Clear Blue Sky

by F. P. Lione

  The smoke enveloped us, and we were getting hit with bigger things now. I don’t know if the wind was on our side or if it was God helping us, but as soon as I was into it, it was almost like the smoke retracted back and I was out of it.

  While the cloud itself seemed to have pulled back, the whole area was consumed with white dust from the collapse. It was getting dark now, almost impossible to see, and with each breath I took, my mouth and nose filled with grit and powder.

  We ran as far as the Chambers Street footbridge to catch our breath. I saw that, like me, Joe was trying to tuck his chin into his shirt. We were all covering our faces so we weren’t breathing in the dust. I can’t really write down a lot of what everyone was saying—I’d be bleeping out every other word—but they kept saying the same things over and over as we stood there in shock, sweating and breathing heavily.

  “All those people just died,” Walsh said.

  “They did this on purpose,” Rooney kept saying. “They did this on purpose.”

  “It came down,” I said. “I can’t believe it came down.” All those people, they must have been so terrified.

  For the first time in my life my knees actually got weak. I felt nauseous and shaky knowing that all those cops and firemen had that building come down on top of them, all those people.

  “They’re gone,” Hanrahan said. “They’re all gone. All those people are dead.”

  Hanrahan was right. All those people were dead. There was no way anyone could have survived a hundred-story building coming down on top of them. There was no way.

  More people were reaching us now, holding their chests and bending over from running. A gray-haired man sat down on the curb, looking to be having trouble breathing. He was covered in dust; I guess he didn’t outrun the cloud. He pulled a shoe out of his shirt, stared at it, and then looked down at his own feet. He had shoes on. I guess it got stuck in there with the debris. He started to take deep, gulping breaths, and I was afraid he was gonna have a heart attack.

  He looked up at Joe and me and put out his hand with the shoe in it. “It’s not my shoe,” he said, looking confused.

  “Come on, buddy,” I said, taking the shoe from him as Joe and I grabbed either side of him. I dropped the shoe behind my back into the street as we brought him over to an FD ambulance that was parked in the middle of West Street.

  “He’s having trouble breathing,” I told the EMTs.

  They must have been there awhile. They were washing out eyes, cleaning out gashes, giving oxygen, and dressing burns. I thought they seemed almost oblivious to the fact that the South Tower had just disintegrated, but then I saw that the EMT working on the guy with the shoe was crying, making tracks down the dust on his face with his tears.

  I looked around at the dusty crowd around me and realized I didn’t know where everyone else was. Rooney, Walsh, Joe, Hanrahan, and I were together, but somehow we got separated from Bishop and his guys.

  “Where’d they go?” I asked Hanrahan.

  “I don’t know. But we’re together and we’re going back,” Hanrahan said. “We need to see what we can do to help.”

  “Boss, if we go back, the North Tower’ll be closer, and we barely got away from this one,” Rooney said.

  “Alright, here’s the plan,” Hanrahan said. “If the North Tower goes, we’ll run north along the building line on the east side of the street. This way, at least we’ll have some protection from the buildings.”

  I thought about it, and it made sense. The buildings would give us some cover as long as the top section of the tower didn’t fall off and land on the buildings.

  I tried to hear the transmissions on my radio, and I could hear calls for help and 10-13s that sounded frantic. Someone was screaming, but the battery on my radio was dying. I could hear static and pieces of transmissions but nothing clear to give me a location.

  I pulled my cell phone out and saw that I was down to one bar. I wanted to call Michele just to hear her voice, but I got an “All circuits are busy” recording. I tried it twice more and shut the phone off to save the battery, since I forgot to charge it before I left for work.

  Fiore tried using his cell phone but flipped it shut and said, “It says all the circuits are busy.”

  “That’s what I got,” I said.

  “I need to let Donna know I’m alright,” he said.

