3000 Degrees (15 page)

The mask cleaved to Robin's face as his boot hit the bottom step. He'd drawn the last breath, emptied the tank. It sucked back, like a vacuum pulling on his lungs. He never broke stride as he reached for the mask, ripped it off, gasping acrid air and sprinting outside.

S
ixty feet above the pavement where Robin was wheezing, Jerry Lucey felt for his radio in the darkness. “Rescue 600 to Command,” he said. “We need help. On the floor below the top floor of the building. We're lost.”

No one answered. Paul Brotherton was next to him, the two of them on their hands and knees, keeping low, trying to get beneath the smoke. It was impossible. Everything was greasy black. They couldn't see each other, let alone the way out. Jerry wasn't too worried, though, not yet. He'd been here before, lost in a cauldron, wondering if he'd get to fresh air. He always did. Like that time in a triple-decker, the whole back end shrouded by a sheet of fire, Jerry looking for the stairs, going the wrong way, walking into the flames. One of the local sparkies took a picture of him from below, Jerry nothing more than a smudge in a wash of orange. He framed the picture, hung it in his basement rec room next to the Gottleib Rescue 911 pinball machine and above the stuffed dalmatian and opposite the
Backdraft
poster. Hell of a movie,
Backdraft.
Jerry had watched it more times than he could count. But Hollywood could never get the fire scenes right. In the movies, a burning warehouse was all orange light and bright flashes. “That is so fake,” he'd tell Michelle. “If they really showed what it was like, the screen would be black.”

If only he had a rope. Jerry thought every man, especially rescue guys, should carry a length of fireproof rope, a leader he could tie off where he came in, mark his trail. His would have been knotted to the door by the B stairwell, all the way across the warehouse. After they left the roof, he and Paul had swept the top level. From the top of the stairs, they moved quickly through two storerooms off the vestibule, then went into the main chamber. It was the same as on the lower floors: eighty-eight feet wide and fifty feet deep, bounded on the far end by a brick fire wall. They passed through that into a slightly smaller room, then turned left toward the C-side elevator shaft. They were able to get around the smoke and embers blowing up toward the vent, move around to the back side of the shaft, explore the whole floor. They saw nothing that alarmed them.

With the top floor clear, they backtracked to the stairs on the B wall. They had no choice: the stairwell next to the C elevator, the one Robin Huard had escaped through, went only to the third floor. Above that level, there was only one way up or down.

Jerry concentrated on his breathing, kept it slow, measured. The temperature was rising, 200 degrees, maybe 220. Heat expanded the air in his tank, made it seem thinner, made each breath seem shallow. If a man wasn't careful, he'd pant through the last few pounds in short, gasping moments. He retraced their path again in his head. They'd taken roughly the same route as they had on the floor above: across the chamber, through the fire wall, around one room, left through the elevator shaft. They were in the back corner, behind the shaft, when the lights went out. All that smoke, pouring in from everywhere at once. It smothered everything, even the beams from their flashlights. He and Paul had tried following the walls, feeling a path back out to the stairs, but they'd only gone in circles. Above him, chest-high if he'd been standing, Jerry could feel a narrow ledge, like the sill of a window. But he couldn't put his hand through it.

Paul's alarm went off, his mask rattling against his face. He had three minutes of air left, four if he was lucky. Fifty-five seconds had passed since Jerry had called for help, and still no answer. They could hear Jack Fenton, the deputy chief, calling the third-alarm companies, telling them to get to the second floor, relieve the men on the hoses. Jerry's transmission must have gotten lost in the chatter and the static.

He keyed the microphone again. “Rescue to Command, Rescue to Command.” He measured each word, not wasting oxygen. “We need help on the fourth floor, one floor down. We're running out of air.”

Fifteen seconds ticked by. Then Mike McNamee's voice. “Last message, can you repeat? Last message?”

Other voices clicked on immediately after Mike, jamming the airwaves. Robert A.: “Engine 1 to Command, get everybody out of the second floor, back them out.” Jack Fenton: “Command to Fire Alarm.” Fire Alarm answering. Twenty-two more seconds gone.

Paul pushed his talk button. “Fire Alarm, Fire Alarm. Emergency, emergency! Clear the air, clear the air! Emergency!”

