by Sam Fisher
They studied the schematic in silence.
'So what have we got?' Foreman said after a moment. 'There are ten levels altogether. We're on Ground. Three floors above us, six below.'
'My vote would be to go down,' Todd said from where he was sitting.
'Why?'
'Obvious, isn't it? The damage will be far greater up than down. It's unlikely you'd reach the roof, which is what you're thinking, right?'
Foreman and Dave were silent.
'He's right,' Marty interjected. 'Besides, even if you could get to the roof, the sniper could pick us off easy.'
Dave was scrutinising the diagram. 'Yes,' he said slowly. 'Yes . . .'
'What?'
'Well, look at the diagram. This spiral here.'
'What is it?' Marty asked.
'Access to the first level of the car park on B2. You see? B1 is admin – offices and storage. The five levels beneath it are all car park. The spiral represents the way into the car park from the ground level. And then you get between the lowest four floors by driving up and down these ramps in the centre of the level. Here, see?'
'So?' Marty asked.
'If we could get to B2, we could go up the ramp to the surface.'
'Alright,' Foreman said. 'I take your point. But isn't it academic anyway? How are we going to go up or down?'
'The elevator?' Todd said.
'You're insane!' Marty responded. 'The elevators are the last thing you use.'
'Well this is the last thing, isn't it?' Todd snapped.
'They're not going to work,' Dave exclaimed and stabbed at the button dismissively.
Nothing happened for a moment. Then they all saw the light over the door of the undamaged elevator start to blink on and off. They watched as the figure B5 flashed, then clicked off. B4 appeared, then B3. For several tense seconds they kept their eyes fixed on the clutch of LCDs in the strip above the door, expecting at any moment for the ascent to peter out because the lift had hit an obstruction. But it kept going. Amazed, they watched as G lit up and the doors opened.
48
'Shit, I hate elevators,' Dave said as the doors shut.
'Since when?' Todd asked, incredulous.
'Like you take a lot of notice. I always take the stairs at college. Don't trust these things.'
Kyle depressed the B2 button and the elevator began to move. Dave looked around, extremely uneasy. Todd was shaking his head, a mocking smile on his face.
'Oh, fuck off!' Dave exclaimed.
The elevator jolted and they heard a sharp cracking sound, then it stopped suddenly between floors. The lights went off and flicked back on again. Todd's smile vanished. Dave gripped the railing that ran around the interior wall. He caught a glimpse of his own terrified face in a mirrored panel.
Then the elevator dropped.
It seemed to fall forever. But it was in freefall for no more than a second. In that interval the four men in the elevator believed they were living through their final moments. There was no time to panic. They simply experienced a horrifying stillness, a sense of utter powerlessness. Their lives were stripped away. Everything became meaningless.
The elevator shuddered to a stop.
The jolt threw them around inside the tiny space. Foreman and Dave smashed together. The impact broke the senator's nose, and blood spurted down his shirt. Todd collided with the wall and landed heavily on his broken arm, making him scream in anguish. Marty was propelled headfirst towards the doors. He just managed to break his fall and quickly sat up, dazed, his vision blurry.
There was a horrible creaking sound coming from the centre of the elevator's ceiling. None of them dared move.
Foreman dabbed at his face with the sleeve of his shirt, and soon the expensive Egyptian cotton was coated in red snot. He slid to the floor, resting his back against the wall, leaning his head back and pinching the bridge of his nose.
Nursing his arm, Todd scrambled back against the opposite wall, his face creased in pain.
Dave was shaking. His face was covered in sweat that ran in rivulets down his filthy, bloodied cheeks. He was pulling the backpack off his shoulders and rifling through the bag. A moment later he had a small plastic container in his fist. Surreptitiously he tipped a couple of tablets into his palm and chewed them with practised ease.
Foreman slowly got to his feet and edged to the elevator's doors. 'You okay?' he asked Marty, helping him to his feet.
'I guess.'
Turning to the two students, he repeated the question. They nodded. 'Not much worse than I was,' Todd added.
Foreman looked at the keypad and then up at the electric display above the door. It was flickering between B3 and B4. 'Anyone have a cell phone?' he asked, looking at each of them in turn.
