Into The Inferno Part 15

The combination of ammonium nitrate and diesel fuel was the same explosive compound that had been used to blow up the World Trade Center in New York the first time, as well as the Federal Building in Oklahoma City.

There was a good chance the trailer was going to blow up.

My daughters!

Before I could think the situation through, I found myself on the ground. On my b.u.t.t. I'd landed hard. With no warning.

With even less warning, I was on my back, staring up at ribbons of black smoke in a blue sky. I hadn't fainted. Nor had I tripped. There had been no explosion. Not yet.

Struggling to a sitting position, I peered around to see what had taken my legs out from under me. There was nothing around me, no man or woman, no dog, no offending object.

I rolled to one knee and regained my feet, only to fall again.

Day 3: Worse headache, dizziness, falling down.

It was the second time today I'd fallen.

Taking a glove off and placing the radio mike to my lips, I said, "Dispatcher from Edgewick Command, we're going to evacuate. We have indications of large quant.i.ties of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil on the premises. All incoming North Bend units stand by one-half mile away. We have ammonium nitrate and fuel oil. Lots of it."

Reaching my feet unsteadily, I grabbed the sidewall of the trailer for support and then let go. The metal wall was as hot as a pancake griddle. I moved slowly at first, more confidently after a few steps.

When I reached the front of the trailer, I realized n.o.body on scene had heard my radio transmission.

Ben and Karrie were still in the smoky front doorway. I reached into the smoke and slapped Ben on the rump. "The place is filled with ammonium nitrate. Abandon the building. Now!" Twisting her head around, Karrie looked at me through the mask of her SurviveAir face piece. "I mean it! Out!"

Reaching up into the cab, I turned the siren on and switched it to the abandon building warning, a tone we'd never used except in practice.

I dashed to where my daughters and Morgan had been. The old woman was there, but my girls and Morgan were missing. Choking on my own dry throat, I called out my daughter's names. "Britney? Allyson?"

"Daddy?"

The three of them were watching me curiously from the other side of the maroon Chevrolet. Judging from the looks on their faces, I'd been bleating their names like a maniac.

I stepped between them, picking up Allyson under one arm, Britney under the other, adjusting their skinny little bodies as I ran. "Follow us, Morgan. You, too, lady. Everybody out of the yard. It's going to blow up."

Behind me, I heard the old woman complaining that her purse was in her car, that her Robitussin was in her purse. I didn't have time to quibble and was happy to see that despite the complaining she followed us.

On the other side of the street, I set my daughters down and looked back as Ben, Karrie, and Ian ran across the road behind us. "You girls hide behind that motor home. I'll be with you in a minute."

Something in my voice told them not to ask questions.

I jogged back to Caputo's driveway just as a black pickup truck pulled into the drive and plugged the opening.

I stepped around to the darkened driver's window and found myself confronting Steve Haston. He wore full bunking gear and a white chief's helmet. He'd never been a chief. For the last five years he hadn't even been a volunteer. Then, I noticed he had Newcastle's gear on, Newcastle's gear that had been hanging on a hook in the firehouse for the past month, the gear n.o.body had the heart to dispose of. The coat was too short in the arms by about five inches.

He said, "The fire's behind you, Jim. You got everybody going the wrong direction."

"Get your truck out of here. Even if this place wasn't a powder keg, n.o.body parks their personal vehicle in the driveway at a fire scene. You know better than that."

"Powder keg? What are you talking about?"

"The trailer is full of ammonium nitrate."

He laughed. "Ammonium nitrate? Isn't that fertilizer? By the way, you'd better tell Snoqualmie to get down here. They're back a ways pulled off the road."

"The trailer is on fire, and it's going to blow. Now get the h.e.l.l out of here."

"No can do, buddy boy. I'm taking over as incident commander." By now everybody else was off the premises. Accompanied by a thick, fast-moving plume of black smoke, flame began to emerge out the front door of the trailer. The pump on Engine 1 was still running, although somebody'd shut off the siren. "I've decided, in light of how you people lost control of the department with the health issues and so forth, that somebody needs to get on board and take charge. I guess that's going to be me. Now you get those people back in here and fight some fire."

