Monster Hunter Memoirs: Grunge - eARC (33 page)

Feet wet.

* * *

“There is no way we can survive penetrating directly into the cistern,” Brad said, pointing out the cistern on the map. It was laid out on a table in the “crisis management” tent set up by city engineering.

The city engineer had been briefed in when the MCB realized it was that serious. So had the fire chief. They were still grappling with Portland being overrun with giant spiders but trying manfully to ignore it. Shaw told me, later, that the fire chief had pulled her aside and tried to get her to admit this was all some sort of cockamamie drill. She’d taken him down to the bum encampment, shown him some of the spider silk and asked him where she could get some more.

“Well, we can’t just blow it up,” the city engineer said. “It’s nearly a football field in length and width. That would make one hell of a big cavern in the city. And there are houses on it.”

“We can evacuate them if we have to,” Special Agent Elbert Mathis said. “We
will
have to. Shaw, get Portland PD on that if you will.”

“Got it,” Shaw said, making a note. “Build up of potentially toxic gases detected by city engineering in an abandoned cistern? Possibility of explosion. Some fires have already occurred. Probably nothing but we’re evacuating you for your own safety.”

The spiders had broken off pursuit after Phil’s little present. But that didn’t mean they were done. I was of the opinion all those homes should have been evacuated two days ago. The spiders were going to be looking for new victims soon.

“You bucking for a promotion to MCB?” I asked, grinning.

“Bite your tongue,” she said. “No offense, Special Agent.”

“MCB is the worst job in the government,” Mathis said. “Probably the worst in the world. And when you get briefed in on everything? You never get another wink of sleep and realize that, yeah, it’s one of the most important in the world. The shit that’s out there makes this look like
Disneyland
. Not getting the job done. So if not into the cistern? What?”

“We’re going to have to drive them out,” Brad said. “Set up a trap in the tunnel and drive them all into it.”

“Got a ton of pesticide around?” Jesse said then looked at the scale of the map. “Twenty tons?”

“This is bad enough I’m thinking of calling for a ton of VX gas,” Mathis said.

“Not in my county,” Shaw said.

“Spiders don’t react to standard pesticides,” I said. “They’re fairly resistant to organo-phosphates, period. So VX would hurt us more than them. They’d die, don’t get me wrong, but they’re more resistant.”

“You know this how?” Mathis asked.

“I’m a fund of sometimes useful knowledge,” I said. “Fire chief?”

“Yes, sir?” the chief said. He was still sort of boggling.

“Know if there’s an
ethanol
plant in town?” I asked. “Or a transfer station? Somewhere we can get a tanker-car full of ethanol?”

“You planning on getting ripped, Chad?” Shaw asked.

“After the day I’ve had?” I said. “What spiders don’t like is any form of alcohol. Anything with an OOH chain, chemically. Methanol or isopropyl would work but they’re also poisonous to humans. Ethanol is but to a much lesser degree. If there’s somewhere we can pump ethanol into the cistern, that will drive them out or kill them. And if there are any surviving b…transients they might survive. Not that I’d want to after a sassus bite. But that’s a possibility.”

“There’s an ethanol plant over on 148th Avenue,” the fire chief said. Anything as flammable and potentially dangerous as ethanol a fire chief would know where it was made and stored.

“There’s a water test pipe,” the city engineer said. “Somewhere. Has to be with a cistern…” He flipped through the sheets. They were really old diagrams. Thank God for bureaucrats who were pack-rats for information. “There. But that’s…” He pulled out another map and considered the two. “I think it’s buried in some home-owner’s backyard. Somewhere.”

The cistern had once been in open country. Then Portland had expanded.

“Get a metal detector,” Mathis said. “Find it.”

“But if you drive them out you still have to kill them,” the fire chief said.

“Obviously,” Brad said.

“How?” the chief asked.

“We’ve got an M-2 fifty-caliber machine gun, two hundred claymores, three hundred pounds of C4 and more ammo than an army division in the U-Haul,” I said.

“I really want in your U-Haul,” Shaw said.

“Glad to give you a personal guided tour,” I said. “Very personal.”

“What I thought,” the chief said, ignoring the byplay. “You realize that ethanol is flammable.”

