3000 Degrees (19 page)

No one came. He descended to the fourth floor, pounded on the railing down there. He heard no more yelling. Bob was getting dizzy from the heat and the noise. He wondered how much air was left, decided not enough. Suddenly, he was scared, the same fear he'd had in that burning cellar. He had to get out, was sure he wouldn't if he didn't go now, right then. He grabbed the rope, pulled himself up the stairs, moving faster than he did on the way down, faster than he thought he could. When he got to the roof, he was still enveloped in smoke, blackness all around him. The ladder was gone, hidden behind the cloud. He ran to the right, toward the edge of the roof, spotted the ladder, started down, Charlie with him.

At the bottom, on the back of Ladder 5, Bob went numb. He was exhausted and dehydrated, but he was also scared, certain he'd fled death, escaped a step ahead of it.

And then he was ashamed.
What if they'd heard me? What if they were almost there?
He put his head in his hands.
What if I left them to die?

J
ohn Sullivan circled the warehouse, looking at faces stained with ash and sweat. Jay and Joe would have gone inside, that much he was certain of. And Jay would have gotten them both out. Jay was ballsy, maybe wanted too badly to be a hero, but he was smart, seasoned. He wouldn't risk losing Joe.

“Have you seen Jay or Joe?” Sully asked an engine man. Then a ladder man, another lieutenant, every fireman he saw. Each shook his head, and Sully asked the next one more frantically. He went around the building again. Jay would be there, somewhere. Maybe by the door. He knew how it would end, Jay lumbering out, Joe next to him, both of them all soot and steam, Jay grinning. “Man, that was fucked up, huh?”

No one had seen either man all night, not since Sully left them at the truck. It didn't make sense. Mike McNamee was at the bottom of the stairs almost constantly, and when he stepped out to get a better look at the building, other men were stationed there, waiting their turn to go up. Maybe Jay had managed to sneak past them. There was one other door, at the A-D corner, but no one was using it. If he'd forced it open, then he was on his own inside.

He clicked his radio at 7:27. “Engine 3 to Engine 300, Jay or Joe, call in.”

No answer. He kept moving, stalking the fireground, hunting his men. Three minutes later, he tried again. “Engine 3 to Engine 300.”

Nothing.

He saw McNamee on Arctic Street, checking the building again. Sully sprinted toward him. “Mike, I can't find Jay or Joe,” he said, his voice shaking. “I've been around this building three times, and I can't find them. No one's seen them.”

Mike stared at him, didn't say a word. His mind spun. Paul and Jerry had been missing for forty-five minutes. No one had heard from Tom Spencer and Tim Jackson for twenty. The temperature inside, in the belly of the building, had soared to 3,000 degrees, almost twice as hot as a crematorium. And none of those men had enough air to last more than a half hour.

Sully stared back. He was pale, even through the grime on his face, and his eyes were wet.
They're dead.
The phrase scratched across his mind, over and over.
They're dead. All those fucking guys, they're all fucking dead.
His legs turned to jelly. He wanted to vomit. He spun away from Mike, shuffled to his truck, robotic and numb. He watched the fire, the flames dancing in the office windows, the smoke and steam rising from the roof. It was too much to witness. He went to the back side, put the truck between himself and the warehouse, as if he was hiding from the building, wishing it away. Then he fell to his knees and began to pray. Sully wasn't a religious man, but he didn't know what else to do.

15

B
ARELY MORE THAN AN HOUR AFTER THE FIRST ALARM HAD
sounded for an innocuous plume of smoke seeping from the roof of Worcester Cold Storage, sixty-three men were battling a hellfire inferno. Four alarms had aleady been struck, and more men were coming. Worcester firemen were called at home on their night off, the chief of the department, Dennis Budd, was paged away from dinner with his wife, and crews from sleepy bedroom towns like Paxton and Auburn were speeding into the city. A truck from Millbury was bringing a thermal imager, a camera that can see through smoke, the kind of high-tech gear Worcester couldn't afford.

Shortly after seven o'clock, District Chief Randy Chavoor was holed up at the South Division station. Normally, the second district chief in the city reports on the third alarm, which had been sounded at 6:40, but he had to wait for a man to relieve him at the firehouse. The southern district has always burned more readily and heavily than the rest of Worcester; leaving half the city, eighteen square miles, unsupervised was a dangerous proposition, no matter how ferociously a fire might be burning in the north.