"Good-bye, Steve," I said, walking away. "I'll see you get the best funeral the city can afford."

"What?" he shouted out his window. "What?"

Moments later Haston's truck sped across the road in front of me. In reverse. He parked on the lawn in front of a ranch-style house about seventy feet beyond where my girls had taken refuge. The way he was driving, we were lucky he hadn't run over anybody.

We were not quite directly opposite Caputo's place, s.h.i.+elded by a motor home, as well as by a small hillock on the edge of Caputo's property. I figured we were almost two hundred yards away, but somehow it didn't seem far enough. I had no idea how much ammonium nitrate was in the trailer or how much of an explosion it might produce, or even if it would would explode. Years ago in Kansas City, when a burning construction trailer blew up and killed six firefighters, windows were knocked out over a mile distant. The noise was heard ten miles away. explode. Years ago in Kansas City, when a burning construction trailer blew up and killed six firefighters, windows were knocked out over a mile distant. The noise was heard ten miles away.

Like a mother bird spreading her wings, I opened my bunking coat and enveloped my daughters under the fire-r.e.t.a.r.dant Nomex material. When I motioned to Morgan, she gathered close, too. "Is there really a bomb?" she asked in a small voice.

"I guess we'll find out."

As we huddled, I began to have misgivings. In my twelve-year career, I'd never seen anybody anybody pull everyone out of a fire building. I was going to look either prescient or remarkably stupid. It was possible I'd misread the evidence. After all, what had I uncovered? An injured dog, some empty sacks, a couple of oil barrels. pull everyone out of a fire building. I was going to look either prescient or remarkably stupid. It was possible I'd misread the evidence. After all, what had I uncovered? An injured dog, some empty sacks, a couple of oil barrels.

And why would Caputo turn his trailer into a makes.h.i.+ft bomb?

Stump blasting. Of course. He'd been blasting stumps. Why hadn't I thought of that sooner? Now that I thought about it, stump blasting made a whole lot more sense than anything else. Whether or not the materials were inside the trailer was another story.

Beside us now, Ian Hjorth said, "Did I hear you say bomb?"

Ben Arden unbuckled his backpack and dropped his self-contained breathing apparatus into the gra.s.s. "We could have had it out in another few minutes."

"I'm going with my gut here," I said.

Ben and Ian exchanged glances. I knew they were both wondering whether I'd lost my mind.

The radio traffic was atwitter, both from the dispatcher and from the units waiting half a mile down the road. Everybody wanted details.

It was at this point that Mayor Haston stormed over to us. I had a feeling if not for the fact that my girls were with me, he would have thrown a punch. He was that angry. I'd heard a rumor that when Newcastle fired him from the volunteers, they'd nearly come to blows, that Haston had a hair-trigger temper. This was the first time I'd faced it. I knew he blamed me for the fact that our wives had run off together.

"I don't know much," Haston said, standing over me, his helmet akimbo, "but I know that trailer's burning like a box of kindling. It kind of makes me wonder about you, Swope."

"You're right, Steve. You don't know much."

"You got everybody into a lather at the meeting. Could be you're just one of those people likes to run around crying wolf."

It had been more than three minutes since we'd evacuated the property. "Steve, the way I figure it, this is a no-brainer for you. I'm right, you get to live. I'm wrong, you'll look good for wanting to go back in."

"Don't hand me any of your bulls.h.i.+t. I want your people back in there. Now."

"You're not going to make much of a chief if you don't know what ammonium nitrate and fuel oil do," Ian said.

At that moment, in the midst of the withering look Haston gave Hjorth, the world around us altered in a manner that few people ever experience.

The ground rocked. The air pressure all around loaded down in an instant. Our ears popped. A great gust of hot air rocked the motor home, nearly tipping it. The tops of nearby trees bowed to the ground and then flew back up like whips. Half a dozen birds came cras.h.i.+ng to the earth around us, as if they'd been shot.

