The Glass Inferno

CHAPTER 61

Barton and Infantino were outside on the plaza, staring up at the shear wall, when the scenic elevator broke loose from its rails. It slipped a few feet, then suddenly plunged from its seating on the stele tracks. It came to an abrupt stop when the remaining cables broke its fall. The cage bounced a few times, then settled down to swaying gently in the wind, occasionally brushing against the side of the building.

Barton slowly let his breath out. He could imagine the panic inside the darkened cage. He wondered again if Jenny were in it or if she were still up in the Promenade Room. If she were in the cage she had taken quite a jolting. And if she were in the Promenade Room …

Infantino watched his eyes traveling up the side of the building to the smoky red haze that hung around the sixty-fourth floor. “When the Southport pumper gets here, we can do something about that, Craig.

I already have men and hoses in the stairwell on the sixty-third floor landing and below.”

“The fire will have gotten quite a foothold by then.”

“Sorry, Craig-we do the best we can.” The night had been full of tragedies, Barton thought.

Certainly Infantino had his: Lencho, who had been from Infantino’s own division and something of his personal protege, probably because he needed babying.

And Chief Fuchs, now in intensive care, with the first reports anything but encouraging. Plus Gilman, the veteran under whom Infantino had once been a rookie. But tragedies were something you were selfish about. And Infantino’s had already happened; Barton was still waiting for his to occur. There were more sirens cutting through the crisp night air now. There was something strange about them to Barton’s ears; partly the number of them and partly the slightly different pitch to their sirens. Then one of the firemen was racing across the plaza to Infantino. “Chief, the crews from Southport have just passed the barricades!”

Infantino turned and shouted to Barton, “Lets go!”

and took off across the plaza to the street. Barton followed.

The winking red lights on a small parade of new pumpers and salvage trucks were now plainly visible as they slowly drove down the crowded street.

A red command car was the first to pull up. The man who bounced out was small and wiry with a weatherbeaten young face, the type of face a professional surfer might have after a few years of riding the waves on the ocean. A younger version of Chief Fuchs, Barton thought.

“Chief Infantino?” Infantino nodded. “Battalion Chief Jorgenson from Southport.”

They shook hands and Infantino asked, “How many companies did you bring?”

“More than you asked for. We’ve got a number of high-capacity respirators, heat shields, and several dozen proximity suits.”

“What about the shape charges?”

one-pound charges and a dozen or so ten pounders. About a thousand feet of Primacord to go along with them. You can’t get a simultaneous detonation without connecting the charges with Primacord.”

He looked at Infantino curiously. “You thinking of blowing through a floor with the charges?”

“Yes, we were thinking about it.”

Jorgenson shook his head. “I’d think twice if I were you, especially if the building is structurally weakened.”

Infantino was shouting against the wind now. “We’ve got some serious problems on nineteen through twenty-five, but I think we can contain them without explosives -most of the windows have blown out and pretty well vented the floors. It’s the fire topside that really worries me.”

He described the situation to Jorgenson. The Southport chief whistled. -“When you big city people have a fire, you really pull out all the stops, don’t you?”

Southport didn’t have the problems that their city did, Barton thought. It was primarily an industrial shopping center town; their fire chief hadn’t had to do the budget balancing that he suspected Chief Fuchs had had to contend with. And the tax base was such that money was no problem.

“We stand a chance now that you’re here,” Infantino was saying.

He suddenly turned toward the street and scanned the Southport equipment lined up against the far curb. Already men in aluminized suits were getting off the trucks. “Chief, where’s the Seagrave pumper? None of those at the curb have the capacity.”

Jorgenson looked grave. “She’ll be late. She skidded off the freeway coming in; we’ve got tow trucks trying to pull her out of the ditch now.”% “For Christ’s sakes!”

Infantino shouted. “How long is that going to take? We don’t have the time, man-we just can’t sit here and wait!”’ “I feel as bad about it as you do,” Jorgenson said.

“There’s no way of telling. Maybe in the next half hour, maybe not until morning. I didn’t stick around to see how deep she was mired in.”.1 Infantino turned away in disgust and Barton asked him, “What’s it mean, Mario?”

“It means we can’t count on her,” Infantino said bitterly. “It means that you may be right-we just stand here and watch the Glass House burn.

There’s not another pumper that size in a hundred-mile radius.”

“Chief Infantino, how do you want my men deployed?”

Infantino turned back to talk to Jorgenson. Barton stood, staring blankly up at the building. No way to put out the fire at the top, he thought dully. She would burn and keep burning until eventually the fire would engulf the Promenade Room, the roof would collapse and with it the elevator housing for the scenic elevator, and the cage itself would take its final plunge to the plaza below.

