floor.” He turned and walked toward the checkroom, most of the tenants trailing after him.
He could hear the man and his wife argue whether or not they were going to go up to the roof. They’d go all right, he thought.
At the checkroom, Quinn and the young diner were handing out coats, tablecloths, and plastic table liners.
From somewhere Quinn had found several thick blankets and had cut them roughly into two. “Follow Miss Reynolds into the kitchen-she’ll show you the ladder and trapdoor leading to the-roof.” Most of the tenants lined up silently and followed her into the kitchen hallway.
Douglas looked around. Albina was still sitting in a chair; Jesus came out of the checkroom with a fur coat and wrapped her in it. Well, he could hardly blame him, Douglas thought. He looked at the fur.
“Looks like a good fox,” he said noncommittally.
“Nab,” Jesus sneered, “synthetic-but a nice one.”
“How can you tell?” Douglas asked curiously.
Jesus laughed. “Just something I picked up, man. If it was the real thing you could feel where they sewed the skins together underneath the lining. And you take a good look at the quality of the tailoring-the buttonholes and how they sew the buttons on, the details, that sort of thing. It’s like cars, the more expensive they are, the better built they are. They got cheap customers up here; this was the best coat in the whole room.”
Boosting, Douglas thought. Jesus had his talents, all right.
He turned for one last look around the dining room. It was empty-no, it wasn’t. Not quite. At a far table, an elderly man was sitting by himself staring out at the flakes of snow swirling down.
Douglas hurried over. “Mr. Claiborne? It’s time to leave.”
Harlee Claiborne didn’t move and Douglas could see his eyes were bright with tears. “I thought I’d wait until Lisolette came back,” he said. “I’ll have to tell her where you’ve all gone.”
Douglas stood there and searched his mind for the right thing to say.
Finally he said, “Do you think Miss Mueller would want you to wait?”
Claiborne thought about it for a long moment, then got to his feet, shaking slightly. “No, I guess she wouldn’t,” he said in a sad voice.
He followed Douglas toward the kitchen hallway.
Douglas noticed that just before he left the dining room, Claiborne took the carnation out of his buttonhole and dropped it on the floor behind him.
Douglas pretended that he hadn’t seen.
CHAPTER 64
There had to be room for the helicopters to land and discharge their passengers. Barton instructed Garfunkel and Donaldson and the few security and maintenance people still on duty to clear the plaza of its ceramic planters. He watched for a few moments while they struggled to tip them to break the ice seal at the bottom, then slid them over to one side of the building. He estimated the size of the area they would be able to clear, then ran back into the lobby.
The next ten minutes Barton worked cutting the Primacord to the proper lengths. Then one of the comm men ran over to Infantino.
“Chief, the lead ‘copter is on mike.”
“Be right with you,” Infantino said. They were just finishing the last of the complex web of Primacord and shape charges, using the measurements they had taken from Shevelson’s prints. The web was in two sections so that two men could carry the bulky charges. “Pack those up in two musette bags,” he instructed a fireman who had been helping. “Let’s go, Craig.”
Barton jogged after him toward the comm van, asking the runner: “Any sign of the Sikorsky?”
“Three or four minutes behind this group.”
They climbed into the van and Barton heard the crackling hiss of a voice transmission as they entered.
“This is Burleigh. E.T.A one minute.” Barton grinned.
Burleigh! The one stroke of good luck during the whole damned night.
He couldn’t have asked for a better man.
Burleigh, a crazy Texas chief warrant officer who could put away more scotch than any man he’d ever met. One of the mainstays of their reserve unit, a man with two years’ combat duty in ‘Nam. “Mario, let me speak to him.”
“It’s your mike, Craig.”
“Tex, this is Craig Barton.”
“Didn’t know you were down there, Captain. Where do you want us?”
“We’ve got about fifty people in the restaurant on top of the Glass House and we can’t get them down. Can you bring in your birds and land on the roof?”
“How much clearance do we have?”
“There’s a penthouse and some gardens adjacent to it, the air-conditioning evaporators, and a shed that houses the scenic elevator hoist. I’d say you might get two U.H-1’s onto the roof.
Certainly you can get one in.”
“Any television antennas?”
“No commercial ones; there’s a community receiving one.”
“Let’s hope for the best, though that could make it tricky. Okay, we’ll move in one at a time.”
“Tex,” Barton added, concerned. “Do you see any sign of a Sikorsky F-106? We asked City Shuttle to dispatch theirs.”
“Just a minute, it’s so goddamned dark…. Why the hell didn’t you have your fire at high noon? Yeah, there’s the bird. A couple of miles away, unless I’m watching the wrong lights.”
“You’ve got the pyrotechnic torches?”
“I do,” Burleigh said. “where do you want them unloaded?”
Barton’s voice turned grim. “Tex, that’s part of the problem.
I’ll need your help. Let the other crews handle the evacuation.
Have your copilot drop you on the roof.”
“What the hell for?”
“Give me a minute and I’ll tell you.” Barton talked rapidly, explaining his plan.
Burleigh sounded dubious. “I don’t know, Captain. I’ve got the hardware Colonel Shea asked for. Three splicers, if we can get that many on the cables. One should do it, though.”
“Can you make the linkup?”
Burleigh paused. “I think so. But in this weather, it will be touch and go.”
“There are at least ten people aboard that elevator,” Barton said slowly. “I have reason to believe one of them is my wife.”
Burleigh whistled. “I’ll give it everything I’ve got, Captain.”
He signed off and Barton said to the comm man, “Get me that Sikorsky pilot as soon as you can.” He clicked off the mike and leaned back in his chair, fatigue suddenly washing over him. If anybody could do it Burleigh was the man.
“I hope it will work,” Infantino said quietly.
“If you’ve got a better idea tell me now,” Barton said.
Then, desperately: “Look, Mario, it has to work-we don’t have time to try anything else.”
CHAPTER 65
They weren’t going to make it, Douglas thought. They didn’t stand a chance. They couldn’t go back down the ladder to the restaurant; the smoke was far too heavy for that. But twenty.minutes or half an hour on the roof would finish them off from exposure, even if the fire didn’t claw its way up there and eventually force them over the edge.
The plastic table liner he had wrapped around himself was stiff with the cold and little protection against the
