Vertical Burn

by Earl Emerson

  “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 attitudes 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 ungodly problems in the basement.

  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 shitty 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 assignments. 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 unscrewing 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 pissy 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.

  “We got some keys, but for some reason they don’t work. This also means any civilians coming down are in serious trouble unless they can hold their breath for seventy-odd stories; they won’t be able to rest up on a clean floor. Hasta la vista, amigos.”

  After the group left, Oscar began to wonder why he felt so smug. A typical house fire drew temperatures around twelve hundred degrees. This would be a lot hotter. Cold-drawn steel, such as that used in the elevator cables in this building, failed at eight hundred degrees. The building was constructed around a steel core, and the heat would eventually deform that at around two thousand degrees. More than one of these boys probably weren’t coming back. Still, he felt smug.

  Oscar couldn’t even imagine the commissions they were going to convene trying to explain tonight. Not that he had to worry about it. When this was finished, there would be no evidence and no witnesses. The others would be long gone and he would be in Costa Rica reading about it four days late in the Wall Street Journal.

  The question was, did he feel anything over the fact that he had planned and was in the process of murdering some two hundred souls, including one Patterson Cole, who’d paid for the whole thing? It was hard to tell. Oscar’s primary concern right now was whether they would actually get the money. A million five in his pocket would go a long way toward assuaging his guilt. There was so much testosterone and adrenaline in the air, Oscar didn’t really know how he felt. Besides, there was no stopping it now. They’d done it, and they would have to live with it.

  65. GETTING DOWN TO BUSINESS

  Stillman had just sent another group upstairs, this with two women firefighters in it, their round faces reminding him for some reason of a pair of semi-pro women softball players he’d once met in a bar in Portland. He turned back to the wall just as G. A. Montgomery stepped out of the confusion, G. A.’s face dripping with perspiration, his nose and cheeks red.

  “Everything moving along according to plan?” G. A. asked.

  Oscar glanced around to see if anybody had noticed them. “Yeah, yeah, yeah. I understand we’ve been getting cell phone calls from upstairs, from Patterson. You got the cash?”

  “Jerry started it early. Stupid bastard.”

  “I wondered what happened. I got your call that everything was starting, and I just went ahead and did what I was supposed to. I guess the others did their share ’cause the city’s in a tizzy. But what about the money? You got it?”

  “You know I do.”

  “Where?”

  “Don’t get your nose out of joint. It’s close. Right now I need to know how things are going.”

  “There’s three firefighters trapped in the mid-fifties. Everybody else is below the lower fire. On sixteen, seventeen, and eighteen.”

  “And they’re sending people to get above it?”

  “They tried. The stairwell’s too hot. You get up around twenty, it’s hotter than a hooker on payday. It gets worse as you go up. A lot worse.”

  “What about elevators?”

  “With the exception of one we left for ourselves, they’re all disabled.”

  “How many more hours do you estimate this will take?”

  “Not long. Our highest fire has been burning over an hour with no water on it. Hell, by now every floor between fifty-four and the roof has to be full of smoke.”

  “Nobody’s going to believe this is an accident,” G. A. said. “The papers will be full of speculation. It will go on for years.”

  “All the same, it couldn’t have gone better.” Oscar tried to smile, feeling his lips and cheeks stiff with the trying. G. A. always had been a worrier, ever since the night he’d recruited Oscar into this little group. G. A. had received the initial offer from Patterson Cole’s man, Norris Radford. Together they’d approached Jerry Monahan. Monahan had in turn suggested Marion Balitnikoff, and Balitnikoff brought in the Lazenbys. He couldn’t remember how Tony Finney got into it. One or more of them might have backed out, except that Norris Radford had been FedExing Oscar bundles of cash so that they’d been paid nearly $50,000 each for their practice runs, $10,000 a week to prepare for tonight. And that didn’t take into account the cost of the engine they’d had built to ensure they were the first firefighters responding to the Columbia Tower. Good thing, because tonight the real Engine 10 was in Ballard fighting a ship fire.

  “Know where everybody is?” G. A. asked.

  “I think so.”

  “Good. Round them up. I need to see the whole team. Now.”

  66. IT’S TOO DAMN HOT

  On floor fifteen Finney took stock of their situation. They were one floor below staging. They’d climbed seven stories on the aerial and then scurried up the remaining floors at a pace he knew they couldn’t maintain. Kub, who could move like lightning for a hundred meters on the flat, was having trouble keeping up. Finney wondered whether any of them could make it another sixty stories. His thighs were trembling from the load. Diana looked ashen.