The scenario was already written; all it needed was time for the acting out.

Shevelson had come over and read his face. “That bad?”

Barton nodded. “The big Southport pumper it in a ditch; no telling when she’ll be out.” Shevelson said: “The grapevine claims you and Infantino are thinking of bringing in explosives. Any experience with them?”

“Some-in the service.” Barton felt annoyed. “The grapevine doesn’t waste much time.”

“When you’re not getting your skin burned off or drinking coffee, you might as well gossip.” Shevelson hesitated.

“The utility core’s not in very good shape.”

Barton thought for a moment. “The steel skeleton will hold. You could drop part of a floor, probably without fatal results. If the building were reinforced concrete you would run the risk of pancaking the floors. Not so here.”

Shevelson lit another cigar. I’m not so sure it would matter; the building’s a mess now anyway.”

“Give a few million and it can be repaired,” Barton said bitterly.

“By Leroux? It would be rebuilt with all the same old mistakes if he had his way. But this time, he won’t have his way; by the time the courts and the papers get through with him, plus the civil suits that will be brought against him, he’ll be out of business for good.”

Revenge must taste sweet to Shevelson, Barton thought.

Unfortunately, it was a revenge compounded of a number of personal tragedies besides the destruction of the Glass House itself. There had been the deaths among the tenants and the firemen and then there was Jenny, condemned either to die in the restaurant at the top or to plunge to her death in the elevator cage. It was difficult for him to keep a sense of perspective and right then he didn’t feel like trying.

“Shevelson, you’ve got a right to your revenge but don’t gloat about it around me. I don’t give a crap what you think about Leroux and I don’t care what happens to him. Tonight I’ve seen too many dead people and in a few minutes my wife may become one of them. if you want to brag about how right you were tell somebody else.

I’m not in the mood.”

Shevelson looked faintly ashamed of himself. “Look, Barton, I’m sorry about your wife. I’m sorry about the others, too. Not that it matters, but people have been killed by the building since the day it started to go up. My best friend worked in high steel on it; a crane operator accidentally knocked him off a beam one day. Another bought it when they were pouring the foundations; he’s still down there, they chipped off a couple of hunks of concrete and buried them in a symbolic rite.”

“All right,” Barton muttered. “So everybody’s been a loser.”

He turned to go back inside the lobby when Quantrell appeared in front of him, his cameraman a few feet away.

“It looks like you’re going to lose the entire building, Barton-any comments on that?”

Barton whirled. If nothing else, Quantrell was a target he could take a shot at, unlike the others of the evening.

“If your trained seal points his camera at me just one more time, Quantrell, you’ll both be picking up your teeth off the sidewalk!”

Behind him, Shevelson said calmly, “Need help, just holler.

Always glad to help a friend-particularly in this case.”’ Quantrell bared his teeth and Barton had a momentary image of the cornered weasel. “They call it freedom of the press, gentlemen, in case you ‘haven’t heard.

It’s guaranteed me in the Constitution. Barton, I understand your wife is either in the Promenade Room or on the scenic elevator, is that true?”

“What do you want me to do?” Barton gritted. “Spill my guts so your viewers get ten seconds of wallowing in my problems and they can forget theirs? Get the-” Overhead there was the sudden beating of helicopter blades and all four of them glanced up to see the bubble craft lowering toward the plaza. Infantino, who had been in urgent conversation with Jorgenson a dozen’feet away, ran over to.Quantrell.

“That’s a K.Y.S ‘copter-who the hell gave you permission to use this plaza as your private landing pad? We’ve got equipment coming in here!”

Quantrell looked startled. “What the hell, I didn’t order them down!”

Barton and Infantino ran toward the helicopter, Shevelson and Quantrell trailing after. The door of the bubble opened and a man carrying a young girl climbed out.

“Somebody give me a hand!”

Barton took the girl from him and Infantino folded back the edge of the tablecloth that had been tucked around her throat and face.

“Smoke inhalation-pretty bad.” Quantrell turned to the cameraman.

“Get her downtown to one of the hospitals; I can have a photographer waiting to get some pictures and maybe a reporter to interview the doctors.”

Infantino held the cameraman from taking the girl back. “Sorry about your scoop, Quantrell-, but she wouldn’t make it without Pulmotor help.” He turned and waved at some of the white-clad attendants in one of the ambulances. The men got out of the cab and.ran over. “Get her on a ‘motor.” He glanced again at the girl’s mottled complexion and the slight motion of her chest. “Maybe we’re not too late.” The attendants took the girl’s still form from Barton and ran for the ambulance.

