1634: The Baltic War: Chapter Three

    Within a few seconds, two thick streams of water began arching into the air and falling into the smokestacks. A thick cloud of steam flashed instantly into the air, as the water contacted the hot brick. Fortunately, the smokestacks were ten feet high, and the steam flashed above them, so the firemen weren’t cooked where they stood. Courageously, they continued pumping water into the smokestacks.

    Then disaster struck. The incredibly hot firebrick in the reverbatory furnace had some resistance to water at room temperature, but none at 900C. It dissolved under the impact of the water, collapsing and blocking both smokestacks, trapping high temperature steam within. The main furnace chamber, containing the retorts, held.

    “My God!” the chief reacted. He looked at the foreman and the other two plant workers, who were staring, mouth open, at the damage.

    “Stop the pump! Get the wagon back! Everyone get back!” he directed. He stared at the furnace. It was a ruin, obviously enough. But at least the smoke had stopped. The fire was probably out.

 

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    “Hell’s bells,” Mike hissed, when he heard the bricks collapse. “We could use Jerry Trainer right now,” he said to no one in particular.

    “What’s happening, sir?” the sergeant asked.

    “No idea,” he replied. “We’ll keep the men here, though, just in case we’re needed.”

    By now, they were in the middle of a large crowd, standing behind a very sturdy-looking waist-high brick wall that surrounded the plant everywhere except along the river. The men at the plant had ignited torches to replace the gas lamps, and the faint light and drifting snow gave the scene an eerie look.

    “Do you see flames there?” One of the sailors pointed to the location where the gas main entered the furnace room.

    Mike squinted, trying to see through the snowfall. It was very faint, but something did seem to be burning. And the flames were blue.

 

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    Chief Kruz and his men were also watching the furnace. “Look!” one of them yelled. From closer up, very faint blue flames were apparent where the gas main entered the furnace, and also around the doors of the retorts.

    “Get the men back! Back!” Kruz had never seen flames like that, and he didn’t like it.

 

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    The flames were indeed blue, the color of burning hydrogen gas. When water was pumped into the furnace, besides destroying the firebrick, it reacted with the red-hot coal in the furnace to make hydrogen and carbon monoxide. The hydrogen, being very light, pushed the coal gas down as it sought the highest elevation. It then began leaking out between the firebrick and the gas main, as well as around the retorts. When the hydrogen reached the air it burned, creating high temperature steam, which began to eat through the firebrick. The structure holding the gas main in the furnace dissolved, and the pipe shifted. When that happened, all the remaining hydrogen rushed out, and air rushed in to fill the gap, where it mixed with coal gas into an explosive mixture.

 

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    The fire chief was not positioned to see the gas main shift, but one of his men was. He saw a flash as the hydrogen escaped and exploded, and yelled “down!” A split second later, the coal gas-oxygen mixture exploded.

    The gas main pipe went flying end-over-end, spewing smaller pieces of red-hot iron and crashing into a large metal distilling vat. Some of the retorts also split, blasting out of the furnace like cannon fire. The thin walls of the furnace rooms came off, as did large sections of the roof.

    One of the retorts smashed into Stiteler and slammed him into the column behind him, killing him instantly. The shovel flew from his hand and Engler and Krenz ducked to avoid being hit by it. Luckily for them, as it happened, because a second piece of wreckage hurtled right through the air where they’d been standing a second earlier.

    Another piece of a retort went through the thin wall as if it weren’t there and landed on the barge holding the coal for the plant. Another, much bigger one, did the same thing to a different wall—and then shattered the wall of an adjacent factory as it struck, instantly killing two workers and starting the structure on fire.

    Stone, iron and coal sprayed in all directions from the impact site. In other cases, only the doors to the retorts flew out, red hot frisbees delivering death and destruction. One of these struck the fireman holding the hose by the river, cutting him in half and throwing what was left of him into the waters of the Elbe. Another flew across the street into an apartment building, starting yet another fire. Fortunately, no one was killed outright, although a young mother was badly hurt and the baby she’d been feeding would wind up losing his arm below the elbow.

