John Ringo - When the Devil Dances

The Maze was the confined spaces test chamber on the third floor. A plywood and pipe “rat-maze,” it filled only one room but encompassed a total of a hundred and sixty-five feet of linear “floor.” The Maze was multi-level with a series of small passages and doorways, many of which could be slid open or closed at the whim of the testers. None of the passages permitted so much as crouched movement; the entire maze was done on the belly, sometimes crawling at an angle or twisting through three (some suggested four) dimensions to reach a new passage.

Strangely, Wendy had never had a problem with the Maze, even when it was blacked out. Perhaps being buried alive in Fredericksburg had some compensations; she had come out of it with a fundamental lack of claustrophobia. Much the same could be said for Shari, who had waited out the weeks awake . If she had tended to claustrophobia, she would have put herself under like the firefighter who was trapped with her.

That didn’t mean it was easy. The movement method was difficult. But Wendy didn’t have a problem, including remembering not to take the smooth tunnel. The plastic tunnel was greased after a few feet and anyone who went in wasn’t backing out. And it dumped them out right at the feet of the grader.

Wendy, on the other hand, came out the corrugated tunnel and popped to her feet reasonably refreshed. She knew she had made up time on the Maze and the next test, the door breach, was another “good” one for her.

She trotted up the stairs to the roof and picked up the essential tools for the door breach test: a backpack of liquid nitrogen and a CO 2-powered center-punch. The testing device was in the center of the roof; an apparently freestanding doorway with a closed memory plastic door in it.

The design of the door necessitated the unusual gear. For safety reasons, memory plastic doors were designed so that their “base” configuration was “closed.” That meant that a precisely graduated charge had to be applied to them to get them to “open” or collapse into a tube along one side of the door.

When in their extended configuration the doors were very tough; you could hammer at them with a sledge all day long and not get them to break. And for security purposes the charge had to be applied along a recessed edge. When first confronted with this design, emergency personnel were momentarily stumped. However, a former Marine firefighter pointed out that lexan shatters fairly easily when chilled. Thus, a new entry method was born.

The tester nodded when Wendy had the gear on, held up a stopwatch and pressed the start button with a shouted: “Go!”

There were several steps to the door breach and each had to be done precisely. She trotted to the door, positioning herself on the left side, and removed her Nomex gloves then began running her hand over the door and doorframe. She started at the top and ran her hand rapidly across and down. As she reached the bottom left-hand corner of the door she suddenly noted increasing warmth. The bastards.

She stepped back and shouted “Hot door!”

The tester hit the stopwatch and made a notation on her clipboard as Wendy took the opportunity to put her gloves back on. “The door is to be considered hot, but breachable,” the tester said. She did not bother to note that if Wendy had not detected the heat she would have been disqualified; that went without saying. “Continue,” the tester added, hitting the stopwatch again.

Wendy stepped back and looked at the pressure gauge for the LN bottle. The bottle had a line running out of it to a nozzle similar in appearance to a flamethrower. The outlet pressure, which was controllable at the nozzle, determined how far the stream of nitrogen would go. There was a maximum effective distance, but that really didn’t matter. What was important was to reduce, as far as possible, splashback.

The nitrogen gushed out of the nozzle in a white, foaming stream, exploding into vapor as it heated in the room-temperature atmosphere. The reason that the test was on the roof was two-fold; it permitted the gas to be carried off and it prevented having a supercooled room.

There was a limited splashback zone, about a foot out from the door, and the small amount of liquid quickly boiled off. Before it had entirely vanished, however, Wendy stepped forward, avoiding the drops, and placed her punch against the left side of the door.

Normally she would have placed it against the lower left, but with the single point of high temperature being there, she felt a need to adjust. As cold as the nitrogen was, the memory plastic of the doors had a fairly high specific heat and the lower left might not have cooled off enough to be cleared.

Placing the punch, she angled it so that it would go straight in but, in the event of a refractory door, would not kick into her body, and pulled the trigger.

The punch, which looked somewhat like a cordless electric drill, contained a twenty-centimeter steel spike, charged by a CO 2cartridge in the handle. When triggered, the spike flew out at over three hundred meters per second, penetrating the door and, if it was cold enough, shattering the plastic.

In this case it was cold enough and the door shattered from top to bottom, breaking into chunks ranging from dust up to a few centimeters across. The sole exception was an almost perfectly circular point on the lower lefthand corner. It looked like her decision not to punch the door there was a good one.

She looked at the person in a silver suit on the other side of the doorway. The firefighter was holding a propane torch in one hand and faintly through the layers of lexan Wendy could see a grin.

“Bitch,” she whispered under her breath with a returning grin. You always popped the door on the lower left, if you were right-handed anyway. It was the safest side and generally the bottom of a door was cool in all but the most intense fires.

The firefighter just pointed at the start of the rope course.

God, this was going to be a long day.

She managed to survive the gear drag and rope course. Both of them were basically gut-checks, in one case for strength and in the other for fear of heights. She wasn’t the strongest person on the course and she hated heights, but she could take gut-checks all day long.

But at the end of the rope course, the only thing left was the buddy drag. She started to trot over to the station and realized that she just didn’t have any trot left. She kept wondering when that famous second wind was going to kick in, but so far the only thing that had kicked in was utter fatigue. The buddy drag was going to be a hell of a lot of fun.

The test involved lifting a 225-pound dummy and dragging it. The dummy was on the ground, lying on its back, dressed in a bunker-coat and trousers. The candidate was required to lift the dummy up, holding it from behind with their arms wrapped around to the front, and drag it one hundred feet without dropping the dummy.

“Don’t drop the dummy,” she whispered, grabbing it by the shoulder of the bunker-coat and pulling it up to a sitting position. The head flopped to the side and the arms dangled, all of the appendages getting in the way no matter what she did. Finally she maneuvered herself behind it, her arms under the dummy’s, right hand gripping the front of the bunker-coat and left hand locked on her right wrist.

With a grunt she straightened her legs, getting the dummy up, and then just paused, trying not to sway. The dummy was taller and much heavier than she was and just staying on her feet was a challenge. Finally, she leaned carefully backwards and started dragging.

Every step was an agony and a struggle. There was no momentum to build up, that evil enemy gravity prevented anything along those lines. She just had to drag it step by painful step. Two thirds of the way there, her grip on her wrist slipped, but a quick snatch with the left hand got a handful of bunker-coat and the dummy didn’t, quite, fall. Now all she had was its coat and her Nomex gloves had gotten slippery with sweat so maintaining her hold was problematic. But she could still do it. She was nearly there.