Clear Blue Sky

by F. P. Lione

I almost smiled. “Where is she?”

  “She was still at school and called me when she heard the towers were hit. She said when she didn’t hear from you she got worried. I told her I saw you on TV, and she lost it.”

  “I gotta get in touch with my family,” I said. “They probably all saw it.”

  “Give me someone’s number, and I’ll keep trying,” Donna said, her voice shaking.

  I gave her Denise’s and Grandma’s numbers. “Get a message to Michele,” I said. “Tell her I’m okay and I love her and I’ll keep trying her cell.”

  “I will. Tony, be careful and make sure Joe comes home safe,” she said, starting to cry.

  “He’ll be fine,” I said.

  As we walked back down, I started to feel disoriented. West Street was unrecognizable, and if it wasn’t for the water, I wouldn’t be able to figure out where the towers used to be.

  Cops and firemen were pouring back into the area, and Bishop and Noreen were back at West and Vesey, with Bert, Ernie, and Big Bird with them. Noreen looked shell-shocked. She said the first building fell when she got out of the van up on Chambers Street. She got stuck in the smoke and was holding on to buildings, trying to make her way out of the area. She said she had to go step-by-step along fences and buildings, and when she could finally see a little, she realized she was back on Vesey, and then the second building went down.

  “I went into a building, and the next thing I know, the smoke is so thick in there, everyone started to panic, trying to get back outside. We could hear people were screaming as they ran past the building. It was so dark it looked like nighttime outside,” she said. “I had to feel around for the door handle to get out of the building. It was so much worse outside I didn’t know what to do.” She put her hand over her mouth. “I tripped over a body,” she said, choking up. “And when I tried to reach down and help them, I realized they were dead. The crowd almost trampled me, and I had to leave them there. I don’t even know where I was, or I’d go back and get them.”

  “Nor,” Hanrahan started to say, but we heard fighter jets overhead. I wondered if they were ours or if this nightmare was just beginning.

  People started to run in every direction again. They ran about ten feet before someone yelled, “Why are you running? They’re our jets.” Everyone slowed down. When no bombs dropped from the planes and they didn’t kamikaze into a building, I actually felt safer, knowing our boys were in the air, watching over us.

  I looked around at the devastation and the piles of steel girders and twisted metal. There was no Sheetrock, no desks, no computers or fax machines lying on the ground. If all these tons of concrete and steel couldn’t survive the collapse, what chance would a human have?

  “Come on, let’s get in there,” Hanrahan said, and I realized that the cops, firefighters, and EMS workers had already started spreading out, picking through the debris. The pass alarms the firemen wore were still going off, but not as many as before, and I realized that once the batteries went dead on the alarms we’d have no way to know where they were.

  “Pete, listen,” Bishop said to Hanrahan. “We’re gonna stay on post.”

  “Alright, Charlie, we’re gonna go in and see if we can find anyone.”

  “Listen up,” Hanrahan told us. “Stick together and be careful everywhere you step. If you’re not sure it’s safe, test it first. I don’t want any of ya’s falling in.”

  The scene was surreal, and as we picked through the rubble, I looked around. We looked so insignificant crawling around in the massive piles. I heard the alarms, but they were buried beneath the rubble where we couldn’t get them. We were quiet as we took tentative steps, checking for solid footing before we put our weight down. It was difficult walking, and the pieces of steel were jagged in places. There were a lot of ways to get hurt here.

  “There’s nothing left here,” I said to Joe. “How are we gonna find anyone in this?”

  We were making slow progress, concentrating on not falling, when Walsh called out, “Can anybody hear me?” breaking the silence. I jumped a little, not expecting it. No one answered him, but it was a good place to start.

  “Don’t go in there,” Hanrahan barked at Rooney, who was trying to shimmy into a hole in the debris. “We don’t know how deep this stuff is, Mike. We don’t know how deep it is, and we don’t know how secure it is.”

  “Boss, then what’s the sense of being here if we’re not gonna look for anybody?” Rooney said, frustrated.

