Vertical Burn Part 28

By now forty or fifty civilians were wandering the lower floors, cleaning personnel and office workers who'd been putting in overtime. There were gawkers and a couple of homeless men who'd walked in off the street carrying bedrolls. Even as they organized the rest of the fire, the command post area began to deteriorate into bedlam.

Diana remembered reading about the First-Interstate Bank fire in Los Angeles, where the flames could be seen from eight miles away. She hated to compare this to the First-Interstate, because she had a gut feeling this was going to be worse. For starters, L.A. had poured four hundred firefighters into the effort. Seattle had two hundred on-duty firefighters, so even if they used the entire s.h.i.+ft, they would need another two hundred to duplicate L.A.'s effort, as well as another fifty or so to give minimal coverage to the rest of the city.

So far, including the county chief, who was overwhelmed with the situation, Diana counted sixteen firefighters on the command floor, a few more upstairs, another handful outside. The building security people were tied up trying to explain to the firefighters how the fire suppression systems worked, even though none of the fire suppression systems seemed to have activated properly, none that is but the piercing whistle and loud honking from the alarms. A firefighter from 6's finally took the bull by the horns and broke the closest speakers off the wall with a pike pole. It was remarkable how much confusion the noise alone had caused.

A Seattle air rig arrived, and spare masks and bottles were brought in for the overtimers to use. The man running the up up elevator would take people up and come down empty. The man in the elevator would take people up and come down empty. The man in the down down elevator would go up empty and come down full. Trouble was, the elevators weren't working. elevator would go up empty and come down full. Trouble was, the elevators weren't working.

Waiting for an a.s.signment with the others, Diana drifted over to a console of television monitors in the security enclosure, where she was astonished to see one of the upper floors had dozens of people milling about in formal dress.

"What's this?" she asked a short, balding man of around thirty, who sat in front of the monitors reading a magazine called Combat Readiness Quarterly Combat Readiness Quarterly. The building security personnel all wore dark gray blazers, and she'd heard rumors they were ex-FBI men, though that was hard to believe. This guy seemed particularly unimpressed with their predicament.

"Some sort of wedding party," he replied, growing more interested when he looked up and saw Diana.

"Those people don't even look like they know the building's in alarm."

"Oh, they know all right." He sat up straight. "They're on emergency power up there right now."

"How many people are in the building, total?"

"Probably a couple hundred."

"What floor is that?"

"Seventy-five."

"So why don't we send someone up there to bring them down?"

"The elevators above forty aren't working. In fact, we've been having trouble with these down here. We're trying to figure it out now."

"What about the stairwells? I thought they were automatically pressurized with clean air when the building went into alarm? Why don't they come down the stairs?"

"Maybe they're supposed to be pressurized, but they're all smoky now. I don't know how that's supposed to work, but you could be right. Hey, is it hard to get in the fire department?"

"It's not hard at all," Diana lied. "I think you should sign up."

"Really?"

"Absolutely."

Diana knew that in L.A. the First-Interstate Bank fire had burned at temperatures close to two thousand degrees, that it had taken most of the night to extinguish. Yet there was one notable difference between that fire and this: Except for a few stranded office workers and about forty maintenance personnel, L.A.'s building had been vacant. The Columbia Tower was like a bee colony.

It was all too easy for smoke and heat to travel upward and sometimes downward in a high-rise building via plumbing and electrical chases, ventilation shafts, air-conditioning ducts, elevator wells, and tenant staircases. It was possible for a fire to be contained on a lower floor while people twenty or thirty stories higher were dying from smoke inhalation. It was even possible for this to happen with almost no smoke on the floors in between. And this was not a building where people could open windows for fresh air. Diana had seen a 250-pound man slam away at similar windows using a pick-head axe with absolutely no effect. None of the windows opened in the conventional sense, and the only ones that could be broken were those designated by small decals in the lower corner.

There were two ways of looking at this. The first as a tactical fire problem. The second as a trap. John had been right. Leary Way had been rigged. Bowman Pork had been rigged. And this building was rigged, too. They were standing on a big piece of cheese in a very tall mousetrap, cheese oozing up between their toes.

