by Brian Blose
On his way back out, he noticed a figure standing in the shadows and his heart began to race. Hess had spotted him. Feigning ignorance of his surveillance, he slunk towards the hotel's exit, digging into one nostril with a pinky as if oblivious.
No one followed him once he was outside. His feet felt light as they navigated him towards the train station.
Chapter 29 – Hess
He approached Elza as the others left the room. “So I need saltpeter?”
“And sugar.” She went to the cupboard to get paper and pencil. “Two parts oxidizer to one part fuel. Mix it together in water. Bring the solution to a boil. Once it becomes a thick paste, remove it from the heat and shape the material into lumps the size of a finger.”
He cleared his throat. “Which is the oxidizer? The sugar?”
“The saltpeter, Hess. It's potassium nitrate – nitrate means one nitrogen to three oxygen. You're making rocket fuel, so be careful. Make it in small batches. Don't let the mixture overheat. And when you feed them into the furnace, do it only a few at a time.”
Erik sidled up to them. “Rocket fuel, eh? I have some experience with oxyhydrogen gas. Burns nice and hot, but you gotta be extra-extra-extra-careful about explosions.”
“As I was saying, Hess, be careful. This is a solid fuel, so there will be an explosion hazard if too much ignites at once in an enclosed space. You'll have to watch the steam engine, too. Bring it fully up to temperature using coal. Too hot too fast –”
“And the boiler explodes. I'm familiar with the process.”
Elza pushed the hand-written instructions at him. “I know you are. Just be safe.”
They stood silent for another moment before separating. As he walked out the door, Erik nudged him. “So are we done stealing corn?”
“I'm not sure how much rocket fuel we can make. Why don't you do a load of maize? I'll get a few bags of bulk sugar and figure out how we're going to get inside the refinery.”
After Erik departed with the horses, Hess climbed the general store's fence once more. He searched the warehouse for half an hour before determining consumables weren't kept there. Then, he used two nails from the warehouse to pick the rear door of the store. The lock sprung open with hardly any effort, a combination of its poor craftsmanship and the fact that it only had two pins.
With abundant care, Hess eased the door open and slipped inside, closing up behind himself. He stood among shelving on the clerk's side of the counter. The clerk, a middle-aged woman, sat oblivious on a tall stool, penning something. Judging by the pile of paper, she wrote something consequential; a memoir or novel or perhaps even a treatise on a subject dear to her heart.
Hess ghosted along the shelving until he located the sugar. There were several sizes, ranging from one pound bags to fifty pound sacks. He tested the floor boards for give along his path, making a mental map of where not to step. Then he shifted the largest sack onto his shoulder and waltzed around potentially squeaky boards on his way to the door.
Checking that the clerk sat undisturbed, he opened the door, exited, and placed the sugar near the fence. Then he returned three more times to repeat the maneuver. After the final trip, he staged the sacks of sugar on a corner of the roof before climbing over the fence. He carried the sacks two at a time away from the store to stash them behind a rock.
Satisfied with himself, Hess moved on to study the saltpeter refinery. The complex of buildings sat in the center of town, patrolled by a guard enamored of catcalling women through gaps in the sturdy gate. His lewd comments drew a variety of responses. Some women ignored him, others called back insults, a few laughed at the attention, one even bent over to shake her rear in his direction – an action the guard very much appreciated.
Hess scouted the entire perimeter of the refinery, but the only place it didn't abut another adjacent property was along the street where a guard currently manned the gate to the yard. He identified his ideal route of bypassing the fence, which involved climbing the lintels along the main building's front to descend from the roof into the open yard, as well as a backup route, which would be to lasso a crenelation atop the fence and use heavy gloves to pass over the barbed wire.
Retracing his steps, Hess waited for Erik along the main street. Together, they loaded the sugar and rode to their staging area. Hess put aside a large skillet and made sure the wood stove was stocked and ready to light. Then they planned for their trip into the refinery that night.
