3000 Degrees (16 page)

While the CO was shutting down their bodies, the other toxins were destroying their airways. The smoke particles would have irritated their bronchial tubes and lung tissues at room temperature. Superheated, they scorched the deepest parts of Paul's and Jerry's chests, burning all the way into the tiniest air sacs. Their throats were closing, swelling shut from the trauma, the same way a finger swelled if it was slammed in a door. But there wouldn't be much pain. The CO would knock them out before it hurt too badly.

Jack Fenton struck a fourth alarm immediately after Jerry's transmission. Two more engines, one more ladder, nine more men. Mike had three teams working up the stairs, three at the bottom waiting to take their place. Then another message from Paul, frantic now.

“Fire Alarm, we have a second emergency here,” he said. “Get people up on this floor now or we are going to die. We have no air, and we cannot breathe.”

“What floor are you on?” Fire Alarm radioed back. “What floor are you on?”

“We don't know,” Paul said, his voice weaker now. “We don't know. We were on a wall. We have no air. Please.”

13

W
HEN THE SECOND FLOOR WENT BAD, THE FLAMES NEARLY
exploding and the smoke instantly shrouding everything in oily vapor, Capt. Mike Coakley headed for the roof. It was a calculated risk. He knew going up meant fighting his way through the worst of the cloud, all that gas and dirty molecules rising on their own heat. But he also knew Worcester Cold Storage better than most men on the job. He'd been in it a number of times for routine inspections, always in the light, never under pressure. And he'd gotten lost. Like every other Worcester fireman, Coakley used to tell himself,
God, if that goes up, I hope I'm off duty.
So much for hoping. He remembered the door from the stairs to the ground floor was tucked behind a short wall, that he could stumble past it, find himself at a dead end in the basement, maybe get lost in a maze down there. Moving the other way was a straight run to the open night sky and relatively fresh air. There was an escape route waiting, too, Ladder 1's big aluminum stick rising up from the back of the truck. All things considered, up was a safer bet than down.

Bert Davis, one of his men from Ladder 1, followed him, the two of them humping double-time through the darkness. Immediately before the bulkhead at the roof, Bert felt a sharp whack against the top of his forehead: a metal pipe, hung low across the stairwell. He blinked the stars out of his eyes, ducked, bounded up into clear air.

Neither man liked the view from the top. The vent just beyond the fire wall, the skylight Paul and Jerry had smashed out, was a volcano, orange flames shooting up through it, blowing thirty feet into the air, embers spinning away like bottle rockets, smoke braided through the strands of fire. Closer to them, the roof was bubbling, the tar starting to melt, to boil. There was too much heat below, so much that it couldn't all escape through the huge hole Paul and Jerry had bashed out above the elevator shaft, 15 feet to a side, 225 feet square. The warehouse had become an enormous blast furnace: the flames on the second floor were drawing great drafts of oxygen through the loading dock doors, gorging on air, then exhaling through the elevator shaft, which was functioning as a massive chimney. Attacking the fire—by the numbers, a textbook operation—appeared to have only antagonized it. It was as if the building had set a booby-trap, lured the men in, then erupted.

Then Coakley felt a chill, despite the sizzling atmosphere. Paul on the radio.
We're lost, Dave. You gotta send a rescue team up here for us.
Coakley shuddered, felt his sweat go clammy. He knew Paul and Jerry were in peril, could hear it in their voices. He also knew where they were, give or take a couple dozen yards. Fifteen minutes earlier, after the roof had been vented and the hoses were positioned around the flames, Coakley had stood with Paul and Jerry on the fifth-floor landing. Coakley and Bert were going to help man the hoses. “You want to come down?” he'd asked the rescue guys. “Nah,” Paul told him. “We'll finish this floor. Then we'll be down.”

He heard Paul again.
Second floor down from the roof. Two floors down, I think.

That meant they'd never finished the fifth floor. Coakley considered how much time had passed, mapped the building in his head from memory. Best guess, they'd crossed through the fire wall, had found the single opening between the two halves of the warehouse, then gotten turned around in the labyrinth on the far side. In clear light, it might take a man two minutes to cover that same ground, find them, get them a fresh bottle of air. Groping through a coal-black cloud on all fours would take five minutes, and then only if a man was guided by blind luck. Realistically, it was far longer, if it was even possible.