  “Mike, we don’t have any lifelines, and I don’t want anybody falling into any crevices. If we hear anybody, we’ll take it from there. There’s no reason to take chances unless we got somebody alive in there.”

  I felt so frustrated, we needed to get them out now. Any real search would be useless without heavy equipment to move the debris. The beams and pieces of building were just too heavy to move by hand, and they’d have to be moved to do any real search.

  We must have been there about an hour, and I realized we’d only gone maybe fifty feet. As we got further into the debris we saw pieces of humans. I stared at a bloody, torn-off torso. It was a man, but that’s all there was to him. I saw shoulders and the back of a man’s head with short, dark hair covered in gray soot. We caught up with a couple of guys from FD who were already picking up pieces of people and putting them in body bags. I was thinking this wasn’t what I was here for. Wasn’t there someone alive in all of this?

  “What are you doing with the body bags?” Hanrahan asked a fire captain.

  “We got an impromptu morgue set up by the Winter Garden,” he said. “They’re stacking the bodies and the parts over there.

  We heard someone yell, “Hats off,” and we stopped, taken aback for a second. Then we took our hats off and knelt down as a couple of firemen passed with a body. “Hats off” meant the body was a member of service, either PD or FD.

  We came up on an assembly line. FD had found a body in a crevice of the rubble. It was a whole body, and there were what looked like three more pinned beneath her. She looked like a doll, lifeless but surprisingly intact. Then I realized the bodies beneath her were just body parts.

  I heard someone say, “I got something here,” and we scrambled, tripping and falling as we converged to the spot. Body parts were being put in body bags for the last guy on the line to take over to the morgue. We stopped to help them, moving what we could by hand, but it seemed futile.

  I kept praying for someone to be found alive, and I wondered how sick and evil someone had to be to do this to innocent people. These people weren’t doing anything, they just went to work and were doing their jobs.

  It’s different for us cops and firemen. It’s part of our job. We could get shot or killed in a fire, and we know that when we show up to work. But these were office workers, stockbrokers, janitors, and maintenance people. They showed up downtown on a beautiful Tuesday morning and got incinerated because some psycho thought they’d score some points with Allah if they went down in a fireball, taking us with them. I knew it was them, and I don’t care how politically incorrect it is to say it.

  A retired fire chief who now worked for OEM, or the Office of Emergency Management, who introduced himself as Frank, was working through the debris with us. He must have been right here when the building went down, because he was covered head to toe in soot, like someone dumped bags of flour on his head.

  “I was a firefighter for thirty years,” he said, tearing up. “And I never dreamed I’d see anything like this.” He put his hands out as he looked around. “I feel so helpless.”

  “I know,” I said. “I don’t even know where to start.”

  We were looking around at the size of the massive steel beams.

  “We need equipment in here, heavy machinery. Dogs.” He looked over at 7 World Trade Center and said dully, “My office is on fire.”

  “That’s right, you’re in the Trade Center now,” Joe said. “You guys used to be over on Church Street.”

  “Yeah, we moved h
ere in 1999.”

  “You’re in the bunker?” Joe asked.

  “We were,” he said.

  Not doing much good on fire, I thought. The EOC, or the Emergency Operations Center, was supposed to be the place where the city government operated during a time of crisis. They called it the bunker because that’s what it was built to be.

  “Didn’t I read somewhere that in an emergency that’s where the mayor’s supposed to go?”

  “It was too dangerous, they moved him up to Barcley Street.”

  “I thought the bunker was supposed to withstand anything,” I said, watching it burn.

  He wiped the dust from the corners of his eyes and rubbed his hands on his dusty pants. “It was built to withstand two-hundred-mile-an-hour winds in the event of a hurricane.” He started rattling off the perks. “The exterior walls have steel framing. They’re bombproof and bulletproof. They have three generators independent from the building’s backup generators, a six-thousand-gallon fuel tank, an eleven-thousand-gallon potable water supply, and a backup system for heating and air conditioning.” He shrugged. “It even has a pressroom.”