On the floors below them, dozens of men felt a spasm of dread. What they heard, what they would later swear they heard, was, “Mayday, mayday.” Perhaps the syllables had been distorted by the background noise and the sketchy frequency. Or maybe it was Paul's tone, urgent and almost bewildered, and every other man's nerves that twisted one word into the other. Whatever the reason, they would remember it, be haunted by it, because they knew how frightened Paul must have been. Firemen were loath to speak that word, “mayday,” ashamed to call for help, to admit that the heat and the smoke and the flames might be tougher than they were. Men called mayday only before they died, or when they believed they would.

Two more broadcasts followed in quick succession. First Jerry. “I have an emergency.” Then Paul. “Command, we are two floors down from the roof,” he said. “This is the Rescue company. Come now, come now.”

The transmissions were breaking up, chopped by fragments of static and the background drone of the fire. “Okay,” Mike answered. “Where are you? Where are you?”

“Two floors down from the roof.”

He got on the radio. “All companies, we have an emergency. Somebody is two floors down from the roof.”

“Guys, we're …” A different voice. Jerry. “Not the top floor. One floor down.”

Mike broadcast again. “What is your emergency?”

Fire Alarm answered, clear and distinct, so every man could hear it. “Running out of air.”

“C
ommand to Engine 3.”

Lt. John Sullivan heard Mike McNamee call his truck. He punched his radio. “Engine 3”

“Come up to the side of the building,” Mike told him. He kept the message short, clipped, not wasting time or breath. Mike had blocked out all emotion, distilled the operation to a tactical chore. He had two men—
his
men—lost in the black mist above, frightened and choking and probably dying. Mike couldn't afford to be afraid. No one below the fifth floor could.

Sully didn't bother answering, just started moving. Instinct took over. There wasn't much in the manuals about moments like this, two men missing. There didn't have to be: when one man is in trouble, every other man goes after him.

He called back over his shoulder, “Jay, shut it down. You're coming in. You take Joe. I'll take Mark and Doug.”

Jay Lyons nodded, jumped down from the cab. At most fires, the driver usually stayed with the truck, ran the pumps and fed the lines. He was also the only man not fully dressed for battle; a man couldn't drive a firetruck very well if he'd had a tank of air strapped to his back. Jay reached for a harness, slipped his shoulders through it, shrugged, rolled the air bottle into postion between his shoulder blades.

Joe McGuirk watched Sully and the others run toward the warehouse while Jay put on his gear. He was eager, excited, desperate to get inside. Joe had never been in a big one before, never seen enough fire for everyone. The worst danger Joe had faced on the job was a medical run when an overdosed junkie puked all over him, splashed vomit in his eyes. He had to worry for a couple weeks that he might have been infected with hepatitis. Nothing heroic about that. This is what he'd waited for, the mission that was born into him, the stuff of lore and legend. He was a real fireman going to save real lives, his brothers’ lives.

He was relieved Sully had left him with Jay. Of the two, Joe would probably see more action with Jay. He always wondered if Sully was too timid. Those times Sully had let slower trucks overtake Engine 3, let other men jump into the flames—sure, it was protocol, Engine 3 taking its assigned spot as second due. Joe understood that. But he still suspected that maybe Sully wasn't as eager to jump into the flames as some of the other guys. Guys like Jay. Jay was aggressive, a warrior. “Ballsy,” like Sully said. Joe wanted to be ballsy, too. Once Jay made lieutenant, maybe he'd get assigned to a ladder truck, and maybe he'd take Joe with him. Joe hoped he would.

Jay fastened the clasps on his coat, double-checked his harness, made sure his mask was clipped to his shoulder. He felt for his medallion, St. Florian on a silver chain around his neck, similar to Tom Spencer's. Around the saint's image were four words stamped in relief:
SAINT FLORIAN. PROTECT US
.

Jay looked at Joe. He saw Joe's jaw set firm, his teeth clenched. But there was a shine to his eyes. “You ready?” he asked Joe.

Joe nodded. He realized he wasn't afraid. “Let's do it.”

The two of them broke into a light jog, the warehouse looming above them, rising with perspective until it overtook everything, filled their entire vision, a smoking hulk splashed with the red and white of the firetrucks’ lights.

M
ike shook off the fear that stirred in his belly. Paul had called mayday. He was sure of it, and he was terrified by it, or would have been if he dwelled on it. He couldn't afford that. Paul and Jerry couldn't afford that.