Mayor Haston, who hadn't been sheltered by the motor home with the rest of us, actually flew backward eight or ten feet and landed on his back.

In the eerie stillness immediately following the explosion, burning debris began sprinkling out of the sky. His face impregnated with tiny bits of blackened material resembling sand, Steve Haston slowly sat up on his elbows.

"That," Ian Hjorth said, "is a cheap lesson in what happens when ammonium nitrate mixes with fuel oil."

"What?" Haston was deaf now, at least temporarily.

"It means you just tried to murder about fifteen people," Arden said. "It's a good G.o.dd.a.m.ned thing you weren't in charge. You dumb b.a.s.t.a.r.d."

"What?"

"He said you're a dumba.s.s because you're on your keister while we're all safe here behind this motor home," Hjorth said, smiling. "s.h.i.+t-fer-brains."

"Why don't you stand back up?" Arden said. "When the secondary blast comes you can do that little puppet dance again. Like Pinocchio jacking off. I kind of liked that."

Karrie stepped over to her father and said, "Shut up, you two."

I couldn't help recalling that Ben had been on the pipe back at the trailer, Karrie's rump wedged firmly in the doorway while Ben had been inside. It should have been the other way about, Karrie on the pipe, Ben backing her up. She needed to prove herself in the same manner as every other firefighter since time immemorial. And she needed to be aggressive about doing so.

27. FARTING NICKELS.

"You okay?"

Allyson and Britney craned their necks up at me and nodded, their eyes like half dollars. I'd never seen them so frightened. Morgan had instinctively twined her arms around my neck when the blast hit, her body knocking us all up against the side of the motor home, and now she clung to me long after the danger was over. Embarra.s.sed over our cheek-to-cheek position, she stood up and gave me a smile that was part chagrin and part conspiracy, as if we might have moved to a new level in our relations.h.i.+p. As if we had a relations.h.i.+p.

"You guys stay here," I said. "There could be another blast."

Morgan wiped her teary eyes with the back of her hand. "I don't think I like fires."

"Trust me, this was a freak deal."

I'd watched the blast send Haston's helmet flying a hundred feet across the yard like a lost prayer. Saw a crow with a broken wing on the roof of a house, having fallen out of the sky. Later, the doctors found particles of aluminum from the outer walls of Caputo's trailer embedded in Haston's face. They removed several small pieces of insulation from under his scalp.

Pieces of Engine 1 had become projectiles. Strips of metal and burning debris had rocketed over our heads across the yard, striking the house or landing in the woods beyond the house. Twenty seconds after the blast, heavy metal parts were still dropping all around us.

A large chunk shook the ground when it landed forty feet away. A second later a sliver of metal knifed into the ground where the four of us had been moments earlier, burying itself eighteen inches in the turf.

Morgan began crying. Britney and Allyson looked out from under the motor home where they were hiding, their eyes huge and round and curious, just a little bit pleased with the whole thing. They didn't want to miss any of this. I winked at them. Allyson winked back, but all Britney could do was scrunch up her face. In other circ.u.mstances it would have been hilarious watching her efforts.

When I figured everything that could could fall out of the sky fall out of the sky had had fallen, I b.u.t.toned my coat, straightened my helmet, and stepped out onto the lawn to survey the situation. fallen, I b.u.t.toned my coat, straightened my helmet, and stepped out onto the lawn to survey the situation.

Two of our volunteers dragged Haston back behind the motor home to protect him from a secondary blast, should there be one. On the radio, the Snoqualmie unit warned about the possibility of more blasts. We all knew from the ant.i.terrorism cla.s.ses we'd taken that planned terrorism events often came in pairs, the second explosion designed to catch the police and first-in rescuers off guard.

Trouble was, this wasn't an act of terrorism. At least I didn't think it was.

This was the work of a moron.

Except for Haston, whose face was almost as black as his truck, all the survivors on this side of the motor home looked pale.