  It’s got more than that. I remember reading about it, one of those “Big Brother is watching” articles that the liberals write when they’re up in arms about privacy. It said that the Coast Guard allowed the EOC to monitor all of the city’s major waterways by video and they can rotate and zoom in and out. They can also feed off the metro traffic cameras to look at the major roadways in all five boroughs. They have direct weather feeds, Doppler radar, and satellite that the National Weather Service feeds every hour.

  I guess they never thought to watch the airports.

  We heard “Hats off” again and knelt again as they brought the body past. It was a fireman. I could see the sleeve of his turnout coat as his arm hung lifelessly. I prayed for him and his family and again for Nick and to find someone alive here.

  “The irony,” Frank continued a couple of minutes later, “is that today the office was pretty quiet because we were doing a drill for weapons of mass destruction up at Pier 94,” he said, talking about the passenger ship terminal. “I was supposed to be there at ten o’clock.” He shook his head. “In the exercise, we were simulating the distribution of medication to about a thousand people who were exposed to a biological agent.”

  “Who does the drill?” I asked as I sifted. I knew the city did drills like that and other drills for catastrophes. I would have never thought someone would do something like this with the planes, and it was hard to comprehend that someone could be that evil.

  “Most of the staff does something in the exercise, and we were using fire and police cadets from the police and fire academies.”

  “I didn’t realize the city was doing stuff like that,” Joe said. “Was something up?”

  I knew from working New Year’s Eve in Times Square that the city got threats, and we were concerned about this in crowds of almost a million people. But never something like this.

  “Nothing specific,” Frank said. “It’s not like they haven’t tried to hit these buildings before. Plus, recently, with the embassy bombings, we have to be ready for stuff like this.” He paused. “But I never thought I’d see something like this.”

  We looked up as the Air Force jets crisscrossed over Manhattan. The sound was amplified now, and we could feel the force of the jets in our bodies as they roared overhead.

  Once they were gone there was an eerie, menacing silence. I’m not saying there wasn’t noise. People were yelling, and there was some machinery noise. But this was a different kind of silence. Manhattan is never quiet. I realized that all the ambient sounds of the city were gone. There were none of the usual sounds: no cars or buses, no horns, no sirens, and no people. It seemed as though the aura of the city was gone and all that was left were these mountains of rubble.

  We heard the “Hats off” call again. It was a cop this time, and Joe and I knelt in the dust for our fallen brother.

  There were more cops and firemen here now, sifting through the wreckage.

  “They’re saying we have an estimated two hundred firefighters missing,” Frank said.

  “And the 1st Precinct lost their whole day squad.”

  “Where did you hear that?” I asked. A day squad would be at least twenty-five to thirty cops.

  “Someone from the mayor’s detail,” he said.

  That didn’t mean it was necessarily true, but the mayor’s office would probably have more information than most.

  As more people joined in the search, the “Hats off” calls became more and more frequent.

  I saw someone I went to the Academy with, and we both started crying. I couldn’t even remember his first name, but I was so happy to see he was okay.

  “Thank God you’re alive, buddy,” I said. I didn’t shake his hand. It was unspoken—I grabbed him and held on.

  “This is unbelievable,” he said, crying. “I can’t believe this is happening.”

  “Tony,” Joe interrupted me and nodded toward a fireman in a helmet and turnout coat. He was scanning the area with a telephoto lens, taking pictures of the devastation in and around the site.

  “Boss.” I motioned to Hanrahan.

  Rooney and Walsh caught it and were half stomping, half stumbling over to the guy.

  “Get Rooney,” Hanrahan said.

  Joe and I stumbled through the debris to keep up with them before either of the two muscleheads lost it and killed the guy.

  “Hey!” Rooney yelled. “What are you doing?”

  I saw the guy scramble for the lie as he hid his camera. “I’m going down here,” he said as he pointed. “I’m looking for my company.”

  “What house you in?” I asked, almost friendly, as I reached him.

