As he stared toward the Twin Towers, Jay felt the strange and unfamiliar sensation of being overwhelmed. He’d spent years studying fire, learning its destructive ways and plotting creative, disciplined responses to every kind of catastrophe he could think of. Now, looking through a windshield the size of a big-screen television, Jay had a view that shamed his imagination: orange flames and gray-black smoke blasted from an enormous, angled hole in the topmost quarter of the North Tower, polluting a sky that had been as crystalline as a mountain lake. “Buckle up!” he called to his men. “We’re
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