Chapter 30 – Hess
Two guards sat on rickety stools by the gate, rolling cigarettes and complaining about their domestic lives loud enough for the echoes to reach Hess and Erik. Isolated phrases like “won't cook anymore”, “alcoholic”, and “man on the side” reached their ears, lacking the context they didn't need.
Erik leaned close. “Sure you don't want some stabby?”
Hess shook his head. Riding the edges of shadows, he reached the far side of the refinery's main building. Hess gauged the distance to the first window ledge, crouched with hands extended down to each side, and launched himself straight up. His palms smacked down on the lintel, fingers clenched and held.
He shimmied to one side, legs swinging like pendulums; pressed his weight onto toes and knees to stabilize his position; reached one hand to grasp the corner of the building, which he seized between his thumb on one side and the strength of his combined fingers on the other. The rough surface of the brick stung beneath his solid grip.
Hess worked his hand up the corner, re-positioned his toes to take advantage of the different angle, then pivoted the hand on the lintel to face palm down. Then he worked himself as high on the corner as possible while pushing himself up with the other hand. When he was as high as he could go in that position, he paused to gather courage.
Two quick breaths.
He pulled against his grip on the corner, pushed down with the other hand, and moved a foot onto the lintel. Continuing the dynamic movement before he could fall, Hess extended the planted leg to press himself up. His weight thrown off, he started to swing off the wall as if his hand on the corner were a hinge.
At the last moment, his hand from the lintel seized the side of the window casing, grasping with frantic strength. His momentum slowed, slowed, and stopped. Releasing an unsteady breath, Hess worked his other foot over so both were on the lintel.
Hess looked down and mouthed only two windows to go.
Erik mimed smacking his head.
At least I have friends who believe in me. Oh, crap, did I just think of Erik as a friend? That's a problem for later. I can't stay on the side of this building for long.
The distance between windows was less than the distance from the ground to the first one, so Hess was able to grab the next lintel by hopping instead of leaping. Using the same method, he worked his hands up, placed a foot, nearly fell, and caught himself.
He had to rest his hands a moment, so he wedged his head into the top of the window casing until the rough facing of the brick cut into the skin of his forehead. Using the tension of his spine, anchored by his feet and his head, Hess maintained his position while he shook out his cramped and bleeding hands.
After weighing the need for speed against his desire to heal his hands before continuing, Hess decided he couldn't afford five minutes. So he continued with only a two minutes break. His method barely got him onto the third lintel.
Breath ragged, Hess paused for another break. Now not only his hands were shaking, but his legs as well. His breaks might be good for his grip strength, but they were hell on his calves. Not good. Someone inexperienced might think of climbing in terms of upper body strength, but a skilled climber knew legs were every bit as critical as arms.
Before the shaking became too bad, Hess resumed his climb.
He reached one hand up and over the lip of the roof to feel at the slate shingles. The pitch was shallow, so he placed both hands on the lip. Then he hopped, pulled with both arms, swung his legs to one side, hooked a heel over the edge, and curl
ed his leg to bring his lower body up. He harnessed his upward momentum to roll over onto his back, laying on the edge of the sloping roof.
Hess gave himself several minutes to relax. Sitting up, he nearly fell off the roof and had to use his core muscles to redistribute his weight. At a snail's pace, he inched further up the slope of the slate tiles before transitioning to his side, then this knees, and finally onto his feet.
He waved in case Erik was watching, then padded across the roof to look down on the guards. They had moved on from discussing wives. The current topic of conversation was the prospect of better work on the mainland. Apparently, besides nitrate-rich soil and abundant sea life, the island had little to offer ambitious young men.
Hess moved past the guards, down the gated receiving yard to where the main building abutted a shorter one. He climbed down to the other roof, went to its edge, took a knee with his rear end and feet hanging out over empty air, and dropped to dangle by his hands. He fell to the loading dock two body lengths below, rolling as he hit. It left him winded and sore but uninjured.