  Visibility was almost zero as we started to walk back toward the command post. The air was thick, clogging my nose and my eyes. With each breath, I could feel my mouth and nose fill with grit from the chalky powder. We were disoriented as we walked; at one point we walked into scaffolding that was in front of a building because we didn’t see it until we were right on it. We went into the building to try to use the phone. The air in the lobby of the building wasn’t much better than outside. People were crowded in, and I could hear moans and crying. I tried to use the phone at the security desk but got the “All circuits are busy” message again.

  People were crowding into the building now, crushing into each other, and I knew we had to get out of that building.

  “Everyone remain calm,” Hanrahan ordered the crowd. “Don’t push and don’t crowd each other. You’re far enough away that you can safely walk uptown.”

  “Let’s get everyone moving uptown,” Hanrahan told the four of us.

  We made our way to the doorway and started taking them outside and directing them uptown. They were too stunned to argue with us and moved uptown like blind cattle, holding on to the buildings as they walked.

  It took maybe five or ten minutes to clear the lobby. We walked back out to West Street and almost felt our way down toward Vesey with our arms stretched out in front of us. The closer we got to the corner of Vesey Street, the thicker the dust became. I felt like I was walking in half a foot of dust, conscious of the powder being kicked up with each step I took. I could feel the dust caking around my neck and getting underneath my vest as it went down my back as I walked. My feet were crunching over fragments of whatever there was under there.

  People were crawling out from under parked cars, almost appearing out of nowhere, covered in so much dust you couldn’t tell they were people.

  The dust was so bad I untucked my shirt and used the corner of it to wipe my eyes. My eyelids felt like they were filled with sand, and I felt them scratching my eyes every time I blinked.

  “Can you believe this?” Rooney asked when we got to Vesey.

  From the limited visibility we had we could see that cars were on fire, moved, and smashed in at odd angles. The fire truck that Rooney had talked about running under was smashed beyond recognition. If we had jumped under it, we’d all be dead right now.

  When we got to within about fifty feet of the command post, a lieutenant was waving us over as the brass started to straggle back to the post. He was a task force lieutenant, mustering up his guys in hats and bats. The task force is who we use for crowd control. They respond at a moment’s notice in vans to help beef up our numbers in crowds. The lieutenant was pumping them up, saying, “We gotta get in there, and we gotta get everyone out of that building before it comes down.”

  “Come on!” He waved us to move as we got closer. “You’re coming with us, we’re gonna get everyone out of that building before it collapses.”

  Now, here’s the thing. Task force is mostly for crowd control, like in riots, protests, parades, anything where you have a ton of people you don’t want getting out of hand, and when they’re not looking all tough, they’re usually out writing summonses. The patrol cop answers jobs for disputes, drugs, robberies, and street crime. We’re not rescue workers. The only time we rescue people is when they’re stuck in elevators, and even then we don’t have the equipment for it and wind up calling ESU half the time anyway. When we have a rescue situation, we call ESU.

  We had no idea what the conditions were inside that building, and it was wrong for him to send us in there without oxygen, protective gear, and radios. We had no communication equipment; we
didn’t even have helmets.

  The cops from task force weren’t standing in their usual helmets-on, bats-held-up, don’t-mess-with-us stance. Their bats were down by their ankles, and they didn’t have that confident look on their faces; like us, they didn’t want to go in there.

  Hanrahan surprised me by saying, “With all due respect, Lou, our inspector gave us a command to stay on this post and make sure nobody gets into that area.”

  Technically, the lou is a higher rank and we’d have to follow his command, but the truth is, we’re not rescue workers and he was putting us in harm’s way.

  “Sergeant, we are going into that building,” the lou said, dead serious. “And we are getting as many people out as we can before it comes down.”

  A chief who was walking up behind him caught what he said and started yelling, “Are you crazy? I’ll take your bars from you right now!” The chief got in the lou’s face. “I’ll suspend you right now. Nobody is going in that building. It’s unsafe, and I’m not losing any more men. If you listen to your radio, you’ll hear we’re calling everyone out of the North Tower.”