    The last one flew unerringly into the vats of coal tar products, badly damaging the support structure for one of the vats. At the same time, pieces of burning coal from the retorts flew into the air, bombarding those passersby not lucky or smart enough to be crouching behind the wall or under shelter.

 

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    Mike rose from behind the wall, and briefly looked at his escort to make sure they were unharmed. Some of the sailors and Marines were purposefully moving to put out flames and administer first aid to bystanders who had been hit by flying coal. The coal plant itself seemed to be fairly free of flames, now. There were a few piles of flaming coal but little other damage beyond the explosion. As he watched, he saw two people come stumbling to the wall.

    “What happened to the plant?” the sergeant asked them.

    Now leaning with both hands on the wall, one of the men shook his head. “I don’t know. Robert…” He shook his head again. “Robert Stiteler. He was killed. I don’t believe this.”

    “Do you work here?” Mike asked.

    “Yes. I am the night shift foreman. Thorsten Engler.” He nodded to the man next to him. “This is Eric Krenz, the crane operator.”

    Hearing a new sound, of collapsing metal, Engler and Krenz turned their heads around to look back. As they and Mike watched, the damaged vat began to shift, finally falling on its side. It impacted with a loud crack, and gallons of thick pitch began to ooze out.

    By now, the fire chief had reorganized his men, and moved to put out the fires in the adjacent factory and the apartment buildings across the street. Only one other structure was aflame, the roof of a shed near the river, away from both the coal tar and the machinery.

    “What’s in that shed?” Mike asked.

    Engler looked over. “Nothing much,” he said. “Just fertilizer. For growing plants.”

    Mike frowned. “Why do you have fertilizer at the coal gas plant?”

    “It’s very new. They call it… ‘ammonium nitrate,’ I think. Supposed to be the best fertilizer ever. We make it from some of the waste from the coal tar.”

    Mike would swear he could literally feel the blood draining from his face. Ammonium nitrate, for the love of God!

    Bituminous coal mining operations rarely used explosives much, any longer, but he’d been around enough blasting operations to know what the stuff was used for besides farming.

    The sergeant was staring at him. “Is it dangerous, sir?”

    “Hell, yes, it’s dangerous,” Mike replied. “There was a cargo ship full of it in Texas City that blew up once and took out most of the town—not to mention that it was the stuff that provided most of the force for the Oklahoma City bombing.”

 

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    Mike looked again at the shed. The flames had moved down from the roof to the walls, and the whole thing was being consumed. “Everybody down!” he yelled. Then, repeated the yell for the benefit of the firemen, accompanying it with frantic arm waving.

    Fortunately, the fire chief wasn’t pig-headed. He immediately ordered his men out of the area and behind the wall. Mike grabbed Engler and Krenz and dragged them over the wall. Then, dropped down himself him below the top.

    For perhaps twenty seconds, nothing happened. A few people started to get up, here and there. Then there was a tremendous explosion that seemed to obliterate everything in a sheer blast of noise. Half-dazed, Mike saw one of the bystanders who’d been incautious enough to raise his head over the wall get decapitated. By what, he had no idea. A piece of brick, who knew? One moment the man had a head, the next moment a corpse was collapsing to the ground with blood gushing out of a neck stump.

    When it seemed to be over, Mike carefully peered over the top of the wall. There was a ten foot crater where the shed had been. Some of its flaming remnants had apparently landed on the coal barge, and were completing its destruction.

    Mike shifted his gaze, and saw that the vat which had tipped over seemed mostly empty. However, two more of the vats had shifted from the impact, and were now also tilted.

    Engler’s head had come up next to his, with Krenz following a second later. Mike pointed at the vats. “What’s in those vats?”

    “Coal tar,” said Krenz. “Different kinds. We separate them, and sell the different kinds.”

    “The one that fell on the ground contained pitch,” Engler added. “We usually don’t have more than a few days’ worth, there’s a lot of demand for it. That one”—he pointed to the one starting to list—“contains something called ‘light benzoils.’ We don’t get much call for it, so we’ve been saving it up to sell to the Americans.”

    “How much of it is stored up?”

    “I add a new barrel or two to that vat every day,” said Krenz. “Maybe a couple of hundred barrels worth.”

