When the Devil Dances

“Very well,” Connolly said. She looked around for a moment then leaned forward and whispered, very definitively, “Don’t. Drop. The dummy.” Then she straightened up, looked at her watch, pointed at a rack of ladders and said: “Go.”

Wendy trotted over to the ladders at a fair pace. She could have run, but this evaluation was as much about pacing as capability; she’d seen women in fantastic condition wear themselves out halfway through.

Three ladders were racked on the wall, hung vertically. Beside each one, to the left, was a spare, empty rack. The test was simple; lift off each ladder and move it over one rack.

The ladders weighed forty-seven pounds and were awkward in addition; it was quite a test of upper body strength and balance for a one-hundred-and-twenty-pound female to lift and move one, much less three. Add in forty pounds of bunker gear, a breath-pack and all the rest and it was a challenge. And only the first.

She managed the ladders in good time. And managed the second evaluation which was to fully raise and lower, “extend and retract” one of the ladders. Harder than it sounded, it had to be done hand over hand, maintaining control, or the ladder simply “dropped.” A drop was not an automatic fail, but it would count heavily against her.

The third evaluation, the high-rise pack, was the first that she knew was going to kick her ass. This involved carrying an “assault pack,” two fifty foot sections of 1¾-inch attack line, a nozzle, a gated Wye valve and a hydrant wrench, to the fifth floor of the smokehouse. Forget that the smokehouse was living up to its name, with thick black smoke belching from a generator on the ground floor and billowing up through the stairwells. Just lifting the pack — which was about a hundred pounds, or more than seventy percent of her body weight — off the ground was a struggle. The requirement was to move “expeditiously” up the stairs, but in reality nobody managed so much as a trot. Each step was a struggle and by the time she reached the third level she knew that if she paused for even a moment she could never get going again. But finally, panting in the heat from the suit and gasping for air, she saw the firefighter at the top. It was through a haze of gray that was only half to do with the smoke, but she’d made it. She carefully lowered the pack to the ground and just rested on her knees for a moment until the red haze over her vision cleared. Then she stood up and, following the pointed finger, went back downstairs to the Maze.

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 CO₂-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.