Red Rabbit - Tom Clancy [200]
"Oh, shit!" one of them observed. The senior paramedic on the crew put an oxygen mask on the colorless face and started hitting the button to force pure oxygen into the lungs, and a second man began pounding on the victim's chest to get his heart restarted while, behind them, the enginemen snaked a two-and-a-half-inch hose into the flat and started spraying water.
All in all, it was a textbook exercise. The fire was snuffed out in less than three minutes. Soon thereafter, the smoke had largely cleared, and the firemen took off their protective air masks. But, out in the corridor, Owen Williams showed not a flicker of life. The rule was that nobody was dead until a physician said so, and so they carried the body like a large and heavy limp rag to the white ambulance sitting on the street. The paramedic crew had their own battle drill, and they followed it to the letter, first putting the body on their gurney, then checking his eyes, then his airway—it was clear—and using their ventilator to get more oxygen into him, plus more CPR to get the heart moving. The peripheral burns would have to wait. The first thing to be done was to get the heart beating and lungs breathing, as the driver pulled out onto the darkened streets for Queen Victoria Hospital, just more than a mile away.
But by the time they got there, the paramedics in the back knew that it was just a waste of their highly valuable time. The casualty-receiving area was ready for them. The driver reversed direction and backed in, the rear doors were wrenched open, and the gurney was wheeled out, with a young doctor observing but not touching anything yet.
"Smoke inhalation," the fireman-paramedic said, on coming in the swinging doors. "Severe carbon monoxide intoxication." The extensive but mainly superficial burns could wait for the moment.
"How long?" the ER doc asked at once.
"Don't know. It does not look good, doctor. CO poisoning, eyes fixed and dilated, fingernails red, no response to CPR or oxygen as yet," the paramedic reported.
The medics all tried. You don't just kiss off the life of a man in his early thirties, but an hour later it was clear that Owen Williams would not open his blue eyes ever again, and, on the doctor's command, lifesaving efforts were stopped and a time of death announced, to be typed in on the death certificate. The police were there, also, of course. They mostly chatted with the firemen until the cause of death was established. The blood chemistry was taken—they'd drawn blood immediately to check blood gasses—and after fifteen minutes, the lab reported that the level of carbon monoxide was 39 percent, deep into the lethal range. He'd been dead before the firemen had rolled off their cots. And that was that.
It was the police rather than the firemen who took it from there. A man had died, and it had to be reported up the chain of command.
That chain ended in London in the steel-and-glass building that was New Scotland Yard, with its revolving triangular sign that made tourists think that the name of the London police force was, in fact, Scotland Yard, when actually that had been a street name years before for the old headquarters building. There, a Post-it note on a teletype machine announced that Chief Superintendent Nolan of Special Branch wanted to be informed at once of any death by fire or accident, and the teletype operator lifted a phone and called the appropriate number.
That number was to the Special Branch watch officer, who asked a few questions, then called York for further information. Then it was his job to awaken "Tiny" Nolan just after four in the morning.
"Very well," the Chief Superintendent said, after collecting himself. "Tell them to do nothing whatsoever with the body—nothing at all. Make sure they understand, nothing at all."
"Very well, sir," the sergeant