's what he wanted people to see. It rubbed a lot of guys the wrong way, like he was flaunting his smarts, reminding everyone that he tested higher than they did.