Aquifer: A Novel (46 page)

“Modified napalm,” Bill explained. “This stuff’ll get much thicker than the Styrofoam stuff. The egg whites make it into a thick meringue which you can mold like C-4 plastic explosives, and it stays put.”

“Is this stuff stable?” asked the Mayor.

“Fairly. It’s extremely incendiary but not explosive, though with this much of it around that’s a moot distinction.”

Bill pointed to a group of teenage boys working at a table about thirty feet away. “Members of the high school Rocket Club. They're coating Nichrome wire with a zinc/sulfur mixture. We’ll use those as makeshift napalm detonators.”

“Impressive,” noted the Sheriff.

About two hundred feet away, to separate them from the gasoline fumes, was a group of students who were wielding soldering irons, electrical components and circuit boards.

“At that table,” Bill continued, pointing to the distant group, “is the high school Radio Club. They’re building the circuitry for the master control console and the remote detonators.”

The three men continued strolling through the quarry inspecting the various work stations. It seemed that not only had the entire town turned out to help with the project but a true sense of comradery and unity prevailed.

At the fertilizer station W.T. directed several men who were opening bags of ammonium nitrate fertilizer and powdered ANFO, dumping them into the hopper of a cement truck mixer. Several dozen pallets of fertilizer were stacked nearby keeping the forklift operator busy. A diesel tanker was parked next to the cement mixer and an operator dumped diesel fuel into it as it tumbled.

A second cement mixer was parked nearby. Its pour chute was discharging the completed mixture into barrels and drums that were stacked on pallets.

“Now this stuff is very explosive,” Bill explained to the Sheriff and Mayor. “It’s what those guys used to blow up the federal building in Oklahoma City a few years back. But don’t worry, it’s stable. The only way to detonate it is with blasting caps. Fortunately the quarry has plenty of those for our use.”

At the inoculation station the town doctor and his nurse were using Tina’s antidote to give inoculations to everyone. No one minded that the expediency in this life and death situation did not allow for compliance with the lengthy and expensive FDA certification process for new vaccines. A long line of people awaited their turn. Each of them hoped that they would not need the benefit of the serum, but were nevertheless deeply grateful for the opportunity to protect themselves and their families.

“You’ve got to hand it to the ole boy,” said Bill. “When those frog guys first came to town I didn’t give them two cents worth of respect. But that Clayton fella knows his stuff. You can put me on his team any day.”

“How did he learn about all this stuff?” asked the Mayor.

“You’d be surprised what he can find on the internet,” replied Bill.

=/\=

C
HAPTER
F
ORTY
-N
INE

Crash Site

At the impact crater where the alien space craft had crashed, fifty men and several service vehicles surrounded the hole in the cave roof. Extension ladders protruded from the opening. Small groups of men, each wearing hard hats and work clothes, gathered around the ladders awaiting their turn to descend into the darkness below. A crane truck from the lumber yard off-loaded ATV's and utility trailers from a half dozen flatbed trucks and lowered them through the cave opening. Additionally, hundreds of 55-gallon drums of the ANFO fertilizer/diesel explosive mixture and pallets containing the buckets of the homemade napalm were similarly lowered to the cave.

Inside the tunnel leading from the crater, workers positioned drums of the explosives using electric forklifts and placed them at one-hundred-foot intervals along the bank of the underground river. The line of explosives stretched from the impact crater all along the one-mile tunnel to Blue Spring. Interspersed between the barrels on the riverbank were other barrels of explosives that were secured underwater in the deep river that flowed through the tunnel. Kegs or boxes of nails were strapped to the barrels with duct tape and bailing wire. A blasting cap detonator was attached to each drum, creating an array of concussion and shrapnel bombs.

Another ATV drove down the cave tunnel paying out a wiring harness. A team of quarry workers connected the wiring harness to the blasting caps so that all the barrels could be detonated simultaneously. As each blasting cap was connected it was tested with low voltage to insure a proper connection to the master wiring harness. Each grouping of ten barrels was wired to a different circuit. That way, each circuit was independent of the others. Failure of one circuit would not prevent the others from being detonated.

Two other ATV’s shuttled down the tunnel hauling 5-gallon buckets of the homemade napalm. When they stopped, a team of eight men grabbed the buckets, one at a time, like an old-fashioned bucket brigade, and handed them down the line, man after man. The last man poured a thick stream of the gooey, inflammable material along the seam where the cave wall and floor met.

Though the men were meticulously careful in attending to the specific jobs they had been assigned, they tried not to think too much about the overall picture of what they were doing. They were building two independent bombs that overlapped each other; one was highly explosive and the other was extremely incendiary. Each bomb was over a mile in length and thirty-to-sixty feet wide, containing enough material to destroy their entire town many times over. The men were working inside the bombs. One false move and the entire cave could explode. The drivers of the ATV’s were careful to keep their vehicles close to the riverbank so that there was no danger of muffler sparks igniting the napalm along the cave wall.

In addition to the bomb builders, another group of men erected supports for loud speakers, both along the riverbank and underwater. They payed out spools of speaker wire to connect each speaker to a master control panel located in the Blue Spring nesting chamber.

*

A mile away, at Blue Spring, several teams had assembled around the perimeter of the spring’s lagoon. One team stretched a fine mesh nylon webbing across the outlet river to serve as a strainer net. Though the water in the spring branch was only a few feet deep, they took great care to ensure that the webbing hugged the floor of the riverbed by burying the bottom edge of the mesh in the gravel and then securing it with large rocks spaced every few feet. They did not want anything to escape under, or around the webbing. Above the strainer net they stretched metal chain-link fencing. Two high voltage, welder’s electric generators were connected in parallel circuitry to the chain-link fencing, creating an electrified net that would spell instant death to anything that touched it.