“I’ve set enough curtains on fire pretending to be a dragon,” Jesse said. “Yeah.”

“And in a confined space it will, let me make this very clear,
explode
,” the chief said.

“The force of such an explosion is a function of the amount of accelerant and the area of confinement,” Phil said. “I’ll calculate the maximum amount of ethanol to pump in to prevent structural collapse.”

“You can do that?” the chief said.

“I can do that,” Phil said.

“He can do that,” Brad added. “The question is if it’s enough to get the spiders out.”

“They really don’t like ethanol,” I said. “It’s like tear gas for them. Fucks up their book lungs.”

“You probably rock at Trivial Pursuit, don’t you?” Shaw said.

“Not the only place I rock, honey.”

“Would you two get a room?” Louis asked.

“Call me ‘honey’ again and it’ll be the morgue,” Shaw said.

“Chief, if you would arrange for the tanker of ethanol,” Brad said, still looking at the maps. “Engineer, find the inlet pipe or whatever. Shaw, FBI, if you would coordinate on clearing all the potentially affected neighborhoods. Despite my assurance and Phil’s, these structures are old and creaky. So, yes, we might just end up with the Portland Crater. That’s a chance we’re going to have to take. I’ll point out that my team is going to be right in the center of it and just as likely to be buried. We’d appreciate a rescue plan being in place. One that assumes all the spiders are terminated.

“While those arrangements are being made, we’re going back in. We’ll recon to see if the spiders have cleared and start setting up an ambush. That will take time. Which you have to get your end ready. We’ll pay for the ethanol. Someone else, probably fire personnel, are going to have to do the pumping. You probably want to have the actual ethanol tanker and whoever is going to be using it beyond the edge of the cistern.”

That was the most words in one breath I’d ever heard Brad say.

“That sounds like a plan,” Mathis said. “A risky one but the best we’re going to get.”

“The ‘underground toxic chemical buildup’ is ethanol,” I added. “Due to a rare form of yeast that has been breeding in the old cistern. That will explain any smell. Might want to keep the ethanol sign off the truck when you bring it in. If it all goes to hell and we get buried, you can tearfully talk about a specialty company that was brought in to handle the hazardous emergency and lost their lives when the ethanol detonated while being cleared.”

“I’ll get started on the press release immediately,” Mathis said. “Just in case.”

“Just hoping is more like,” I said, grinning.

“We got gear to move,” Brad said, straightening up.

“Why?” I asked. “Let’s just back the U-Haul down. We can even set up the Ma Deuce in the back and use it for cover.”

“And I have to go clear neighborhoods,” Shaw said, sniffling theatrically. “I wanna shoot the Ma Deuce!”

“Maybe later,” I said. “But you gotta be
really
nice to me. Honey.”

* * *

We backed the U-Haul down. It was tighter than with the van but it fit.

Louis was in the back manning the Ma Deuce. Why Louis? We drew straws and he won, lucky bastard. Roy was the assistant gunner feeding ammo. Why Roy? Nobody trusted him anywhere else. Phil and Brad were in the back working on gear as we rolled. Jesse drove.

Aware that the small tubes on the walls of the maintenance tunnel could be used by the spiders, I’d drawn the really short straw and was up on top of the cab of the truck, prone, Uzi in hand and back in armor, watching for infiltrators. So far so good.

We were finally back to the tube I’d crawled through. It was about two hundred yards from the bend. Far enough back to set in a serious mechanical ambush.

That was the technical term for what we were planning. Most of the firepower was going to be mines and explosives, thus the “mechanical.”

We started at the far end of the ambush, backing the truck down to save on walking and as a means of rapid exit if necessary. Jesse moved to the front, by the driver’s door, to keep an eye on infiltrators from that direction. Louis, Roy and Brad, most of the time, were in the back watching the main avenue of approach.

That left Phil and I laying in most of the explosives. Which suited me just fine.

I’d been trained in laying in claymores in the Marines. The main difference was those were assumed to be blown by an individual Marine infantryman using a clacker. What?

Ahem.

The M18A1 is a Directional Antipersonnel (or anti spider in this case) Mine. In form it is a small, green, curved, plastic box with four folding spikes on the bottom, two on either side, for feet, a “knife” sight on top along with two “detonator wells” with screw-in detonator points and a notice on the front, molded into the plastic, that says “Front Towards Enemy.” Spiders in this case.