  I couldn’t help but think that if we were out here and we couldn’t hear them ordering everyone out of the building, how were they gonna hear it in there?

  Both sides of West Street were now jammed with fire trucks, police cars, and ambulances. I spotted a “pumpkin” on the helmet of a young firefighter rushing past us. They call it a pumpkin because probees wear an orange patch on the front of their helmets instead of the black and white or red and white insignia that has the engine or ladder company they’re assigned to. I should have realized there’d be probees here. They love something like this when they’re new. Nick Romano was here. I don’t know how I knew, I just did. There may be almost forty thousand cops in New York City, but there were only about eight thousand firefighters. I remembered when the Oklahoma City bombings took place, our FD went all the way there to help out. If something this catastrophic happened in their own city, they’d be here even more so.

  I prayed again, this time for Nick, asking God to get him out alive. I didn’t want his daughter to have to grow up like he did, to have her father die a hero for reasons she could never understand. And I didn’t want Denise to have to lose him, to finally find something good only to have it snatched away from her.

  There were firefighters everywhere, and I watched, fascinated, as they ran from their fire apparatus toward the North Tower. They never slowed down, they just ran right into that building. They knew the other tower had fallen, but they ran anyway, like it didn’t even matter to them that the building was unsafe, they were going in. We could hear the jangling of the fire equipment as they ran past us kicking up dust as they went.

  The radios were frenzied now, and I could hear this one cop screaming for help from inside the tower. Someone was trying to get his location, but they didn’t know where he was.

  There were still a lot of civilians in the area, and we went back to moving them uptown.

  “Keep moving north,” we told them. “Everybody head uptown.”

  I realized that this would be all over the news by now. I thought about Michele, Denise, and Grandma. They would be worried about me, and I needed to call them. I turned my cell phone back on and tried to call Michele but got the “All circuits are busy” recording again.

  I heard the sound of the trains again and everyone started running for their lives again. I looked up and saw that the North Tower had started to collapse. The ground shook, and the world went insane as the North Tower crumbled to the ground. The smoke curled around the buildings and snaked through the streets, filling the crevices of the city blocks as it chased us.

  We ran toward the river this time, completely forgetting our plan. We passed a bunch of firemen who had kicked open the door of a city bus and piled into it on top of each other. We almost jumped in the bus with them, but Hanrahan yelled, “This way.” We were running as fast as we could, and just before we reached the water, we jumped over a six-foot ledge and backed up against the cement wall as the wave passed over us.

  I could feel the dirt and debris as it washed over me. I covered my face with my shirt and arms. We were closer to the building this time and got caught in more of the fallout, and my shirt was already full of dust, so it was pretty much useless. I could feel the dirt in my hair and on my skin and seeping through my clothes.

  I looked down at my radio and realized it was silent now, and so was everyone else’s. Whoever had been calling for help never made it out of the building.

  I don’t know how long it was until we moved, probably only a couple of minutes. I had no idea how many people were dead, but I knew the casualties were massive.

  It was like being in a bad dream that you can’t wake up from. Visibility was worse than when the first tower fell. We may as well have been blind as we walked back to West Street. Even through the smoke I could see that there was nothing left of the towers but massive piles of twisted steel sticking out in every direction. I didn’t see any movement coming out of the piles, no signs of life.

  One of the pedestrian bridges that crosses West Street had collapsed to the street and was lying twisted on its side.

  The buildings that were still standing in the Trade Center were all on fire, it looked like every floor was on fire. Even the Customs House was burning.

  West Street was filled with piles of steel and impossible to get through in places. The buildings on the west side of the street, including the World Financial Center, had sustained a large amount of structural damage. Huge I beams had fallen and crashed through the side of one of the buildings and were hanging dangerously from about thirty floors up.

