Fires of Midnight (22 page)

Authors: Jon Land

BOOK: Fires of Midnight

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J
ohnny Wareagle laid Joshua Wolfe across a lab table in one of the classrooms in the vacant school’s science wing. They had passed the nurse’s office, locked up for the night, on the way. Blaine had shot his way through the door and emerged with a first-aid kit in hand.

“Here,” he said, offering it to Susan.

She didn’t so much as look up from Josh’s inert body. “Unless there’s a portable defibrillating machine in there, don’t bother.”

She was compressing the boy’s chest again as Blaine positioned himself to take over the breathing portion of the CPR.

“This is no good,” she said, her breathing growing labored. “We’re going to lose him.”

“No defibrillator. Sorry.”

“Not yet,” Susan said, looking around the room before fixing her stare on Johnny Wareagle. “Take over for me. Please.”

Johnny slid into place without missing a beat, his motions surprisingly gentle considering the power he was capable of exerting.

Susan disappeared briefly into an adjacent storage room located between this and another science lab. She reemerged holding what looked like a long, thin black box. Blaine recognized it as a simple voltage capacitor, a staple in every school science lab for use in any experiment dealing with electricity. He watched as she stripped the wires free of its back, revealing
two pairs identical in all ways but color. She left the capacitor on another table near the closest electrical outlet and then strung the red and blue wires toward Josh. Johnny Wareagle suspended his rhythmic pumping long enough to allow her to strip open the boy’s shirt and place the ends of the wires on either side of his pale chest.

Blaine couldn’t believe his eyes. “You’re not going to …”

“He’ll die if I don’t try.”

Johnny went back to pumping, Blaine to breathing. Susan returned to the capacitor and lowered the white and black wires toward the electrical outlet.

“Stand clear on my signal. Ready …
now
!”

A brief sizzling sound followed and the lights dimmed momentarily as Josh’s body lurched upward. Blaine started administering CPR again while Johnny felt the boy’s heart. He looked at Susan and shook his head.

“Get ready to stand clear again. Ready …
now
!”

And again she jabbed the black and white wires into the wall socket, pulling them out after a single count.

Josh’s body jumped again, back arching as the current jolted his body. Johnny Wareagle gave a great sigh and nodded.

“He’s breathing!” Blaine proclaimed as Susan rushed back to the boy.

“Normal cardiac rhythm,” she announced happily, raising the ear she had lowered to his chest.

Watching her making use of whatever she could find to save the boy’s life was eerily familiar to McCracken. In Vietnam he had seen plenty of medics at work in the field, poorly equipped and under intolerable conditions, men who could save kids who’d lost a chunk of their stomachs or skulls with no more than what they could carry in their backpacks. Holding them tight, soothing them with words while they waited for the drugs to take effect. Miracle workers in every sense of the word. It was easy to rip flesh apart. The real heroes were the ones who put it back together.

Watching Susan now, that was what he thought of. She moved with the same refined urgency the Nam medics did; she had the same
eyes
. Professional and unyielding. They could look into the gristle of a grunt’s shrapnel or bullet-scorched wound and tie the ruptured arteries off with a shoelace, if that’s what it took.

“He’s not out of the woods yet,” she reported. “Far from it.”

“It won’t matter unless the Indian and I can work
our
kind of magic,” McCracken told her.

“In here, Blainey,” Johnny said from the entrance to the storage room. McCracken joined him inside and saw the chemicals lined up in jars and containers filling shelves from floor to ceiling.

“Charcoal … sulphur … and … saltpeter,” he said as he pulled each from the shelves. “Everything we need, Indian.”

“Just about, Blainey.”

McCracken was nodding, his thoughts mirroring Wareagle’s. “Some one-inch PVC pipes—foot-long connectors, preferably—and seals to go atop them.”

“Heavy-duty twine, too, for fuses,” Johnny added.

“All likely to be available in the wood or metal shop,” McCracken suggested.

Johnny hurried off, leaving Blaine to his part of the work. He had no idea how long they had before the school would come under siege by Group Six troops. It would take a certain amount of time to gather and equip Fuchs’s men as well as transport them to the school. Say half an hour maybe, twenty minutes at the very least.

He cleared off a table in the center of the storage room and placed on it the three jars he had pulled from the shelves.

“Gunpowder,” Susan said, reading their labels from the doorway.

“How’s the kid?”

“His vital signs are normal. He’s stable for now.”

“Good, because I need you. There are some candles there on the right.” And, after Susan quickly located them, “Break them into small pieces while I start mixing these powders up. Then melt them. You’ll find the Bunsen burners over—”

“I see them.”

He half watched her pile the resulting fragments of wax into a dish over a Bunsen burner he had found on another shelf. The hiss of its blue flame splashed heat upward and the wax began to melt almost instantly.

Satisfied, he turned his attention to emptying the proper amounts of sulphur, saltpeter and charcoal into a plastic bowl and swirled them together. That done, he located a tray containing a dozen large test tubes and rested it on the table next to the bowl half filled with what was now gunpowder. The tubes jangled together in their slots. He stuck a funnel in the first and held it in place while Susan filled it. They repeated the process with the other tubes, enough gunpowder to fill ten in all.

When they were finished, Blaine searched the shelves until he found a glass jar containing potassium nitrate.

“What’s that for?” Susan asked him.

“Turning our twine into fuses once the Indian gets back with it.”

He had just poured the potassium nitrate into a steel bowl when Johnny Wareagle returned and set a box down on the counter adjacent to the table Susan and Blaine been working on.