In L.A. they'd done their rescues with fire department helicopters and teams of specially trained paramedics who'd rappelled down the outside of the building from the roof. Seattle didn't have any helicopters, nor did they have rappelling paramedics. Even if they did, Diana knew the roof of this building was filled with antennae and microwave dishes and wouldn't accommodate helicopters on a good night, much less in the fog.

Floor four, which acted as the lobby from Fifth Avenue and accessed most of the elevators, was still accepting stragglers from the smoky stairwells. These latecomers had traveled farther and looked worse than the earlier escapees. Because the doors to the stairwells kept opening and closing, the area soon began to reek of smoke.

Moments later Chief Reese rushed in, flanked by two administration chiefs who hadn't seen combat in some time. This was going to be good.

Chief Reese began reorganizing in a surprisingly calm and methodical manner. After a.s.signing division commanders, mostly lieutenants who would later be replaced with captains or chiefs, Reese ordered SPD to clear floor four of nonessential personnel and to have any civilian who'd been in the smoke taken downstairs to the medics.

Thirty-five minutes into it they managed to get water to floor eighteen. Thirty-five minutes was an unacceptable amount of time to leave a fire burning, and now reports from upstairs said it had spread to the entire wing. The original teams had been replaced by fresh troops, a move that had all but exhausted their meager resources. Diana was one of the few people left in staging, a factor she attributed to the county staging officer's reluctance to put a female at risk. She could wait. There was going to be plenty of fire to fight.

Now that she was witnessing it firsthand, the whole thing seemed so much easier to pull off than she'd imagined. A natural gas leak at Northwest Hospital, twenty-one firefighters and a.s.sorted hospital personnel tied up in the process of evacuating two wings. A multicar accident on the 520 floating bridge with persons trapped. Eighteen firefighters and five units sent to that one, the bridge gridlocked with thousands of cars backed up into town. Two additional engines locked up in traffic because of the backup from the accident on 520. A warehouse burning in Ballard. A s.h.i.+p fire, also in Ballard. Short of a once-in-a-lifetime natural calamity, it was improbable, if not impossible, for this many large incidents to occur coincidentally at once. On the other hand, it would be easy for an individual to break a gas line at the hospital. Easier still to drop some debris from a moving truck and cause an accident on either of the two floating bridges that spanned Lake Was.h.i.+ngton.

She was thinking about all this when she saw Finney enter the building in his bulky yellow bunking suit.

61. CARRIED AWAY BY THE CROCODILE.

Engine 10 was parked at the base of the Columbia Tower on Fourth Avenue, the motor roaring as it powered the dual stage internal water pump, hose lines sucking water from a nearby hydrant. Finney walked over to the engine and ran his hand along the underside of the wheel well on the driver's side before going inside the building.

Once inside, he was directed up the frozen escalators to the command post on four where Chief Smith had been temporarily left in charge.

"John?" Diana came toward him in full bunkers, her coat unb.u.t.toned, flashes of a Hawaii Ironman triathlon T-s.h.i.+rt underneath. "John? I should have believed you. I'm sorry."

"You would have been crazy to believe me."

"What are you going to do?"

"Try to get them to listen."

"They have to listen now."

"Don't bet on it."

Several homeless people who'd been asked to leave were protesting their ouster. On the other side of the room firefighters still awaiting a.s.signments lugged equipment inside from Fifth Avenue, building a stockpile of compressed air cylinders, hoses, spare nozzles, chain saws, pike poles, forcible entry equipment, gas-powered fans.

Chief Smith was talking on a cell phone when Finney arrived. "Chief, whatever you think you know about a high-rise fire, put it out of your mind."

"I'll call you back," Smith said into the telephone. "You know something I don't, John?"

"I know if you fight this according to Hoyle, you're going to lose people."

Chief Smith grew more alert; he'd already lost two firefighters that year and didn't need to lose more. "Did you have anything to do with this?"

"Of course not. But I know this place is b.o.o.by trapped. Whatever you try, it's going to backfire. Don't go by the numbers, and don't count on any of the building's systems kicking in. I wouldn't count on water from that engine outside either."

"What engine? What are you talking about?"

"The engine pumping into the standpipe is a phony. All it's doing is tying up the standpipe connection."

"What do you mean a phony?"

"It's not the real Engine Ten. It's a fake built just for tonight."

