Vertical Burn - Earl Emerson [134]
65. GETTING DOWN TO BUSINESS
Stillman had just sent another group upstairs, this with two women firefighters in it, their round faces reminding him for some reason of a pair of semi-pro women softball players he’d once met in a bar in Portland. He turned back to the wall just as G. A. Montgomery stepped out of the confusion, G. A.’s face dripping with perspiration, his nose and cheeks red.
“Everything moving along according to plan?” G. A. asked.
Oscar glanced around to see if anybody had noticed them. “Yeah, yeah, yeah. I understand we’ve been getting cell phone calls from upstairs, from Patterson. You got the cash?”
“Jerry started it early. Stupid bastard.”
“I wondered what happened. I got your call that everything was starting, and I just went ahead and did what I was supposed to. I guess the others did their share ’cause the city’s in a tizzy. But what about the money? You got it?”
“You know I do.”
“Where?”
“Don’t get your nose out of joint. It’s close. Right now I need to know how things are going.”
“There’s three firefighters trapped in the mid-fifties. Everybody else is below the lower fire. On sixteen, seventeen, and eighteen.”
“And they’re sending people to get above it?”
“They tried. The stairwell’s too hot. You get up around twenty, it’s hotter than a hooker on payday. It gets worse as you go up. A lot worse.”
“What about elevators?”
“With the exception of one we left for ourselves, they’re all disabled.”
“How many more hours do you estimate this will take?”
“Not long. Our highest fire has been burning over an hour with no water on it. Hell, by now every floor between fifty-four and the roof has to be full of smoke.”
“Nobody’s going to believe this is an accident,” G. A. said. “The papers will be full of speculation. It will go on for years.”
“All the same, it couldn’t have gone better.” Oscar tried to smile, feeling his lips and cheeks stiff with the trying. G. A. always had been a worrier, ever since the night he’d recruited Oscar into this little group. G. A. had received the initial offer from Patterson Cole’s man, Norris Radford. Together they’d approached Jerry Monahan. Monahan had in turn suggested Marion Balitnikoff, and Balitnikoff brought in the Lazenbys. He couldn’t remember how Tony Finney got into it. One or more of them might have backed out, except that Norris Radford had been FedExing Oscar bundles of cash so that they’d been paid nearly $50,000 each for their practice runs, $10,000 a week to prepare for tonight. And that didn’t take into account the cost of the engine they’d had built to ensure they were the first firefighters responding to the Columbia Tower. Good thing, because tonight the real Engine 10 was in Ballard fighting a ship fire.
“Know where everybody is?” G. A. asked.
“I think so.”
“Good. Round them up. I need to see the whole team. Now.”
66. IT’S TOO DAMN HOT
On floor fifteen Finney took stock of their situation. They were one floor below staging. They’d climbed seven stories on the aerial and then scurried up the remaining floors at a pace he knew they couldn’t maintain. Kub, who could move like lightning for a hundred meters on the flat, was having trouble keeping up. Finney wondered whether any of them could make it another sixty stories. His thighs were trembling from the load. Diana looked ashen.
He wanted to stop and strip off some of the nonessential equipment, maybe remove the liners from his bunkers, wear only the light Nomex shell without the vapor barriers that kept in all the body heat, but if they did that and