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.
CHAPTER 62
There were lights strung throughout the lobby now and Barton found the blueprints much easier to read. Buried someplace within them had to be at least the suggestion of an idea. But then, it was only magicians who pulled rabbits out of hats, he thought.
“Give it up, Craig,” Infantino said after Barton flipped back to the first of the drawings and started to go through them again.
“Within another hour or so, they should have the booster pumps hooked up on emergency power.”
“Within another hour, the whole top of the building will be a torch,” Barton said. “There’s still the Southport pumper-that might still arrive in time.”
Barton hit the table with his fist. “I don’t believe that and neither do you, Mario.”
A runner came over and told Infantino that the last of the lower floors was now under control. Shevelson relaxed visibly. “You won’t have to use any explosives then, right?”
Infantino shook his head. “That’s right, though I really doubted that we would’ve right from the start. It was just nice to have them on hand in case we needed them. Why?
I thought you said there was no danger?”
“I’m no engineer,” Shevelson said. “That was an off the-top-of-my-head answer. If I had to gamble I’d still stand by it, but there would always be an outside chance if the structure were weakened enough you might end up dropping an entire floor.”
One of the men from the CD comm van came running into the lobby then to report to Infantino, “Chief, Colonel Shea just radioed that the U.H.-1’s are airborne. We should be seeing them in fifteen minutes.”
“What about the Sikorsky?” Barton asked.
“Still trying to locate the owners-the shuttle ‘copter service is closed for the evening”: “Keep trying and when you get through, light a fire under them. We need that dinosaur pronto, ten or more lives depend on it.”
“Can’t we use the winches on the U.H-1’s?” Infantino asked.
Barton shook his head. “Doubt it. Certainly not while the birds are airborne and I don’t know how -to anchor them on the roof for enough purchase.”
“Colonel Shea also said he was sending over half a dozen pyrotechnic torches,” the comm man added.
Shevelson looked at Barton, puzzled. “What the hell are they?”
“Essentially self-contained solid rockets,” Barton explained.
“They give you an oxygen-rich flame, burn for about one minute, and will cut through almost any metal.
I wanted an oxyacetylene torch, but these will be less clumsy.”
“I still don’t get it,” Shevelson’ said. “What. do you want them for?”
“In case we have to cut through elevator cables.”
Shevelson stared at him for a moment. “I don’t know what you’re planning, but I’m glad it’s your responsibility and not mine.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Barton said curtly. He turned to Infantino.
“That leaves us only the fire at the top, right?”
Infantino nodded and spread his hands. “That’s right, Craig-but beyond waiting for the pumper or the booster pumps to be hooked up, there’s not much that can be done.”
“There’re five more floors of unfinished apartments for the fire to spread to in the next hour or so,” Barton said.
“What do you think your chances of saving the building will be then?”
“We’ll probably save the building,” Infantino said carefully.
“The top floors will be gutted, of course.”
“And if there are further explosions in the utility core?”
“All bets are off then, you know that.” He paused a moment.
“You’ve got an idea, haven’t you?”
Barton shook his head and pointed to Shevelson’. “It’s not my idea, it’s his.” He flipped through the drawings to one of the machinery room just below the Observation Deck, and then to the Observation Deck itself: the large Freon tanks, the huge water reservoir for the wet standpipe, the hVAC system on the, machinery floor, and the piping to the rooftop evaporator next to the untenanted penthouse.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Infantino said. “It’s too dangerous.”
“You don’t know how much damage explosives will do to the structure of the building itself,” Shevelson objected.
“None of us are sure,” Barton pointed out. “But we know how much damage the fire is doing, don’t we?” He pointed at the drawings of the Observation Deck with its massive - water and Freon tanks. The supporting metal beams were clearly outlined in the print. “We can take measurements right off the drawing and assemble a