Haston was shaking his head and repeatedly s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g his fingers into his ears, his temporary deafness a situation Hjorth and Arden were determined to exploit to the limit. "Trying to put another nickel in the meter?" Arden asked.

"Maybe it would work better if you shoved it up your a.s.s," Hjorth said. "A guy like you should always keep a pile of nickels up his a.s.s. That way whenever you need change you can fart nickels."

Hjorth and Arden laughed uproariously at the thought. Either they had gotten over the explosion more quickly than anybody else or they hadn't gotten over it at all and abusing the mayor was their way of coping. It was hard to know with them.

A quick survey of the fire-ground personnel told me that except for an a.s.sortment of ringing eardrums and a few minor cuts, Mayor Haston had sustained the only real injuries.

We'd started out with five civilians-Haston, Caputo's mother, my girls, and Morgan-along with eight firefighters, four paid and four volunteer, so it was a relief n.o.body had been killed. North Bend could easily have lost thirteen people.

Fourteen, depending on where Caputo was.

We waited five minutes. During that time the officer on the Snoqualmie rig got on the air to ask if we were all right. I gave a status report and added that they'd better start searching for spot fires, because from our vantage point we could already see at least one off in the trees. Nothing burned faster than a dry Douglas fir, and the area was well populated with them.

When I got off the radio, Caputo's mother confronted me, eyes empty, lips quivering. "What does this mean? Where's my son?"

"I don't know, ma'am. I don't know where your son is."

"What's this?" She gestured at a large chunk of pink insulation from the trailer's walls that had drifted out of the sky like a piece of cotton candy. "Tell me about this. Can anybody tell me what this means?"

Ian gave me a beleaguered look and draped his arm around the old woman's shoulders, walking her to one side and speaking softly. In twenty seconds he'd gone from mocker to grief counselor.

After I set up a perimeter to keep out neighbors and pa.s.sersby, who were already showing up on foot, after I had a.s.signed a team to check nearby residences for casualties and damage, Ben Arden and I walked across the road.

Aside from burning brush and two large maples that had been knocked half over so that their branches were knuckling the ground like football players waiting for the snap, the first thing we spotted was the still-burning hulk of the maroon Chevrolet. On the far side of it sat Engine 1, stripped down to the frame and six metal wheels, most of the rubber vaporized or blown off: no hose, no tank, no motor, no cab. The engine had been in a perfect line with Caputo's now-vaporized trailer, as well as with the motor home two hundred yards away. Combined with the small hillock, it had probably saved our lives.

On the far side of the decimated engine, Caputo's double-wide trailer had been replaced by a giant hole in the ground. As if a bulldozer had flattened them, the brush and trees surrounding the trailer were leveled for a distance of sixty feet in all directions. The oil drums and paper sacks I'd seen behind the trailer were gone. As were the blackberries. Not even the dog collar remained to convince me I had seen a dog.

Spot fires continued to smolder in the trees and brush around us.

After Snoqualmie and our second engine from the Wilderness Rim satellite station arrived and began lobbing water high into the firs, the Snoqualmie officer sent a runner to tell me they'd found an object wedged into the fork of a tree approximately a quarter mile from ground zero, that they'd tentatively identified the object as a human head.

Everybody at the scene remained on pins and needles, looking for more body parts, but all we found was a mangled hand-Caputo's-the hospital dressing still in place. Just as I thought, they hadn't sewn his fingers back on.

It took an hour to get loose of the scene. I fielded questions, gave orders, explained what had happened to at least twenty different individuals, all the while promising my girls we would have lunch soon.

Morgan seemed more distraught than anyone, and after a while I began to suspect she might be overreacting to garner attention from me.

Just after the media arrived, two Eastside Fire and Rescue investigators showed up and began snapping pictures, focusing their questions on Ian, Ben, myself, and Karrie-the four who'd gotten closest to the trailer.

They were particularly curious about the fact that we'd visited Caputo yesterday.