I dropped my hand and swallowed. “I know. It’s just me.” I didn’t know what else to say. “I’m sorry.”
She nodded acceptance, but there was no way she would ever be happy about the situation. “Just go.”
I didn’t want to leave like that, but if Ken and Jim were waiting on me, things must have been about ready for the mission.
Some corner of my mind noted how funny it was that I had started thinking in military terms. Just like Jim said, “A grown man dressed up like GI Joe, playing at war.” The rest of my mind was on my wife. She stood just out of my reach, her anger flaring once more. I couldn’t leave like this. “Debra?”
She must have seen the question in my eyes, for her expression softened. “Go ahead, Lee. I’ll be okay.”
I dropped my gaze, understanding that this was all she could give me for now.
As I started to stand, my aches and pains became almost crippling. The simple act of getting to my feet abruptly became a painful process. Besides aching as I did from the previous day’s activities, I was stiff from getting too little sleep afterward on a cold concrete floor. Suddenly, I felt Debra at my side holding my arm, helping me stumble to my feet. She took mercy on me and hugged me. Then, she pushed me back. “Just make sure you come back in one piece.”
A lump in my throat choked off my answer, so I just nodded, turned, and headed back to Jim’s office.
I walked through the office door to find Wayne asleep on an ancient sofa that someone had dragged in. Ken stood in a corner on the other side of the room. He turned when he saw me, nodded, and went back to what he was doing. A few seconds later, he walked over and handed me a hot cup of something that smelled like coffee. Better yet, it actually tasted like coffee. I sighed contentedly. “Pure, unadulterated heaven!”
I saw how bloodshot his eyes were as he shook his head. “Nope. Just Colombian roast. Jim found some in a cabinet. Thought we might need some to help get us going.”
“Going?”
Jim walked in from the back, his own steaming cup in hand. I noticed the area around his left eye was now a deep blue. I winced at the thought that I had done that to him. Jim didn’t seem to notice it, though, as he picked up on the conversation. “Yep, you’re leavin’. Y’all need to be in position before sunrise, else you’re gonna be too easy to spot goin’ in.”
My shoulders slumped at the thought. “Already? Damn, Jim, I’m so tired I can hardly see straight.”
Jim laughed. “Hell, Leeland, at least you got a couple of hours. Me and Wayne have been workin’ all night.”
“You didn’t sleep?”
“Didn’t have time. I found Wayne out back, and he looked like he could use some help.”
“What did you come up with?”
“Somethin’ called Astrobrite, I think…”
“Astrolite?” I perked up. “You made Astrolite?”
“Yeah,” he answered, “And let me tell you something. That is some nasty smellin’ stuff when you’re mixing!”
Jim peered at me over his coffee from behind his desk. “By the looks of that grin on your face, I take it Astrolite is good news?”
“Good news? It’s probably the most powerful explosive there is, short of a nuclear reaction.”
The mayor suddenly appeared somewhat less than pleased. “Nuclear reaction?”
I laughed. “Don’t worry, Jim. That just means it has a high detonation velocity. There’s no danger of any more radiation.”
“You sure? I mean, if it’s that powerful, mebbe we should think a bit more about this.”
“Look, I’d be lying if I said I really understood all of it. But from what I’ve read, the way an explosive does its damage is by the rapid transfer of energy through a chemical or nuclear reaction. Astrolite uses a chemical reaction, not nuclear, so there’s no danger of radiation.”
“You ain’t helpin’ me any, Lee. If it can do as much damage as a nuclear explosion without the radiation, why didn’t the government use it instead of nukes?”
“I never said it can do as much damage as a nuke. I said that it’s the most powerful non-nuclear explosive. It does its damage with its speed.”
He didn’t seem convinced.
I leaned over his desk, snatched a pencil and a notepad, and wrote down an old high school formula, e=1/2ms2. “Okay, ’e’ is the amount of energy released. ’m’ is the mass, and ’s’ is the speed. It’s the reason why people can break boards and bricks with their hands. It isn’t that their hands are harder than the bricks. It’s simple physics.”