    Mike felt his face paling again. That was the equivalent of several thousand gallons of gasoline. If it spread and ignited, half the city was likely to burn down before it was all over.

    He turned to the sergeant. “Get every available man from the base.”

    He turned to another Marine. “See if you can find Gunther Achterhof, the CoC guy for this district. We need all the manpower we can get. Tell him to bring shovels, buckets, whatever will fight the fire.”

    He looked back again. Fortunately, the pitch still hadn’t caught, despite the hot fragments of furnace littering the ground. “Two of you Marines get shovels and buckets and get those fragments out of here before they ignite the pitch.”

    Once those pressing immediate tasks were seen to, he turned to the contingent of sailors and Marines who were gathered around him. “We’ve got to keep that vat from tipping over. Get some long pieces of lumber from the dockyards. Get block and tackle. Fast!”

    Half a dozen sailors took off, heading for the base. As he looked again, he saw the pitch slowly oozing out of the plant and into the street. Beyond it, he saw the road leading to the open end of the sewer under construction. “Christ on a crutch,” he said. “If the stuff in that vat gets in the sewers, the entire city will go.”

    “There isn’t enough time,” Engler said. “We have to get in there now.” He climbed over the wall and into the plant’s yard, heading for the coal tar vats. Krenz came right behind him.

    Mike stared at them, decided they were right, and followed himself. His men joined him.

 

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    The ground was an obstacle course, requiring them to zigzag to avoid the still-hot debris from the explosion. They ran over to the fire chief, who was lying on the ground, stunned. “Wake up!” Mike shouted. “You’ve got to get your pump going.”

    “We still have steam, we can pump!” one of the firemen yelled, having heard him. “But we have to put out those fires now.” He was pointing to the apartment buildings, and Mike could see that he was right. As tightly packed as those buildings were throughout most of Magdeburg, if a fire got out of control it would be almost impossible to stop.

    One of the other firemen pulled out a knife and cut away the harness for one of the horses. The animal’s back had shattered by a big chunk of flying debris. The fire chief staggered to his feet and looked around. The first fireman ran over to him. “Sir, there are buildings on fire. We’ve got to put them out now!”

    Mike came to a quick decision. “Go,” he said. “My men and I will take care of the plant.”

    The fire chief nodded, and stumbled after the pump as his men led it away.

    Mike continued through the obstacle course, finally arriving at the upended vat, He looked beyond it to the damaged one. It was still standing, but was now starting to leak a thin liquid on the ground.

    “Make way!” Krenz yelled. He carried an empty barrel across the pitch to put it under the leak. “That won’t stop it for long.”

    “We’ve got to jack up that platform, or that won’t matter,” one of the sailors said.

    “Over there,” Mike directed. “The platform for the destroyed vat. See if any of the wood can be salvaged.” Several men started pulling lumber off the ground. Others pushed the grounded vat a few feet out of the way. They replaced parts of the damaged supports.

    “The vat’s too badly damaged,” Engler said. Mike could see that he was right. The leak was increasing. They had to move the tar before it ruptured entirely. As he watched, the first barrel filled up and overflowed. The liquid quickly overtook the thick pitch in its downhill flow. A couple of men rolled the barrel out of the way, and a new barrel replaced it.

    “We can’t keep this up. We don’t have enough barrels.” Mike glanced at the nearby steam crane and turned to Krenz. “You said you filled the vats. Can you put those barrels into other vats?”

    “Yes,” he replied. “But it takes time to bring the boiler to steam. We don’t have enough time.”

 

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    One of the Marines pointed to the burning coals scattered across the yard. “We can use that coal.”

    “Do it,” Mike said. He directed some of the newly arrived troops to use their shovels to fill the firebox of the crane. Others, he directed to help the fire brigade put out the nearby fires.

    Krenz sat down in the crane, then yelled, stood up, and batted a small lump of coal from the seat. Despite the tension of the moment, a burst of laughter went up from the men who saw. Krenz grinned himself, shaking his head ruefully, before he sat back down at the controls.

