The overhead chain rattled like an avalanche of iron links.
Lin Mei covered her ears as the conveyor gears shrieked against the ceiling. High above the catwalk, the heavy steel links raced along the overhead I-beam at twenty-one inches per second. The greasy drive belt whipped in a blur of black canvas, throwing droplets of warm machine oil down onto her tortoiseshell glasses.
She wiped the glass with her sleeve. Through the rising steam, the twelve hanging slabs looked like tombstones marching into an industrial crematorium.
“Look at the thickness of those blanks,” Mac Cole said. He stood at the edge of the catwalk, dripping water from his quick dive into the sump, the canvas bag of thermite slung over his shoulder.
“That’s not single-ply paper. That’s four inches of raw pulp pressed solid.”
“Clause-Pulp,” Dr. Beatrice Hahn said from her wheelchair. Her voice trembled with dread.
“Dredged straight from the hold of the SS Covenant at four hundred feet. When raw pulp that thick passes through the nip-rollers at three hundred and eighty degrees, the heat fuses the polyester film directly into the cellulose core.”
“You can’t tear it. You can’t burn it.”