Besides, Randy wasn't worried. After twenty-three years on the job, he had a pretty good idea how an empty warehouse would burn. He could write a script, crib the basic operation from the textbooks, add the details from experience. The ladder guys would enter and vent, the rescue men would sweep, the engine men would soak the flames. If it got away from them, if the red stuff overpowered the wet stuff, the firemen would simply regroup, fall back to a safe distance and open up the big guns. Surround and drown. Maybe some of the guys would have to rub salve onto their ears to soothe a minor burn, and the locker rooms would echo with wracking coughs, soot being hacked out of weary lungs. But everyone would shower and have coffee.

He'd monitored the fire all night, since he'd tried to swipe the alarm from Mike McNamee. After he'd left Grove Street, he had his aide, Franny Baldino, park on Grafton Street, a block or so from the building, so he could watch the attack. He saw seven shiny red trucks and two dozen men in heavy coats surrounding a big brick cube that was leaking a soft puff of gray smoke. He'd seen the same scene a hundred times before. He got bored and told Franny to take him back to South Division.

The radio chatter hadn't spooked him, either. When he'd heard Jerry call for help, say he was running out of air, Randy grinned.
Man,
he thought,
I am gonna bust his balls tonight.
He could write that script, too, because he knew Jerry, knew what kind of fireman he was, which was a good one.

He'd met him back in 1992, when Randy was the captain in charge of Rescue 1 and Jerry still had the green shield of a rookie bolted to his helmet. (The green made a recruit easy to spot on the fireground; there was no sense sending a man into a burning building before he'd gotten some experience under his belt.) Jerry had introduced himself, told Randy he wanted the open slot on the rescue truck. The veterans were amused. Guys waited years, sometimes decades, to get on rescue. And a green-shield thought he was waltzing in? Randy had to admit he'd never heard of such a thing. Then again, he'd never known a rookie with the stones to ask a captain for a job, either. He took him on. “I believe I can make someone a good firefighter,” he told the other men when they complained. “But no one can make a good attitude. The kid's got a good attitude.”

Randy gave him a hard time early on. Shortly after Jerry joined the truck, Randy leaned out a window on the second floor of a burning triple-decker, felt his helmet slip off his head, watched it disappear into the bushes below. He sent the green-shield to find it, made him root around in the shrubbery, miss all the action inside. “I can't fucking believe it,” Jerry groused to anyone who'd listen. “My first big fire, and that fucker made me look for his fucking helmet.”

Jerry learned the craft quickly and well. Within a couple years, he was moonlighting at the Massachusetts Firefighting Academy, support work mostly, but passing on some of what he'd picked up on the job. The past few years, he'd been partnered with Paul LaRochelle, another good man. Sick and Twisted, they called themselves. “I'm Sick,” Paul would say. “And he's Twisted.” It was a good schtick. Rescue partners were tight like that, like brothers. Each entrusted his life to the other, believed he would survive because his partner wouldn't let him die. Like that night Paul was foundering in a kitchen, smoke falling across his face mask, the linoleum melting beneath his knees. “I can't find the door,” he screamed, and Jerry answered, soothing, steady. “I got it, Paul, I got it. Come this way.”

Jerry and Paul LaRochelle got out that night because rescue men always got out. Randy had never lost a man when he ran the truck, had never heard of any truck losing any man in all his years with the department. So Randy knew Jerry would get out of Worcester Cold Storage. And when he saw him later, after the warehouse had been reduced to smoldering rubble and steamy puddles, he would swat his shoulder and make a face at him. “What's the matter with you, Jerry?” he'd tease. “Didn't I teach you better than that?
Real
rescue guys don't get lost, you know.” Then they would both laugh, even if the sting from the smoke made their throats hurt.

Chief Budd had struck a fifth alarm at 7:26. Ninety seconds later, Randy got out of Car 4, his Ford Expedition, and started to cross Franklin Street. He saw Mike McNamee ahead of him, just off the curb, a sillhouette in his off-white officer's coat. He reached out a hand as he passed, never broke stride as he patted Mike on the shoulder. “Hey, Mike, you got those two guys out, right?”

He took two more steps before Mike answered.

“Randy. No.”

