Joseph Finder - Power Play

Unfortunately, the whole process of making planes out of this stuff is sort of a black art. We basically experiment, see what works and what doesn't.

This doesn't sound too reassuring, I know. If you're a nervous flyer, this is already probably more than you want to know.

Also like Boeing and Airbus and the others, we don't really build our own planes anymore. We mostly assemble them, screw and glue them together from parts built all over the world.

But here in Fab, we made exactly one part of the SkyCruiser: an incredibly important part called the vertical stabilizer-what you'd call the tail. It was five stories high.

One of them was suspended from a gantry crane and surrounded by scaffolding. And underneath it I found Martin Kluza, moving a handheld device slowly along the black skin. He looked up with an expression of annoyance.

"What's this, I get the kid? Where's Mike?"

"Out of town, so you get me. Your lucky day."

"Oh, great." He liked to give me a hard time.

Kluza was heavyset, around fifty, with a pink face and a small white goatee on his double chin. He had safety glasses on, like me, but instead of a yellow safety helmet, he was wearing an L.A. Dodgers cap. No one dared tell him what to do, not even the director of the plant.

"Hey, didn't you once tell me I was the smartest guy in the SkyCruiser Program?"

"Correction: excluding myself," Marty said.

"I stand corrected. So I hear we've got a problem."

"I believe the word is 'catastrophe.' Check this out." He led me over to a video display terminal on a rolling cart, tapped quickly at the keys. A green blob danced across the screen, then a jagged red line slashed through it.

"See that red line?" he said. "That's the bond line between the skin and the spars, okay? About a quarter of an inch in."

"Cool," I said. "This is better than Xbox 360. Looks like you got a disbond, huh?"

"That's not a disbond," he said. "It's a kissing bond."

"Kissing bond," I said. "Gotta love that phrase." That referred to when two pieces of composite were right next to each other, no space between, but weren't stuck together. In my line of work, we say they're in "intimate contact" but haven't "bonded." Is that a metaphor or what?

"The C-scan didn't pick up any disbonds or delaminations, but for some crazy reason I decided to put one of them through a shake-table vibe test to check out the flutter and the flex/rigid dynamics, and that's when I discovered a discrepancy in the frequency signature."

"If you're trying to snow me with all this technical gobbledygook, it's not going to work."

He looked at me sternly for a few seconds, then realized I was giving him shit right back. "Fortunately, this new laser-shot peening diagnostic found the glitch. We're going to have to scrap every single one."

"You can't do that, Marty."

"You want these vertical stabilizers flying apart at thirty-five thousand feet with three hundred people aboard? I don't think so."

"There's no fix?"

"If I could figure out where the defect is, yeah. But I can't."

"Maybe they were overbaked? Or underbaked?"

"Landry."

"Contaminants?"

"Landry, you could eat off the floor here."

"Remember when some numbskull used that Loctite silicone spray inside the clean room and ruined a whole day's production?"

"That guy hasn't worked here in two years, Landry."

"Maybe you got a bad lot of Hexocyte." That was the epoxy adhesive film they used to bond the composite skin to the understructure.

"The supplier's got a perfect record on that."

"So maybe someone left the backing paper on."

"On every single piece of adhesive? No one's that brain-dead. Not even in this place."

"Will you scan this bar code? I want to check the inventory log."

I handed him a tag I'd taken from a roll of Hexocyte adhesive film. He brought it over to another console, scanned it. The screen filled up with a series of dates and temperatures.

I walked over to the screen and studied it for a minute or so.

"Marty," I said. "I'll be back in a few. I'm going to take a walk down to Shipping and Receiving."

"You're wasting your time," he said.

I found the shipping clerk smoking a cigarette in the outside loading area. He was a kid around twenty, with a wispy blond beard, wearing a blue knit beanie, even though it had to be ninety degrees out here. He wore Oakley mirrored sunglasses, baggy jeans, and a black T-shirt that said NO FEAR in white gothic lettering.

The kid looked like he couldn't decide whether he wanted to be surfer dude or gangsta. I felt for him. During the eighteen months I'd once spent in juvie-the Glenview Residential Center in upstate New York-I'd known kids far tougher than he was pretending to be.

"You Kevin?" I said, introducing myself.

"Sorry, dude, I didn't know you weren't supposed to smoke back here." He threw his cigarette to the asphalt and stamped it out.

My cell phone rang, but I ignored it. "I don't care about that. You signed for this shipment of Hexocyte on Friday at 1:36." I showed him a printout of the inventory log with his scrawled signature. He took off his sunglasses, studied it with a dense, incurious expression, as if it were Sanskrit. My phone finally stopped ringing, went to voice mail.

"Yeah, so?"

"You left early last Friday afternoon?"

"But my boss said it was cool!" he protested. "Me and my buddies went down to Topanga to do some shredding-"

"It rained all weekend."

"Friday it was looking awesome, dude-"

"You signed for it and you pulled the temperature recorder and logged it in, like you're supposed to. But you didn't put the stuff in the freezer, did you?"

He looked at me for a few seconds. My cell started ringing again.

"You picked a lousy weekend to screw up, Kevin. Heat and humidity-they just kill this stuff. There's a reason it's shipped packed in dry ice, right from the Hexocyte factory to here. That's also why they ship it with a temperature sensor, so the customer knows it was kept cold from the minute it leaves the factory. That's an entire week's work down the tubes. Dude." The cell finally stopped ringing.

The sullen diffidence had suddenly vanished. "Oh, shit."

"Do you know what would have happened if Marty Kluza hadn't caught the defect? We might have built six planes with defective tails. And you have any idea what happens to a plane if the tail comes apart in flight?"

"Oh, shit, man. Oh, shit."

"Don't ever let this happen again." My cell started ringing for a third time.

He gave me a confused look. "You're not telling my boss?"

"No."

"Why-why not?"

"Because he'd fire you. But I'm thinking that you'll never forget this as long as you live. Am I right?"

Tears came to the kid's eyes. "Listen, dude-"

I turned away and answered my cell phone.

It was Zoл. "Where are you?"

"Oahu. Where do you think I am? Fab."

"Hank Bodine wants to see you."

"Hank Bodine?"

Bodine, an executive vice president of Hammond Aerospace and the President of the Commercial Airplanes Division, was not just my boss. He was, to be precise, my boss's boss's boss. "What for?"

"How the hell do I know, Landry? Gloria, his admin, just called. He says he wants to see you now. It's important."

"But-I don't even have a tie."

"Yeah, you do," she said. "In your bottom drawer. It's in there with all those packages of instant oatmeal and ramen noodles."

"You've been in my desk, Zoл?"

"Landry," she said, "you'd better move it."

I'd met Hank Bodine a number of times, but I'd never actually been to his office before, on the top floor of the Hammond Tower in downtown Los Angeles. Usually I saw him when he came out to El Segundo, the division where I worked.