Coakley did more math. Paul and Jerry had one tank between them, buddy-breathing their last precious wisps of air. Their lives were being measured in minutes. How many? Two? Four? The exact number didn't matter; Paul and Jerry would be dead before anyone got to them. Coakley was sure of that. They could be recovered, but not rescued.

He leveled his stare at Bert, locked eyes with him. A Bible verse crept into his thoughts, something from Matthew. It was hard to remember. No, John. Definitely John, chapter 15. “A greater love hath no man than to lay down his life for his brothers.” Something like that. It had been a noble abstract in Sunday school. On the roof, in the steam and the soot and the ferocious crackling, it was an obligation. Paul had been in the first drill class Coakley had taught, and one of the things he was supposed to have learned, that Paul did learn, was to never leave a man stranded.

“We gotta go get 'em,” he told Bert. “Let's go.”

It was an order. Bert didn't hear it as one, because Bert didn't need to be told to go save his friends. But Coakley meant it as one, an officer telling a subordinate what to do, relieving Bert of accountability. It was easier that way. In his mind, Coakley assumed responsibility for Bert's life.

Bert nodded, the quick, firm tilt of the chin that men do when they are very serious. They went back to the bulkhead, snapped their masks into place, and stepped into the darkness. They felt their way down one set of stairs, then a second flight. Coakley felt for the door into the fifth floor, pushed it open, then dropped to his knees. Bert was immediately behind him, one gloved hand holding tight to Coakley's coat.

They crawled inside the fifth floor, trying to move in a straight line, aiming for the fire wall on the far side. Coakley felt for a wall, something to keep his bearings. His air tank had already been tapped, part of it already inhaled. They'd have only about ten minutes inside, and only if they controlled their breathing, kept it steady.

Coakley felt something solid to his right. He swept his hand up, then down, moved it in a wide circle. A wall. He scooted forward, keeping in contact with the flat surface on his right. After a minute or so, he came to an inside corner. He shuffled left, keeping the wall to his right. More crawling. Another corner. Then a third and a fourth. Coakley's throat tightened.
I'm in a fucking room.
But he hadn't felt a door. A four-sided room had to have a door. They'd gotten in. There had to be a way out.

He kept moving, his knees scraping faster over the same stretch of warehouse floor he'd been around once. Four more corners. Coakley shifted his arm higher, up where the door handles should be. He remembered the iron rings lay flush, nestled in pockets, but maybe he could feel one in the dark.

Four more corners. Still no door. His heart raced. “Bert,” he yelled over his shoulder, “we're going to die in here.” He crawled forward, quelled the panic rising inside. He said the same words to himself, believed them.
I'm going to fucking die. I'm going to die for a piece of shit building, trying to save a guy who's already dead. I'm going to fucking die in here.
Logic took him the next step.
I've killed Bert. I've fucking killed Bert.

His low-air alarm hadn't gone off yet. There was still time. He'd given Bert an order. Forget laying down his own life. His duty, his immediate and only obligation, was to get his man out alive. Behind him, Bert was thinking the same thing: he had to save his captain. They had to save each other.

They kept moving, knowing that to stop was to concede defeat, surrender to the building. Coakley focused on the time. How long had they been in there? He wasn't sure. His air had to be running low.

He swept his hand forward along the wall. His fingers jabbed a hard ridge. He reached for it with both gloves, slid all ten fingers against it. He felt a thin lip of metal. The door. A draft, a gust of heat or a hard puff of smoke, must have nudged it, pushed it in just far enough to be felt by a blind man. His heart pounded harder, two beats, three beats, twelve. Coakley rose up on his knees and pulled open the door, felt to make sure Bert was still with him, then edged through it. He paused, listened. The sounds—clomping boots, whining saws, clanking tools—were louder to the left. He turned, scuttled as quickly as his knees would move, felt another door, then the steel treads of the stairs. With Bert still behind him, he bolted down the stairs, his mask buzzing against his face as he cleared the final steps.

B
ob Mansfield followed Robert A. up the stairs from the ground floor a minute after Paul's call for help. Both of them had a fresh bottle of air, but neither trusted the supply to hold out. They were breathing hard from hiking through black steam, kicking the risers of each step to find their way to the fourth floor.

