Dead Man's Footsteps

succeeded.
    A short distance ahead there was a barrier across the road, with the bar raised for the convoy of vehicles to pass through. Two young soldiers manned it, facing his way. They wore dusty combat fatigues and GI helmets, and were holding machine guns in an aggressive stance, as if they were intending to find something to shoot at soon in the new War on Terrorism.
    A crowd of what looked like tourists, among them a group of young Japanese teenagers, stood staring, taking photographs of just about everything – the dust-coated store fronts, the sheets of paper and flakes of ash that lay ankle deep in places on the street. There seemed to be even more grey dust than on Tuesday, but the ghosts were less grey. They looked more like people today. People in shock.
    A woman in her late thirties with matted brown hair, wearing a smock and flip-flops, with tears streaming down her cheeks, was weaving in and out of the crowd, holding up a photograph of a tall, good-looking man in a shirt and tie, saying nothing, just looking at each person in turn,silently imploring one of them to give a sudden nod of recognition. Yeah, I remember that guy, I saw him, he was fine, he was heading …
    Just before he reached the soldiers, he saw on his left a hoarding with dozens of photographs taped to it. Most were close-ups of faces, a few of them mounted on Stars and Stripes backgrounds. They had clear cellophane wrapped round to rainproof them and all bore a name and handwritten messages, the most common of which was: HAVE YOU SEEN THIS PERSON?
    ‘I’m sorry, sir, you can’t go past here.’ The voice was polite but firm.
    ‘I’ve come down to work on the pile,’ Ronnie said, putting on a phoney American accent. ‘I heard they’re needing volunteers.’ He looked at the soldiers quizzically, glancing warily at their guns. Then, in a choked voice, he said, ‘I got family – in the South Tower on Tuesday.’
    ‘You and most of New York, buddy,’ said the older of the soldiers. He gave Ronnie a smile, a kind of helpless, we’re-all-in-this-shit-together smile.
    A backhoe excavator, followed by a bulldozer, rumbled through the barrier.
    The other soldier pointed a finger down the street. ‘Make a left, first left, you’ll see a bunch of tents. They’ll kit you out, tell you what to do. Be lucky.’
    ‘Yeah,’ Ronnie said. ‘You too.’
    He ducked under the barrier and, after only a few more strides, the whole vista of the devastated area started opening up before him. It reminded him of pictures he had once seen of Hiroshima after the atomic bomb.
    He turned left, unsure of his bearings, and followed the street for a short distance. Then, ahead of him, the Hudson suddenly appeared, and right by the river he saw a wholemakeshift encampment of stalls and tents at the edge of a massive area of rubble.
    He walked past an upturned sports utility vehicle. A shredded fireman’s jacket lay on the ground near it, yellow bands on the grey, dusty, empty uniform. One sleeve had been ripped off and lay some distance from it. A fireman in a dusty blue T-shirt, sitting on a small mound of rubble, was holding his head in one hand, a water bottle in the other, looking as if he couldn’t take much more.
    In a momentary respite from the helicopters, Ronnie heard new sounds: the roar of lifting gear, the whine of angle cutters, drills, bulldozers, and the intermittent warble, wails and shrieks of mobile phones. He saw an ant-line of people, many in uniforms and hard hats, entering the cluster of tents. Others were queuing at stalls made from trestle tables. There were new smells here too, of spit-roasted chicken and burgers.
    In a daze, he suddenly found himself in line, passing a stall where someone handed him a bottle of water. At the next stall he received a face mask. Then he went into a tent, where a smiling, long-haired guy who looked like a superannuated hippie, handed him a blue hard hat, a torch and a spare supply of batteries.
    Cramming his baseball cap into his pocket, Ronnie put on his face mask and then the hard hat. He passed another stall, where he declined an offer of socks, underwear and work boots, and continued out of the rear entrance. Then he followed the ant-line past the blackened shell of a building. An NYPD cop in a hard hat and a filthy blue stab vest trundled past on a green tractor, towing what looked like plastic body bags.
    Beyond a blackened leafy tree, Ronnie saw a bird flying above a skeleton in the