I looked up to see Jim and Ken still appearing confused. “Look at it like this. A man hits a brick with a punch that has an equivalent mass of two hundred pounds.” I scribbled hastily. “And a velocity of fifty miles an hour. Plug the numbers in, and the energy released is,” more quick math scrawls, “two hundred fifty thousand… uh, joules or dynes, or whatever the measurement is.”
“Ergs,” Wayne piped up from the couch, “but only after you convert to metric equivalents in your formula.”
I look over at where he still lay with his eyes closed, apparently half asleep. “Wayne! You explain it to them. You’re the chemistry teacher!”
His hand waved me off, as if it had volition of its own. The rest of his body remained motionless until his lips moved. “You’re doing fine. I’ll chime in if I hear you screw anything up.” His eyelids never even twitched.
Scowling, I turned back to my scratch paper. “Okay. Now, let’s say he hits twice as hard. Four hundred pounds, still traveling at fifty miles an hour…” I scribbled through the math again, “gives us five hundred thousand ergs.”
Wayne’s voice corrected once more, “’s not ergs ’til you convert it to metric.”
“Whatever,” I said. “But see what happens when you double the speed instead of the mass. Back to the original two hundred pounds, but now traveling at one hundred miles an hour gives us…” More scribbling. “One million ergs!”
“Not un-”
“I know! Not until I convert to metric! But I’m no good with metric units. So pretend I already did it, okay? The important thing is that the higher the detonation velocity…”
Jim finished, “The bigger the boom, right?”
“And then some.” I sipped some more of the coffee. “So how much did you make?
“About three gallons.”
I nearly sprayed my coffee all over him. “Three gallons? Ken, just one gallon of this stuff can bring down a house! What are we gonna do with three?”
Ken appeared to think about that for a second, mulling it over as he finished a sip of coffee. Then, without the slightest hint of humor, he replied, “We’re going to kick Larry’s ass.”
Ken and Jim had worked out a plan that called for two groups of fifty people to trickle into town over the next few hours. The first team’s objective was the stadium. We were to take out the tank, if possible, and get our people out and to the stadium.
The second team was to get to the hospital, where we had learned that some of our people had headed the night before. So far, our attackers had left the hospital alone since the doctors and nurses were treating Larry’s wounded along with our own. We couldn’t count on that being the case after we busted three thousand hostages out of the stadium, though. We had to plan on springing our people from both locations at the same time.
For once, I didn’t have to do anything but ride along, at least until we reached the edge of town, so I leaned my head on an ice chest in back and caught up on some much needed sleep.
I awoke when the vehicle pulled to a stop. Looking around, I found myself back in the yard at Amber’s. Ken yelled instructions to everyone.
“Leeland, you and Eric grab that ice chest in the back and bring it with you. Wayne, grab the Astrolite in the back of yours. Come on, people, gather ’round! Let’s move! We have to be in place before sunrise.” I noticed that each Humvee carried a couple of ice chests.
Within a few minutes, everyone circled around Ken
, much as we had the night before. This time, though, we met deeper in the woods, safe from any of Larry’s patrols.
Once he saw we were ready, Ken signaled for Eric and me to bring him the ice chest we had carried. The ice chest was quite light, so I waved Eric off, thinking to carry it up to Ken alone.
“Let Eric help you, Lee. We don’t want to take any chances with that stuff.”
I froze as I suddenly realized what I had been carrying so nonchalantly. I hoped no one noticed as I carefully backed away when Ken opened the chest and withdrew an odd-looking contraption consisting of a liquid-filled test tube topped with a black rubber stopper from which two wires gracelessly dangled-Wayne’s homemade blasting caps.
