by Sean Flynn
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
BARELY 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 th
e 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.
Mike 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.
Mike couldn't continue on the radio. There were too many other men for whom he was responsible, scattered throughout the building, some holding the fire at bay, others making last-ditch efforts to explore the upper floors. Randy Chavoor was on the third floor with two other men, wanting to know where the Millbury guys were with the thermal imager. A man on the second floor reported that the flames had broken through the fire wall, had clawed across the second floor toward the B stairs. A rescue team called in, told Mike the stairs were impenetrable past the fourth floor. “Okay,” Mike told them, “don't risk it. Back down.”
Mike realized the building was claiming territory and more men, taking them two by two. If the fifth floor was gone, Tom Spencer and Tim Jackson were likely dead. Brosnihan knew it as well. Mike heard him on the radio again, a shriek this time, a choking, sobbing scream. “Ladder 2 to Ladder 2! Lieutenant Spencer!”
Mike counted ten seconds. Silence. He pushed his own button. “Interior to Ladder 2,” he said. “Lieutenant Spencer, answer. Please.”
He waited eight seconds, then tried Jay Lyons. “Interior to Engine 300. Interior to Engine 300.”
The fire roared in his ears, the only sound he heard.
Minutes contracted into seconds, Mike's sense of time blurred by the chaos around him and the adrenaline surging through his veins. He was struck by the fact that he wasn't afraid. He was controlled, determined, processing information like a machine. But he was in uncharted territory, trying to make decisions in a situation he'd never experienced, never expected to face. The warehouse was going to be destroyed, that much was certain. On any other night, he would have withdrawn an hour earlier, let the flames feast on rotting timbers and fetid rubbish, devour the whole thing. Yet on no other night, not once in his twenty-seven years as a Worcester fireman, had six men gone missing. And never had any man been abandoned. We always win, he told himself. The building might burn to ash, but everyone goes home. We win.
There would be a point at which the danger of continuing the search would outweigh the promise of finding anyone, dead or alive. But when? Firemen had survived worse fires, dragged people out of more ferocious blazes, gone into infernos when the stakes weren't nearly as high. Paul Brotherton had once risked his life to save someone's pet parrot. A parrot! Mike knew none of his men would admit defeat, surrender and walk away. He couldn't, either, not if there was the faintest ray of hope.
Worcester Cold Storage was deteriorating more rapidly now. Engine 9 called in, announced the exterior walls appeared to be cracking, that the side closest to the highway looked like it might collapse. Mike absorbed all of the facts coming over the radio and from the men returning from above. But he had to see for himself, gauge with his own eyes and ears and skin how treacherous the situation had become. He bolted into the stairwell, felt for the railing, climbed the stairs. By the second floor, the heat was withering, wrapping around him, pressing on him like a vise. He kept moving. He cleared one riser to the third floor, turned, made it to the next step.
Then something blew up. He heard it first, felt it an instant later. The sound was the same as when a match touches the pilot light of a stove, only loud as thunder, a spasm of air expanding so fast and hard against the warehouse walls that the whole building shuddered. The railing vibrated beneath his gloved hand. He gripped it tighter, waiting for the explosion to subside.
Robert A.'s voice barked over his radio. “Can you confirm that someone just said part of this building collapsed?”
He was close, just above Mike in the stairwell. “Robert A.,” he yelled. “I don't think so. But I think a large area just lit off.” A flashover maybe, somewhere on the upper floors, all those molecules of melting petroleum finally reaching their ignition temperature, turning to fire.
Mike barreled down the stairs. None of the men at the bottom had balked, fled outside. They eyed him like expectant fathers, waiting to be given the order—the permission—to ascend again into the inferno. Mike paused, skimmed their faces. “Wait,” he said. “Nobody goes up.”
He ran across the floor again, toward the back door, out onto the loading dock. The night sky glowed above him, illuminated by flames shooting thirty feet into the air. He told men to start pulling hoses down the stairs, get them out of the building. In the background, he could hear Mike Coakley warning of another breach in the walls, a six-foot crack above Ladder 4. Chief Budd ordered the truck moved away. Randy Chavoor came on the radio. The men from Millbury had made it to the third floor, but the thermal imager malfunctioned, the extreme heat blanking out the screen, showing only a field of white-hot smoke.
“Command to Chief McNamee.” It was Dennis Budd. “Mike, how you doing in there?”
“We're backing out the back,” Mike said. “We got a report tha
t the walls were weakening in the front. We are trying to back the lines out so we can use them. It's through the roof in the back, and it's going like hell right up the side. I think we're almost ready to go to an exterior attack.”
Then he ran back to the B stairs, into the doorway, onto the first step, then back down to the pavement. The lieutenant from Engine 2, Jimmy Pijus, emerged at the bottom of the stairs, exhausted. “We couldn't make the third, Chief,” he told Mike. “It's just too hot. We can't get past it.”
Mike nodded. He trusted Jimmy, knew he'd push through any fire that didn't physically hold him back. He looked at the men arrayed in front of him. The faces were all familiar. The beads of sweat cutting streaks through the soot, the eyes stung red from the smoke, the jaws firmly clenched—he'd seen them all before. They'd been at 728 Main Street, when Walter Rydzewski snapped at him, ordered him to leave that mangled woman on the pavement, save the people who could still be saved. They'd been in that warehouse on Jacques Street, sitting in the hallway, gasping, amazed their lieutenant had gotten out alive. They'd been inside flaming triple-deckers and outside crumpled Buicks and next to wheezing old men clutching their ailing hearts. They'd sat with him in the mornings, cleanshaven and showered, drinking coffee, and in the evenings, carving roast beef and wiping gravy from their mustaches. They had wives and girlfriends and children and parents. They were his men, and he was responsible for all of them.
“No more,” he said.
For one stunned moment, no one said a word. The white noise of the fire droned above, punctuated by snaps and pops and hisses. Then, as if a trigger had been pulled, the men surged forward in unison, stormed the stairwell. “They're still in there,” someone yelled. “Goddamnit, they're still fucking in there!” The other men joined in, all of them yelling, pressing forward.
Mike spread his arms and legs, pressed his palms and his boots against the jambs of the door, used his body as an X to block the path. “Listen to me!” he bellowed. “You listen to me!”