After waiting to see if the guards would react, he slipped off the loading dock to search for an improvised weapon. The area was bare, so he contented himself with pulling free a loose cobblestone.
As the guards discussed how the governor's stubborn refusal to pay damages was costing the entire island the coal it needed to operate – coal the saltpeter refinery needed – Hess slunk up behind them. When he was in range, he lifted the cobblestone high and to one side, then brought it down with a mighty twist of his frame and all the force of his arms. The blunt instrument struck hard, sending the guard tumbling from his seat.
In a blink, the other guard jumped up and sunk a short dagger hilt-deep in Hess's eye socket. Hess stumbled back from the strike, tripped and fell. His hands hovered around the protruding hilt, afraid to touch it.
The guard opened his mouth to shout, then gasped as Erik's sword slipped into his side. Strong hands reached through the gate's slats and pulled the guard close. Erik seized the exposed throat and crushed it like cardboard. The hapless guard broke free and screamed a high-pitched fluting noise through his broken trachea.
He screamed and screamed, till he had to take a breath, whereupon he discovered the air only went one way in his throat. The guard sank to his knees beside Hess. In a final act of defiance, he aimed his collapse to hammer the knife deeper into Hess with his forehead.
Even as Hess swore at the renewed pain, he felt admiration for the man's grit.
“Open the gate, dagger-face.”
Hess fumbled at the pockets of the guards until he found a key. He stumbled to the gate and fitted key to lock. With a twist, the gate opened to admit Erik. “Pull that fucking thing out of your eye.”
Hess backed away from Erik. “The blade will vanish when I heal.”
“Whatever. Give me the keys.”
Erik opened the door to the loading dock and went inside the building.
They bumbled through the darkness, scattering haphazardly stacked pans, stepping into boxes of dirt, and colliding with industrial stoves. Finally, Erik located a lantern that he lit with a flint and steel.
Holding the lantern aloft, Erik led Hess deeper into the three-story building he had scaled earlier. The immense first floor held hundreds of desks with oversized mortars and pestles. Prominent signage in every direction read “ABSOLUTELY NO FIRE”.
They halted their tour of the desks to return to the original room by the loading docks. Erik kicked in a locked door to reveal bags filled with saltpeter. He hefted one. “Five pounds a piece, I think. How many do we need?”
“Four hundred pounds.”
“Please say you're fucking kidding me.”
“I wish I could.” Hess noticed light from outside and went to the nearest window. In the receiving yard, a handful of people stood around the corpses of the guards. Hess thought he saw a musket and at least two swords in the group. “While we're making wishes, I'd like those witnesses to not be here.”
Erik scowled out the window. “To state the obvious, this ain't good, Hessie. Way to go, Mr. Screamy Guard. The whole fucking town's coming out to check on their precious refinery. What the hell even makes this operation a refinery? It looks like a dirty bakery.”
“Let's go out one of the windows,” Hess said.
“You get started on that. I'm going to disobey some signage. The fire brigade will have to earn their keep tonight.”
Hess loaded a cart with bags and pushed it to a row of windows facing the yards of houses abutting the refinery. He shattered the glass and began dropping bags one at a time, counting as he did so.
When he returned to refill the cart, a frantic Erik ran into him. “We got to go. This saltpeter shit turns wooden desks into fucking matchsticks.”
“More bags first,” Hess shouted. Together they piled the cart high and then raced the smoke filling the room all the way to the window. They tossed bags by twos and threes, not bothering to count, not caring that a man ran towards them through the yard with a fire iron in his hands.
Hess jumped to the ground, twisting an ankle as he landed on a shifting pile of five pound saltpeter bags. The man raised the fire iron above his head and glared down at Hess.
And Erik crashed into him, burying a shard of glass into the man's neck mid-air. The man and Erik found their feet at the same time. The man noticed gushing blood and fell back with a look of horror on his face. Erik slapped blood-slicked hands to his cheeks and screwed his face up into the mirror expression of the man's. “Oh no, I cut your neck!”
