“But explosive isn’t any good without a way to detonate it. We need blasting caps, or something like them. I can make them, if we’ve got the right ingredients.” He waved his bottle of methanol.
“Bombs?” one of the older men said. “Want to blow down the fence?”
“I had something else in mind,” Nick said. He wiped sweat from his face. Pain beat through his head.
“Antipersonnel weapons. Claymore mines, command detonated.” He looked over his shoulder at the gate. “We kill them. Kill a lot of them, all at once. And then we take their weapons and we fight.” The seven men of the Escape Committee looked at him, silent for once.
Boom.
Nick made list after list. There was so much to do. Get the battery from the little tractor, so that he could boil the contents down to make sulfuric acid. Get Miss Deena to put out a call for aspirin, which could be used to make picric acid as a booster explosive for detonators. Chip bits of lead off the well pipe and the pipes in the cook shed, to make Lead monoxide, which was a preliminary step necessary to make lead picrate as a primary explosive in detonators.
But the first thing on the list was to collect buckets of human manure from the piles behind the outhouses. Because that could be turned into saltpeter, which was necessary for just about everything.
“You want your sand buggers?” one of the old men on the committee asked him.
“Hm?” Nick said.
“You want your sand buggers, you best get in line.”
Nick looked up and saw that a line was forming at the dining tent, and he decided that though he had no idea what a sand bugger might be, he knew he was probably hungry enough to eat one. He rose from his crosslegged position under the pecan tree, and walked to the end of the line, still carrying his notes. Manure, he thought, quite a bit of it. He hoped there was enough methanol to do all the work he needed it to do.
He looked up, saw Manon walking toward him. Her long hands rested on the shoulders of Jason and Arlette. From the solemn look on their faces, Nick could tell that Manon had told them what had been happening here in Spottswood Parish.
“Nick,” Manon said as she approached. “Tell Jason that he’d be a fool to try to escape tonight.” Nick hesitated before answering. The objections he’d given to the Escape Committee in regard to their planned mass escape might not all apply to a single individual.
But the single individual could still get himself killed.
“I wouldn’t leave without Arlette,” Jason said. “But I think it could be done.” Arlette’s name set alarms jangling along Nick’s nerves. There was no way that Nick would let his daughter go over the wall before he could make it absolutely safe. “I’m working on something else,” he said.
“What else?” Jason asked.
Nick looked uncertainly at the people standing with him in line. “I’ll tell you later,” he said. It occurred to him that not all the people in the camp might be safe. He didn’t know how much contact they all had with the guards, or—as far as that went—which of them might just be too talkative, too inclined to boast to his captors.
They stood in awkward silence in the food line till they received a sand bugger apiece—a patty of vegetable matter, fried like a hamburger and consisting mostly of potato with bits of onion and greens mixed in. With this was served a spoonful of baked beans and one of the strange, greasy crackers they’d had when they’d first arrived at the camp.
It all tasted awful. Nick ate every bite, then licked the plate. Then he took the others aside and told them what he was going to do.
Jason wanted to help, so Nick collected some plastic buckets and a shovel and went behind the nearest outhouse. Piled high was a decade’s worth of manure covered with bright green grass and blazing red pods of hearts-a-bustin’-with-love. Nothing like a shit pile, he thought, to make a fine flower garden.
“Dig,” Nick said. “Slowly.”
Jason gave him a thoughtful look, as if wondering if Nick had chosen this moment for some strange joke, and then apparently decided otherwise and began to dig. Jason turned a few spadefuls while Nick peered into the pile, and was rewarded with the sight of a line of dirty yellow crystals running through the soil.
Yes, oh yes, he thought. Potassium nitrate. Saltpeter.
Boom.
Jason filled three buckets with crystal-laced dirt, then he and Nick carried them to the cookhouse, where Nick filled another bucket with wood ash from one of the campfire circles. He took a fifth bucket and punched holes in the bottom, put the bucket in a big saucepan, put a towel in the bottom of the bucket, and poured in a layer of wood ash. Then he put another cloth on top of the wood ash, filled the rest of the bucket with night soil. He told Jason to go into the cookhouse and asked them to boil some water, and when the water began to boil he poured it into the bucket a little at a time while Jason watched.
“What in heaven’s name are you doing?” Miss Deena asked from the shadow of the cookhouse.
“Making saltpeter.”
“You going to add that to our food? Think we’re getting too sexy around here?”
“I’m going to do a magic trick.” He looked up at her from his position hunkered by the bucket. “I’m going to make guards disappear.”
Deena gave him a cold look. “Uh-huh,” she said.
“You’ll see,” Nick said.
“I got that aspirin you wanted.”
“I’d like to take a couple. For my head. I won’t need the rest till later.” She gave him some aspirin. Nick swallowed them and poured hot water into the bucket. He repeated the procedure until he was out of earth.
When he was done, he poured the hot liquid from the saucepan to a clean saucepan, throwing away the dark sludge left behind. He went into the cookhouse and put the saucepan on a burner. Miss Deena and the other cookhouse crew watched him with suspicion.
“What now?”
“Crystals will start forming in the water after a while. We want to scoop those out with something clean. A paper napkin, or filters from a coffeemaker.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I’m going to need another burner. You might want to clear out for this next bit.” He found a glass baking dish. He put on some rubber gloves and pulled the caps off the battery he’d taken from the little tractor. He poured battery acid into the dish and turned on the burner beneath it. Sulfuric acid fumes began to fill the cookhouse. Nick sent Jason outside. Nick’s eyes watered, and he tied a bandanna over his mouth and nose and stood outside the cookhouse till he saw white fumes rising from the baking dish. Then he dashed inside, turned off the burner, and took the baking dish outside and put it on the grass.
“That acid’s concentrated,” he told Miss Deena.
“Uh-huh,” she said.
He looked at Jason. “Wait for it to cool, then pour it into a clean bottle. Make sure you’ve got rubber gloves on, and that your eyes and nose are protected. Put the bottle in the chest in the cookhouse, and don’t let anyone touch it.”
“When can I use my cookhouse again?” Miss Deena demanded.
“Use it now, if you like.”
“Uh-huh.”
Whatever Nick did next depended on having sulfuric acid and potassium nitrate, so he washed his implements, then left Jason watching the boiling saltpeter water while he went to report to the Escape Committee.
Leaves rustled overhead. Awnings in the camp crackled as the air snapped at them. The wind that had sprung up since the morning was growing brisk, providing the only relief from the day’s sledgehammer heat.