3000 Degrees (25 page)

He held that moment in sharp focus, examined it, dissected it. He'd been lucid, he was sure of that. It occurred to him that he hadn't been scared, that he'd been almost calm. The most awful decision he had ever been forced to make—one fogged by loyalty and responsibility and honor and tradition and unimaginable distress—had been wholly pragmatic. He remembered his words, the blunt declaration.
We've already lost six. We're not going to lose any more.

Another concussion shook the warehouse. More sparks raced up to the sky, soaring two hundred feet above the streets, and the flames leaped again. A second floor had collapsed. Mike looked toward the warehouse, felt the hot wind blow into his face, watched the water spray into the fire, then rise out as steam.

No man could survive that, he thought, not inside, crawling blind, trying to feel his way out. If he'd sent anyone else in, if he'd let even one of those men push past him, charge into the boiling black, he'd be dead. He had been right to call it off, order everyone out. He was sure of it.

P
aul Brotherton was not dead. He was only missing. If the building was as complicated as it had been described to her, a maze of storage rooms and walk-in freezers, Denise reasoned, then Paul could have found refuge behind a thick wall, or squirmed into an air pocket in the debris. People, ordinary people who weren't as skilled or as brave or as resourceful as a fireman on Worcester's Rescue 1, had survived beneath the rubble of an earthquake for days, a week, sometimes longer. Yes, she told herself, Paul was missing but he was alive and he would be when the other firemen, his brothers, dug him out in the morning.

Paul was dead. Denise was sure of it now. He'd run out of air in the belly of an inferno, and when a man could breathe only searing poison, he dies. It was an immutable law of physiology. She had been a nurse long enough to know how it had happened, too. His death had been relatively painless, or it should have been. The smoke would have scorched his throat, but it would have only hurt for a minute, until the carbon monoxide polluted his bloodstream, addled his brain, rendered him mercifully unconscious.

But she could be wrong. She thought of the earthquake survivors again, limp and dusty, rescuers lifting them from a mountain of shattered concrete. Their wives had believed those men were dead, and they'd been wrong. Denise could be wrong. Until they pulled a dead man from the ruins of Worcester Cold Storage, she could hope she was wrong. Her six sons, Paul's six sons, could hope, too.

Three of the boys were awake when she got home. It was one-thirty in the morning and there were people in the house, friends and relatives, all talking nervously, some of them crying. The boys asked their mother what was going on.

“There's a really bad fire, guys,” she said. “And …” And what? Daddy's dead? Daddy's missing? Daddy's trapped under smoldering bricks waiting to be dug out? She didn't know, which is what she told them. “It's a really bad one. I don't know if Daddy's going to be able to beat this one.”

Mike, the oldest, didn't say a word, just turned and walked away. Brian threw up. Timothy, nine years old, the fourth son, simply wept.

T
he warehouse was still burning at dawn, heaving lead-gray smoke up against the morning's flat silver sky. The worst had passed, the towering flames finally beaten back, the fuel inside depleted and soggy. But the fire was stubborn, refusing to completely surrender.

No one had been able to get back inside since Randy Chavoor had crawled out just after eight o'clock the night before. The ferocious heat and smoke that had forced the men to retreat had done tremendous damage to the interior, burning away the supports, weakening the entire structure. After almost a century of squatting on the edge of downtown like a square-edged mountain, sturdy and solid, Worcester Cold Storage was now a fragile shell.

Firemen knew that the danger did not end when the flames had been extinguished. Floors weakened, walls buckled, roofs sagged. Charred ruins were inherently treacherous, unstable jumbles that could crush a man as surely as fire could burn him and smoke could choke him. The deadliest firefighting disaster in New England, in fact, had happened after the flames went out. On June 17, 1972, Boston firemen spent three hours snuffing a four-alarm fire at the old Hotel Vendome. They were prowling the wreckage afterward when part of the building collapsed, crushing nine men to death.

The Worcester chiefs weren't taking any more chances with the warehouse, wouldn't give it an opportunity to kill anyone else. A crane was ordered to the scene to begin dismantling the exterior walls, knock at least one of them down, split the building open so they could see what they were up against.

