“Hey pal, look around,” the big bruiser of a fireman said without stopping or looking. “Everyone here is dying. I got twelve people trapped over there. I can’t help you right now.”
Hiccock searched for another emergency worker but he could see they were all busy. All involved in one hundred individual battles with death. He ran to the abandoned Rescue 1 truck. All the tool lockers were open and empty. No medicine, no radios. Then he got an idea. He went around the back and looked for the spare tire. They hafta have a spare on this rig. Off the back and below the chrome-coated diamond plate he found the tire well and the heavy-duty hydraulic jack. It felt like it weighed a ton but he cradled it in his arms, along with the pipe that fit in the jack, and headed back to the woman. Halfway there he heard the Bronx cop call out to him.
“Hey, stop. Where are you taking that thing?”
“I got a woman trapped here, get someone to help me!”
He reached the woman and assessed the situation, not sure what he was going to do next. The woman was losing consciousness. “Hey! What’s your name? Lady, what’s your name?”
“Shelly,” she said distantly.
Hiccock saw a place where he might wedge the jack. “Shelly, huh? Is that short for Michelle?”
“Who are you?” she asked.
“Bill. At your service!” He inserted the pipe into the jack and started pumping it.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m getting you free. How are you doing?”
“I think I’m going to… throw up. The… pain is so… horrible.”
The jack tightened up under the twisted beam. Hiccock continued pumping. The concrete below the jack started to crack. He guessed the woman was about fifty and she was fading again. “Shelly! Shelly! Stay with me, Shelly!” He saw her snap out of it. “Shelly are you married?”
“Yes. Oh God! My leg … it hurts.”
“Just a little longer; this is starting to work.” He was lying. The beam hadn’t moved, but the concrete below the jack was turning to powder. He stopped. He scrambled over to the edge of the platform on his hands and knees and looked at its underside. There were steel cross-members at even intervals supporting the slabs of concrete. The jack was just a few inches to the right of one of them. He flipped the pipe and fitted the notched end to the valve on the base of the jack that released the hydraulics. The piston relaxed but didn’t lower enough to free the jack. He reached in and pulled down on the piston with all his strength.
“What’s your husband’s name, Shelly?” His voice was strained with exertion.
“Mario.”
The piston budged only about half an inch but it was enough. He repositioned the jack over the seam in the concrete right above the steel crossbeam and started pumping again.
“What’s he do? Shelly! Your husband, Mario, what does he do?”
“He, he imports… I can’t feel my… ”
“Imports what, Shelly? Keep talking to me, what does he import?” The beam started to groan as the jack applied enough lift to raise a truck.
“Dried fruit and nuts.”
“That’s a new one on me, Shelly!” The beam was lifting ever so slowly. As it rose, other pieces of the fallen structure started to snap and buckle, each threatening to re-collapse as the pressure from the jack fought upward against the weight bearing down.
Hiccock caught sight of a cop from the corner of his eye. “Good, you’re here! I almost have her free. When I say, pull her out.”
The jack was now bending the beam as it lifted it. Hiccock saw that the whole thing was starting to tilt toward him. He kept pumping but tried to keep his action purely up and down.
“Officer, this is Shelly. I told her we were going to get her out of here.”
“Yes we are,” the cop said, as he wearily looked up at the collapsed structure.
The jack and the beam were starting to tip over. Hiccock placed his foot on the jack and pushed with all his might to keep it upright.
“I think I can pull her out now,” the cop said.
“Now or never,” Hiccock said, his leg fully extended.
The cop grabbed Shelly under the shoulders and started to pull. She screamed. Her leg was coming out shattered, bloody, and flattened, but moving out. Hiccock felt the jack tipping, the weight of the station starting to overcome the height he had created.
“Come on. Hurry, I can’t hold it much longer.”
“Just another few inches,” the cop said over Shelly’s screams.
Hiccock looked up and saw the whole roof and structure start to fall over to crush him. From the corner of his eye, he saw the cop drag Shelly clear to the edge of the platform. Hiccock was now in a helpless situation; if he stayed where he was, he would be crushed by the tons of stuff on top of him. If he moved, the jack would give way and cause it to happen anyway. The sweat poured from his forehead. He decided he couldn’t just wait for the thing to fall over. Mentally he counted to three, then pushed off from the jack in an attempt to scramble out from under the falling debris. But the jack went the other way when he pushed off from it and the whole structure started to come down.
Suddenly ten poles hit the concrete like javelins. They formed an instant wedge of protection as the weight of the roof was counter-levered by them. Hiccock got out from under the overhanging mangled roof to see ten firemen, straining with their pike poles, staving off the collapse.
As soon as he was out, the big bruiser, who didn’t have time for him before, commanded, “Let her go.” The firemen jumped back with their tools and the remaining part of the structure fell with a huge crash.
“Thanks,” Hiccock said, watching the wreckage he could have been buried under.
“No problem,” was all the fireman said before he and the rest of his Rescue 1 men went off to save someone else.
Catching his breath, Hiccock looked over at Shelly. “How’s she doing?” he asked the cop.
“She’s out cold but she’s still breathing.”
Two EMTs with Fort Lee New Jersey Volunteer Ambulance Corp patches on their sleeves appeared with a stretcher. “We’ll take it from here.”
Hiccock turned to survey the nightmare around him. There weren’t going to be a lot of happy endings like Shelly’s tonight.
CHAPTER TWO
“Sixty seconds to detonation,” squawked the box.
Even in the air-conditioned, electronically filtered environment of the SSC, a slick sweat covered Professor Richard Parnes’s face as the concluding stages of FINAL SWORD played out on the large-format displays in front of him. He was fully aware of the massive amount of death and destruction this operation could create. Nevertheless, for the safety of America, he had to continue with this mission in order to guarantee that the United States would remain the dominant power on earth.
“Disable safeties, arm firing circuits,” Parnes said into his headset. From his raised console, he looked down at members of his team throwing switches twenty feet in front of him. Mentally he retraced his wiring design and the triggering sequence, the precise timing of which would release the initial impulse of focused energy into the dirillium base. From there on it would be nature’s sequence of neutrons smashing into atoms releasing more neutrons to smash more atoms’ nuclei until the whole thing exploded into a rough approximation of hell.