  I pulled open the turnout coat and saw his clothes and press ID. Joe caught Rooney as he lunged.

  “Give me the camera,” I said, my voice shaking with rage.

  Hanrahan turned to the guy I knew from the Academy. “Go get me someone from FD. See if you can get a chief or a marshal.”

  He looked at the reporter with disgust before he went.

  “Give me the camera,” I said again.

  “I’ll sue you if you break my camera,” he said. I guess he knew by my face I was about to smash it into a million pieces.

  “I’ll kill you,” Rooney roared. “You sick piece of garbage, you’re stepping over dead bodies so you can sell your pictures.”

  It took Walsh and Joe to pull Rooney off. He was still screaming, “You animal, I’m gonna find you! Get his name, Tony”—he pulled away from them, and the photographer stepped back, scared now—“because I’m coming back to kill him.”

  “What’d you do? Did you take that coat off a dead fireman?” I asked.

  “No,” he said, “I got it off one of the trucks.”

  “Either way, you stole it,” I said.

  I grabbed the camera and tried to figure out how to open it. I saw him staring at the camera like he had gold in there, which infuriated me more.

  “Give me the camera,” Hanrahan said. He turned it over a couple of times, opened it up, and ripped the film out, exposing it.

  “Check his pockets,” Hanrahan said.

  I found two rolls already used and a bunch he hadn’t shot yet.

  “You can’t take that!” he said. “You can’t search me.”

  “Buddy, this is not the day to tell me something like that,” I said.

  “Shut up,” Hanrahan yelled at him. “You’re in enough trouble.”

  We held him until we got a chief and then turned him over to the fire marshals.

  FD was all over now, their movements looking strange as they crawled through the maze of twisted metal and steel. I kept looking for the pumpkins on the fire helmets of the rookies, hoping to see Romano. There were so many cops and firefighters there that as I looked around this hell I thought, If everyone is downtown, who’s watching the city? I was thinking that this wasn’t over and whil
e we were all down here stuff was gonna blow up all over the city. Our guard was down, and the city was completely vulnerable to attack now.

  The radios were starting to chatter up again, and I heard, “Sergeant Hanrahan from the South on the air?” coming from Hanrahan’s radio. Mine was dead, and so were Joe’s, Walsh’s, and Rooney’s. Hanrahan must have grabbed a new battery before we left the precinct. He was kneeling down, trying to move a piece of metal framing with insulation in it, and I guess he didn’t hear the radio.

  “Boss, they’re calling you on the radio,” I said.

  “Oh,” he said, pulling it out of his back pocket.

  “Sergeant Hanrahan on the air.”

  “10-2 your post.”

  “10-4,” Hanrahan said and sighed. “Time to head back.”

  When we got back to West and Vesey, we were mustered up in small groups.

  Some of us would be establishing a perimeter now and screening everyone who was trying to get into the collapse site. We started allowing store owners in to the area to open their doors, but they weren’t allowed near the collapse site. Others would be searching the buildings, making sure there were no injured and the buildings were evacuated.

  Help was pouring in to West and Vesey now. Water and shovels and buckets were being passed out, along with masks for us to breathe through. They were the paper ones but still better than nothing. Stores and restaurants in the area were opening their doors with food, water, and whatever they had to give out.

  We rinsed the dry, gritty dust from our mouths and poured the water over our eyes.

  Big Bird waved us over to him. “I hear we got estimates that between five and ten thousand civilians and five hundred cops and firefighters were lost in the collapse,” he said quietly, looking around as he said it.

  “How many people did the buildings hold?” Joe asked him.

  “I think fifty thousand,” Big Bird said.

  That meant a lot got out, but the numbers were staggering. I couldn’t even imagine that many people being dead.

  “Listen up,” Hanrahan said. “We’ll be searching the buildings just outside the Trade Center, across from 1 World Financial Center. We’re going in with a team of cops and firefighters. We’re gonna search twenty floors of the building and mark off each floor once we establish there’s no one in there.”