  Fire trucks, RMPs, ambulances, and other vehicles were either destroyed by the falling steel or engulfed in flames.

  The cars in the outdoor parking garage across from the World Financial Center were completely destroyed, with a lot of them still on fire.

  I’d never seen anything like this in all my years as a cop, and nothing could have ever prepared me for this. The whole area looked like those pictures you’d see on the news of Beirut and Israel, places where these psychos usually have their fun.

  As we crossed the street and headed back toward the collapse, we heard a sickening sound that got louder as we got closer.

  “What is that?” Walsh asked.

  We all stopped and listened.

  “It’s the alarms,” I said, looking at Joe and watching his face as he realized what it was.

  “Oh, Jesus, help us,” Joe said, his voice cracking.

  “Oh no,” Hanrahan said, choking up.

  “What is it?” Walsh asked. “What alarms?”

  “It’s the pass alarms,” I said. FD wears them so they can locate someone if they’re not moving.

  I listened as the sound of beeping alarms swept over the whole area like a field full of chirping birds that were really dead firemen.

  “We gotta get over there,” Joe said, and all of us started toward the area of the towers.

  “We gotta get a land line and call the house,” Hanrahan said. “Then we’ll go over. I want us to stay together.”

  I was ankle deep in powder and building debris that had fallen from the towers. We held on to the buildings as we made our way north up West Street, bumping into each other as we fumbled our way along. The further we got from the site, the better the visibility was. We stopped in the first building we came to once we could see, a school on the corner of Murray Street, a couple of blocks up from the towers, and got a land line.

  I caught the one side of Hanrahan’s conversation as he called the precinct.

  “We were? . . . Yeah, he was a moron standing there filming. I didn’t realize it was live. We got separated from Bishop and his guys after the South Tower fell. . . .You did? Oh, thank God. What about Noreen, we sent her over to Beekman. . . . She did? Okay, good. Yeah, get him for me. Hey, boss. . . . Yeah, thank God. Listen, we’re gonna head back there and see if we can h
elp looking for survivors. . . .What? Are you serious?” I didn’t like the look on Hanrahan’s face. “Okay, boss. Will do. Thanks, boss.” He hung up and turned to us.

  “That guy that was filming showed us live,” Hanrahan said. “Coughlin said they saw us just as the building fell, and I guess it looked like the building caught us when the guy dropped the camera and everything went black.” He looked down for a second and said, “They hijacked another plane, it crashed somewhere in Pennsylvania.”

  This was too much. I wondered how many planes were out there and who they’d be hitting next.

  “How many planes did they hijack?” Rooney roared. “They put two in the towers, one at the Pentagon, and now one crashed in Pennsylvania? How are they getting all these planes?”

  Good question.

  Fiore used the phone next, and I could hear Donna screaming and Joe trying to calm her down.

  “It’s alright. I’m alright. I didn’t lie to you, we saw the plane hit on our way back to the precinct. I’ve been trying to call you. Donna. Donna.” He looked at me and shook his head. “Donna, you’re gonna scare the kids, calm down.”

  She screamed loud enough for us to hear her say, “Don’t you tell me to calm down, Joseph, your face was the last thing I saw on television before that building fell!”

  “Don, I can’t do this with you now. What? Is she there? Okay, I’ll tell him. I have to get back down there. No, I’m fine,” he said, trying to calm her down and get off the phone at the same time.

  “Wait,” I said. “Is Michele there?”

  He shook his no. “I gotta go, babe. If I can get to another phone I’ll call you. I love you too, more and more every day.” Joe always tells her that.

  “Wait,” I said. “Let me talk to Donna.”

  “We gotta get back down there,” Hanrahan said.

  “Boss, give me a second, I want to make sure Michele knows I’m okay,” I said taking the phone from Joe.

  “Donna, it’s Tony,” I said. “Did you talk to Michele?”

  “Yeah, she said to tell you to get home now.”