Vertical Burn - Earl Emerson [138]
“Already done.”
Kub found a portable television in one of the offices and brought it out to the elevator lobby, set it on the floor, and plugged it in with an extension cord he’d bootlegged. He was soon watching television pictures shot in the street a block from the building, and then from the lobby, where Reese was chatting with a reporter. Reese felt confident that the fire teams would extricate everybody from the building. No, he could give no time line.
“Sure is weird to watch this on TV,” Kub said.
By jamming a desk into a nearby doorway and throwing webbing around it, Diana had managed to set up an anchor that was both close to the shaft and stable. She had rigged up the anchor with the webbing, a carabiner and two cords tied onto the main rope with prusiks. They clipped the two loops onto the carabiner and then looped the prusiks onto the rope. The prusiks created enough friction to easily hold the rope and Finney’s weight should he fall, yet when the person controlling the prusiks gripped them, the rope passed through, allowing him to climb.
When Finney stepped into the shaft, Kub was in the doorway monitoring his progress. Diana would be forty feet away on the floor, her gloved hands tending the prusiks, Finney’s rope sliding through as she allowed it. Should anything happen to her, the prusiks would hold him.
Finney was tethered to the end of a six-hundred-foot rope, most of which, after being fed through the prusiks, would remain in the bag near Diana’s boots. He had nineteen floors to climb in his bunkers. As he stepped into the shaft and reached with his left arm for the steel ladder on the wall, he felt a frisson of fear.
He began climbing, reached the next floor and stopped to wrap a short loop of webbing around a ladder rung, clipped a carabiner to that, and slipped the rope through the carabiner.
His pulse was pounding, first in his ears, then his temples. Normally he wasn’t afraid of heights, but he was so shaky from the climb and from the heat he didn’t trust himself. It helped that he could not see either up or down. In fact, with his flashlight bobbing from the clip on his coat, what he saw mostly was wall.
After four stories, he began resting briefly at each floor.
Midway through the trip, his hands began trembling. When he rested at each floor, he looped his elbows through the ladder and worked his fingers to pump blood into them. He was dehydrated. He knew it, and there was nothing he could do about it now. All he could do was climb one floor at a time.
It seemed like it took a week to reach forty. When he got there, he attached a carabiner high over his head and clipped his rope through it. His arms were shakier than ever. As he stepped from the dark ladder to the elevator door ledge, he found the latch, and released the door.
Forty was almost entirely free of smoke.
The lights were on. The lights didn’t surprise him.
What surprised him were the two men pointing guns at him.
68. CORPSES THAT BITE
Finney must have seemed like a leprechaun coming out of a hole.
“Who the hell are you?” said the one with the portable radio.
“Just the sonofabitch who’s going to get you out of this,” Finney replied, calling down the shaft for slack on the rope, then stepping out of the shaft.
A small portable television was set up on a desk in the lobby area, tuned to the same channel Kub had been watching downstairs. Faces heavy with incredulity, the two men stared at Finney.
They were with building security. They’d been trapped since the beginning, had used phones and their radios, but nobody had been able to give them a prognostication of their outcome or even any advice. In the beginning they thought about making a run down the stairs, but they’d hesitated and now the stairs were too hot.
The two men looked at one another. The one with the radio said, “Buddy, if you were a woman, I’d propose. What do you want us to do?”
“First, don’t propose. Second, help me find a place to tie off this rope. There are two more coming up.”
“We been watchin’ the news,” said the second man, who