When the Devil Dances

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 CO₂ cartridge 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.