'I've got twenty-five rounds of bird shot and twelve rounds of 10mm hollow-points in my Smith. Halahan may need to find some more snakes, and you guys might have to dig bird shot out of your butts, but I'm not getting bit, period. End of discussion.'
'Me neither.' Thomas Woeshack solemnly nodded in agreement.
Takahara contemplated the jury-rigged contraption that he and Woeshack had spent the morning building with six four-by-eight sheets of three-quarter-inch plywood, six eight-foot-long two-by-fours, approximately 240 drywall screws, two wing bolts, and $1232.00 worth of assorted power tools, all charged to one of Halahan's Special Ops credit cards. In short, they had designed, built, and charged to the government what amounted to a large wooden funnel onto whose top they could lower and secure an unopened crate, hopefully safely open it, and dump its inhabitants into the prepared terrarium below.
'Well, now that we've got the basics worked out,' Larry Paxton snorted sarcastically in the direction of the team's visibly nervous tech agent, 'you ready to get started?'
'Not really, but…'
'Like jumping into a lake of ice-cold water in the middle of winter,' Paxton assured him. 'If you're dumb enough to do it in the first place, you might just as well hop in and get it over with.'
'Was that supposed to be inspirational?' Takahara asked.
'As inspirational as it's gonna get until things start looking up around here,' the Bravo Team leader replied. 'Okay, Thomas, you pick up one of those terrariums over there, take the lid off, let Stoner fill the bottom with gravel, and then you slide it under the funnel..'
Paxton stopped talking while Woeshack carefully set the extinguisher down, removed a terrarium from one of the twelve-by-eighteen-by-twenty- four-inch cardboard boxes, set the lid aside, waited while Dwight Stoner carefully poured a half-inch layer of small gray stones into the bottom, slid the terrarium into the lower slot of Mike Takahara's thoughtfully designed device, locked it in place at both open ends with sections of two-by-four, and then hurried back to the extinguisher.
'Now, Mike, you and I will start with this box, number twenty-three, 'cause it's got screening over the air holes, so we don't have to worry about something getting at us through the holes..' Paxton motioned to one of brightly labeled wooden crates on top of the stack.
'First we cut the bands off.' He used a pair of metal snips to sever the tightly cross-wrapped steel bands.
'Then we lift it up.' Paxton set the snips and cut bands aside, then he and Takahara carefully lifted the heavy crate off the stack.
'And place it in the frame right… there.'
The heavy wooden crate dropped into Takahara's makeshift apparatus with a satisfying thunk, causing its inhabitants to thrash around in what — as best the agents could tell through the screened air holes — looked like shredded paper.
'I can't believe Newark didn't send us a description of contents,' Larry Paxton complained. 'You'd think if somebody went to the trouble of numbering the damned boxes in the first place, they could've made a goddamned list, too, while they were at it. You see anywhere on the box where it says what's in this one?' the supervisory agent asked hopefully.
'Not unless they renamed a species Danger, Hot Snakes, or Hazardous Cargo,' Takahara replied as he carefully inspected the wooden container from all angles.
'Okay, no problem.' Larry Paxton's face had taken on a decidedly glossy sheen in the cold warehouse. 'Now we lower the box and the frame just like so…'
Working slowly and carefully, Paxton and Takahara carefully released the wing nuts and slowly lowered the jig holding the crate to a point just barely above the top of the wooden funnel.
'All right, now tighten everything back up,' Paxton ordered. The two agents carefully retightened the wing nuts. Then Paxton sighed heavily.
'Okay, now comes the fun part.'
The sound of a low-based bird-shot round being jacked into the chamber of an 870 pump shotgun echoed throughout the warehouse, causing Larry Paxton to flinch, then glare at his huge subordinate agent. Then he turned to Takahara.
'You ready?'
'Oh sure. Anytime,' Mike Takahara croaked dryly.
Stoner set the shotgun within easy reach and leaned forward to hold the top of the crate in place with his two huge hands, while Woeshack moved in with the fire extinguisher. Paxton and Takahara each picked up one of the battery-powered variable-speed drills fitted with Phillips screwdriver bits, and stretched out on the concrete floor on either side of Takahara's makeshift apparatus.
The design allowed just enough room on the outside of the wood funnel to get at the screws that held the bottom of the crate in place
… which meant a gap slightly in excess of three-quarters of an inch would exist between the sides of the crate and the edges of the funnel when they slid the bottom of the crate out of the way-an issue that generated several hours of emotional discussion until Mike Takahara finally convinced the rest of the team that a three- quarter-inch board couldn't possibly move through anything less than a three-quarter-inch space.
But the unresolved point was whether any of the inhabitants of the seventy-two wooden crates would want to — and more to the point, could — squeeze through a three-quarter-inch space and either escape or attack, rather than cooperatively drop into a nice, clean, gravel-filled terrarium.
Hence Woeshack's fire extinguisher and Stoner's shotgun.
Paxton and Takahara had backed out the first pair of wood screws halfway when the sudden thrashing inside the crate caused both of them frantically to roll away while Stoner lunged for the shotgun.
'I think I'm gonna have a heart attack,' Larry Paxton commented to no one in particular as he lay on the concrete floor with his eyes closed.
'Don't forget, I was the one who said somebody's gonna get bit,' Woeshack whispered nervously to Stoner, who nodded and glared pointedly at the Bravo Team leader.
Eight minutes and several frazzled nerves later, Paxton and Takahara removed the last two screws holding the bottom of the crate in place, and the last portion of the three-quarter-inch plywood piece dropped a sixteenth of an inch onto the top of the wooden funnel.
'Okay,' Mike Takahara murmured softly. 'Now it gets interesting.'
Larry Paxton glowered at his tech agent. 'Well, thank God for that! I was afraid I was gonna fall asleep out of sheer boredom.'
Ignoring the sarcasm, Takahara picked up a carefully sanded two-foot-wide-by-three-foot-long piece of plywood. Working cautiously, he used it to push the bottom board of the crate until each covered half of the box.
The inhabitants of the crate stirred uneasily.
'Okay,' Takahara whispered to Paxton, 'grab the end of the other board, but don't do anything until I tell you.'
As Larry Paxton gingerly took hold of the released portion of the crate, he felt the container's inhabitants shifting heavily on it.
Movement continued for several more seconds and then stopped.
Takahara looked at his fellow agents. 'Everybody ready?'
The three men nodded with varying degrees of confidence.
'Okay' — Takahara's voice sounded ominously loud in the otherwise silent warehouse — 'one… two… three… now!'
In the instant that Takahara and Paxton yanked their respective boards out from under the crate, two huge black snakes with bright red scales on their bellies plummeted into the terrarium with a loud thump and thrashed against the glass, causing Larry Paxton to scream 'SHIT!' and lunge out of the way.
'Oh my God,' Thomas Woeshack whispered, backing away quickly as he held the extinguisher in front of his body as if to ward off an evil spirit.
Dwight Stoner leveled the shotgun at the terrarium, and then watched uneasily as the huge snakes coiled their thick bodies around each other and began probing the glass with their stubby black noses.