Members of the Volunteer Fire Department fastened lengths of half-inch rubber tubing to couplers connected to 5-gallon barbecue propane tanks. The other end of the tubing was connected by way of several step-down adapters to two-foot lengths of three-inch diameter metal pipe. Near the connection point they installed a pinch valve for a trigger. A pilot light was fashioned at the other end.

One of the firemen grasped a completely assembled unit and held it in both hands like he would a fire hose. “Okay, let's see how good this thing works,” he said as he aimed the metal pipe out over the spring and squeezed the pinch valve. Immediately a twenty-foot flame jumped from the end of the pipe’s nozzle. “Woah! Now that's what I call an alien barbequer.”

“You got that right!” exclaimed another fireman.

The Sheriff's office was setting up a communications command post fifty feet from the edge of the spring. All the communications and detonation control panels built by the high school Radio Club, as well as the communications equipment from the Sheriff’s Department and the Search and Rescue teams were routed through the Sheriff’s spring-side command post. This gave the Sheriff both audio and visual communications. The president of the Radio Club was determining and assigning communications frequencies for each of the teams that would be working inside the cave.

Additionally, the wiring for all detonation equipment was being routed to the Sheriff’s command center. He alone would have detonation authority and direct access to the detonation controls.

Larry and Tina backed a trailer into the spring and off-loaded the two scuba planes. Welton assisted in loading sound equipment, wiring harnesses, underwater speakers and canisters of pheromones onto one of the scuba planes. Tina had successfully synthesized the alien’s pheromone and had prepared a large quantity of it to congregate the creatures where they wanted them.

Search and Rescue personnel began loading the homemade explosives and incendiaries onto the other scuba plane.

One of the Search and Rescue deputies picked up an automatic shotgun and sealed it in a plastic bag before loading it onto the scuba plane. “Fully automatic twelve gauge shotgun with a forty round barrel type magazine loaded with rounds alternating between "000" shot and slugs.”

“That should stop a rhino!” observed his companion.

“My point exactly! I just hope I get to bag me an alien with one of these babies.”

When all of the equipment was loaded, Larry, Tina and the Search and Rescue divers entered the spring, submerged and steered the scuba planes toward the underwater cave opening.

=/\=

C
HAPTER
F
IFTY

Time Bomb

Clayton had been up working all night for the second night in a row, sequestered in his portable lab parked at the Alley Springs Camp Ground. His appearance was disheveled, his hair was mussed up and his eyes were extremely bloodshot. Mass producing the mutated Chytrid organism had become an obsession for Clayton, driving him throughout the night - ironically grateful that he had not been successful in his previous attempts to kill the fungus.

He poured the contents of hundreds of Petri dishes and glass jars into a red 5-gallon plastic bucket. The fungus he had cultured in those dishes was the secret that insured their ultimate victory over the ravenous aliens rampaging through the town, in case the rest of his plan should fail.

“Pollution!” he muttered. “Who would’ve ever thought . . .”

The vivid image of the slaughter of Major Reid and his detachment was burned deep into Clayton’s mind, though it only added to the other images that haunted him. The ghastly memories of Ellie Jo and the others made him sick. He would do anything to prevent that horror from happening anywhere else.
I of all people
, he thought,
I should have realized the viciousness of these aliens and the danger they posed
. Unfoundedly, he blamed himself for the loss of so many lives. His feelings of guilt were a relentless taskmaster as he slaved through the night.

As he worked, Clayton mumbled sarcastically. “I came to the Ozarks to save our planet from the logging industry's pollution. Now their pollution is the key to saving the world from man-eating alien monsters.” He shook his head in disbelief and then released a deep sigh. “And the only way I can stop them is by deliberately proliferating the results of their pollution. Now that's poetic justice for you!”

He placed a lid on the plastic bucket and pounded it on tight with the heel of his hand. Grasping it by the wire handle he headed for the Hummer. “I just hope I’m not too late.”

*

In the Blue Spring nesting chamber Larry and the other Search and Rescue divers surfaced in the subterranean lagoon. They cautiously searched the interior of the cavern with powerful handheld searchlights before nudging the scuba planes to the shore and climbing out of the water.

They began unloading their equipment onto the dry riverbank of the cavern. There was a lot of equipment to transport. Larry, Tina and most of the Search and Rescue team members started unpacking and setting up the equipment already delivered. Two of the team members returned with the scuba planes to the vehicles at the edge of the spring to reload. They made several trips before all of the equipment had been successfully transported.

On their last trip they pulled a long power cable from the Sheriff’s command center through the water and into the subterranean nesting chamber. Connected to a 25-kilowatt generator located near the supply vehicles, the cable would supply sufficient current to power all of the equipment inside of the cave.

With the arrival of the final pieces of equipment Larry began directing the placement of loudspeakers throughout that section of the cave, as well as the placement of underwater speakers along the bank of the subterranean river.

One of the Search and Rescue team members timidly approached Larry seeking reassurance. “Are you sure that there won’t be any aliens around here?”

“No, not entirely. But it’s a gamble we’ve got to take. Tina and I released some of the pheromone into the water in the Great Cavern Room at Meramec Caverns about one o’clock this morning. We think it should attract most of the aliens and keep them there for several hours. But nothing works perfectly. There could possibly be a few aliens that either aren’t attracted by the pheromone, don’t smell it, or for other reasons simply choose to ignore it. That’s why we’ve still got to be extremely vigilant while we work,” Larry explained.

“So how much time will that give us?”