The crane was positioned on Arctic Street, near the stairwell where Mike had sent men up to search for Paul and Jerry. It was a huge machine, a long steel spire dangling a thick cable, on the end of which was a 4,500-pound wrecking ball. Mike stood off to one side, far enough away from the building that he wouldn't be caught in an avalanche of bricks and mortar. The crane operator hauled the ball into the air, raised it almost to the top of the wall. He shifted his levers, swung the ball away, then back toward the warehouse.

Mike heard a dull thud, felt a vibration beneath his feet. But the wall held. A puff of mortar dust marked where the ball had struck, but no bricks fell.

He turned to look at the man running the crane. The operator opened his eyes wide, exaggerated surprise, then shook his head. The building was tougher than it appeared. It seemed malevolent, deliberately frustrating the puny men who challenged it. Most of Group II, the shift that had been on duty when the warehouse began to burn, had returned to the scene. Hundreds of other firemen—from Worcester, Boston, and a dozen other cities and towns—were there, too, all of them desperate to get inside, to start searching. Like Denise and the other wives, they held on to a slim hope that someone had survived. Even if all six were dead—which every man knew in his gut was the truth—they needed to recover the bodies, retrieve them from the ashes. Firemen never left a brother behind.

The wrecking ball swung again. Another thud, but no noticeable damage. On the third strike, a handful of chips snapped off the brick facing and fluttered to the ground. Mike kicked the pavement with the toe of his boot in frustration.

As the day wore on, the big ball taking small chunks from the B wall, the rest of the men were growing restless, tense and edgy. They milled around the staging area in the parking lot across Franklin Street, next to a blue tent that had been set up to shelter the families of the missing six. Emotions were raw. Men bickered, sniped at each other. A rumor circulated that firefighters from out of town would be sent into the building first, that Worcester men wouldn't be able to bring out their own. More loud voices, angry shouting.

Mike set up a stepladder, climbed to the third rung so he could see the entire crowd, holler down on them. “Hey,” he barked. The men quieted. “Now listen to me. We've never been through something like this before….”

Grumbling from the men, their voices rising again.

“Hey! Listen. We're going to get through this. But now is not the time to be fighting. We're all doing the best we can here.”

He scanned their tired faces. Hardly any of them had slept for more than an hour, and most not even that long. They were still caked in sweat and cinders. Some of them had feared for their lives only hours before, had been certain they were going to die, right there, right then. And they wanted to go back in. Mike understood how they felt. He wanted to get inside.

B
y late afternoon, the wrecking ball had hammered a rough V shape through the B wall, making it seem as if the bricks were being slowly unzipped. From Arctic Street, Mike and the rest of the men got their first clear view of the inside. The floors had indeed collapsed, pancaking one on top of the other. The second floor had apparently held, though it was hard to be certain from that angle. The rubble from the upper floors was piled more than twenty feet deep. Finding the bottom would take days of digging.

The men could also see the fire wall, opposite of and parallel to the side the crane was dismantling. From the doorways cut into it and the holes that had once held the charred stubs of floor joists, they could count exactly how many levels the warehouse had contained. Six, which meant Paul and Jerry had been lost on the fifth floor, two down from the roof. At least they'd looked in the right place.

A team of searchers ventured onto the pile shortly before dusk. They did only a surface scan at first, carefully picking their way through the smoldering debris, looking for any sign of movement, any trace of the missing six. Spot fires flared, and flames still crackled from behind the firewall.

Mike was exhausted, but he remained on his feet, patrolling the grounds, picking through the ruins. He wondered if he might be in shock, if the enormity of the fire, of the loss, had overloaded his emotions. He hadn't shed a tear or thrashed in a rage. Six men down. It didn't seem real. He was too close to it, surrounded by it. From his position on Franklin Street, he couldn't see the grief rippling outward, through the city, across the state, into the wider world.

