Vertical Burn - Earl Emerson [141]
Finney used his portable radio to advise Columbia Command where they were and what they were doing. When he received no reply, he sent the transmission again. After a few moments he heard Reese asking the dispatcher, “Is there somebody on our channel? We’re getting some odd radio traffic. Who’s on channel one?”
Finney keyed his mike and said, “This is John Finney. We have a crew of three on floor seventy-four with ropes and harnesses. We’re going to send people down the elevator shaft to forty.”
“Do not be sending people down without ropes. Repeat. Do not be sending people down without ropes.”
“We have ropes.”
“Clear the channel,” Reese said. “We’ve got fire traffic here. Repeat. Clear the channel.” After their conversation, Reese called Division Sixteen and asked whether anybody had gone up the stairs. Division Sixteen, who may or may not have been the same captain they’d chanced upon earlier, replied, “Negative. It’s too hot in the stairwells for anybody to get past our level. Repeat. The stairwells are not usable at this time.”
They would be receiving no help from below.
69. THE BALLROOM DANCER
Almost immediately upon the arrival of the firefighters, the people on the floor separated into cliques, the family of the young bride in one corner, the family of the groom in another. Most of the staff and hired help congregated in the kitchen area in back by the freight elevator.
Off in a corner, the top of Patterson Cole’s head was visible over a couple of shorter security men he’d kept by his side.
His sidekick, a small, stumpy man with a soft neck that overflowed his collar, broke away from the group and towed the older man across the room, shadowing Finney.
They’d set up the rigging. Diana was managing the lowering operation, and Kub was getting people into harnesses, each teaching their job to others. Finney was examining the system, checking knots and trying to figure out if there was anything they’d missed. He’d given his speech; he didn’t know whether this was going to work or not, didn’t know if these people would make it all the way down to forty or not, didn’t know how tenable forty would be by now if they did. Should the security man they were lowering run into trouble, they would haul him back up.
“Sir? Sir?” It was Cole’s yes-man. His suit had been tailored to make his pear-shaped body look leaner. He had pale, wet skin and tiny silver eyes that were delicate and set too close together.
“What is it?”
“Norris Radford. My name’s Norris Radford. This is my boss, Patterson Cole. We need to talk. In private.”
“Right here is fine,” Finney said.
Nervously looking around, Radford said, “Some fool saw The Towering Inferno last week. They drew numbers in the movie to determine what order to go in, so we drew numbers. Mine is going to put me at the tail end of this Chinese dragon. Mr. Cole’s is even higher than mine. There’s no way we’re going to make it before the fire reaches here.”
“Things should move along pretty quickly,” Finney said.
“I don’t see how. The television people are saying it’s climbing at the rate of thirty minutes a floor. It’s on sixty now, and it’ll take twenty minutes to lower each of us . . . you can do the math.”
“First off, I doubt the fire is climbing at thirty minutes a floor. Second off, the first few people we lower will take longer than the rest, but nobody is going to take twenty minutes.”
“Whatever it takes, it won’t be fast enough.”
“Sure it will.” Finney made a point of sounding more certain than he was, if not for Radford, then for those bystanders listening in.
Finney knew this was like trying to swim a horse across a swift river. You might make it. You might not. Whatever you did, you didn’t stop in midstream to calculate the prospects. Once you launched out, you kept moving and you didn’t think about anything except the opposite shore. Besides, trapped or not, these two were part of the machine that had initiated this. He’d just that minute recognized Radford