“Eight pieces of PVC piping,” he said to both of them, displaying one of the sections. It was a foot long by an inch and a half in diameter. McCracken laid the pipes out in a neat row before him while Wareagle began the process of sealing their bottoms with hard rubber stoppers. Susan, meanwhile, got ready to pour in the contents of the test tubes they had filled.

“Not yet,” Blaine told her, his eyes sweeping about the shelves again. “One more thing we’ve got to add …”

By the time Wareagle finished sealing the bottom ends of the PVC pipes, McCracken had found what he was looking for: ajar of phosphorus. He took the first finished pipe and filled it almost to the one-quarter point with the shiny gray powder. He repeated that process with the remaining seven while Wareagle poured a bit of water atop the evened-off powder and Susan funneled the melted wax into a narrow beaker. Then she poured a small measure atop the water in each of the eight plastic pipes.

While Susan poured the wax, Blaine turned his attention to the twine Johnny had brought with him from the shop. Working in tandem, they cut off eight foot-long strands and laid them in the bowl of potassium nitrate to soak, turning them flammable.

Turning them into fuses.

By that time the wax had hardened, trapping the water and phosphorus inside the pipes and assuring separation from the gunpowder they poured in through funnels. Susan managed to locate eight hard rubber test tube stoppers of the proper diameter to fit the top of the pipes, each equipped with a hole which would save them the trouble of drilling one to accommodate the makeshift fuses. Blaine twisted the stoppers into the open tops of the pipes and squeezed them in as far as they would go.

Johnny had already removed the foot-long strips of twine from the bowl of potassium nitrate and laid them across some paper towels on the table.

“Five minutes to dry, Indian.”

“Leaving us time for other projects.”

“Other
projects?”

“The spirits were kind to us tonight, Blainey. I found something else in the shop area we can use.”

“N
ot bad, Indian,” Blaine said when he saw what Johnny had waiting for him in the lobby.

The logistics of the school’s sprawling layout made enacting an elaborate defense difficult at best. The two-story main wing of the building, which contained the science labs and lobby, ran north and south, while a pair of parallel one-story wings connected to it here and next to the nurse’s office ran east and west. The main wing was closer to the woods lying on the outer rim of the playing fields which extended the length of the parallel corridors, all the way to the street beyond where the enemy was undoubtedly amassing. Primary points of access, then, were three: the main entrance, and the two hallways accessible via a second school entrance too far away—and close to the street—to be defensible. Clearly they could not stop the enemy from entering; their strategy turning toward cutting off their approach to the main wing. And the twin tanks
Johnny Wareagle had hauled up from the school’s shop would certainly prove beneficial here.

“Acetylene,” Blaine said, gazing at them.

Johnny had placed the tanks at the head of the hallway on the school’s right side where it joined with the lobby They would be visible from atop the stairwell leading to the second floor directly behind them but, more importantly, not from the main entry doors on the right past the main office.

Blaine watched Wareagle produce a hammer from his back pocket and carefully begin tapping the valves on each of the twin tanks. Too soft would have too slow an effect. Too hard might pop them off prematurely. Johnny fell into an easy rhythm, the
chink-chink
sound no louder than a clock’s ticking.

“One more hard knock will do it, Blainey,” he said when McCracken returned from the nearby school library with a pair of huge dictionaries.

Blaine gazed down the hall that led to the library and the other wing of the building. A pair of double doors stood at the foot of a slight decline sixty feet away. Anyone entering from the opposite end of the building and taking this corridor would have to pass through those doors to get to the main wing.

Johnny followed his eyes and his thoughts. “They open to the outside, Blainey.”

“Meaning someone coming toward us from the other end of the building would have to
pull
them … .”

They looked at each other, no need for further discussion. Together they centered the tanks directly in front of those doors at the very start of the hall’s decline. While Johnny held the tanks in place, Blaine positioned the books so the loosened valves would strike them if toppled. Then he fastened one end of the heavy twine they had used to make fuses for the pipe bombs to the top of the acetylene tanks at the same time Wareagle ran the remainder out all the way to the closed double doors. He looped the twine through both handles and pulled until it stretched taut while McCracken held fast to the tanks so they would do no more than wobble from the strain.

“That’s one route of access to us covered, Blainey.”

“And I’ve got an—”

“Hey,” Susan Lyle called from near the stairwell that spiraled up to the school’s second floor. She was holding a large glass jug in either hand. The strain of lugging them had turned her face beet red. “I thought you might be able to use these.”

Blaine gazed briefly at Johnny before speaking. “What are they?”

“This,” she said, looking to her right, “is ammonium hydroxide. Doesn’t like oxygen. Mixing the two makes lots of problems for whoever’s
around.” Susan looked to her left now. “And this is sulfuric acid. Doesn’t like water. Soon as they mix …”

“We get the idea,” McCracken told her. “Kid still holding his own?”

“For now, but until he regains consciousness we won’t know how deep the damage goes. Serious electric shock is known to, well …” Her voice faded out at the end, almost breaking.

“What is it?”

“It should have … been me. The charge … He dove in front of it.”

“You saved his life. Makes you even.”

“Not if he doesn’t recover.”

“Blame Fuchs.”

“That won’t help if he dies.”

“You’ve got to
make
it help, Doctor. It’s how you get through.”

“We were talking about me, not you.”

“Lessons of experience. Figured I’d share them.”

Wareagle’s eyes shifted to the wall-length window that ran along part of the hallway, attracted to it like a dog to a sudden scent.