gray with smoke. Several firemen had retreated to the stairwell, smoke-streaked and coughing, while a fresh team edged past them with additional sections of two-and-a-half.
Somebody tapped Infantino on the shoulder and handed him a respirator.
“You can’t go in there without a Scott, Chief.” He helped Infantino strap on the cylinder and adjust the valve.
The main corridor was a maze of crisscrossing hoses, some of them snaking down side passages and others arrowing directly ahead. The smoke was dense and grew denser as he edged forward through the rapidly growing darkness. He could feel the heat now and occasionally the red reflection of flames a few dozen feet ahead. He crouched by three hoseman; the lead man was directing the high-pressure stream toward the flames immediately in front of them. The water on the tile floor was an inch deep-and hot. Another hose team was a few feet farther ahead; Infantino waddled toward them. The stream from the nearby hose drenched the forward group with spray that cascaded down their soot-streaked turnout coats and puddled on the floor.
Infantino felt a hand on his arm and turned; he recognized Lencho in spite of his mask.
Lencho leaned over, touching the face plate of his respirator to Infantino’s ear. “It’s bad,” he shouted. “We’ve sent two crews down already. A lot of flammable stuff, plastic light fixtures and the like. And pieces of the false ceiling keep falling on us. It’s a fucking mess.”
“Whose crew is that up ahead?”
“Mark Fuchs’s-he’s working the nob.” The chief’s son, Infantino thought, getting his baptism under fire. Handling the nob of a high-pressure hose was a man’s job; if you lost control, the heavy brass nozzle could swing around and brain somebody. It was the man on the nob who was most exposed to heat. Infantino had seen them come down after fifteen minutes close up on a fire with their faces red and the backs of their hands blistered right through their gloves. If it were hot enough and your turnout pants were tight against your knees, the flesh under the pants would blister.
“The fire loading is incredible,” Lencho shouted.
“Desks, open files, wall hangings, foam chairs and couches … all that paneling. The stuff goes up like it was drenched with kerosene.”
Infantino nodded and started back down the corridor.
He had just gotten to a cross corridor filled with dense, oily smoke when he heard a panicky “Get down, get down!” Heat flare-up, he thought; the differential between the ceiling and the floor could be in the hundreds of degrees and heat spread in waves. The first man to sense it would cry, “Get down!” so those behind him could flatten themselves against the floor. At that moment he heard a muffled explosion. The far end of the cross corridor flared a brilliant orange. Thick smoke suddenly boiled out at Infantino. He ran for the stairwell door and grabbed a walky-talky from one of the men there.
“Philtron, smoke explosion on seventeen! Get a rescue company up here, on the double!”
There was a flurry of activity in the corridor.
Two men stumbled through the door dragging a third. They pulled the mask off his face and dropped it on. the concrete. The mask was filled with vomit; already blisters were puffing up the man’s face.
The man himself was coughing hard enough to turn his lungs inside out.
“Hot lung!” one of the men shouted. The man had breathed superheated air or even flames; he must have literally burned out a lung, possibly both. Infantino thumbed the walky-talky again.
“Infantino here. Have an ambulance on standby; first casualty coming down. Notify the hospital emergency ward: hot lung case.”
Two men carried the casualty down the stairwell.
“It’s going to be an all-night wienie roast, Mario.”
Verlaine had appeared on the landing, his mask off and his lungs heaving. His face was red from the heat. “Ceiling temperatures have to be six, seven hundred degrees.
We’re inching the hoses along the floor.” More men were staggering out on the landing now several of them vomiting and gagging.
He was only in the way, Infantino thought. “Take care of yourself, Hal.” He turned and walked down the steps, turning sideways halfway down to let another company come up. He rode down on the same elevator with the ‘unconscious man with the ruined lungs, watching the faint pumping of his chest. He was going to die, Infantino thought; he probably wouldn’t make it through the night.
For a fleeting moment he wished to hell that all the taxpayers who had showed up at the last City Council meeting to protest pay increases for firemen could be here now-Why did a man stick with the department, he wondered blackly. Why did he? It certainly wasn’t the Money.
He pushed his way through the lobby and headed across the terrazzo plaza to the communications van. The door was partly open and he could hear the babble of Police and Fire Department transmissions crackling out into the cold night air. Fuchs was standing by the half-open door, staring up at the building, obviously lost in thought.
“We’re not even holding our own,” Infantino said grimly.
“Didn’t expect we would; it’s too soon. If we can keep it from spreading, sooner or later it’ll start to die for lack of fuel.”
“We had damned well do better than that.”
“It’s higher up than usual but we’ve handled fires like it before.”
“I’ve never seen a fire like this before,” Infantino snapped. “I don’t think you have, either.”
Fuchs looked at him intently. “Okay, Mario, what do you want?
You didn’t come outside just to enjoy the weather.”
“I want to order some shape charges and blow through the floor. .
.
vent the fire from above.”
“Forget it,” Fuchs said flatly. “Central Supply doesn’t have any.”
“The department in Southport does; we could borrow some.”
“Infantino.” Fuchs paused -to search for the right words. The snow cresting on his eyebrows made him look like a thin and haggard Santa Claus, Infantino thought.
“You’ve had free rein so far but you can’t have it on this.
You’re not detonating any explosives in that building. U you want to hole through - a floor have your wrecking company do it.”
“That would take time-and we don’t have any.”
“On the contrary, we have all night. We’ll continue to use conventional methods; the unconventional ones are too damned dangerous.
I see no reason why we shouldn’t be able to control this fire with them.”
Infantino felt the, frustration start to build. “Do you know what shape charges are? How they work?”
“I’m familiar with them,” Fuchs said. “But I also know the risk of using explosives in a building we know next to nothing about.
Legally, it’s risky; structurally, it’s even more so. You prove to me that you’re a building engineer and I’ll listen to you.
Otherwise, it’s a flat no. You run the risk of weakening the whole structure to the point where it might have to be condemned after the fire.”
“That’s nonsense; I’ve handled explosives in the Army.
Infantino persisted. “I know what they can do.”
Fuchs looked up at the side of the. building, ignoring Infantino.
“I said no, mister,” Fuchs said.
Infantino followed his eyes up the side, to the tiny spot of light crawling down the southern shear wall. The scenic elevator, probably with Barton and Leroux aboard. They might be able to provide both the information and the arguments that he needed…
There was a sudden shout from firemen in the plaza.
Far above him, Infantino heard a brittle, popping sound.
