The top of the massive sub’s sail tower abutted the bridge of the catwalk, nearly twenty-five meters above the frothing surface of the water below the dock. The walls of the dock and the floor surface as well were covered in clumps of slime and brownish white eggs by the hundreds or thousands. The water next to the giant parked sub was roiling with hundreds more swimming salamanders. But what Tom Duncan noticed first as he drove his HDT dirt bike out onto the metal catwalk was that several things around the room were on fire.
Flames had erupted from all surfaces except the catwalks. Even parts of the water were on fire. Duncan then saw why in the flickering light of the flames. The Gen Y team had poured flammable fuel over nearly everything and three of their team were firing the M203 grenade launchers mounted on the bottom of their MP5s around the space, targeting salamanders that got too close or sometimes those far away. Duncan hadn’t realized you could attach an M203 to a small submachine gun like that but he recognized the design. As each salamander got hit, it would explode and flaming chunks of its flesh would ignite pools of fuel into a new blaze. The noise from the explosions and the squealing of hundreds of mutated amphibians was deafening. Several salamanders were attempting to get at the Gen Y men, but the men had sprayed a semicircle of fuel around themselves and ignited it. The flames made a waist high fence around their position.
One of the black-clad Gen Y men was picking up a sticky egg the size of a basketball and placing it into a backpack, while kneeling on the floor, ignoring the chaos around him. The other three men were providing cover with their grenade launchers. The kneeling man shook his hand after sealing the backpack and a large line of clear viscous slime slid off it to the floor.
Duncan rode his bike to a point a few meters from the end of the catwalk that stopped at the top of the sub and quickly dismounted. So far, he hadn’t been noticed at all. He set a small fragmentation grenade with a tripwire across the end of the catwalk, by the sub’s sail, at ankle height. He then retreated to the mid-section of the catwalk on foot. He quickly set an anchor with carabiners and tossed a climbing rope over the side of the railing. One of the Gen Y men noticed the falling black rope in the middle of the air and spotted him. Before Duncan was quite ready, the man had opened fire on his position with the MP5.
Bullets clanged off the metal catwalk’s floor and the railing by Duncan’s head, as he squatted and readied his own weapon. He threw the LED flash bang off the rail and squeezed his eyes shut tightly. The burst was brilliant—even through his shut eyelids. The squealing of the frantic salamanders increased as the men on the dock also screamed out in pain. Then Duncan stood and let loose with the M202 FLASH rocket launcher. His flamethrower would only reach out to about a maximum range of 40 meters. He had brought it to deal with salamanders. The FLASH fired four 66 mm incendiary rockets filled with over a pound each of TPA—a substance similar to napalm. These, he’d brought for Gen Y.
As the first rocket hit the ground between the men and the entrance to the sub, Duncan realized it wasn’t terribly accurate—he’d been aiming for the center of the group of men. Still, they had stopped firing at him, because now they were running. The detonation threw flame and smoke all around the concrete dock. The man with the egg in the backpack was deserting the others and racing up the metal stairs to the platform. Duncan would put an end to that. He aimed the FLASH again and launched another rocket at the stairs. It hit a few meters under the man, but the effect was spectacular. He was blown up the stairs from the explosion, flying further up to the platform, which had been his intended destination. The stairs were shattered in the middle and one of the other men that had only just begun to climb the stairs got crushed as flaming metal rails and step fragments rained down on him.
Duncan turned to face the spot where the men had originally been clustered, only to see that there was just one man still there. The fourth man had run for cover on the far side of the sub. The man who was still on the dock had fired a 40 mm grenade up at Duncan, which had missed. It exploded on the ceiling of the Dock area, and the man was about to fire another projectile. Duncan launched his third rocket down at the man, then dove to the side for cover, landing heavily on the metal grill of the catwalk.