They dropped to their knees and began to crawl. They didn't know if they were on the right floor, if they were crawling toward Paul and Jerry or beneath them. But maybe Paul and Jerry didn't know precisely where they were, either. Other men were already searching the fifth floor. If there was a chance Paul and Jerry had made it down to the fourth, Robert A. and Bob weren't going to risk leaving them there.

The heat was ferocious, roiling the smoke, making it seem like the atmosphere was alive, angry, a predator smothering its prey. It wrapped around their masks, obliterated their vision, took away shadow and light. But they could feel it, moving with an unnatural velocity, swirls and eddies twisting around their arms and legs and chests as they inched forward, a physical presence that pushed back, pressed on them. And they could feel each other, Bob on Robert A.'s right shoulder, maintaining contact with one hand, holding a Haligan in the other. Robert A. had the only radio between them, and the background noise overwhelmed their voices unless they yelled in each other's ears. If they lost touch for more than a moment, they would lose each other.

It was difficult to know how far they'd gone, but Bob memorized the turns. He'd practiced how to maintain his bearings in utter darkness on the underwater rescue team. In a black-water dive, men floated blind, losing sensory perception in three dimensions, side to side and front to back and up and down. At least in a fire he didn't have to worry about up and down, only the level movements. So far, he and Robert A. had made three lefts, tracing a giant U-shaped path into the warehouse. That's what it seemed like, anyway. Were they in fifty feet? One hundred? And how much air did they have left? It was impossible to be certain.

Robert A. wasn't taking chances. With two lives on the line, he wouldn't help anyone by getting himself lost. “We're far enough in,” he said after the third left. “Let's get out of here. Because if we don't get out now, we're not getting out.”

“All right,” Bob said. He was relieved. The danger, the very real risk of dying, was outweighing the possiblity of finding Paul and Jerry on the fourth floor.

He felt Robert A. scoot forward and to the right.

“Hey, hey! Wrong way,” he screamed. “You're going the wrong way. It's this way.” He tugged Robert A.'s sleeve to the back and right, the reverse of the turns Bob remembered making.

“No, it's not,” Robert A. shouted back. “It's this way.”

He scooted forward again. Bob's hand slipped away. He reached for Robert A., felt nothing but smoke. Just a few feet away, Robert A. was groping for Bob. He turned for him, reached again. Nothing. They were both spinning, swinging their hands, desperate to reconnect. They called for each other, but the noise, the rush of hot air and the grumble of flames, washed away their voices, grabbed them in the short gap between the two men, carried them away.

Bob froze. His mind raced, two instincts, survival and duty, colliding, spinning around each other. Firemen didn't leave anyone alone in an inferno. Men lived because other men never left them alone to die. He couldn't leave Robert A., but he couldn't find him, either. Maybe Robert A. had switched directions, moved back the way Bob told him to go. Or maybe he'd crawled farther into the warehouse, made another turn, snaked into a corner. Bob didn't know, couldn't know. If he went after him, he'd just be guessing. And it would probably kill him.

He decided not to die. If he got out, got more air, he could come back. He could tell other men where to look, get someone to raise Robert A. on his radio, talk him back to the door. Nausea churned in his stomach as he lurched back and to the right, the way he remembered.

Bob crawled a few feet, then made the first right turn. He felt something hard and solid rise up in front of him. A wall. He spread out his hands, reached ahead. Another wall, coming into the first and forming a corner. “Shit,” he whispered. He didn't remember any corners. It must be a room, he thought. But he shouldn't be in it, didn't know how he'd gotten there. He realized he'd made a mistake, maybe a fatal one.

Panic tickled his brain stem. He squeezed his eyes shut, shook his head, concentrated, forced his nerves to steady themselves. He'd been through this before, thinking he would die, trapped in a flaming cellar, three minutes of air in his tank, the hose that led out through a maze of boxes and shelves hidden under rubble and water. He'd panicked then, started to hyperventilate, convinced he didn't have enough oxygen to escape. “You dumb shit,” he'd muttered next. “You keep breathing like that and you're definitely not getting out.” Self-control had saved his life. This was the same thing, only worse.