The streets nearby were crowded with pedestrians who stared at the gray ribbons of smoke puffing into the air. They were hushed and somber, not morbid gawkers come to rubberneck the gore but more like mourners come to pay their respects on hallowed ground. Gov. Paul Cellucci ordered all state flags to be flown at half-mast. At most of the fire stations in the commonwealth, the flags were lowered as a matter of course. Pres. Bill Clinton wrote a letter of condolence, which was printed in the local paper:

Hillary and I were deeply saddened to learn of the tragedy that has struck the Worcester community. The six firefighters, who are now missing and presumed dead, valiantly put their lives on the line in the effort to save others and protect their city. Their courageous service reminds us all of the tremendous commitment and sacrifice made by the thousands of firefighters across America who risk their own lives every day to protect our communities.

Ordinary folks sent condolences and cash. An anonymous donor wrote a $10,000 check to the Salvation Army Saturday morning, and by the afternoon, less than twenty-four hours after the first alarm, the
Telegram & Gazette
collected $1,200 for a relief fund the newspaper had established the night before. Eventually, the paper would collect more than $6 million.

The men in the ruins, grimy and tired, didn't know any of that, not then. And they might have been chagrined. Friday night they'd been waiting to eat dinner on secondhand furniture in stations where, not so many years before, they'd been told to keep the doors closed on even the hottest summer nights so testy taxpayers wouldn't see them sitting around, waiting for the bell to go off. Friday night, they sent out trucks with too few men and with radios that shorted out when they got wet. Friday night, they had to borrow a thermal imager from a neighboring town, a piece of equipment that might have helped them see through the smoke, might have saved two men if they'd been able to crawl in with it an hour earlier. Friday night, they had gone into a death trap that had stood vacant for a decade, that was supposed to have been shuttered tight, an aging hulk on a decrepit block in which the Worcester Redevelopment Authority had invested $89,000—the price of three thermal imagers—to study whether a private developer could convert it into a biotech facility. Friday night, Paul and Jerry and Tommy and Tim and Jay and Joe were alive.

Saturday morning, the president was calling them heroes and the governor was in a state of official mourning and people were throwing money at their corpses. It was all well intended, but disquieting just the same.

Darkness fell. Lights were attached to large stands, their beams directed into the warehouse, illuminating the wreckage and the men who scoured it. Mike could feel the fatigue now, his reflexes slowing, his mind blurring. He decided to get some rest, come back early the next morning. From the look of things, there would still be work to do then, enough digging for everyone.

He got home and took a long, hot shower, scrubbing off the filth, trying to wash away all the dirty traces of the night. He thought about the details of the recovery, how cranes and back-hoes could do some of the work, but that most of it would have to be done with shovels and sifting screens. He was still thinking like a tactician, professional, focused.

After he dried himself and dressed, he padded through the den and into the living room and eased into an easy chair covered with orange velour, so old that it had molded to his shape. The chair faced the front window. He stared at the Lyonses’ house, his mind numb.

The phone rang. He picked it up. “Hello?”

It was Kate, his oldest daughter. “Hi, Daddy.”

Mike heard her voice and started to cry. He sat in his chair, facing the window, and wept.

19

M
IKE STEERED HIS GOLD
B
UICK AROUND THE LONG WAY, TO
the far end of Franklin Street, avoiding the avenues that the police had blocked off. It was early, about nine o'clock Sunday morning, almost forty hours after the first alarm rang for Worcester Cold Storage. As he drove down a long hill, he could see the warehouse smoldering beneath him, a pall of yellow-gray smoke held low to the ground under an unusually bright December sky. Fire and brimstone, he thought. The Building from Hell.

Joanne sat next to him. She eyed the building, remembered when Mike had told her how badly it scared him. She wondered if it had known, if the warehouse itself was alive and malevolent, if it had been stalking her husband, her friends, all those men. She watched the steam and the smoke pulse out of the ruins. It was breathing, hissing at her. “It's a devil,” she muttered. She hardened her glare. “That building's a devil.” She decided she would stare it down, stand on the street and watch it finally die.

Mike parked the Buick fifty yards from the warehouse and walked the rest of the way to the command post in the parking lot opposite the A-B corner of the building. He wasn't scheduled to work, and, in his jeans and sweatshirt, he wasn't dressed for it. But he'd been drawn to the building, compelled to be there when his men were finally found. He'd stowed his gear—boots, coat, pants, helmet—in the trunk of the Buick.