Hell Holes: What Lurks Below
Location of the Hell Hole
This is an aerial photograph of the area where most of the action of the book takes place. The Dalton Highway (known locally as the Haul Road labeled Highway 11) is the thick gray line that runs from the upper right to the lower left. The team drives down this highway from Deadhorse, which is a long distance off the map to the north. The Trans-Alaskan Pipeline is the thin gray line between the Dalton Highway and the river. Pump Station 2 is the gray blob along the pipeline in the upper right near the river. The original hell hole is the black disk in the lower left of the photo. The team drove and then walked between the hell hole and the Dalton Highway roughly along the path marked by the dashed yellow line.
Pump Station 2
This is Pump Station 2 along the Trans-Alaska pipeline, where the team takes temporary refuge from the demons before fleeing south along the Dalton Highway towards Fairbanks (the subject of the second book, Hell Holes: Demons on the Dalton). The photo shows the pump station from the south, which is the direction from which the team members approach, hidden behind the elevated pipeline. The office and bunkhouse buildings for the L-shaped complex in the lower of the station. The garage is the small building to its right just beyond the satellite dish. The north gate and exit are at the upper left of the pump station.
Pump Station 2 Office and Bunk House
The Office Building (on the left) and the Bunk House (on the right) is where the team take refuge from the demons.
Pump Station 2 North Gate
This is the north gate of Pump Station 2 through which the survivors of the team escape onto the Dalton Highway. To make the action more exciting, these chain-link gates were replaced by a barrier gate that required the bar to be raised to allow the team’s SUV to pass. This is one of the very few places in which the book where facts were intentionally changed to fit the story.
Hell Holes 2: Demons on the Dalton
Pave Hawk Medical Evacuation Helicopter
This is a Pave Hawk Medical Evacuation Helicopter like the one that was used to evacuate the book’s main characters to Eielson AFB just south of Fairbanks after the battle of the Yukon Forest Fire. Note how the stretchers are stacked one on top of the other on either side of the passenger compartment.
Hell Holes: To Hell and Back
Demon Plague UAV
I selected the Uvision Hero 30 as the military UAV to distribute the plague on the demon homeworld. The wings and tail fins fold lengthwise so that it fits into a rectangular tube launcher that is TBD long with a cross section of TBD by TBD. It weighs 3 kg (15.4 pounds) and can carry a payload of 1.2 kg (2.6 pounds). It has a maximum speed of 100 knots (115 mph) and has an endurance of 45 minutes. It is controlled via a communication link with a range of 40 km (25 miles). It is man portable in a special very large backpack that weighs TBD fully loaded. The actual UAV is a loitering munition (flying bomb), but was modified in the book to carry and distribute the plague virus.
B-61 Variable-Yield Thermonuclear Bomb
To totally destroy the portals used by the demons to invade Earth, I needed something that was reasonably available, flexible (large enough yield to guarantee destruction, small enough so that the UAV could exit the blast zone before it goes off), and sufficiently portable. The B-61 set to 10 kiloton yield fit the bill, assuming that you could remove all of the unnecessary parts, essentially the nose and tail of the bomb, leaving only the middle cylinder. As you can see, the bomb is made of four main components. From left to right, they are the nose cone, the warhead, the computer that controls the bomb, and the tail assembly. To save as much weight as possible and thereby make the bomb more portable, only the middle two components were taken through the portal.