  He wanted to stop and strip off some of the nonessential equipment, maybe remove the liners from his bunkers, wear only the light Nomex shell without the vapor barriers that kept in all the body heat, but if they did that and got caught by fire, they’d be as bad off as the civilians. They certainly couldn’t jettison the spare bottles. And if they didn’t take the rope bags and hardware, they might as well not make the trip.

  It would get easier by seventeen pounds, he knew, after they emptied their first bottles and off-loaded the empties.

  Floor fifteen was clear enough that all three had taken off their facepieces and were gulping building air. When Kub sat against the wall, Finney noticed the nose cone of his facepiece was half full of sweat, the fluorescent lights glaring off the tiny moving puddle like a mirror. Kub had unsnapped his coat, and his T-shirt was sopping. Diana took her coat off and then her T-shirt, dropping the shirt, which slapped the floor like a wet dishcloth. She was left with a damp sports bra and bunking pants.

  Diana scouted out a watercooler and began tossing down water from a small paper cup. “If we don’t drink,” she said, “we’re going to get dehydrated, and that’s going to cause us to start making bad decisions.”

  “Hell,” Kub said, struggling to his feet. “We already made one bad decision. We’re here, aren’t we?”

  Diana’s smile was weak.

  Finney said, “This next is going to be the tricky part. We not only have to get past stairwell division, but we have to get past the fire.”

  “It’s already way hot,” Diana said, pulling her facepiece back on and opening the valve on her regulator.

  As he began breathing bottled air again, Finney laughed at their audacity. The three of them didn’t stand a chance of bluffing their way past stairwell command, much less plunging into what would probably be the worst heat they’d ever encountered. The higher they went, the hotter it would get.

  Moving with a load again was not a pleasant experience. After only one floor Finney’s thighs began burning and his shoulders ached where the air-pack straps pulled. The insides of his bunking coat and pants were still wet and clammy from their first climb. Soon that clamminess would feel like a sauna. It didn’t help that the air coming through Finney’s regulator didn’t come fast enough. Nor did it help that he secretly believed this whole wrong-headed idea would get Diana and Robert Kub killed. Just what he didn’t need. More dead partners.

  They climbed past sixteen and encountered smoke so thick they had to keep one hand on the guardrail to maintain equilibrium. They slogged through running water that came down the steps like a mountain stream. Finney assumed the water was pouring out the door on the fire floor, that the panicked firefighters on that floor were using too much water, but sometimes pranksters opened one of the stairwell valves, and these could remain open for weeks, or until somebody charged the system and water began spilling out the way it was tonight.

  Finney led the way, though the others followe
d so closely that when he slowed they bumped into him. On eighteen they ran into five firefighters kneeling under the heat. Just inside the door to that floor another crew worked a hose line.

  A short man in an orange captain’s helmet rose from a crouch and approached. “Okay, I want you three on this backup line, while these others rotate inside. Give me your passports.”

  “This isn’t the firefighting stairwell,” Finney said. “I thought everyone was in A.”

  “We’re using both now. Give me your passport.”

  “They told us to go higher,” Finney lied.

  “Forget that. Nobody’s going higher. And give me those spare bottles.”

  “We’re supposed to take the bottles with us.”

  “We tried that. It’s too hot. Who the hell are you guys?”

  Finney didn’t hear the rest—he was moving.

  They were already hot, but as soon as he reached the turnback on the stairs, he could feel severe heat beginning to crawl inside his bunkers. Because he was first in line and higher than the others, it would hit him first. He hoped that would give him some measure of control, that he could turn back before Diana and Kub were burned too badly.

  They passed nineteen, and by now the stairwell was so smoky their flashlights were useless. Last week’s burns on his ears and neck began to feel raw and sore. He welcomed the pain; it was sharp and precise and took his mind off what they were walking into.

  By the time they reached twenty-three, it was hotter than anything Finney had ever known.

  Waiting for the others, who had slipped back, he dropped to one knee.

  He sensed rather than felt Diana making her way up the last half-flight, but Kub stopped below on the turnaround landing and said, “I’m on fire! Goddamn, I’m on fire. Damn, my neck. Goddamn!”

  Finney could hear him splashing water from the floor onto himself. He grabbed handfuls of water himself and splashed it around his own facepiece.