He had shown one of them to me before we left, and explained, “The Astrolite’s completely stable as long as you keep it away from the accelerator. In fact, I could probably drop a beaker of that stuff on the ground, and the only explosion I would need to worry about would be Ken and Jim blowing up at me for ruining several hours of work.
“But these little babies,” he held the test tube gingerly, “these are the touchy ones. The stoppers have been partially hollowed out, filled with gunpowder, sealed, and placed on the test tubes filled with HMTD.”
“Filled with what?”
“Sorry. I figured you’d know about it, since I found the recipe in one of your books.”
“Well, if I knew everything in my books, I wouldn’t need the books, would I?”
He shook his head. “Guess not. Well, HMTD is one of the less stable soups in your cookbook. Not as bad as nitroglycerine, but still pretty touchy. I run wires to the gunpowder and run a charge through the wires. This causes a spark, which sets off the gunpowder, which sets off the HMTD…”
“Which sets off the Astrolite.” I finished.
He had nodded and gently laid the glass tube down on his makeshift workbench. What I didn’t know at the time was that he had also devised a strange-looking contraption in which to carry those test tubes. It consisted of hundreds of strands of rubber bands that acted as a makeshift suspension system, protecting the caps from any sudden shock. A suspension system inside of an old ice chest, the same chest upon which I had rested my head during the trip out here, and from which Ken now gingerly extracted a single test tube.
Ken turned, giving everyone a chance to see exactly what he held. “Okay, people, it’s last chance time again. We’re splitting up after this. Group One is with me. We hit the stadium and take out the tank that we know is there. Group Two goes with Eric Petry to get our people out of the hospital.
“Do it quietly if you can, Eric. If you wait for us to start the fireworks, that might set up enough of a distraction for you to get in and out without the bad guys ever knowing about it.”
Eric nodded, obviously ready to get to it. “Group Two, gather ’round me!”
Ken interrupted. “Wait a second, Eric. I got something else to say here.” He paused for a minute, evidently trying to figure out the best way to say all that needed to be said. “Some of you were with us last night. We got caught with our pants down and lost some good people.”
I could see that he still blamed himself, but he didn’t make any excuses. “I didn’t expect it. And this time I’m counting on it being worse. So this is the last chance for you to turn around and go back. No one will think any less of you. I would rather have you leave now if you have any doubts, than to have you hesitate under fire and get yourself or someone else killed.” No one budged. Everyone had known from the beginning what they were getting into.
“Okay, I need twelve volunteers for extra hazardous duty. These twelve will have to go in alone. Not with each other. Totally alone.”
He had everyone’s attention with that one. He held up the hand with the test tube. “I have a dozen explosive charges that need to be carried into town separately. Six go with each group.” Voices muttered in protest.
“Wait a minute!” He raised his voice to cut off the objections. “These aren’t the main charge. They’re just homemade blasting caps.”
Just? I thought, recalling Wayne’s lecture. Just blasting caps?
“They’re mostly stable, and it’s not very likely that they’ll explode from anything less than someone actually dropping them, but there’s still the chance. The thing is, we can’t afford to have all of them together if one does explode, because then we lose all of them. Separately, if someone drops one, we only lose the one.” More murmuring, as people realized exactly what he was saying… or rather, what he wasn’t saying. He neglected to mention that if someone dropped one, we also lost the person carrying it.
“I’ll take one.”
Billy stepped forward and held out his hand. Ken pursed his lips and regarded the boy before him. Then he handed the tube to Billy. “You’re with Group One, right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You know where the Regency Warehouse is?”
Billy nodded. “Yes, sir.”
“All right. Get there as quickly as you can, but don’t let anyone else see you.” Billy turned and headed out, walking carefully. The crowd parted before him like the Red Sea before Moses.
Ken called after him, “Be careful, boy.”
Billy grinned nervously. “I will.” With that, he turned his full attention back to the delicate task at hand.
“Who else?” The rest of us raised our hands at once, shamed into volunteering by a boy who was a slave, who couldn’t even claim he was fighting for his home.