Randy stopped short, jerked, snapped at the waist, as if a ghost had swung a two-by-four into his gut. He twisted around, but slowly, the air around him suddenly sticky and thick, like molasses. His stomach hurt.

“What?”

“Randy …” Mike blinked hard, swallowed. “Randy,” he said again, his voice a hoarse whisper, “it's not two. It's six.”

The two district chiefs stared at each other. Randy tried to catch his breath, force air through his throat, form words with his numb tongue and lips. His shoulders slumped and his hands tingled and his head buzzed, his brain trying to reconcile what he'd heard with what he knew to be true, which was: firemen were immortal. That was dogma, the underlying tenet of their collective faith. Men went into burning buildings, stood firm against a force of nature—against the fundamental element of the entire universe—only because they knew they would not die. Sure, they talked about the danger. They recited romantic drivel about how every alarm could be their last and they shellacked “The Fireman's Prayer” to pieces of oak they hung in their half baths off their kitchens and they told women in bars that they wanted to die with their boots on like real American cowboys and they chiseled the name of every old retiree who finally dropped dead at eighty-seven into granite monuments surrounded by petunias and geraniums. But none of that was real. None of them believed it, not in his soul. No man would go to work if he expected to die before sunrise.

Randy wheeled, his legs moving automatically. One step, a second, then faster, running toward the building. Six men were still inside, needed to be saved. If he let them die, then a part of him, a piece of every man there, would die, too.

M
ike watched Randy head for the building. He felt a shudder go through him, squirmed under his coat. He had to focus, concentrate on tactics. Paul and Jerry were probably dead, but the other four still had a chance. Tom Spencer and Tim Jackson were two of the best, almost fifty years of experience between them, and most of Tim's had been on Rescue 1. Jay and Joe weren't as seasoned, but they were good firemen, strong young guys. If anyone could survive inside that building, Mike would put his money on those four. It was his job to get them out, and not lose any more men doing it.

He hurried back into the building, to the bottom of the stairwell where a dozen men were staging, waiting to be sent back up. “Everybody stay here,” he hollered at them, then kept running, forty feet across the first floor and out the rear loading door, to the platform on the C side of the warehouse. The fire was being fought mostly from that side, hoses slithering up the stairs to the second floor. The flames were advancing, but his men were keeping them essentially in check.

The radio system was breaking down, alarms sounding from random units. The microphones that men wore near their collars had emergency buttons on the side, but they weren't watertight. When they got wet, they shorted out, broadcast a priority emergency that stole a channel. Communication, already difficult, was becoming impossible. Mike could hear Fire Alarm telling Engine 1 to disable one of its radios, clear the air.

He sprinted back to the B stairs. The men were all waiting. Chief Budd was on the radio, calling him. “Go ahead,” Mike said.

“Yeah, Mike, I've got a thermal imager down here from Mill-bury and I want to send it in. I'm bringing down an aerial scope on this side of the building, on the east side of the building, and we want a couple of guys down here to go in with them.”

“Okay,” Mike said. “Nobody in without lifelines, though. We want lifelines on everybody. We have ropes tied off upstairs.”

The ropes were the only chance he had left. He realized the fire was winning, spreading superheated gases into the freezer rooms and corridors. If anyone let go of the lifeline, another man would be lost in murk. And if Tom, Tim, Jay, and Joe were alive, there was a slim possibility they would stumble across the lines, find their own way out.

“Ladder 2 to Ladder 2.” He recognized Paul Brosnihan's voice. Eighty seconds ticked off. He heard it again. “Ladder 2 truck to Ladder 2.”

Then Brosnihan was calling him. “Ladder 2's truck to Chief McNamee.” Again. “Ladder 2's truck to Chief McNamee.” He kept pressing the button. “Ladder 2 to Chief McNamee.” Anxiety laced the words. “Ladder 2's truck to Ladder 2.”

Brosnihan was desperately trying to get a response from his lieutenant. Mike joined in. “Command to Ladder 2, Lieutenant Spencer.”

No answer. Mike Coakley tried, screamed into his microphone. “Ladder 1 to Ladder 2! Ladder 2!”

For a minute, Mike McNamee and Mike Coakley alternated broadcasts, each one more urgent, each one answered by silence. Brosnihan got on the air at 7:40, pleading, his voice cracking. “Ladder 2 to any company on the fifth floor, to any company on the fifth floor.” No one replied.