Staring resolutely at Finney, Chief Smith picked his white helmet up off the counter and held it under one arm. "Look around. n.o.body has to tamper with any systems to make this bad! This is as bad as it gets. We've got what? Thirty firefighters? We need five hundred? Don't tell me to break the rules. And don't try to feed me any more of your harebrained conspiracy theories."

Several people had been clamoring for Smith's ear, and as he turned his attention to a police sergeant at his side, a large volume of ankle-deep water came gus.h.i.+ng out the doorway of the nearest stairwell. Smith turned to Finney and said, "I guess that phony engine outside is pumping phony water, huh?" Several firefighters ran over to contain it, stacking rolled canvas tarps inside the landing to dike the flow. Even so, long fingers of water spread across the floor.

After a couple of minutes, Finney found Chief Reese speaking to Oscar Stillman in a cubbyhole on the other side of the elevators. Finney stopped just short of the corner and listened. "No, you will not call in a task force from Tacoma. Or from Bellevue. You will limit your losses, and you will fight a defensive fire."

"d.a.m.n it, Oscar. I'm the chief, not you. And I am not going to let all those people upstairs die. You think that's what I want as my legacy?"

"Screw your legacy. Get those guys out of the stairwells. Then get as many civilians out as you can. After that, pull back. What we're talking about here is saving firefighters' lives."

"I'm not going to pull twenty firefighters out so I can lose two hundred civilians."

"You want me to spill my guts about Leary Way?" Oscar asked, lowering his voice.

"You do what you have to. Our first directive is to save lives."

When Finney stepped around the corner, he looked at Reese. "G.o.d, I thought you were part of this. One day I saw you coming out of this building behind one of them."

"I come out of this building every day. My wife works here."

"I hope she's not here now."

"She's home."

"And you're being blackmailed."

Reese considered Finney for a moment. "Did you have anything to do with setting this?"

"Don't look at me. Who checked out the building and told you it was invulnerable? Who's telling you to pull out? Look, Charlie. Get somebody from the company that installed these systems and get them here fast."

"I suppose we're fakes, too?" Marion Balitnikoff stepped around the corner behind Finney, followed by Michael Lazenby in full battle gear. "And I suppose that rig we've got out in the street is a fake."

"They're part of it," Finney said. "And yes, that rig outside is a fake."

Reese said, "You're going to have to leave, John. You're in the way."

1932 HOURS.

Everyone's attention was captured by four burly SPD officers wrestling with a firefighter in yellow bunkers. Diana's heart leaped into her throat when she recognized Finney. Working together, they wrestled him to the ground and snapped handcuffs onto his wrists, one officer's knee on his back, another putting his full weight on his neck. They dragged him through the foyer toward the doors on Fifth Avenue, past Reese and Smith, who both ignored the commotion, past the building security guards. It looked as if Finney were being carried away in the jaws of an animal, perhaps a great crocodile.

As they exited the building, Finney turned and looked back over his shoulder, and for just a second he caught her eye.

When she turned around to gauge the reaction of the other Seattle firefighters on the floor, most of the looks were shocked, but the faces of three men bore the definite aura of triumph: Balitnikoff, Lazenby, and Oscar Stillman.

Diana followed Finney and the police officers outside to Fifth Avenue, where one of the officers began speaking into the remote mike on his collar. Several engines were in the street, hose lines connecting one of them to a hydrant across the street, firefighters loading hose on their shoulders at the rear of that rig.

Keeping Finney in the center of their phalanx, the officers headed across the street.

It took a few moments for Diana to take in what happened next.

There was a noise high above. She didn't know what it was until she saw Finney turn and, using his chest and shoulder, bull two of the policemen back toward the doorway she was standing in. They had retreated six or eight steps when a loud impact occurred in the center of the street. Particles of something small and hard stung Diana's face. Water began spraying into the air in several directions, some of it onto her. A second impact in the street struck the roof of the engine and threw more particles at the building and at her. Then all was quiet except for curses and the water gus.h.i.+ng into the street from severed hose lines.

The two police officers who'd been in front had turned and chased Finney, so that all five had missed the explosion by eight or nine feet. A window had fallen into the street. If Finney hadn't turned them around, they might all be dead. The officers were wet from the hoses, and even though they'd missed the center of the impact, two of them were bleeding.