Ken distributed the packages to twelve individuals. “Get to the warehouse as quickly as you can. Be careful, but be fast.”
He turned to the rest of us. “The rest of you divide up into five-man groups. One group leaves every five minutes. Make sure every group has someone in it that knows where their objective is. I don’t want anyone getting lost and giving us away. I also don’t want anyone seen! Understand?” We all nodded.
“Good. Now, we don’t know when, or even if, our people are going to make a break for it. We have reason to believe that if they do, it will be either tonight or tomorrow night. That means Group One gets into position, and we wait. We wait all day long. You can sleep if you want, or play pinochle for all I care, but nobody leaves cover once we’re set. If nothing happens tonight, we wait until tomorrow night, all day long again. Most of these chests have food and water in them. There should be enough to last two days, easily. After that, if nothing has happened, we’ll slip back out of town and try to figure out something else. But our best guess is that we’ll be plenty busy before that happens.
“Group Two, you wait ’til you hear from us. You don’t make a move until I tell you to. This hit has to be synchronized, or it’s all wasted effort. Do not let yourselves be seen. Some of these guys have night vision goggles so don’t count on hiding in the shadows. Pretend it’s broad daylight, and plan every step accordingly.” He looked us all over again. “Questions?”
When no one piped up, he turned. “Group One with me. Group Two with Eric. We stay in touch by radio.” He looked around one last time. “Okay, folks, let’s go.”
I was in Group One since I’d had the most recent experience with the setup at the stadium and knew the route we’d taken to avoid contact with Larry’s boys. Going in was actually anticlimactic compared to all the excitement I’d had helping Sarah get into the stadium. There was no gunfire, no yelling or screaming. We snuck in like proverbial mice, quiet as….
It took us twice as long to get in, and I felt strange as we passed by the volunteers making their way, step by careful step, into town, but not one of us was spotted, and we all made it without incident.
Chapter 15
August 18 / Sunset
Cris, pleurs, larmes viendront auec couteaux,
Semblant fuyr, donront dernier assaut,
L’entour parques planter profonds plateaux,
Vifs repoussez amp; meurdris de plinsaut.
Cries, weeping, tears will come with knives,
Seeming to fle
e, they will deliver a final attack,
Parks around to set up high platforms,
The living pushed back and murdered instantly.
Nostradamus — Century 10, Quatrain 82
The Regency Warehouse was two buildings down from where my group had holed up the night before and turned out to have much nicer accommodations, considering the fact that there were plenty of chairs, sofas, and even a few mattresses in stock. We put a half-dozen people on rotating guard duty, and the rest of us, myself included, slept as much as we could.
I awoke slowly to the familiar feel of someone shaking my shoulder. “Leeland, wake up!”
I saw upon opening my eyes that the sun was beginning to set. Ken stood over me smiling. I had slept the day away. Considering how exhausted the last few days’ activities had left me, I wasn’t terribly surprised. Even after all the sleep I had just gotten, I still felt a little groggy.
“Good grief,” I growled. “Don’t you ever sleep?”
“Not when I’m surrounded by bad guys.”
That got my attention. “What’s going on? Is it starting?” I grabbed my gear, scrambling to strap my weapons in place.
“Calm down, Lee. No need to panic. Just thought you ought to know. Billy spotted Sarah.”
“Where?”
“Come on, I’ll show you.”
We headed to the third floor, where Billy and three others knelt just inside one of three windows to watch the activities around the stadium. Ken and I carefully crept over to join them.
Billy handed Ken a small pair of binoculars. “She’s still out there at the front fence.”
Ken peered through the window. A moment later he offered the binoculars to me. “Just at the edge of the chain link near the entrance.”
Sure enough, there was Sarah at the front of a crowd of people. She had worked her way to the edge of the refugees and now stared out through the fence at a tank that barred her escape. She wore a desperate expression. She had no way of knowing we were there. “Anyone signaled her?”
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