Finding them would be impossible if Mike couldn't figure out where they were, at least which floor. Paul had said two down from the roof, but that wouldn't do the men starting to search from the bottom much good if they didn't know how many levels the warehouse had. Mike sprinted outside, faced the building, craned his neck toward the sky. He studied the facade, pored over it for a clue—a break in the pattern of bricks, the weathered arch of an old window, anything that might tell him where Paul and Jerry were lost. He checked one wall, darted around the back, then back to the front. Nothing. Worcester Cold Storage wasn't giving up any of its secrets.

Mike hurried back to the stairs at the same time the third-alarm companies were storming the building. He decided to post himself in the stairwell so he could keep track of everyone, who went up and who came safely down. He saw John Sullivan coming with two of his men. “Sully, we need more bottles,” he said. “Can you get us more air?”

Sully and his men went back outside, onto Arctic Street, to find a truck with a spare stash of air tanks. As they left, Tom Spencer and two of his men, Tim Jackson and Paul Brosnihan, clambered over the loading dock and into the foyer. Mike noticed the look at Tim's face, which was unusual because it betrayed nothing. No fear, no anxiety. Just a quiet determination, the countenance of a man who accepted that he signed on for a job that might actually require him to get hurt. Mike thought Tim must have been a hell of a soldier.

He turned to Lieutenant Spencer. “All right, Tommy, I need you to go to the fifth floor,” he said. “Stay on the ropes, stay together, and leave before your low-air alarm goes off.”

Tom nodded as he tightened his mask around his face. Mike caught his eyes, looked hard into them for a moment. Three curious facts flashed through his mind.
Patrick, Casey, Daniel.
Tom's kids. He knew all their names, how old they were. He was sending their father into a poisoned void.

Tom held the gaze, but only for an instant. His mask secure, he brushed by Mike and disappeared into the cloud, Brosnihan and Tim following hard behind him.

He heard Dave Halvorsen, Rescue 1's lieutenant, on the radio. “Rescue to Paul Brotherton.” A pause. “Rescue 1 to Rescue 600.”

“Yeah, go ahead,” Paul said. “Go ahead.”

“Six hundred, what's your location?” Dave was cool, almost formal, using Paul's call sign.

“Two floors down from the roof. Two floors down from the roof. Please hurry.”

Paul was pleading. Time was burning away.

“Rescue to Rescue 600”.

“Go, yeah.” It was Jerry again. They were taking turns on the radio. Dave didn't recognize the voice, couldn't tell it was a different man.

“You all right, Paul? You all set?”

“We need air, we need air. We're sharing a tank right now, off of me.”

“Paul, if you need air, come on down. Come down.”

Paul answered next, gave the mask to Jerry. “We're lost, Dave,” he said. “You gotta send a rescue team up here for us.” He sounded perplexed. Not desperate yet, but confused, baffled.

“What floor?” Dave asked. “What floor?”

“Second floor down from the roof. Two floors down, I think.”

Jerry gave the tank to Paul, barked into his own radio. “We were on the roof, and then we checked the next floor down,” he said. “Now we are on the next one. Hurry.” Forty seconds later, he pushed the talk button again. “Get up here. Please.”

It was 6:52. Paul and Jerry had been lost for at least six minutes—longer, probably, considering Jerry broadcast their initial call for help at 6:46. One air tank was already drained, and the second couldn't have more than another handful of breaths left in it. After that, they would be forced to pull the mask away or die gasping. Once it was off, though, the only thing left to breathe would be smoke, a venomous mix of carbon monoxide and, depending on what was burning, several hundred or several thousand toxic chemicals. Hydrogen cyanide and hydrochloric acid were probably in the vapor. And the asphalt and polystyrene on the walls were the industrial equivalent of napalm, petroleum byproducts superheated into a poison mist.

They were already woozy from the carbon monoxide, maybe already crippled, their muscles paralyzed. A heavy concentration reduced a man to a paralytic stupor in five breaths, the CO bonding to the red blood cells, starving the body of oxygen. The brain, trying to save itself, would shut down the least important tissues, everything except itself, the heart, and the lungs. That's why firemen were always finding civilians unconscious next to doors and windows, overwhelmed by carbon monoxide one desperate lunge from safety.