“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.