    The crane lifted its bucket, which Krenz sat down next to the first barrel. By this point, there were three filled barrels, and the last one was almost full. Several men tipped one of the barrels into the bucket, which was quickly raised and poured into a different vat.

    Mike looked at the barrels and the vat. “It’s not going to be enough,” he muttered. “It’s just a finger in the dike.” He called several of the men, both naval personnel and the CoC members who were starting to arrive.

    “It’s not enough. We’ve got to keep it out of the sewers.” He looked around. “Some of you, fill in the end of the sewer. The rest of you, we need to direct what gets out into the river. Start a trench here.”

    Gunther Achterhof came running up with a number of his people. “This looks bad, Prime Minister. How can we help?”

    “Could your people relieve my troops helping the fire brigade? We’ve got to handle this leak before it gets in the sewers.”

    “Yes, of course.”

    Mike turned back, to see that the trench was beginning to take shape. But the leak was getting worse, and was clearly winning. He moved back to Krenz and the crane. “The leak is speeding up, soon it’ll be more that we can stop. How can we redirect the benzoil?”

    “It would take too long to use the crane to dig a trench,” Krenz said, “and this is the wrong scoop, anyway.”

    “Okay, then. Can you use the crane to knock the vat so that it goes into the river?”

    Mike thought, briefly and little ruefully, of what environmentalists in the world they’d left behind would say to a thousand gallons or so of toxic organic chemicals being poured into the river that ran right through a major city. But they were three and half centuries away in a different universe and didn’t have a town burning down around them.

    “I can lift the side of the vat with the scoop. The crane isn’t strong enough to pick it up, but that might be enough. Make a shitpot of a mess, though.”

    “If most of that liquid reaches the sewer, we’ll have a lot bigger mess on our hands. I’ll tell the men.”

    Mike went over to the men desperately unloading the vat. “We’re going to lift that side of the vat, and pour the liquid into the river. Get some long pieces of lumber as levers, and we’ll try to direct which way it goes. The rest of you, get the hell out of here. Move!”

    Krenz carefully brought the scoop under the side of the vat, and two sailors used pieces of wood to direct it into place. Several others braced lumber against the vat, now pouring its flammable contents at a rapid rate onto the ground. While they did that, the people digging the ditch started running from the plant.

    “Now!” Mike yelled, and the scoop lifted up. Under the combined efforts of the crane and the men, the platform started to collapse on the opposite side, and the vat slowly started to topple. A moment later, most of the contents poured out of the vat and surged towards the river. He grimaced as he saw a small stream of it heading for the base of the furnace. Some of the chemicals lapped against the side of the furnace, where the heat caused some of it to vaporize. It touched some of the burning coal near the furnace, and there was an almost-explosion as gallons of it caught fire. Some of the flames raced outward, following the path to the river and entering it. Only there did they stop. Other flames raced towards the other vats, but fortunately couldn’t quite reach them before they burned themselves out.

    It was over. Leaving behind a ruined coal gas plant and one unholy mess, true. Not to mention a number of people killed and injured. But at least an industrial accident hadn’t become transformed into a city-wide catastrophe.

    Mike sat down and caught his breath. Thorsten Engler sat down next to him, and a naval rating on the other side.

    “What a cluster-fuck,” the rating said.

    Engler rubbed his face wearily. “Poor Robert. And all of it because of a stupid grate.”

    Mike didn’t say anything. Eventually, he’d get a full report of what had caused the disaster, in considerable detail. But he already knew the gist of it.

    They were pushing too hard, because of the war. And the only way he could see to end it was to win the war as soon as possible.

 

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    When Mike got back to the government building, he went directly to the radio room.

    “Did we hear anything—”

    Smiling, the operator held up a sheet of paper. “Yes, Prime Minister. Your wife is fine and she says—”

    “Not her,” Mike said impatiently. “I meant did we get anything from Colonel Wood?”

    The radio operator stared at him for a moment. Then, clearing his throat. “Ah, yes, sir. He’ll fly up here tomorrow. He’ll be here by noon, he says.”

    “Good.” Seeing the operator still staring at him, Mike smiled a bit crookedly. “And, now, yes. Of course I’d like to see the message from my wife.”