"What the h.e.l.l happened?" asked the officer closest to Diana. "I thought he was trying to escape."

"A window broke out upstairs," Diana said. "He was trying to get you out of harm's way. I think he saved your life."

"That was a window? s.h.i.+t, it sounded like a cannon."

Another section of gla.s.s crashed to the street, this smaller than the first. Pushed by flame and heat and maybe by firefighters attempting to ventilate, falling sheet gla.s.s would probably continue to come down into the street like guillotine blades all night.

Diana knew those large sheets of windowpane wouldn't fall in a straight line. Like maple seeds, they fluttered this way and that, some landing a hundred yards or more from the base of the building. Some would land flat, others on edge. They would cut hose lines, destroy cars, kill people.

When Diana looked up, she saw a dull glow in the sky. "You think that's one floor or two floors burning?" she asked two firefighters who'd taken shelter beside her.

The shorter firefighter, Murphy, said, "Doesn't matter. If it's not two, it will be. They don't have water on it yet, so you know it's going to lap. It's going to gut the whole building. I wish I could remember what temperature steel loses its integrity at."

"Two thousand degrees," Diana said.

"It won't be the heat," said the second firefighter. "The smoke'll kill those people upstairs long before the fire reaches them."

"They better start evacuating this whole downtown core area," said Murphy. "I think this is coming down."

"Where is he?" asked the tallest policeman, approaching the firefighters. "Have you seen our prisoner?"

There was nothing in the street now but three engines, severed hose lines, and spurts of water taller than a man.

Diana watched as the officers spread out on the sidewalk trying to locate their prisoner. One by one, the fire department drivers ran to their rigs and moved them out of range. Somebody yelled to the drivers that base was being set up two blocks away on Sixth Avenue between Cherry and Columbia. While the police officers warned her to stay out of the street, she crossed Fifth Avenue on foot.

She found him two blocks away staring at her from the shelter of a darkened doorway, his hands still cuffed behind his back. Their eyes met. He seemed surprisingly calm, as if waiting for a bus. Or for her. "Just a minute," she said, and walked to Ladder 9, opening compartment after compartment until she found their bolt cutters, then, sans cuffs, they walked back down the hill together. The police were gone. More hose lines were being laid to standpipe and sprinkler connections outside the tower, while other firefighters stood guard for falling objects; pumpers were set up to pump in tandem in order to build more pressure. They were going to have to raise the water an appreciable distance. No sooner had firefighters laid a line to a nearby sprinkler connection than a large wedge of gla.s.s fell and severed it, water gus.h.i.+ng into the street like blood from an artery. Firefighters began raiding a construction site half a block away, carting plywood sheets to protect their hose lines. A group of civilians from a restaurant down the street helped.

Finney said, "They're pumping all that water onto an open floor somewhere. They're going to have to lay hose up the stairs as high as the fire."

"The fire's on eighteen," Diana said.

"You mean the first fire's on eighteen."

They could hear trucks and engines as, two blocks away, the base area began filling with new arrivals. Most of the newcomers had sped from earlier emergencies with empty water tanks, half-empty air bottles, and dirty or missing equipment. Most of the firefighters Finney and Diana saw coming down the street were already exhausted.

Carrying a ladder at waist height, a tarp laid out on the rungs, equipment stacked on the tarp, a quartet of firefighters trudged down the sidewalk. Their load was so heavy they could barely walk. Although Diana warned the officer that, in order to avoid falling gla.s.s, the ongoing procedure now was to enter the Columbia Tower via the tunnel in the building across the street, he ignored her and made a beeline across the carpet of broken gla.s.s on Fifth Avenue. When one of them dropped a portable radio unnoticed, Finney pocketed it.

Listening to the division reports on the radio, they heard the officer who was running the operation upstairs say, "Columbia Command from Division Sixteen. We have a report from our standpipe team. They're on fifty-one. They're okay for now, but they're trapped and out of air. They've encountered a lot of heat but no fire. No sign of any more survivors. None of the standpipe outlets they checked were open. The water's coming from above them. I'm not going to send anybody else up. Repeat. It's too dangerous to send anybody else up. The stairs are getting hotter every minute."

Finney looked up at the fog.

"What are you going to do?" Diana asked.

"What makes you think I'm going to do anything?"