“We got her off the roof,” the helicopter pilot said, leaning out over the passenger side. “Pretty tricky with the winds up there; this craft’s too light for that sort of thing.”

The cameraman who had gotten out with the girl shook his head.

“Things are pretty bad. The fire’s directly below the Promenade Room now and there are still a lot of people up there.”

“What about the elevator?” Barton asked. “Did you notice it on the way down?”

“It’s off the rails-you should be able to see that from here. The wind is damned strong and it’s swaying back and forth; two more cables have frayed through and so far as I could make out, there’re only two left holding it.

If you’re going to get those people out of there it’ll have to be pretty soon. You’ll have to make it soon at the top, too -“Could you help us?” Barton asked the pilot.

“Take them off one at a time? You’re crazy, man-it was rough enough this time, we were lucky as hell.”

“Take her back up!” Quantrell ordered. “You’re missing some beautiful shots.”

The cameraman suddenly laughed. “What’ll I take ‘em with, Jeff?

Some madman up there threw all my gear over the side.”

“He what?”

“Yeah, I was carried away with the shooting-didn’t realize what he was saying about the girl at first. We would have had to lighten the ‘copter-anyway if we were going to take her so he did it for us.”

“That was five thousand dollars’ worth of equipment!” Quantrell screamed.

The cameraman shrugged. “Don’t yell at me, Jeff-I didn’t do it.

We’re insured, aren’t we?”

One of the attendants came back to report to Infantino.

“The girl’s in bad shape. We’ll have to get her to a hospital fast-heavy monoxide poisoning.”

“Don’t waste time asking me-take off. If we have other casualties, there’ll be other units.” The attendant ran back to the ambulance, with Quantrell and his photographer trailing after. Barton continued to stare up at the building, watching the smoke billow out of the windows on the sixty-fourth and sixty-fifth floors..

Infantino said, “We don’t have any choice, we’d better call in the 304th.”

Barton started running to the CD comm van. “Let’s see if we can shake up Colonel Shea at the Squadron.

He’s got five Bell U.H-1’s under his command-seven-passenger Model D’s, as I recall. “We can get a Boeing from the Coast Guard,” Infantino added thoughtfully. “Fine, we’ll need every rescue unit we can get.

Which leaves the problem of the elevator.” A partial answer to that suddenly suggested itself and Barton snapped his fingers. “We could put in a call to the helicopter shuttle service at International Airport. They’ve got a Sikorsky F-106 that they lease out for industrial use-lifting heavy air-conditioning units to the tops of buildings, that sort of thing. It should be big enough to handle the elevator.”

Where the hell were Garfunkel and Donaldson, he thought. They’d have to start clearing the plaza of the planters holding the conifers; the little news helicopter could set down between them but a seven-passenger Bell was too damned large.

He took a deep breath of the night air and glanced once again at the top of the building. They would have to hurry.

The fury of the fire on the lower floors, is now waning.

Most of the readily available fuel has been consumed and the added influx of additional men and equipment from Southport has begun to have its effect. Numerous crews of firemen with hoses and fire shields are steadily pushing back the fire’s boundaries, slicing off small sections of the beast to drench them with water. The salvage crews follow after the hose teams, ripping out walls and pulling down stringer ceilings, seeking out the last faint spark to destroy it. The beast gives way foot by foot, fighting for its existence, but realizing that.it is slowly dying.

Forty floors up, the beast is very much alive. On the machinery room below the Observation Deck, it greedily feeds on drums of grease and oil. At one end, a stack of wooden pallets on which recently installed machinery was strapped is blazing, heavy drafts sweeping the flames into storeroom and equipment bays.

Oil and grease have flowed through the poke-throughs in the floor to the unfinished apartments below.

The drizzling strands of oil are flaming and spatter on the stacks of asphalt tile and the sheets of plywood below.

They catch fire and the flames quickly spread to the cans of paint and varnish and the excelsior-filled cartons of appliances. In some of the apartments, the windows expand in their frames, as they did on the floors far below.

The first one pops from its frame and sails out over the city.

Its range is much greater since the launch point is more than seven hundred feet above street level.

Firemen have started to rig electric lines from the emergency generator to the booster pumps in a utility room halfway up the building. But it is a task that will take time. The beast is unaware of it and knows only that while below it is dying, it has found new life on the upper floors-an incredible supply of food is close at hand and there is no indication at all that anything will impede its progress.

It has poked a tentative finger into an unstopped hole in the ceiling of the sixty-fourth floor, which is also the floor of the Observation Deck. There is little fuel immediately at hand, but it suspects there may be more in the restaurant on the next floor above and claws its way up along. the painted stairwell walls.

The beast may have lost much of its vitality on the floors below but here it is very much alive-and growing.