'Never owned one,' Dave replied.
'I had one,' Todd answered. 'It's back there.' He nodded towards the floors above. 'In about a hundred pieces.'
Foreman glanced at Marty. The old man shook his head and looked at the floor of the elevator, the muscles in his face tightening.
The senator tugged at his own phone. 'This crapped out earlier, so –' Glancing at the screen, he was startled to see it was active. But a symbol in the top right of the screen told him the signal was practically nonexistent.
He keyed in 911. Nothing. Then, barely conscious of what he was doing, he called up his contact list and speed-dialled the first number. There was a long silence, then three clicks followed by an electronic whir. The light on the screen went out. Foreman lowered the phone to his side, stared at the floor and let out a heavy sigh.
'Kyle? Kyle – is that you?'
'Sandy!' Kyle screamed, pulling the phone up. He saw the word Connected on the screen, and a timer counting the seconds – 00:02, 00:03. Then the phone died. No light, no signal, no sound – no power.
49
Of all the technological wonders available to E-Force from the work of CARPA, the Big Mac was perhaps the most impressive. It was a massive aircraft, and aspects of its design made it look like the great-grandchild of the B2 Stealth Bomber. It consisted of a giant disc referred to as a uni-wing. Above and below this were bulges, which in profile gave it the shape of a burger. The upper bulge housed the flight deck and ops rooms, while the lower contained the giant engines. The Big Mac worked on the same ram-jet principle as the Silverbacks, and like the smaller craft it was a VTOL aircraft capable of hypersonic speeds.
Stephanie Jacobs had piloted the huge craft from Base One and made a perfect landing outside the CCC, her failures in the simulator forgotten. She and Pete Sherringham unbuckled just as Mark came through on the comms.
'Had a slight hiccup with the police,' he began. 'News of your arrival hadn't gone right along the chain of command. It's okay now, though. Josh has talked to the ground commander and he's coming over to you to assess the situation and work out a plan.'
'What's the latest on Mai?' Stephanie asked.
'On her way. Should be with you in five.'
Ten minutes later, Stephanie, Pete, Mai and Josh were in the Big Mac's ops room. On a wall-sized video screen they could see Cyber Control at Base One. Mark was in the foreground, and Tom was sitting beside him in his motorised wheelchair. In the background they could see the holoscreens and virtual keyboards of the workstations, and operators in boilersuits manning the controls.
'Hi, Mai. We all really appreciate –' Mark began.
She raised a hand. 'Please, forget that. Where're we at?'
'The emergency services have swung into action. As you all probably know by now, there was a shooter.'
'A shooter?' Mai hadn't heard.
'Obviously linked to the bombings, maybe the guy who planted the devices. Anyway, that threat has passed, at least for the moment. But it delayed things. Some of the emergency crews were hit. Most are now in the building. Paramedics are bringing out the injured.'
Through the windows of the Big Mac they could see teams of doctors and nurses triaging the victims. A line of body bags lay
at one end of the plaza.
'Yeah, we can see,' Pete said, turning back to the screen. 'What's the state of the building?'
Tom looked up from the electronic pad attached to his wheelchair, a laptop the thickness of a piece of card with a holographic screen above it. 'Bad bits and less bad bits,' he began. 'The overall structure is okay. The whole thing isn't about to do a Twin Towers, but the environment of the Main Concourse and Hall A, which took the full brunt of the blasts, is extremely hazardous. Masonry and girders are coming loose all the time and whole sections of roof could come down . . . along with the three floors above them.'
'What state are the upper floors in?'
'Not good,' Tom replied. 'Huge structural damage. There's a restaurant directly above Hall A on Level 1. Or at least there was. It's taken a big hit. The east end of Level 1 and the First Floor Reception were some way from the second blast but took it bad from the first blast, which had its epicentre behind the Ground Floor Reception. Most of the east end of Level 1 is a bar. It's pretty smashed up. Fortunately, there were very few people in any of these areas at the time of the explosions.