Inside the mine there is, from back to front, the exterior plastic box wall, a thin metal plate, a slightly thicker layer of explosive, then 750 ball bearings about the size of a .25 caliber round then the front of the box.

It comes packed in a green, cloth, bag with a strap, twelve to a case. In the bag is a reel of heavy copper insulated wire, very useful for repairing electrical systems at home by the way, attached to a detonator, safety tip: you want to detach that if you’re going to use it for home electric repair, and a rubber doohickey, also something to remove for home electric but not a safety tip, with two prongs extending in a rubber cover. This is designed to connect to the M57 firing device or in the parlance “clacker.” The M57 firing device is a small box, sized to fit in the average hand, with a sprung lever on top, some lights (won’t get into those) and a metal doohickey that’s the “safety.”

To use it, normally, you go to where you want to set it up, unfold the feet, press them into the ground, sight it using the stupid and useless sight, connect the detonator by unscrewing one of the two plastic plugs, slipping the wire into the slot on the side of the plug, pulling the detonator back until it is snug, screwing it back in, unreeling the wire back to your hole then connecting the M57 firing device with metal wire safety doo-dad firmly in place.

To detonate, remove metal wire safety doo-dad hold it with your fingers underneath and your palm on the lever and depress the lever. Three times is what you have to do to pass the test you get repeatedly as a Marine infantryman.

That’s about the only step that didn’t change in my truncated Marine career. They were constantly changing how you were supposed to lay the damned thing in.

That is the basic, “This is what we teach you grunts” way to lay in a claymore. We were not using that way.

The only thing I was doing was laying in claymores. All the rest of the shit was staying in the bags. And mostly I wasn’t even unfolding the feet. I was using bricks to prop them up slightly to point at the overhead. That way when they detonated, the metal plates would be less likely to come flying back and hit us. The ball bearings were going to ricochet all over this tunnel. With all the claymores we were laying in, anything in the tunnel was going to get shredded.

Where we had something solid to brace them on I was putting them facing forward down the tunnel. And some of the ones pointed up were pointed at the walls. We knew the sassus were going to come pouring down on every surface.

We just didn’t know how many we were going to face.

In the meantime, Phil was laying in a daisy chain.

In my unnecessarily long description above, I mentioned two detonator plugs. And there’s this thing called “detonation cord.”

Det cord is made by, somehow, filling a long, thin, tube of plastic with pure RDX. I don’t know how they do it but I’m pretty sure that magic is involved. Fortunately I’ve never gotten called in when the magic goes awry at an explosives plant. That would suck.

Bottom line, when you detonate the RDX the cord blows up all along its length. Sort of explosive…cord. Or detonation cord. You get the picture.

What Phil was doing was coming along behind me, connecting det cord and detonators to the claymores. He’d run a line of det cord, with a detonator on the end, into the detonator well on one side of the claymore then det cord back out. The second one didn’t need a detonator. It was going to blow up. That line would be connected to another claymore and so on and so forth. He even had places where the det cord crossed over and was tied, to make sure that the explosion would, in the parlance, “propagate.” Once the first explosion went off, all the claymores, occasional not-quite-random bits of C4 and det cord
was
going to blow up. Once it started.

Once we laid out every claymore we had, although not all the C4 since we wanted to survive the encounter, and they were all daisy chained together, Phil had me go back to the van, which was now parked a hundred meters behind the last claymore, and he set up the detonation circuit. We’d really prepared for that. We’d gotten several hundred yards of conduit and while I was laying out claymores Brad had “wire-fished” it in two separate sections with, in one section, det cord and in the other section a pretty standard household electric wire. The conduit had been laid down on both sides of the tunnel at the base of the wall, right up against the wall, and staked down at intervals with big staples. Another one of my jobs and let me tell you hammering in metal staples to cobblestones is not a treat.

When all was said and done, Phil carefully connected the det cord on one side and the wire on the other to separate detonators. He left the wire detonator for last ’cause that was the most unstable. The conduit led to within a few feet of the pile of C4 that would be the “initiator.”