Erik punted the toe of his foot into the man's testicles, then slammed the man head-first into the brick of the refinery. He flashed a big smile at Hess. “We should do this more often.”
They moved the bags to the front of the dead man's property, doing their best to balance speed and stealth. A bucket brigade was storming the refinery while an unheeded man shouted at no one in particular that water couldn’t put out a saltpeter-fed fire and they were throwing away their lives. In the confusion, Erik took a hand-drawn wagon from an old woman under the pretext of hauling back water to fight the blaze. She had sent her two sons with Erik to assist in loading “a dozen full rain barrels from the hotel” but the boys had vanished by the time the wagon pulled up in front of Hess. He pointedly avoided asking Erik about them.
After piling the wagon full, they dragged it down the main street and turned down the harbor road. The gloom painted the world in shades of gray, darker at the tree line, somewhat less so along their path. At one point, their wagon overturned in a rut they had doubtless carved themselves in previous trips with their travois. It took fifteen minutes to collect and reload as many of the sacks as they could find.
Hess ran ahead when they were close to start a fire and bring water to a simmer. It wasn’t until then that he realized his blunder. “We need a scale,” he told Erik in greeting.
“Well, too fucking bad. We ain’t got time for shopping.”
“Chemistry is done by weight, not volume. Help me rig up a scale. We can calibrate with the five pound bags.”
“There ain't time for perfection. This is the eleventh hour. Guesstimate.”
Hess snatched a bag from Erik, dumped it into the waiting water, then eye-balled approximately half the volume of sugar and added it to the solution. He did the same for a second pot, then alternated stirring each pan while Erik retrieved more water in a bucket, setting it close to the fire to preheat it.
When the mixture thickened, Hess removed it from the heat, rolled it into snakes, and pinched off lengths. Then he put fresh ingredients in each pan and put them on the stove again. They moved at a rapid pace, their process limited solely by the time it took water to boil. Batch after batch of solid state rocket fuel came out of the crude shack, to be placed in the emptied five pound sacks on a freight wagon already loaded with a portion of their conventional fuel.
Not long before dawn, they stopped their production. They had processe
d somewhere around forty of the five-pound bags. Both of them sagged with exhaustion as they loaded the freight wagon and watered their draft horses. They would need to make at least two trips to the pier to load the steamship’s fuel.
“I still need to get the rest of the supplies from the hotel,” Hess said.
Erik sighed. “Leaving me to load the rest of the damn logs.”
Hess began the trek back to the hotel. Pushing hard, he managed to reach the town just past dawn. As he trudged past the solemn town, sucking down gasps of stale smoke, angry shouts sounded. Hess looked up to see a group of five angry townies charging at him.
He shuffled back the way he’d come. At the first alley, he slipped down the gap between the houses and huffed towards the tree line, his pursuers hard on his heels. A sword flashed past his face, bare inches from flesh. Hess reached out a hand and seized the smooth trunk of a tree in passing, turning his momentum and sending his opponent past him.
Hess paused to catch his breath as the second man in line reached him. With a snarl on his face, the man executed a sloppy lunge. Hess stepped to the side of the blade, letting it rush past him. He seized the wrist and used his opposite hand to backfist the nose. Then the saber was his.
At the same time, the other men arrived. Three approached from the front while the one who had raced past him came from behind. Hess glanced to the man sitting on his behind with a bloody nose. He couldn’t afford to leave behind potential enemies. With a practiced lunge, Hess pierced the neck, driving his blade from one side of the trachea all the way through the neck to pierce the vertebrate.
While his first victim collapsed, Hess moved to place one of the men between himself and the rest of the group. The first rule of fighting multiple opponents was to not fight multiple opponents. Serial single engagements were much more survivable than a single parallel battle. He closed the distance, holding his blade at the ready. The man struck first. Parried. The man struck again. Parried hard. The man struck a third time. Hess dipped his point below his opponent’s blade, brought it up, established a clear line, and lunged to place steel through the upper rib cage. This time he got the heart.