'Above these, Level 2 is almost all conference and meeting rooms. Every single window has been blown out, including a huge wall of glass at the front of the building. There's some pretty serious structural damage to the main support girders, but they should hold. There were only four people up there. They're all still alive, but we have no idea what condition they're in.
'On the top floor, Level 3, there's a pool and gym. The wall of the pool has fractured and water is leaking down through the CCC. Again, there were only a handful of people up there and they managed to escape down external emergency stairs to the rear of the complex.'
'What sort of casualty figures we talking about overall, Tom?'
Erickson tapped at the virtual keyboard. When he looked up, he was paler than usual. 'The big event was Kyle Foreman's talk. It was sold out and queues had formed at the front of the CCC since this afternoon. He's a popular dude.' He paused for a moment and took a deep breath. 'There were just over 1100 people in Hall A.'
In a corner of the big screen a strange-looking image appeared. It was a dark rectangle with a random arrangement of dots in red and orange.
'This is a thermal image from BigEye 7, which is directly overhead. It was taken about ten minutes ago. It shows that fires are still burning fiercely in Hall A.'
'Didn't the second bomb go off directly under it?' Mai interrupted. 'That's what I was briefed in the Silverback coming over.'
'That's correct. And as a result, almost everyone in the auditorium was killed.'
Tom's words fell like lead weights into the room. There was silence in the Big Mac. Its heavily insulated windows sealed out any sounds from outside.
'Analysis of the image suggests there are fewer than 65 people still alive in the room. And we have no idea how many of them are critically or even mortally injured. I think the rescuers and paramedics should get there soon, although it's heavy going and extremely hazardous.'
'Over a thousand dead,' Josh said, almost in a whisper. 'Gone . . . Just like that.' It was close to the death toll of the Titanic; one-third of the number killed on 9/11. 'We have to do something. We have to help the emergency teams.'
Mark looked up from an image of Hall A on the holoscreen next to him. 'Not our job.'
'Not our job?' Josh exclaimed. 'There may be hundreds still alive in other parts of the building. They may be trapped.'
'That's not what we've been sent in to do, Josh.' Mark glanced at the faces of those aboard the Big Mac.
'But with the equipment we have we could save a lot of lives.'
'Yes, and we'll do as much as we can. But we have a very clear objective.'
They were all silent.
Josh took a deep breath. 'Okay, okay. I know.'
'There are three dozen fire trucks, almost 60 ambulances and dozens of police units there already, or close by. Every hospital in Los Angeles is on high alert and every ER in the county is preparing for casualties. The air is thick with medical choppers and they'll soon be ferrying the most seriously injured to the nearest ERs. We'll offer every assistance we can. But our mission parameters are clear. We have to rescue Senator Kyle Foreman, who, it now seems obvious, was the prime target of this attack.'
'What's the latest on him?' Stephanie asked.
'We have two separate traces on his cell,' Tom replied. 'They were both fleeting. The debris is blocking the signal and his phone may have been damaged. The first call came from a point at the rear of Hall A very soon after the blasts. The second was just over 30 minutes later, from a point in one of the lower levels of the building.'
'A lower level?'
He called up the schematic of the CCC. 'We've pinpointed the call to one of the elevator shafts. Between B3 and B4.'
'He's stuck in an elevator?' Steph asked.
'Looks that way,' Tom said. 'We have infrared traces from BigEye. Foreman's with three other survivors. We're keeping a constant trace on them and will let you know immediately if there's any change.'
'Tom and I formulated a plan as you guys were en route,' Mark said. 'Pete, you take one of the Moles. You need to get down to B2 via the car park access.' He pointed out the spiral entrance ramp. 'From there you can get to the lower levels. The Mole will get you through any rock falls or other obstructions. Mai, Steph and Josh, I want you to find a way down via the Main Concourse. Questions?'
'Any sign of more bombs?' Pete asked. 'It would be nice to know.'
'I have a team conducting a detailed sweep, Pete. Nothing yet. But obviously . . .'
'And the structural integrity of the Main Concourse and Ground Floor Reception?' Josh asked.
'We're monitoring it from BigEye,' Tom replied, bringing up another image on the screen. It was a diagram of the four above-ground floors of the CCC – Ground to Level 3. It consisted of strips of grey and black. Superimposed on these were jagged lines in green, orange and red. 'The dark regions are the structural components of the building, and the coloured lines are stress features. Green indicates the safest, red the most dangerous. As you can see, the red lines are clustered around the area to the west of the Main Concourse, close to Hall A. It's the point where both bombs had an impact. This is the part of the building where Senator Foreman was before he and his companions took the elevator. It's undoubtedly the most dangerous part of the building. But I'm pretty sure collapse is not imminent.'
'Pretty sure?'
Tom looked up. 'Okay. Fairly sure.'
'This is getting worse by the second. Give me some figures.'
'There's a 50 per cent chance it will last more than an hour.'
50
The most senior member of the rescue team on the ground was the fire chief of Area H, Truman Maclenahan. He had a ruddy face, ginger hair and an almost comic handlebar moustache. Although he had grown up in the Bronx, he was proud of his Scottish heritage. According to rumour, he took it so seriously he organised private caber and haggis nights at his house in Palos Verdes and wore kilts in the privacy of his study. It was Maclenahan who insisted on a briefing with the E-Force team members before they set foot in the CCC. It was a reasonable request, but in Mark Harrison's eyes it was just a waste of vital minutes.
The briefing took place in an ops centre in a specially designed fire department RV-type vehicle, which was parked on a slip road just beyond the east wall of the CCC. It was surprisingly spacious, with a round table at the rear of the truck. On the wall, a screen relayed live images from the inside of the gutted building. At the front of the vehicle, a small team operated the computer systems that linked the van with the County Emergency Operations Center, which was across town. Sitting with E-Force were Maclenahan and his number two, Assistant Chief Gerome Roseley.
'I'll be honest with you,' the Chief said. 'I'm only allowing you into that building because I've been told to.'
'I understand your reticence,' Steph replied. 'But we can assure you our op
eration will not impede your rescuers in any way.'
Assistant Chief Roseley sniffed and glared at the four members of E-Force.
'That's precisely our grievance,' Maclenahan responded. 'There are a lot of injured people in there. My men are doing the best they can. Yet you insist on focusing on one individual, Senator Kyle Foreman.'
'Chief,' Josh said evenly, 'I appreciate what you're saying. Indeed, I, for one, am not totally convinced what we've been ordered to do is right. But those are our orders, and we have to follow them.'
'Whose orders?' Roseley asked, rather more aggressively than he had intended. 'Who do you represent?'
'I thought it had all been explained to you,' Mai said.
'Some ridiculous rescue organisation? It's a wonder you're not wearing capes.'
There was a silence for a moment. On the screen they could see the smoke and the debris, the remnants of human beings, charred bodies, fires burning, flames licking up the walls and across the roof. Fire Chief Maclenahan looked embarrassed. 'I'm sorry,' he said. 'Emotions are running a little –'
'Excuse me, Chief,' Roseley interrupted. 'You don't need to apologise for me. Yeah, sure, I'm emotional. I don't like seeing a thousand Americans incinerated. But these people aren't here to help us. They're serving outside interests, and I don't like that.'
'I'm sorry you feel that way, sir,' Steph replied in her most diplomatic tone.
She was about to go on but Fire Chief Maclenahan cut in. 'What exactly is your plan?'
Mai outlined what they had decided. She, Steph and Josh would try to reach Kyle Foreman and his companions, who were trapped somewhere between B3 and B4, by going through the Main Concourse. Pete would take a machine called the Mole directly into a lower level.
'Okay,' Maclenahan replied. 'That sounds like a plan. But I wish to make a request. You know I can't insist.' And he flicked a glance at Roseley, who looked like he was sucking on a lemon. 'I guess I have to simply appeal to you.'
'What is it?' Steph asked.
'We have reason to believe there are some survivors trapped in Hall A. Problem is, the techs believe the roof is about to come down. I have men in there, but it's slow going. I think it's likely the roof will collapse before they can reach anyone. Do you have anything on that ship we can use to support the roof? To buy us time?'